Note: A sermon delivered to Orange City United Methodist Church (Orange City, FL) on August 6, 2023.
As a child, the story of the Tower of Babel always fascinated me. I imagined this magnificent tower growing higher and higher, rising gloriously above the clouds. I thought about all the people coming together to work on this project, all with the intent to enter heaven and meet God. Truth be told, I remember being a little disappointed God had confused everyone, making them unable to finish this architectural wonder. So, I wondered and imagined what might have happened had they been allowed to finish. What would it have looked like and would they have really reached heaven?
As an adult, I still can’t help but think about the Tower of Babel whenever I see tall skyscrapers. I’m drawn to look up at these towers of steel and glass that seem to go ever onward toward the sky. As I gaze upward, I wonder how would the Tower of Babel compare to the marvels of today. For reference, the tallest building in the ancient world is the Great Pyramid of Giza, originally standing at 481 ft, holding the record of the tallest structure for over 3,800. Currently, the tallest building in the world is the Burj Khalifa (buhj-kuh-lee-fuh) at 2717 feet, located in the United Arab Emirates.
For many years, I lived just a half hour away from Miami. I still remember being awestruck by the number of skyscrapers there, 45 in fact, third most in the U.S. behind Chicago and New York. However, nothing came close to the feeling I got from New York City. It is a city of Babels, a forest of concrete, steel, and glass that consistently pulls you to look up at its magnificence. Of course, a dead giveaway of a tourist is one who is always looking up, which, of course, I was constantly guilty of.
There is a remarkable difference when looking from the top of these technological pillars of human achievement and ingenuity. I’ve had the privilege of visiting some of these buildings such as the One World Trade Center and Empire State Building in New York, and the Willis Tower and John Hancock Center in Chicago. I’ve had lunch on the 73rd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, with 360 views of the entire city. As a North Carolina native, I’ve been to the top of numerous lighthouses that provided a picturesque view of the beautiful Outer Banks. But as I reflect on all these experiences, nothing beats the view from the One World Trade Center. I remember how earth, water, and steel went forever onward blanketed in the glow of a setting sun. From there, at 1,268 feet, everything appeared in miniature, giving you the feeling that you were viewing all of creation from a heavenly throne. But feeling aside, I didn’t enter heaven nor did I meet God. And strangely enough, I also heard several different languages being spoken, giving me the sense that we had overcome our confusion at Babel.
Today’s scripture, sandwiched between the genealogies of Noah’s sons and Abram’s father Terah, serves as the narrative conclusion of the primeval history. After Babel, Genesis moves into more character-driven stories, ones centered on Abraham and his descendants. Following our extensive look at Noah, I felt it was important to offer some kind of epilogue to those narratives. I believe Babel helps to set the stage for what is to come, not only in Genesis but for the rest of scripture. And importantly, it helps us to consider God’s role in the building of our own lives.
So, what’s going on here in this story? Well, a lot has happened since Noah and the flood. Humanity has bounced back apparently, and they have some big dreams. This must be the comeback story of the ages. After nearly becoming extinct, humanity has come together to build a city and a tower on a plain in Shinar. They’re ready to “make a name” for themselves and let God know that “We’re back.” We also see here some remarkable cooperation among the people of the earth. They have a common language, they’ve settled together in one place, and now they want to build a tower to the heavens. To be clear, this tower isn’t for office space. They have two specific purposes in mind. First, they want to “make a name for ourselves.” Second, and as to why they want to do this, they’re afraid of being “scattered across the face of the entire earth.”
Not everyone’s a fan of humanity’s newfound obsession with towers. You see, no one had thought to get a permit from God to build such a tower. And like an angry city inspector who’s upset you didn’t get approval to build your new deck, God tells them “You gotta stop.” It seems, at least as far as God is concerned, humanity’s newfound spirit cooperative isn’t all that great. One language means there is seemingly no limit to what they might accomplish. Therefore, God, in conjunction with God’s angelic assembly, confused the people with different languages, thus ending the project. Worse still, God scatters the people across the earth, and humanity’s cooperative foray into tower-making ends anti-climatically. Note that in the text, the word “Babel” signifies some wordplay. In Babylonian, “bab-ili” meant “the gate of God.” In Hebrew, “Babel” and the word for confusion, bālal (baw-lal), creates a pun that mocks Babylon.
So, what are we supposed to learn from this seemingly simple story? Well at face value it functions as an etiology. An etiology is a story that explains the reason or cause for something. In this case, the reason people speak all sorts of different languages. And that’s a fine description of this story, one that is technically correct. But that explanation alone isn’t very satisfying. There’s something deeper, and more meaningful happening here that I’d like to explore together. In fact, the Tower of Babel story might be one of the most significant in the Old Testament. For it sets the stage for the type of relationship that God wants to establish with God’s people. A relationship built on God’s terms rather than our own.
So, for much of my life, I’ve been taught that the Tower of Babel warns us against sinful hubris, pride, and arrogance. It’s an explanation that paints the picture of humanity as attempting to storm the gates of Heaven. Of seeking to meet God face-to-face so to speak. Perhaps they want to give God a piece of their mind. They’re not happy about all that flood business and it’s time to tell what’s what. God can’t have human beings trying to break into heaven, so God nips it in the bud.
However, I’m not a big fan of this explanation. Again, there is something deeper here that we need to reach. What we initially might interpret as a story of pride and defiance gives way to incorrect assumptions about the nature of God’s relationship with us. First, let’s tackle this question of “make a name for ourselves.” From what I can gather, such phrasing is used in a positive sense. In the Old Testament, it either refers to God making a name for himself or God making a name for another like Abram and David. The idea here is that your name would carry on, that you’ll be remembered. It speaks of having a good reputation, and commonly it was your children that carried on that memory, that good reputation. It makes sense, those that are good and honorable are worth remembering and speaking of in the future. Granted, this is the only instance where it is people doing the name-making, but it’s also not the mentality of those seeking to raid heaven. I don’t see this as the kind of wickedness that characterized the time of Noah. These are people who just want to be remembered. And doing that also meant encountering the divine. Second, the people didn’t want to scatter. Again, while misguided, it doesn’t reflect malice. It’s a scary world out there. Who knows what kind of dangers awaited them beyond the plain in Shinar?
Next, let’s look at the tower itself. Because this isn’t just any tower. Classical depictions of the Tower of Babel are often spiral-like, with a grand staircase leading upward to the top. Yet, this image is most certainly wrong. Instead, the Tower of Babel would have resembled a structure called a Ziggurat. Ziggurats were temples commonly found all along Mesopotamia by civilizations like the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians. Built with sun-baked bricks (which gives us a clue as to what verse 3 is referring to), these were multilayered rectangular stepped towers. Often built next to the city temple, a ziggurat were places designated for the gods to come down and enter the temple to be worshiped. You might even think of it as a kind of landing pad for gods to arrive to be worshiped. So here we have a clue as to how the people were making a name for themselves. What greater gift can one give than a landing pad for God?
Now let’s take a quick step back to look at some historical context here before asking why God would be upset at having his own landing pad. I mean, what could be wrong with building a place for God to descend so that God could be worshiped? Well, it’s all about that ziggurat and the connotation it carried as far as how the ancient gods of Mesopotamia interacted with worshipers. For the Babylonians and other Near Eastern cultures, Ziggurats weren’t built for people to come up, they were for the gods to come down. And gods came down not only to be worshiped but to have their needs met by their worshipers. So many cultures believed that the gods needed food, housing, and clothing. Furthermore, this is why people have been created. People provided for the gods and in return these gods offered protection and prosperity. The relationship between the divine and humanity was completely transactional. It wasn’t based on love or relationship. It was one of religious maintenance, work, and service to take care of one’s god. It came down to you “Scratch my back and I scratch yours.”
And it’s here that we can start to see the real reason Yahweh God was upset by the construction of this tower. Because the tower attempted to establish a kind of relationship that God wanted no part of. God didn’t need to be taken care of. God didn’t need to be pampered and fed. But more importantly, God sought relationships with the people rather than godly meals meant to elicit his favor. This wasn’t why God had gone through all the trouble of saving Noah and Noah’s family. God and humans weren’t meant for a different type of relationship.
Babel represents the brokenness that remained following the flood. Humanity was given another opportunity, but the underlying issue was still unresolved. After the flood, the question remains. How do God and humanity find reconciliation? And for these human beings on a plain in Shinar, they decide to establish order on their terms. They seek to bring God’s presence selfishly. Thus, in their attempt to “make a name,” they exploited a relationship for their own advantage. One that sought to make a “working relationship” with God by making humans and God work as independent contractors. The age before the flood represented human beings with complete disregard for God. Now, a new generation sought to do things differently by appeasement and taking care of God. It was a mentality of work. Of selfishly working for God in the hope that by taking care of God’s “needs,” the people would be made great and wouldn’t have to scatter all over the earth.
Again, I don’t see the people in this story as malicious, misguided about the God they sought, but not malicious. I think it’s a similar intention we find when King David wanted to build a temple for God. He felt that God’s needs weren’t being met in a tent. But God says in 2 Samuel 7:6-7, “I have not lived in a house from the time I brought the Israelites up from Egypt to the present day. Instead, I was traveling with them and living in a tent. Wherever I moved among all the Israelites, I did not say to any of their leaders whom I appointed to care for my people Israel, “Why have you not built me a house made from cedar?” Now David had a closer relationship to God than the people who built Babel, still, David also believed that God had needs, such as adequate housing. So, the people building the Tower of Babel are only doing what seems right at the time. Still, it signifies that something must be done. Not in building towers per se, but in rebuilding the relationship God intended to have with humanity. A covenantal relationship rather than a transactional one.
If life before the Flood was one of complete separation. Then the Tower of Babel suggests that humanity wishes to reestablish God’s presence in their lives. And this is a good thing. It shows that the people were looking for something. There was a hole there that needed filling, they just went about it the wrong way.
Sometimes we put a great deal of effort into building and doing the things we think God wants us to do. Our lives become a kind of “Tower of Babel” to entice God to “come down” and be a part of our lives once more. We do all that we can to “make a name” for ourselves, with the hope that our efforts and our work might be enough for God to dwell with us. Truth be told, we are a society and culture that dwells almost exclusively in a transactional mindset that centers on the self. One of “what can you do for me?” And we experience this early on in life. For example, one of the ways my wife and I get our daughter to clean her room, to help around the house, or just to behave is through a reward system. Things like a piece of candy, a trip to a playground, or a visit to see the grandparents. She also, at least sometimes, takes the initiative on her own by eagerly cleaning and straightening around the house with some expectation of receiving something at the end. It might be a marshmallow, to use her tablet, or just to receive praise. And there is certainly nothing wrong with this. In both the giving and receiving for a job well down. Our daughter already has our presence and our love. She knows that we are there and we don’t have to “come down” so to speak.
But problems do arise when we carry over this same mentality and attitude into our spiritual lives. We do more, create more, and pursue more with the hope that God will bless those efforts and reward us for the height our towers have reached. To be clear, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t work for the Kingdom of God. But we do the work for God not to elicit God’s blessing, favor, or presence. It is to acknowledge that God is already present and dwells among us. Often our lives can become like personal Towers of Babel, ones built with the explicit purpose of bringing God’s presence within our lives. And sometimes, if we’re honest with ourselves, we can see the practices and ventures we have pursued so that God might notice us. Not realizing that God wasn’t asking us to do, but just be. To, as we are told in Psalm 46, “Be still, and know that I am God.”
As it turns out, God had something better in mind than the transactional relationship our tower builders had attempted to create. The Tower of Babel brings to a conclusion a series of primeval history stories that highlight drastic failures between God and humanity—the Fall, the first murder, human wickedness, and the Flood. So far, humans have been going at it alone and failing. But God is about to change all this with Abram in Genesis 12. Humanity’s unsuccessful attempts give way to a successful one, God’s covenant. This covenant isn’t based on transactions and needs. By making Abram’s name great, God establishes a new and wonderful way of being in relationship with God. The Tower gives way to a connection that will reestablish God’s presence among humanity. Through the tabernacle, temple, and in the person of Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, God shows that we don’t have to build things so that he might come down. God’s presence is already here, with every one of you. Today I remind you that we were not called to be Babel people, working independently of God in hopes that God might dwell with us. We are those who work with God, trusting that God desires not towers but relationship. We represent the reversal of Babel by bringing the good news—a new language that all people can speak together. A language of love.
Photo: The Building of the Tower of Babel, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Budowa_wie%C5%BCy_Babel.jpg
Liminal Theology 
