Glorious Diversity | Genesis 11:1-9
The Tower of Babel is one of those stories in scriptures that we seem to mostly relegate teaching about to kids. I've personally never heard a sermon that focuses on this passage myself. But I was at Mint + Serif this week, our local trendy coffee-shop, and while sitting down with my caffeine and, reading and rereading the story, I tried to see if God might reveal something to me.
One thing I encountered required me to flip the story upside down. I think that, more often than we might realize, there are stories, writings, sayings in scripture, that might seem to be saying something to us that perhaps we should flip on its head. One of the best examples for me of this are the stories of Abraham. Because Abraham and Sarah are portrayed in the bible as the parents of judaism, we can tend to put them on a pedestal.
But Abraham and Sarah are far from exemplary people. First of all, they were in an incestuous marriage. Their entire family intermarried and interbred. And Abraham would selectively refer to Sarah as either his sister or his wife depending on the situation to keep himself safe from foreign kings and leaders he would encounter. Abraham and Sarah were the owners of slaves like Hagar, who was offered to Abraham to birth his children when Sarah believed she was infertile. When Abraham was asked by God to kill his own son, Abraham did not raise a peep in protest.
Hardly paragons of courage! Maybe some of the stories about Abraham, far from providing a model for us to understand God's intent for us, might provide us examples of how *not* to behave or make crucial decisions or treat our family. Flipping some of these stories on their head can reveal a new word from God for us to discover in scripture. This is the work of exegesis: to poke and prod at scripture, learning its historical context, reading the passages around a given passage, figuring out who the audience was, or the genre. The book of Jonah is satire, for instance!
And with that, let's revisit the Tower of Babel. Is this simply a story we can chalk up to human pride, only really focus on it as a children's story, and move on? Is it a story where humanity being divided into different cultures or languages is considered a punishment? Or perhaps it could be understood as a story where being sent out in different cultures and languages actually saved us! Can we engage in yet another exegetical approach for this story: bringing our current experience and placing it beside what is happening in scripture to see what God might be saying to us?
The Tower of Babel takes on a new light when it is compared to our history of constantly seeking cultural, hegemonic homogeneity. Or, in far fewer syllables, our history of erasing diversity for the sake of economic, industrial, cultural "efficiency," and dominance. There are many moments in human history we can point to where we built "Towers of Babel" to the idol of cultural sameness. Fascist Nazi-germany; the cultural genocide of indigenous peoples across the world--particularly in the United States; and the abundance of chattel slavery in our history, among others. Maybe the story of the Tower of Babel can be a cautionary tale about our efforts to flatten or remove diversity, aside from not allowing for excessive human pride in achievement or a harmless story we can kind of skip past in Genesis. Perhaps the Tower of Babel was a monument to what any homogenous human effort can become.
Homogeneity (consisting of parts that are all of the same kind) is efficient. God wasn't wrong when God remarked, "this is only the beginning of what they will do." (Genesis 11: 6) Because look at the industrial efficiency of many efforts in our recent history to consolidate power homogeneously (violently): American Indian Residential Schools, Chattel Slavery, Incarceration of Immigrants, Concentration Camps, Pogroms--humanity has a vast history of violently seeking to create homogeneity.
What towers of Babel are we building today (or refusing to knock down?): confederate monuments, perhaps? Homages to the fascism of the past? Skyscrapers that represent the visible wealth our nation has accrued on the backs of un/underpaid labor? Our refusal to teach our actual history regarding our nation's treatment not only of enslaved africans, but also the indigenous people of this land?
When allowed to, the story of the Tower of Babel can challenge us today rather than be a relic of a story that has no bearing on the life we are living today. Join us this Sunday to explore it more deeply!
