Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Unity in Diversity


Pentecost Sunday
June 9, 2019
Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-21

            The first computer in my house was an Apple IIc. Anyone remember those? Or have one? You had to insert a floppy disk start-up disk just to turn it on, and then you could put in the disk for whichever app you wanted to run. This is pre-internet days, no downloads here. You had to go to Circuit City or Best Buy or your local computer store to buy the software in person. The box for “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago?” came with a copy of the world almanac so that you could look up the clues. There was another game we had for our Apple IIc that I played a lot, the name of which I can’t remember, but one step was a cryptic message which said, after you solved it, “Variety is the spice of life.” I never thought much of that as a kid, although I had experienced much diversity having already lived in Missouri, Texas, Maryland, and overseas in Egypt by that point in my life. I think I never thought much of it, because I had lived it, because I took it as a fact of life, so why did it really need saying? And why was it put in a kid’s computer game in the 1980s? Turns out that phrase was written by the English poet William Cowper in his most famous work, “The Task,” published in 1785. “Variety’s the very spice of life, that gives it all its flavour.”  In a poem whose rambling topics include the church, pastors, and preachers, William Cowper seems to have also summed up what happened at Babel and on Pentecost. Variety is the spice of life. Diversity is needed to give flavor to life. Too often Pentecost is read as a healing of Babel, as if Babel was a problem to be solved. But as you heard me read to the children in

Babel wasn’t a punishment! That word is nowhere in the story. Instead, God’s plan was bigger than anyone had dreamed! God’s plan is still bigger than we can dream or imagine. And variety, or diversity, is not a punishment but a gift from God. Listen to the story once more, this time from a new translation called The Voice:
“There was a time when everyone on the earth spoke the very same language. As many of these people began moving from the eastern regions into the western part of Mesopotamia, they settled down on a plain in the land of Shinar. Since stone was not readily available, they discovered how to make bricks and use tar for mortar to build their structures.
“People (to each other): Come on, let’s make bricks out of mud and bake them in the fire. Then we can build all we want. Let’s go build ourselves a city with a huge tower that reaches into heaven. That way we will make a name for ourselves. If we don’t, we’ll run the risk of being scattered all over the earth.
“The desire to settle in one place and build a city runs counter to God’s command to spread out across the earth. They want to make their mark on the world rather than conform to God’s plan for their lives. They want power and prestige. They want to ensure that they will not be scattered; that is, they want to choose their own destiny. But God has a different plan and purpose. God is the One who determines destiny.
“The Eternal One came down and took a look at the city and the tower the children of Adam were building. God was not pleased.
“Eternal One: Will you look at that! The people are all together on this. With one language they are able to start this kind of project. This is only the beginning of what they will do. Soon they will think they can accomplish anything and everything on their own. Let’s go down and break this up! If We confuse their language, they won’t be able to understand each other’s words.
“This is how the Eternal scattered people from Shinar all across the surface of the earth. Since they were unable to communicate, they stopped working on the city and went their separate ways. So this is why the city was called Babel: because it was there that the Eternal confused the language of all the peoples and scattered them across the surface of the earth.”
You’ll notice that the sin wasn’t pride but the myth and delusion of self-sufficiency. I can do it by myself. When we hear a two year old say it, what do we do as adults? We laugh, don’t we? It’s cute, and we know the toddler is learning how to put their shoes on, or whatever the skill may be, and they may or may not be actually able to do it themselves on this occasion. But they sure want to try. While much of our United Methodist liturgy comes from the Anglican Church, because we started as a revival movement within the Church of England, when we adopted the liturgy to form our own prayer book, we changed a few things, as you might expect. One thing we did was to shorten the responses in the baptismal liturgy. The answers in our hymnal all say “I do” or “I will.” In the Anglican/Episcopal Church, they say, “I will, with God’s help.” I will keep these vows to love my neighbor, with God’s help. I will resist evil, injustice, and oppression, with God’s help. When Methodism left England and hopped across the pond to America, we edited that liturgy with a bit of our American value of self-sufficiency, and just said, “We will,” implying we can do it by ourselves, without God.  [pause] As if we can keep our vows by ourselves without any help! You can’t keep your marriage vows by yourself because there are two people in a marriage! You can’t keep your baptismal vows or membership vows by yourself, because in baptism you join God’s family, and in becoming a member of a local church, you join that congregation. We’re all in this together. We cannot do it by ourselves, in spite of thinking like the people of Babel, “we can accomplish anything and everything on our own.” As if we don’t need God.
Another sin you may have picked up on was the people’s rejection of God’s mandate to spread over all the earth. By Genesis 11, God has already said this twice. God says it first in Genesis 1:28, with the instructions to Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and take charge over it.” God repeats this instruction after the flood in Genesis 9:1. “God blesses Noah and his family, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.” It sounds like God is serious about this. Have babies and fill the earth. But, here in chapter 11, the people have stopped filling the earth. They’ve found a spot and want to settle down. They don’t want to fill the earth anymore. Instead, the people want to stay the same and preserve their uniformity. “They want to make their mark on the world, rather than follow God’s plan for their lives.” Sometimes the story of the tower of Babel is read as a critique of empires, which impose one dominant language over the empire in order to enforce unity and conformity. But God’s plan is bigger than our plan, especially if our plan takes God out of the picture and is directly contrary to what God has told you to do.
You know who else did something completely contrary to what God told him to do? Jonah. God told him to go to Ninevah, the capital of the Babylonian Empire. Jonah immediately hopped a ship going the exact opposite direction. God caused a storm on the sea, the sailors threw Jonah overboard in order to calm the sea, and after spending three days and nights in the belly of a whale, kinda like Pinocchio, when Jonah found himself back on dry land again, God again said, “Go to Ninevah.” And that time, Jonah went. He still wasn’t happy about it, but he went. The people at Babel said, “Let’s build a city and a tower so we won’t be scattered.” God said, “Uh, no. Scatter.” And you can almost imagine God flicking a finger scattering them off the tower and around the world.
God values our diversity. Otherwise Pentecost would have been everyone hearing the Gospel in one universal language, not everyone hearing the Gospel in their own language. Pentecost isn’t a reversal of Babel. It isn’t a healing. It’s a fulfillment. Go, fill the whole earth. And now that you’ve done that, hear the good news of Jesus Christ, each in your own native tongue. You can go a lot of places around the world today and speak English. But you know what the lingua franca used to be less than 100 years ago? French. And at another point in history it was Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. Variety means we’re not all the same. Diversity means we get to learn about other ways of doing things, that aren’t better or worse, just different. Different understandings, different approaches, different opinions, different ways of seeing the world. Diversity should not mean you have to build walls or put up your defenses or learn how to argue or how to protect yourself. Instead, diversity is God’s gift to us all. We’re not all the same, Pentecost kept those differences, didn’t erase them, but embraced the fact that God has made us all so wonderfully different. Thank God for that.


[1] God’s Big Plan by Elizabeth F. Caldwell and Theodore Hiebert

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