"Beginnings"
A Series of sermons on Genesis 1-11

Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-13


Introduction

With the story about the city and the tower of Babel we continue the series on "Beginnings" which I started last year and which I suspended during the Advent and Christmas season.

The region where our story for today takes place is very familiar to us. For over a decade, ever since Sadam Hussein first attempted to occupy Kuwait, pictures from that region have been flashed over the world's media every day.

We have seen cities like Bagdad, we have seen deserts with fountains of oil reaching into the skies, we have seen the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the fertile plains between them.

It is that region, which lends the backdrop for our narrative today.

There is a mixture of motifs contained in the story for today.

There is some anthropology. With the story of the tower of Babel the author wants to explain some facts of human life:

o Why is the human race split up into different ethnic groups, races and languages?

o Why are humans scattered over all the earth?

And then there is some theology.

o How do we understand human life in the presence of God?

o How does our responsibility to God work out in everyday life?

We shall focus on the question of our human life before God and our human relationship with God.

As I reflected on the text about the tower of Babel three images – words and pictures – crept into my mind.

1. There was the visual image of the two trade towers in New York and how they crumbled resulting from an attack by militant terrorist. In the mean time we have a new architectural design with a tower that shall even be higher – indeed it must (!?) be the highest tower in the world. Is that merely human convenience to provide centrally located office space and architectural aesthetics to feed our longing for beauty, or is there more behind it?

2. The other image was verbal. A word spoken by J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) after witnessing the first explosion of an atomic bomb in the Mexico desert, July 16, 1945. Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist. When President Roosevelt of the US heard in 1939 that scientists in Germany had split the atom, he, Roosevelt, established the "Manhattan Project" in 1941 and in 1942 put Oppenheimer in charge.

Oppenheimer moved to Los Alamos in New Mexico and there he brought the best minds in physics together to create the Atom Bomb.

The first explosion happened in the Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. Oppenheimer remarked:

That was not an anti science statement!

Oppenheimer also said: "Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful."

But it does raise the question that has been debated ever since and which has driven some intelligent and sensitive people to madness – whether we humans should do everything that we can do.

3. The third image is a recent one. The destruction and looting of the Museum in Baghdad. You see, our story is located "in the land of Shinar"; that is a very fertile area between the rivers in Mesopotamia, where beautiful gardens were created and where it is easy to live. And then a few kilometers away from Baghdad is the ancient city of Babylon with its monumental temple buildings – the so-called Ziggurat – including a large tower. I have always wanted to go to the Museum in Baghdad to get impressions of the river lands, the hanging gardens and of ancient Babel and of the temples. The fulfillment of that dream has now become unlikely.

Although the story is very old, its relevance is immediate. We humans are somebody. We have reached grandeur in many fields.

In fact, although we are dependent on nature, we have enforced our will over nature. With self-discovery has also come self-interest; and in the name of progress, we humans have used history to dominate nature and in its trail we have created the ecology crisis. Every time our personal or national interest – like the recent refusal of our government to ratify the Kyoto Protocol – takes precedence over ecological concerns, you have an illustration of history dominating nature.

In the scientific field we humans are somebody. We celebrate achievement after achievement. One Nobel prize winner follows the next, and behind those champions of science there are numberless other scientists who make it possible to fly to Mars and have a message come back; who can manipulate genes, who can design chess software that beats people of mediocre intelligence every time. The military speaks of "precision bombing" suggesting that scientists make it possible to fight wars in which civilians get no longer hurt or killed.

But where will it all lead?

I heard a scientist at the ANU say in a public discussion, that there should be no restraints placed on science. I was at a meeting with a medical researcher who was quite astonished when I raised some ethical questions related to the beginning of life.

Are there, should there be limits to science?

Let us follow the story and see whether it can become a mirror for our own life.

Nomads come from the East, discover the fertile plains between the rivers and decide to settle down.

And they make a discovery. They discover the technology that makes settling down possible and comfortable.

Their scientists discover the brick and bitumen as mortar. Great! They use their God-given intelligence and talents to create a science and technology that makes life comfortable. The discovery of brick and bitumen was as helpful and life enhancing then as the wheel and the motorcar and the TV and radio and airplanes and medicines are today.

But now the story wants to point our attention to a problem! Is everything that we can do life enhancing? Should we not be willing to say that some things that we can do, we will actually not do.

I remember the nuclear debate in the 40's and 50's. At first US and Russia had it, then England and France, and today vulnerable societies like India, Pakistan and Israel. They all have nuclear bombs. And history teaches us that what we have will be used unless we destroy it. Is it life enhancing that unstable societies, or indeed any societies have nuclear bombs? Or should ways be found to say "no"?

The nomads were not satisfied using their science and technology to make bricks, produce mortar and build houses.

They also wanted to build "a tower with its top in the heavens". The heavens is where God resides. It is God's realm. They wanted to invade God's realm and be like gods!

Conceived by their own brains, built with their own hands, they wanted to do what has never been done before. They wanted to be like God!

Is that life-enhancing?

I know that there are people, and some of them very famous (Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud), who say just that. Let us invade , remove or dethrone the gods and let us put ourselves in their place. Then we would have real, our power: then we would have real, our freedom. So says the grand human illusion. So promises the grand human experiment – to live without God.

Not to honour God's name, but to praise and worship their own name. They thought that they did not need anyone to thank. They did not want help from outside. They needed no one to say OK to them.

Is life without God life enhancing? No one to thank for one's life. No one to speak meaning and hope and comfort into our lives. No one who would say to us:

… thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. (Is 43:1)

When you get rid of God, then you build security with and for each other; with the people of your own kind. With the tower bridging earth with heaven they wanted to create their own guarantee for ethnic unity: "otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."

It is an old human problem what we have named racism or apartheid or ethnic purity and superiority today. United we are strong. Gathered we are weak. And don't you hear whispers in the air, even in our own land, where multiculturalism has become an accepted term? If we all were Anglo-Saxon, if we all were white, we would not have the problems we have.

But our God is not a tribal deity, just looking after ourselves. The God whom Jews and Christians worship is the God of all people, who loves all people equally.

What is the theological response to the human attempt to reach heaven? Ultimately the question is very simple: Do we need God to be human? Do we need God to live out our human potential? Is faith in God liberating or enslaving? Let us look at the answer of this ancient text.

"The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built." The people are moving up, and God comes down. Comes down to observe what is happening – and to interpret the situation: "… this – using science and technology not only to build houses and thus make human life pleasant, but to build a tower that reaches to the realm of God – this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them."

They will want to be gods!

Is that good for our human life? Is it freedom to reach for God, dethrone God and place ourselves in God's place – or is it the denial and therefore ultimately the destruction of our own humanity?

Are we creatures, dependent on God, created for relationship with God? Or are we independent, destined to deny, yes, destroy our relational existence.

The story says that God came down, destroyed the unity of the people by confusing their language and thus making communication so difficult that they refused to go on building the city and the tower.

That is the story way of saying that God's judgment served the purpose of protecting what makes us human. We are creatures, not creator. Created to live in relationship with God. Denying that relationship we are negating the very source that keeps us alive. And the biblical understanding of death is isolation, cutting ourselves off from the sources, God, nature, friends who bring to us life.

The story finishes with the reminder that the unfinished city was called "Babel". What does "Babel" here stand for?

The human being – we! – is in constant danger of denying our own humanity by trying to be God. Refusing to accept their being as creature. Refusing to acknowledge God as the ground and aim of existence.

There is no anti science or anti technology element in this text. But it is the reminder that we are all responsible with what do with our life, whether it enhances human life or hinders it.

Even when we try to deny God and arrange life without God, we cannot remove God, but we shall have to live with the consequences of our wilful denial to be creature and live in relationship with God.

And then there came Pentecost where people from many nations were gathered, and God did a new thing by blowing God's Spirit into the lives of people, and where that Spirit was received, there people of different tongues began to understand each other again, and a new community of thanksgiving and solidarity began to take shape.

The emphasis of the Pentecost story is not only on speaking or speaking in tongues, but also on "hearing", on "listening"!

… each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. … And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? … in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power."

The ear, my friends, is Gods reminder that we can't live without God and that we can't live apart from each other. Before we speak, we are spoken to. Listeners we are – "hearers of the Word"!

Let us not try to be other than human. It won't work.

Thorwald Lorenzen, 11 January 2004

Last updated: 13 January 2004