A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — June 13, 2010
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Genesis 11:1-9;  John 17:20-26

God came down to see the city and the tower

a first step.  No telling what they'll come up with next…”

                                       — Genesis 11:5-6 (The Message)

The goal is for all of them to become one heart and mind—
just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, so they might be
one heart and mind with us.  — John 17:21 (The Message)

Today’s two scriptures come from the lectionary several weeks ago.  The John passage is from the final Sunday of the Easter season.  The Genesis story is one of the readings a week later for Pentecost.  The Pentecost story in Acts, where people suddenly are speaking in different languages so all can understand, is often seen as a reversal of the confusion of languages at the end of the Tower of Babel story.

I’ve brought the two texts together because, side-by-side, they lead us to ponder what is meant by oneness… what it means to be united.  We usually view unity as a great virtue.  In John, Jesus—the one we know as Immanuel, God who came down to be with us—prays for his followers to be one in heart and mind.  Their complete unity is to be a reflection of God’s loving presence in and among them.  So unity is a good thing, isn’t it?  It’s Jesus’ prayer and God’s will.

 

Well… maybe not always.  According to the story in Genesis, the Lord God came down to Babylon to see the city and this great tower the people were building out of clay bricks.  And finding that the people there were one people, speaking one language, the Lord garbled their speech to confuse them and scattered them over the face of the earth, destroying their unity.  How very strange and puzzling!

 

What sort of unity was it the Lord found?  Perhaps the answer lies in the kind of place Babylon was and the kind of people the Babylonians were.¹  You see… Babylon was a mighty city situated on the Euphrates River, rising from the plains of what we now know as Iraq.  It is now a heap of rubble and debris, much of which was bulldozed to build an American military base, Camp Alpha, after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  Its ruins are so ancient and buried so deeply that no one has ever determined exactly when it was founded.  But it was a magnificent city in its day—the center of an empire, the major political, military, and economic power in its part of the world.  The Babylonians themselves called their city Babilli, which meant “gateway to the god.”  The Hebrews called it Babel, a derisive pun on a Hebrew word meaning “confusion”—hence the word “babble” in English for confusing speech.

It was a huge city, built almost entirely of baked bricks.  So of course there were builders, and there were brick-makers.  The builders designed great walls and extravagant buildings.  Archaeologists have unearthed private homes in the city as large as 18,000 square feet.  Massive temples had roof beams and walls covered with gold.  Of course the brick-makers didn’t live so well.  They were slaves, after all—something the Hebrews knew well, having themselves been brick-making slaves in Egypt.  I doubt the builders and slaves ever were completely united as one people.  The city was a place of big business, with the wealthy ever intent upon wheeling and dealing.  But at night it was not a safe place.  The historian Herodotus reports that there was a single bridge across the Euphrates River, a bridge covered with wooden planks that were taken up every night to prevent the inhabitants of the two halves of the city from stealing each other blind.

Babylon is remembered in story and song as a place of splendor and terror… of empire and exile.  “By the waters of Babylon there we sat down and wept”—sings the Psalmist, steeped in memories of bitter captivity far from home.  The black preacher and poet James Weldon Johnson once called Babylon “that hell-border city.”²  So what did the Lord find when “the Lord came down to see the city and the tower those people had built”?  I suspect the Lord found the Babylonians strangely…united, but with the unity of masters versus slaves and of slaves versus masters—as Rev. James Lowry once wrote in a sermon poem describing Babylon:

“a sinister union:
    like ducks on a pond united against the ugly duckling;
    like children on a playground united against the new kid in class;
    like neighbors in the suburbs united against a home for the mentally ill.”³

We have terms for such sinister unity like “xenophobia” (the fear of strangers and aliens), apartheid, and the “tyranny of the majority”—when a majority uses it’s power to isolate and impose its will on a minority group.  Once that group is “legally” marginalized or even ruled to be “illegal” (think “illegal immigrants,” for instance), you don’t have to consider things like racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, ethnic cleansing, or genocide… let alone issues of basic fairness.  And all too ofter, when a minority group finds itself the new majority, it will use the law to lord it over some other minority.

I suppose the Lord came down to find the Babylonian rulers to be of one mind as well… but with a dangerous single-mindedness where all are (Lowry again):

    “one like a corporation united for nothing except to make a profit;
      one like a nation united for nothing except its own economy;
      one like a church united for nothing except to serve itself.”³

This is a oneness where power and authority go unquestioned and are rooted on that cynical version of the “Golden Rule”: “the one who has the gold rules.”  Dissent of any kind is not tolerated.

I imagine the Lord came down to find the Babylonians absolutely together—but bound to one another not in any positive sense, but rather locked together…

    “as an addict who is held together by nothing save addiction;
    as a bag lady who is held together by nothing save need;
    as a miser is held together by nothing save greed.”³

The thing about people in such a dysfunctional union—single-minded people marching in lock-step—is that they have but one language.  For only one language is needed when no one is allowed to question the way things are.  And it’s a language of very few words:

    words like—“My way, right or wrong!”
    words like—“What’s in it for me?”
    words like—“Just give me the bottom line.”
    self-centered words like—“I” and “me” and “mine.”³

One people, one language, Babylon and its empire are caught in a death trap.   So according to the folk tale, God garbled their speech and scattered the people to the four corners of the earth.  Hence to this very day our world is made up of different peoples with different languages.  Nevertheless we have retained our human capacity to operate with such death-dealing, single-minded unity of purpose and language.  We see it in international saber rattling on all sides, in corporate decisions that put profits before people, and in the increasing polarization of our nation’s body politic.

The Gospel according to John tells another story of the Lord coming down into the world, this time not just to see what is going on but to be among the people, Immanuel, God-with-us.  Jesus, the Word of God incarnate (that is, in the flesh), comes to be the light of the world, to bring divine grace upon grace for all [John 1:1-16].  In today’s reading, this Jesus prays for his followers that they may all be complete in their unity, mature in their oneness.  Their oneness is to be something entirely different from the oneness of Babylon.  For it is a oneness of inclusion, not exclusion… a oneness of freedom, not slavery… a oneness of love, not fear.  This oneness is not self-serving, but reaches out into the life of the world with grace and acceptance in order to serve others.  And most of all this oneness is not limited to a single language.  Recall the Pentecost story and how the outpouring of the Holy Spirit does not cause all the people to speak the same language, but rather enables the disciples to speak in different languages so that all might hear and understand.

There is much Good News in this oneness of Jesus, this unity we are offered as beloved children of God.  We have many words for it—extravagant words like “redemption” and “salvation” and “amazing grace.”  God comes to us, seeks us out, accepts and cherishes and forgives us.  This is wonderful, comforting, grand and glorious, Good News.  And it is very good that we are comforted… for it is terrible to be lost and alone and desolate, and even more terrible to be trapped within the false oneness of Babylon.

Yet we need to be very careful at this point.  For while Jesus Christ offers us comfort, following Jesus Christ is not about being comfortable.  It is all too easy for us to think that Christianity is primarily about all the rewards we might receive as Christians.  But this is to go back to speaking that single-minded, death-dealing language of “What’s in it for me?”  No, as Christians we are called to give up such language and to be willing to be scattered to the four corners of the earth, speaking the languages of strangers as bearers of the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Being Christian is not about seeing what or how much we can get, but about being freed to forget about getting.  It’s about being freed from self-serving ways so we might serve others… and God.  Knowing we are redeemed frees us from worrying about ourselves and whether God loves us, so that we might embody and carry God’s love to strangers.  Knowing we are saved and that death is not the end but the opening to eternal life, we are freed from worries about dying.  And free of such spiritual self-absorption, we are freed to stand with all those who suffer.

All this is rarely comfortable.  Being Christian is not about being comfortable.  Jesus Christ did not die so his followers could live comfortable lives.  No, his death on a cross was an absurd tragedy, which points to the lengths God will go to seek us out, the depths of suffering God will endure to come and be with us.  We are marked as Christians not by the cross but by the resurrection.  Jesus’ resurrection declares that the cross will not have the last word.  Indeed, the life, teachings, and resurrection of Jesus mark us all with a oneness of love that comforts and strengthens us even as it also propels us to stand with those in pain—and while standing in solidarity with them to do what we can to ease their suffering, to promote justice, and to make known to the whole world the love of the Lord God who comes down as Immanuel, God-with-us always.  Amen.

__________________________

 ¹ Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 1 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1962) pp. 334ff.
 ² James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones (New York: Viking, 1927) p. 25.
 ³ James S. Lowry, “It Was a Warm Day In…” Journal for Preachers (Pentecost, 1995) pp. 10-18.