Sermon: "Scattered for a Purpose," June 27, 2021

“The Tower of Babel,” Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563.

Preacher: The Rev. Ryan Slifka
Scripture: Genesis 11:1-9

Today we’re finishing up our sermon series on the first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis with—you guessed it—chapter 11. It’s been a wild ride. We started with the creation of the universe, the shaping of human beings out of clay. Then the fall of humanity, and leaving the garden of Eden. The first murder, then Noah’s flood. Today we end with the story of the tower, or the city of Babel.

The basic outline of the story is this: humanity is this unified whole, speaking one single language. They migrate to this place called “Shinar” on a plain. And there they settle, eventually building this incredible city out of wood-fired bricks. The famous part of this story is the most interesting part of the city: they start work on this tower that reaches towards the sky, that stretches out to heaven. Long story short, God doesn’t like this. So God comes down from heaven, and mixes up everyone’s languages. They can’t communicate with eachother anymore, so they leave the city with the tower half done, and they migrate, scattering all over the earth.

Now, this story is often read as a kind of cautionary tale about human arrogance. With apologies to Led Zeppelin, these folks are trying to build a stairway to heaven. They’re trying to reach the heavenly realm to storm the pearly gates and be like God. So as a punishment, God creates different languages and God scatters everyone across the earth, leaving the tower half-completed. Which is presumably where the different languages of the world come from. So the lesson is: avoid pride, be humble, remember that you’re not God, otherwise you’ll end up confused and have your life scattered. Just like Babel.

Now, no doubt we could probably put a lot more emphasis on humility in our lives. We human beings can be an arrogant bunch—no problem there. And undoubtedly we could be reminded that we’re not God every single minute of every day. No problem there, either.

The problem with this reading is that the tower’s just not that impressive. We’re talking about what the Babylonians called a Ziggurat, this zig-zaggy temple with around 100 steps. Maybe five stories. While it would have been an impressive, ambitious piece of architecture for the time, it’d have nothing our sky scrapers, or even 10 story condo buildings. I mean, the story even makes fun of the height of the thing in that God has to actually come down and take a look at it, cuz it’s so small. Impressive if you’re on the ground, but it’d barely show up on Google Satellite view. The intention may have been to reach God, but God doesn’t even seem to take it that seriously.

If we read closely enough, the true problem’s spelled out by the inhabitants of Babel themselves. “Let’s build this city and this tower,” they say. “Let’s build this city and a tower to make a name for ourselves. Otherwise, we’ll be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” If you remember way back to Genesis 1, you’ll remember that God created humanity to be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, to till it and keep it. To be a blessing from one corner to the other. This is why they gather together in one place, build a city and a tower, because they’re afraid to do this. The great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann puts it this way:

The fear of scattering is resistance to God’s purpose for creation. The people do not wish to spread abroad but want to stay in their own safe mode of homogeneity. They try to surround themselves with walls made of strong bricks and a tower for protection against the world around them. This unity attempts to establish a cultural, human oneness without God. This is a self-made unity in which humanity has a ‘fortress mentality.’ It seeks to survive by its own resources.[i]

In choosing to remain together in their safe, protective tower, they’re thwarting God’s purposes. They’d rather stick together in their comfort zone of safe, self-serving interest than venture forth, avoiding God’s call for them to be a blessing from one corner of the earth to the other.  This is, rather than pure arrogance, is what gets God down off a cloud, what makes God intervene.

As you probably already know, we’ve been doing a Bible study on the text we’re leading to up on each Sunday. We had our last few sessions this week. They’ve been great conversations. Bible study—highly recommended for everyone, by the way. This past week we read this story. We have two separate study groups, and in each of them we independently found ourselves talking about the Tower of Babel in relation to community and the church.

It was suggested that—like Babel—we have a tendency to come together as like-minded people, speaking the same religious language, and gaining a certain sense of satisfaction about that. We have a tendency to cloister ourselves inside a brick and mortar building and become preoccupied with ourselves—our needs, our desires, and preferences. To stick to our own comfort zones. Rather than taking seriously God’s mandate to reach out beyond our own walls, to speak in the many languages of our friends and neighbors. Ones who are in desperate need of blessing, and Good News.

I gotta say, preachers love it when other people deliver the hard sermons so we don’t have to. We can say something like, “well I would never say that, but now that it’s been said…”

I would never say that, of course. But now that it’s been said… there may be an important Word for us here, here and now.

The last thing we’d probably like to think about right now is scattering. Being pushed out of our security and comfort zones. I know that the pandemic has made me appreciate comfort and security and stability far more than ever. Believe me, none of these things are bad, in of themselves. But perhaps COVID has been a kind of judgment on all of us. Not just St. George’s, but churches in general. Not that God created COVID to shake up the church, or to give us a little colour in our lives. But in scattering us away from our favorite structures and gathering places, COVID has revealed our own fears, insecurities, and self-occupations. God has shown us the limits of our lives and the sometimes too-small scope of our ministries. We can be preoccupied with “making a name for ourselves,” personally, or by marketing our institutions over building communities for mission. Whereas the God we meet in Jesus Christ proclaims that “my redemption, and salvation is for the nations. It’s for people of every tribe, nation and tongue,”[ii] from the end of the street to the ends of the earth, our own comfort often leads us no further than the end of our pew. We can be so focussed on what’s going on within our familiar four walls, that we forget that we’re built for the world outside them. There is, I admit, something to that. And it’s a bit unsettling.

Unsettling as it may be, though, we need not see this as something entirely negative. I mean, on one hand, the scattering of Babel is a kind of judgment. A consequence of turning too far inward. In making our way through these chapters in Genesis, though, we have to remember that with each judgment and consequence there’s always a hidden grace, a less-obvious gift from God. When Adam and Eve were left naked and ashamed, God sewed them animal skins, durable clothing to face the harsh world outside Eden. When Cain was exiled for murder, God marked him with a sign of protection and gave him a new family. Noah’s flood was followed with a rainbow promise never to flood the earth again. In the Bible judgment is never judgment for the sake of destruction, but it’s for the sake of salvation. To get the train moving again when it’s gone off the rails. In confusing and scattering Babel God isn’t simply punishing the city for its self-centeredness and complacency, by foiling the city’s best laid plans, God is actually taking the initiative in order to renew God’s original intent and design for God’s people. Uncomfortable, yes, scary… uh huh, difficult, stretching, stressful, yes, yes, yes. But God’s pushing them out of their comfort zones in order to help them retrieve their original reason for being, to fill every corner of creation with the blessing of God… to make the main thing the main thing again.[iii]

I shared a quotation in last week’s sermon by the late Soviet critic and dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. The quote was about not categorizing human beings into the categories of all good or all evil, but the dividing line between good and evil running down the middle of the human heart. Solzhenitsyn, I shared, spent 8 years in a Soviet prison camp for criticizing Joseph Stalin in a private letter. This was no doubt a time of Babel-like scattering and confusion. A time of trauma, pain, and despair, where all comfort and familiar was shattered. The passage about the line dividing good and evil, though, ends on this surprising note of gratitude for his experience,. “Bless you prison,” he says. “Bless you, prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”[iv] I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity, but the maturity of the human soul.” As de-centering and disconcerning as it was, Solzhenhystin was able to see it as a time God used to refocused his life. While he lost his safety, his security, life as he knew it, he gained something even more important: the desire and willingness to become who he was created to be, for the sake of the world.

And this is how we might see our own situation. As individuals, as church, society as a whole, even. In this time of scattering, deep discomfort, we need not see this entirely as judgment, or punishment, or fully in the negative. This doesn’t discount any of the real pain and suffering we’ve endured. But it means we can see it as a time where the inessential is being stripped away, with the truly essential coming into focus yet again. Where God is using our suffering and struggle to lure us back to the true purpose of our lives, and the true purpose of the church yet again. Leaving our own towers and projects behind, and allow ourselves to be caught in God’s great work of grace yet again. To give an account of the hope that is within us to a community and a culture longing for life, starving for good news, eyes searching for some kind of light to scatter the darkness. It’s not the safe, glamorous, or easy way to be. But it’s right and its good.

Jesus says that in order to have our lives saved, we need to learn how to lose them. So our challenge isn’t to figure out how return to where we were or to rebuild what we’ve left behind. It’s learning to trust the God whose path to life runs through a cross. That in the scattering itself God is doing a new thing. Which is the same old thing God’s been doing from day one.

Amen.  

[i] Quoted in Peter Hong, “What the Tower of Babel Can Teach us about Our Desire for True Gospel Witness,” Christianity Today site, June 22, 2016.

[ii] Rev. 5:9, 7:9.

[iii] One of management guru Stephen Covey’s most beloved quotes.

[iv] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 617.