Toppled

Midweek Worship

The First Week after the Pentecost

A Reading from the Book of Genesis:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

“Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech.” So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The tale of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis is often paired with the much later story of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Christian Apostles at Pentecost. This is because they seem to make nice bookends; the stories mirror one another. In the former, humankind reaches up to the heavens, only to have our languages confused; while in the latter, God the Holy Spirit descends from the heavens and all the tongues of man become intelligible. We all are made one in Him.

You may recall the Tower of Babel from Sunday School, or perhaps from Confirmation. Early on, in the mythical prehistory of Genesis, human beings migrate to the east, to Mesopotamia. There they use bitumen and brick to build a tower of heretofore undreamt-of height. Yet this flies in the face of God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth to steward it.” People don’t want to do what people were made to do.

And so God goes down—which you have to admit is a nice touch, right? No matter how high the buildings of humanity, God still must descend just so that He can see them. And the Lord confuses their languages, so that they form separate groups. Now they see little choice but to do as God intended. It’s hard to live with people whom you cannot understand. And God delights in this diversity. St Paul puts it thus:

From one ancestor [God] made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would [each] search for God, and perhaps fumble about for him and find him [all in their own way]—though indeed He is not far from each one of us, for “In him we live and move and have our being.”

That last line of Paul’s is a quote from a pagan poet. The early Christians, then, could read Babel as an endorsement not only of cultural diversity but even, it might seem, of religious diversity. There is but one God, and one Lord Jesus Christ, but He would seem content that people “fumble about and find him.” Some of the Church Fathers proved quite skilled in discovering reflections of Jesus wheresoever they might seek Him.

Note that in Genesis there is no indication that the Tower itself is destroyed; nor does it say that the Tower was some sort of attempt to invade or defile the heavens. Rather, it was a case of technology run amok: the perennial problem of people so concerned with whether they could, that they never stopped to ask if they should. Those other details—storming the heavens only to have the earth knocked out from under them—these derive from a Greek legend called the Gigantomachy.

According to Ovid, the giants of old, in order to seize “the throne of heaven,” piled “mountain upon mountain to the lofty stars” above. But good old trigger-happy Jove blasted the peaks out from under them with barrages of bolts of lightning. A truly rousing story—I’m always one for the Classics—but not exactly biblical, is it?

Seen in this light, the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and specifically the power to speak in all tongues, cannot be an undoing of Babel, because Babel itself is good. Babel itself was a blessing. Rather, the Holy Spirit fulfills the Tower of Babel. We are not all returned to some original primordial speech, be it Hebrew or Proto-Indo-European, or what-have-you. Rather, we learn each other’s languages. We find unity in diversity, which really was a touchstone of the early Christian Church. Paul again:

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is [therefore] no longer Jew nor Greek; no longer slave nor free; no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Jesus Christ.

Now, all but the most fundamentalist of us would recognize the Tower of Babel as an etiological myth: that is, a story to explain the origin of things. But the origin is not imagined to be historical, as we would understand the term today. Rather, the origin here points to the end, to the meaning and the purpose and the value of the thing. The Tower of Babel tells us not so much the how as the why. Why are there many languages? Why can’t we all understand one another?

Is diversity a punishment? Should we all be but one monoculture, the project of empires from time immemorial? No, says Genesis. This is a blessing, to make up many peoples. This is how we fulfill God’s will, to spread out and steward the earth. Now, that said—there does appear to be a historical core to this story. Mesopotamians did develop fired mud brick, as opposed to the stone constructions of Canaan. And they did build towers which they boasted would “reach to the heavens.”

We might not think of bricks, let alone mud bricks, as some great technological feat, yet in this we would be wrong. There was, in the city of Babylon, an ancient and towering temple—a ziggurat, a step-pyramid—called Etemenanki. No-one knows when it was originally built; no-one living, anyway. Like the Temple at Jerusalem, it had been expanded, destroyed, and rebuilt over centuries. And it ascended to somewhere between 200 and 300 feet high. That’s a skyscraper.

In 689 BC, the Neo-Assyrian Emperor Sennacherib sacked Babylon and destroyed Etemenanki, though one wonders just how thoroughly such a pile could be undone. It would take a century and three separate kings to rebuild it. In that third generation, Nebuchadnezzar II boasted: “Etemenanki, Ziggurat of Babylon: I [re]made it [into] the wonder of the people of the world. I raised its top to heaven, made doors for the gates, and I covered it with bitumen and bricks.” Now all of that should sound rather familiar, wouldn’t you say?

Nebuchadnezzar II was also the Neo-Babylonian Emperor who conquered Judea and sacked Jerusalem, destroying the Temple of Solomon and carrying off all the skilled Judean craftsmen he could find back to his capital of Babylon. Imagine the captives’ astonishment, gazing upon this massive monolith, as yet unfinished, as yet incomplete, due to its rebuilding and renovation. Imagine a broken tower of bitumen and brick, a Tower of Babel, reaching up to heaven.

It was, of course, during their Exile in Babylon that the people first became truly Jewish: that is, People of the Book. It was in the Exile that the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, were collected, compiled, and edited into the work we know today. And the compilers included the Tower of Babel—not simply as a curiosity, but as a symbol, a cautionary tale. Here an empire tried to make everyone into them, to work for them, to speak as them. Here in hubris they reached for the heavens.

But they couldn’t do it, you see. Eventually the empire falls. Eventually the people leave, the Exiles get to go home. Eventually God comes down to put things right again. So yes, my friends, there was a Tower of Babel, intended as a symbol of an emperor’s might. But go and look for it now! Even its roots have been torn from the earth. Etemenanki has toppled. Yet still the Jewish people, along with Christian cousins, tell the tale of the tower of confusion, and of the God who came down to set us all free.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.