Sermon For Ordinary Time 7 – Genesis 11:1-11

Genesis 11:1-11

These are, of course, fairly ridiculous things to be known for, and often the Tower of Babel seems to be seen this way: they wanted to build a tower high enough to reach God! That is an easy concept for us to grasp, being a part of our lived experience as well: the Empire State Building on the NY skyline, the Sears (now Willis) Tower defining Chicago for years, Dubai continuing to build grotesquely large skyscrapers so that no one will ever catch up. But to reduce the Babel story to mere architectural hubris is to completely miss the point. The Babel story is the zenith of the Primeval History of Genesis, the peak of the pyramid (that joke will be funny in a minute), the final movement of that blurry time before records were kept. It is the quintessential example, not of trying to reach God, but of trying to be like God. That sets us up for the real story of Genesis: the loving, covenantal blessings of God being promised to the family of Abraham and his offspring, which is to be a blessing to the whole world, accomplished through Jesus Christ and we who believe. We see here the same mistake made by A&E, Cain, Lamech, and the “great men” before Noah who brought about the flood: striving to be like God without obeying his will can only lead to chaos.

Shinar is the biblical term for Mesopotamia, especially the rich, fertile river valleys around the Tigris and Euphrates. This is an ideal place to settle, and a large group decide that instead of wandering, they will root here and build a great city, to secure their fortune and make their name as a people. So what is the problem? First and foremost, they do this in direct contradiction to the command God left with Noah and his sons: “7 And you, be fruitful and multiply, abound on the earth and multiply in it.” They, like Cain, do the opposite. They have what they see as a positive reason: “let us make a name for ourselves,” and a negative reason, “otherwise we shall be scattered abroad.” 

So they set to building a tower, “with its top in the heavens.” Now this is often where some confusion comes in; this is not their attempt to “reach” the heavens. We should envision them building the Mesopotamian form of temple, a pyramid structure known as a ziggurat (remember the joke?). This would strike us as unimpressive, in terms of height; the structure would be a simple step-style pyramid, each level smaller than the next. The largest in the world (in Iran) is a mere 80 feet tall. But conceptually, this was the heavens. In their religious imagination, these temples were staircases, with gardens at the bottom, and the gods would descend from the highest level to receive sacrifices at the bottom. Having done so, such gods would then proclaim blessing on the people…giving them a name. Yet, here, the people say they will make themselves a name. Their failure is not an architectural or engineering problem, but a religious one.

And so God descends. Humorously, it says God had to “come down” to see the tower, humbling their pretensions about its reach, and proclaims an irony: the word they use for “make” is nilvenah, and the word for “confuse” is navelah. Their effort to “make” led to confusion. In order to disperse them as intended, and prevent their reliance upon their own strength to make their own name, God takes from them the source of their unity. This is carefully placed right before the genealogy leading up to Abraham, and designed to provide a contrast.  God does not “settle” with the settled people “trying to make a name for themselves,” but God travels with an obscure people, Abraham and his descendants, promising to give them a name that they cannot win for themselves. The thrust of the primeval history is that God desires faith from his image-bearing priest-monarchs, and that it is precisely the effort to make ourselves independent from God that spells our ruin. God’s people may roam, but they have his guarantee that their name will be great, and in Jesus Christ, it truly is, the City of God outlasting and outshining every example of the City of Man, of any age and in any place.

The quest to make a name for ourselves goes on. It is at the root of our human divisions, whatever their basis. Nationalisms, rooted as they are in strength coming from an insular unity of language, culture, and ethnicity, are extensions of Babel, and so to my mind incomprehensible to Christians. For, to the Church, we await the day that takes us past Babel into a new unity. As Ephesians 2 puts it concerning Christ and what he has done for Jews and Gentiles, “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” But He doesn’t do this in a way that destroys our differences; quite the opposite, Christ does not reverse Babel, but rather leads us through it, to a new unity, as Revelation foresees: “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.” Babel not reversed, but moved through, diversity embraced in the unity of Christ.

Individually, we too seek to “make our own name.” While a type of ambition is good, where we seek to do well at our efforts in our lives, the lure of Babel is always close. We are always feeling the pressure of insecurity, of disillusionment, of the fear that we won’t accomplish all we intended in this life. To be clear: you won’t. You cannot control the future. You cannot make your own name the way you desire. Whether it is to be a revered professor, a lauded author, the priest of an influential parish, the very best student, the most decorated employee at your work, the theologian of note, a person of wealth, influence, and accomplishment; if these things are sought for their own sake, for you to find that security, self-worth, or praise that we all desire, then you are seeking to make your own name, to usurp God’s place to set yourself in position for your own benefit, and we all if we do this will find that striving to be like God without obeying his will can only lead to chaos. As Hemingway puts it in the first chapter of The Sun Also Rises, “you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” And we can’t escape ourselves and our weaknesses and insecurities and shame by just achieving more, by accruing anything that this world says brings happiness. Rather, it is precisely in our weakness, in our reliance upon God, in saying “I cannot control my future,” that we can begin to find true security, self-assurance, peace; it is in recognizing that, while I cannot control the future, I can control myself, right now, and I can choose, right now, to be the person that God has said that I am and that I want to be. We can choose, right now, to stop trying to make a name for ourselves, and rather embrace Christ in faith, do whatever vocation we have been given well in this moment, plan for the future yes, but always holding our lives with a loose hand, knowing that any security, any future, any worth I have comes only and ever from Jesus Christ, who has declared me an image bearer worthy of love, called to obey him in faith, hope and love. Today, let us go forth as those who know that it is only in Christ that we have a name, and in him find our security, our hope, our peace. Amen.