The Tower of Babel story is about being a Big Deal. Every Big Deal movement is always about A), being right; and B) having power. Far too often we Christians, especially the grown-up kind, are apt to forsake the playfulness of story-telling and instead opt for being a Big Deal. We want to build a Tower of Unshakeable Truth. That would be, of course, the supposed unshakeable truth of our particular view and opinion of a story or of the Scriptures or the faith itself. It’s terrible when that happens.
Big Dealness is how we got so many different kinds of churches. In some ways, each denomination is really nothing more than a Tower of Babel, a way of being a Big Deal, reaching up to heaven with awesome religious achievement. Thus we end up with a Lutheran Babel, a Catholic Babel, a Methodist Babel, and so on, even most recently to, the popular "Non-denominational Babel," building huge Baby Boomer churches in the suburbs of America. Every kind of Tower of Babel is the attempt to be a Big Deal. Which really amounts to wanting to be God. And that is the heart of the problem. And that is what put Christ on the Cross. People who forget the joy of telling faith stories end up almost killing faith itself.
Maybe we could say that God is trying to tell us something important by the way the Bible begins! It begins with the book of Genesis, where we find the Story of the Tower of Babel, but the whole book is mainly a book of stories with the aim of shaping with us and among us faith in the one true God, the Lord God Almighty. Stories and storytelling are tremendously important to the formation of faith in young and old alike. And a lot more fun and good for the human soul than fiercely held doctrines and abstractions about God.
In my view, the world of religion would be a lot more healthy and fun if we could remember a that first and foremost our religion tells faith stories, and that a good story never has only one interpretation, but is open to many. The story of Babel shows us God mocking human pretensions by causing confusion.
So let’s re-enter that story. The Semites, from whom the most ancient of the Genesis stories come, were nomads, endlessly wandering the semi-arid wilderness of the ancient Middle East in search of grazing and water for their cattle. As they wandered, they no doubt met people who spoke other languages. And they probably visited or heard of the great city of ancient Babylon which once upon a time boasted a blue tiled tower that almost seemed to reach the skies —300 feet on each of side of the base and 300 feet high. Truly impressive for those ancient times, centuries upon centuries before Christ.
Perhaps, then, a nomad’s drowsy child might have asked some night, snuggled up close to Dad at the campfire, "Daddy, why do some people talk so funny?" And Dad might have answered, "Well, they aren’t talking funny, they’re just speaking a different language." And then the child of course would have to ask, "But why are there different languages?" And then Dad might say, "Well, son, let me tell you the story of the Tower of Babel" And so the story was passed on down through the generations, until finally, it was written down, embellished, polished, and put into the Old Testament narrative of faith. But having the stories in printed form is no substitute for snuggling up to our loved ones and sharing the faith by story-telling.
Lutheran historian, Jaroslav Pelikan, tells of hearing his eight-year-old daughter sing "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." Suddenly in occurred to him that the lyrics of the song did not really fit children's situation. "She had not read the Bible. She knew that Jesus loved her because her mother, her father, her Sunday-school teacher, her pastor, and others in the Christian community had told her so. Only later would she come into contact with the Bible." --Darrell Jodock, The Church's Bible: Its Contemporary Authority (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 74.
Can you remember who first told you faith stories? Like an ancient nomad telling faith stories around a campfire, faith stories shared at the dinner table, read at bedtime table, or near the Christmas tree, or dramatized in our great Holy Week liturgies, are important ways that children and adults are formed into real Christians. The stories reach us when abstractions do not. If we don’t tell the stories of our faith, we fail our children and each other. We don’t have to have all the answers, or pretend like we know everything. All we have to do is share the stories. God’s Holy Spirit will do the rest!
Frequently it will come as shock to us that we don’t know everything, and that what we assume about a situation, or about another person may not be the case. Don Edwards, a newspaper columnist, writes of the little fellow standing at the bottom of a department store escalator. Intently looking at the handrail as it kept on moving by like a long black snake, the small boy would not take his eyes away. A salesperson, assuming she knew the situation, asked, 'Are you lost?' - 'Nope' came the reply. 'I'm waiting for my chewing gum to come back.'" As cited by Donald E. Demaray, Laughter, Joy and Healing (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1986), 197
Nothing like a story and a dose of the human truth to keep us humble. We might stand in awe of the Tower of Babel shuttle blast-offs, or the atomic bomb, or on Neil Armstrong first stepping on the moon, but upon seeing the earth from outer space it was the astronauts themselves who were completely overwhelmed by the awareness of the majesty of the Creator. All the astonishing accomplishments of modern technology cannot hold a candle to the Creative One who formed the Universe, who spins the galaxies, and first wove the complex strands of DNA.
But humility is not highly valued out in this arrogant world of high tech and science. In fact, there are a lot of people who think Christianity is a religion for losers. Well, the critics may say that, but I think church people are like the little boy by the escalator: we’re not lost, and we’re not losers. We’re just keeping our eyes on Christ, waiting for the Spirit to come back and confirm in us again and again what we already know from our storied experience: God is the Big Deal and we are not. Amen.