The Philadelphia Daily News reported that 46-year-old David Vassallo boarded a jetliner in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for a flight to North Carolina. He began talking to the man seated next to him and boasted that he was an undercover federal sky marshal. The man he was talking to was quite interested, and asked him to tell him more about himself. As he left the plane he was arrested by the man seated next to him — who actually was an undercover federal sky marshal. Vassallo, who before this incident was a postal employee, was arrested and charged with impersonating a law enforcement officer. He was also found guilty of gross stupidity. But that is what pride does to a person. It’s the curse of human hubris.
Our first Scripture reading this morning is about the building of the tower of Babel. It is also a story of gross stupidity brought about by pride. This was early in the history of the world when the population of the world was relatively low, and the people of earth had learned a new technology: the making of bricks. Using bricks instead of rocks they could build a much larger structure. They found a great plain where they could live called Shinar, and decided to build a tower there. They believed they could build a tower that would reach to the heavens — perhaps to prove there was no God watching over them after all. With biting irony the Scripture says, “But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building” (Genesis 11:5). Their tower hadn’t reached heaven at all, in fact, God had to “come down” to “see the city.”
The whole purpose of the building of the tower was that they would be unified by one grand achievement. They had one language, and the plan was to gather everyone to live in the same place to accomplish great things. They did not want to be scattered, they needed everyone to work together. But in the end, God reversed their plan and scattered them over “all the earth.” He confused them, giving them different languages so they could not understand each other. They wanted to be independent of God, but God reminded them that was not possible. The tower intended to bring people together was the tower that scattered people and drove them from each other. Alienation from God results in being alienated from others. Now their language, instead of being the same, all sounded like babbling — thus the name Babel. The place became known as Babylon — a city associated with evil throughout Scripture.
The whole story of the tower of Babel reminds me of Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who in 1961 became the first human to orbit the Earth. According to international media, Gagarin made the comment while in orbit: “I don’t see any God up here.” We are still under the impression that we can somehow use our technology to build something that will get us to heaven so that we can see whether God is there or not. Amazing. We live out the Scripture which says, “Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22).
I was astonished to read one authority on this passage who stated that the text implied that the people had become a threat to God, and that is why he did what he did. How absurd! The people were not a threat to God, they were becoming a threat to themselves. The story of the tower of Babel in Genesis falls right after the story of the flood. God had brought about the flood in Noah’s day because of the rebellion of the human race and the resulting violence that covered the earth. The arrogance of mankind not only leads to stupidity, but to evil, and evil leads to the destruction of who we are as human beings. We are a threat to ourselves. Because God cares for us, he limits the evil we are capable of and diverts our path. When that happens, we need to pay attention.
It is the wisdom of this age that says we must all be alike and be up on the latest of everything. We used to talk about being old fashioned, meaning the way your grandparents did things. But then to be really “with it” you couldn’t wear or do anything that was last year’s fashion. Now kids look down their nose at us and say, “That is so 5 minutes ago!” The language changes so much every day that you can hardly understand some conversations, and if you really want to get lost try reading some phone text messaging. It has become so popular that they have actually put the Bible in text messaging now. You can download it free and send it to your friends (www.biblesociety.com.au/smsbible). Here is an example: “In da Bginnin God cre8d da heavens & da earth”... [and] “da earth was barrn, wit no 4m of life. . .” Or how about 1 John 4.19? It becomes “We luv coz God luvd us 1st.”
But even text messaging is no match for trying to communicate with someone with whom you have a misunderstanding. Words and language become almost incomprehensible, since what you mean by a word is not what the other person means by the same word, and every word is filtered through one’s own emotions. Never have we had more means of communication, and never has communication been more difficult. The curse of the tower of babel is still with us.
However, the day of Pentecost began the reversal of this process. The tower of Babel had seen the proliferation of languages, with the resulting confusion and the division of the human family. Pentecost, with its many languages, began to see people united through a common understanding. At Babel God drove people apart to thwart evil, at Pentecost he brought people together to inaugurate righteousness. The tower was a symbol of our rebellion against God, Pentecost united people who were seeking God, and the Holy Spirit actually came to live in them. “The God up there” became “The God in me.” The people at the tower of Babel wanted to “make a name for themselves.” The people at Pentecost wanted to glorify the name of God. After the tower of Babel people could no longer work together to create a kingdom for themselves. At Pentecost people began to work together to establish God’s kingdom on earth. Babel was the imposition of human will; Pentecost was the acceptance of God’s divine will. Babel was bad news; Pentecost was good news. After Babel the people spread out over the earth in mutual hostility and alienation. It was every person for themselves. After Pentecost the people spread through the inhabited world to serve God and to live in love and fellowship. Pentecost is Babel reversed and undone. Babel was God’s judgment on the people who tried to unite against Him. Pentecost was God’s blessing in bringing people together people from every race, nation and language to live as one under God. Pentecost is God ending the chaos and confusion of Babel and bringing about new understanding. The message of people of Babel was: “We are gods!” The message of the people of Pentecost was: “We are God’s.”
What Pentecost is saying is that God is not far away. We do not have to build a tower to get to him. The Bible says, “The righteousness that is by faith says: ‘Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?” (that is, to bring Christ down) or “Who will descend into the deep?” ‘ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? ‘The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,’ that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming: That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:6-9). God is not hard to find unless you are moving away from him. The book of Proverbs says, “A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18:24).
Is God against human wisdom and technology? Absolutely not. The problem is not wisdom, it is pride. The problem is how we use that wisdom and in what we are wanting to be wise about. Paul said to the Romans: “I want you to be wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil” (Romans 16:19). The Enron scandal has been in the news again as Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling tried to build their own tower of Babel. A recent article reported: “Enron, which had been the seventh largest company in the United States prior to its bankruptcy in 2001, had specialized in energy trading and communications. It had employed some 21,000 people and had claimed revenues of $101 billion in 2000. The fall of Enron marked the end of a stock market boom and sparked a wave of regulatory reforms. Lay, who founded Enron, was convicted on six counts of conspiracy and fraud and could receive a sentence of up to 45 years in prison. Skilling was found guilty of 19 counts of conspiracy, fraud and making false statements. Together those crimes could yield a total sentence of 185 years.” Ken Lay is a United Methodist layman, and yet he and Skilling were busy building their own tower of pride, their own kingdom, rather than seeking the Kingdom of God. Even though Lay was a churchman, he was essentially living as though God did not exist — that he was not here, or if he was, he did not care.
The message of Babel is: “God is nowhere.” The message of Pentecost is: “God is now here.” Pentecost reverses Babel. One of the most dramatic examples of this is the life of William J. Murray. Murray is the son of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the famous atheist who was responsible for the Supreme Court ruling which removed prayer and Bible reading from public schools in the United States. He tells in his book, My Life Without God, about living in a home where there was constant rage and violence. His mother could not keep a job because of her frequent angry outbursts. She never married either man who fathered her children, and lived with her parents and brother in a small row house in Baltimore. Murray’s grandmother read Tarot cards, his grandfather was engaged in illegal activities, and his uncle kept stacks of pornography in his room. William Murray was told by his famous mother that since there was no God, nothing was really right or wrong. She taught him that the most important things in life were food, drink and sex, and he took her advice and fully indulged himself. But in 1980 he sought help for his drinking problem through a Twelve Step program. It was his first encounter with anyone who talked about a loving God. Yet this loving God had no name. He read a novel that told the story of Luke in the New Testament. It talked about Luke’s relationship with God and finding God’s love. There began to be a stirring and yearning in his heart for that kind of experience, but he had no idea how to come into contact with this God. Then one evening, on January 25, 1980, as he was sleeping in his apartment in San Francisco, he says that the Holy Spirit came upon him and told him to seek the truth in the Bible. That was the one place he had never looked before, for that was the very book his mother had removed from our nation’s schools by her lawsuit in 1963. Murray states that the true reason for his mother filing the suit was her deep personal hatred for followers of Christianity. He told how his mother’s zeal against Christianity was so great that it had “taken over her life and rendered her incapable of seeing other people (himself included) as anything but either enemies or people who agreed with her every ideal.” But Murray committed his life to Christ and has never looked back. O’Hair called her son a traitor and cut off all communication with him. Murray experienced the love of God he was longing for and now goes all over the world telling his story. He is the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition in Washington, D.C. Pentecost reversed the Babel in his life.
But there are also the similarities between Babel and Pentecost. At Babel the people all came to one place to build a tower in order to reach the heavens. At Pentecost, the Bible says, “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place” (Acts 2:1), and their purpose was to reach God. At Babel they all spoke one language, and God caused them to speak many languages. At Pentecost they all spoke one language (Aramaic with a Galilean dialect), and God caused them to speak many languages. At Babel God came down to the people, and at Pentecost the Holy Spirit descended upon the people. At both Babel and Pentecost the people were scattered — but with totally different purposes. At Babel the people scattered in hostility and chaos, at Pentecost they scattered with a new love and purpose in their hearts. They wanted to spread the good news.
That is the purpose of Pentecost: To give new purpose. To change chaos and confusion into understanding. To turn us from rebellion to love and obedience through the power of the Holy Spirit. To turn despair into hope. To bring a new love into our hearts that wants to reach out to God and others. This Pentecost Sunday brings the invitation to receive the power of the Holy Spirit.
Rodney J. Buchanan
June 4, 2006 – Pentecost
Mulberry St. UMC
Mount Vernon, OH
www.MulberryUMC.org
Rod.Buchanan@MulberryUMC.org
