Genesis 11: 1-9, Acts 2: 1-18, “Secret Heart” by Brian Andreas

How many of you have heard the Tower of Babel story before this morning?

This is one of the most familiar stories of the Bible… But why? Did Charlton Heston ever make a Tower of Babel movie? Did Mel Gibson & I just missed it? I honestly don’t know why it’s so familiar except that every year we read the Tower of Babel story. Every year. But I have never, ever preached on it. You know why? It’s because the Tower of Babel story is always read on Pentecost – and naturally, on Pentecost we’re always preaching on the arrival of the Holy Spirit. So you may have heard a sermon about how the people on the street there in Jerusalem, hearing the gospel in their native language, was “the reversal of the Tower of Babel.” I believe I’ve preached that myself! While the Babel story is a great complement to Pentecost, this chapter on Genesis deserves at least one sermon of its own.

Once upon a time in a country far, far away, the world was created by a God that would come to be known as Yahweh. Like ancient peoples everywhere, the people of Israel knew their creation stories by heart. They told & retold them, and eventually, after many generations, some 3,000 years ago during the reign of King David or his son Solomon, someone began to write them down.

Those original manuscripts are long gone, but the stories are not. At least four of them are imbedded in the first eleven books of Genesis that were created by the priests of Israel who had been taken into exile when the armies of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar defeated King Jehoiachin about 600 years before the birth of Christ. There by the rivers of Babylon, some learned priest sat down, remembered Zion, and recorded the ancient stories of his people so that they would remember who they were and so that they could believe that their God Yahweh had not abandoned them to those strange gods in that strange land.

The priestly writer told the old stories the people knew, but with a bit of a twist. He added some snippets which sort of connected the dots between the ancient stories. And he came up with some brand new stories that would shed some light on the Israelites’ exilic circumstances and give them hope that some day their captors would be defeated and they would be allowed to return home to Israel. So in the first 11 chapters of Genesis we have some really old stories of the first humans of creation overlaid by stories with marked political intent (and I like to think a measure of pastorly concern.)

In our last episode we met the sons of Noah (that would be the guy with the ark). Japheth, Shem & Ham starred in a rather embarrassing incident with their dad which resulted in Noah pronouncing an angry curse on Ham and all Ham’s children forevermore. This was an old story that the priestly writer used well. Under the clever guise of tracing the generations of Noah’s sons, the priest created a remarkable catalog of the geo-political entities of his world. And perhaps even more important, by drawing on Noah’s curse of Ham, he was able to name and condemn Israel’s enemies on the basis of religion, including someone named Nimrod. Nimrod was a grandson of the cursed Ham, “a mighty hunter” who established a kingdom in the land of Shinar and built the city of Babylon. (Now isn’t that an interesting coincidence? The Israelites are in bondage there in Babylon – and golly! – Babylon was built by someone from the cursed, enemy side of the family! Go figure…)

The priestly writer describes Noah’s family tree as a complicated assortment of 70 tribes and nations to the north, south, east and west of Israel. It concludes that “these are the clans of the sons of Noah according to their lineage in their nations. And from these the nations branched out on the earth after the flood.” In other words, the story ends by telling us that people are spread all over the world – a fact, of course, that everybody knew.

Okay, so that’s the lead-in to our story today, which is the last of the great pre-history tales. You can tell it’s part of the older “Adam & Eve” set of stories because it begins by contradicting the last verse in the previous chapter. Chapter 11 begins: “And all the earth was one language, one set of words. And it hap­pened as they journeyed from the east that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.” Now that’s a very different story from the one the chapter before! We’ve dropped the family tree list! And now we’re back to a simpler tale of Noah’s children who journeyed from the east to a region called Shinar, which as we learned in the last chapter is Nimrod’s turf, the land of the Babylonians!

Archeologists tell us that at least 5,000 years ago the rulers of that part of the world began building ornate ziggurats, tall pyramid-like towers made of brick, with their ‘heads in the clouds’. Built on seven levels, the ziggurat represented seven heavens and seven planes of existence, the seven planets and the seven metals associated with them, and often the top layer was clad in blue tiles to blend in with the sky. These ziggurats were not sites of public worship but were believed to be dwelling places for the gods. (In fact, the word Babel, as in ‘Tower of Babel’ means ‘gate of the god’.) Each city had its very own god or goddess who was believed to come down to earth through their community’s ziggurat.

Of course, the Israelites would look at such buildings with theological horror and outrage, so it’s no wonder that this story would have Yahweh terminate the Babylonian building project. The interesting piece is how God does it. Does God make it rain for 40 days and 40 nights? Does God create an earthquake? Does God send lightning or fire or dust storms? No! Nothing nearly so dramatic. God simply “baffles their language”!

God and an “unspecified celestial entourage” go down and baffle the people’s language. And because they couldn’t communicate, the people of Shinar had to abandon the Tower project. From there the people scattered over all the earth, in search of others who could speak their language.

The story of the Tower of Babel is a familiar story. To be sure, it seeks to explain why there are so many languages in the world, and that’s great. But the Babel story does more than that. It exposes a deep ache in the heart of humanity: We want to connect with God, yet we can’t even connect with each other! We build churches and mosques and cathedrals and synagogues, big ones little ones, fancy ones, simple ones, sun drenched ones and cave-like ones, in the hope that we can find God there. But until we can connect – until we understand each other, the building itself, no matter how grand or how plain, will simply be a waste of space.

Which of course brings us right back to the story of Pentecost and the wonder of the Holy Spirit. Jesus had told his followers that he would not leave them orphaned when he was gone. They just had to be patient and wait in Jerusalem and the Paraklete, the Helper, would come to them.

And come to them the Spirit did that Pentecost morning, and it filled the followers of Jesus who had gathered in the upper room. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and they began to speak in other languages as the Spirit gave them ability.

Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and parts of Libya, Cretans and Arabs, and visitors from Rome, all heard the Galileans speak about God's deeds of power in their own languages. Now did you catch that? The people in that list mirror all those clans and nations of Noah’s family tree! All those people heard the followers of Jesus speak of God’s deeds of power in their own language and many of them were perplexed by it. They were baffled by it. For there is just about nothing more surprising than when someone who seems so different from you turns out to speak your language.

In 1988, toward the end of the Contra War, I spent 6 weeks in Nicaragua. I was part of a construction brigade, repairing a hospital. We had a number of people who could speak Spanish really well, but I was not one of them. My Spanish was pretty basic (present tense only please) and it was really hard work. But with a lot of concentration, dictionary flipping, and wild gesticulating I could carry on some pretty interesting conversations. People were always so amazed that I got along so well – and frankly so was I!

You see, in Nicaragua I learned that while the sharing of a language is an obvious key to communicating, most of the time understanding is not about language. Most of the time the secret is not in your hands or your eyes or your voice. As Brian Andreas points out, most of the time the key to understanding is in your heart. Knowing that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier of course, but it’s a good start.

And another good step is finding out that the word that is translated as ‘understand’ in the sentence “Let us go down and baffle their language so that they will not understand each other” is not about understanding as a cognitive function. Shama is really about listening. It’s about paying attention to each other.

The priests of the exile knew that listening was important business. They knew that when people don’t listen to each other, when we don’t pay attention to what’s really being said, the community begins to erode. A society that does not value listening not only cannot build towers, it cannot believe promises, it cannot hold together. And the key to really being able to ‘shama’, the key to understanding another person, is, as I learned in Nicaragua, not only to listen with open ears, but to listen with an open heart.

I am such a visual person, that taking in auditory information is a real challenge for me! I need all the help I can get! And that’s why when I pray I ask God to open my heart. I ask God to open my heart because I want to be able to hear and understand the world better. I want to understand you better. And I want all of us to understand each other better.

During the season of Lent we sing a hymn here at Bridgeport called “Spirit Open my Heart.” The 3^rd verse goes: “May I weep with those who weep. Share the joy of sister, brother. In the welcome of Christ, may we welcome one another. Spirit open my heart.”

The Pentecost story is right on. The Holy Spirit makes all the difference. When we invite God into our hearts, we have a chance to understand each other in a whole new and very real way. And when we truly connect with each other, we have a chance to experience the presence of God in a whole new and very real way. It is a pretty nice circle.

The story of the Tower of Babel is about the creations of languages but it’s also about the failure of a community that valued building projects over relationships, towers to false gods over community, fame over friendship. Funny how those Babylonians really weren’t so different from us…

But thanks to those priests of long ago, we have this story. May the Holy Spirit open our hearts so that we can really hear each other and understand each other and live our lives in true community, right here, right now. And may all God’s people say, “Amen."

 

Genesis 11: 1-9(Robt. Alter trans.)

And all the earth was one language, one set of words. And it hap­pened as they journeyed from the east that they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to each other, "Come, let us bake bricks and burn them hard." And the brick served them as stone, and bitumen served them as mortar.

And they said, "Come, let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, that we may make us a name, lest we be scattered over all the earth." And God came down to see the city and the tower that the human creatures had built. And God said, "As one people with one language for all, if this is what they have begun to do, now nothing they plot to do will elude them. Come, let us go down and baffle their language there so that they will not understand each other's language." And Yahweh scattered them from there over all the earth and they left off building the city. Therefore it is called Babel, for there God made the language of all the earth babble. And from there God scattered them over all the earth.

 

Acts 2: 1-18(NRSV)

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs — in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power."

All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine."

But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, "People of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

'In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.

 

The Other Reading “Secret Heart” by Brian Andreas

The secret is
not in your
hand
or your
eye
or your
voice,
my aunt once
told me. The
secret is
in your heart.

Of course, she said, knowing
that doesn’t make it any easier.