Roger Ray, pastor
May 19, 2013 Pentecost
Genesis 11:1-9The way that a classic song, movie or book becomes a classic is not that they were written in a classical style but actually it is just because they won the popularity contest. The very first record that I ever bought was a 45 entitled, "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I've God Love in my Tummy" That song did not become a classic. The first album I ever bought was the Beatles "White Album" and though the vinyl is long gone, the music is still on my phone and I listen to it regularly.
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." 5The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6And the Lord said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." 8So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
A classic is a work that has a life beyond its immediate origins. Sometimes that is a function of quality and sometimes it is for more unconscious reasons. There are classic children's stories that we repeat for hundreds of years, not because they are such great stories but because they somehow speak to us at a deep and powerful level..... to children, all adults are like giants and so when a witless child out smarts adults and slays a giant, a child feels an unconscious reassurance that gives Jack a life on multiple continents and in many generations.
Similarly, a lot of the anthropomorphic Greek narratives about the gods remain in use because they speak to profound psychological truths. So much so that we often name certain mental illnesses or complexes after the Greek gods, such as Narcissus, Oedipus and Electra.
A lot of ancient stories collected in our scriptures have been preserved for the same reasons. Sometimes, the stories function at several levels, some of which may be conscious and some are unconscious.
The Genesis narrative about the Tower of Babel is one of those. Many of these ancient Hebrew stories serve as what we call "etiologies," that is, they tell us why things are the way that they are. On the surface of it, the Babel story tells us why there are so many languages among neighboring peoples but at a deeper level there is a profound anti-empire message.
The story is based on a much more ancient Sumerian myth but the name was changed to Babel as a commentary on the pride and arrogance of the great Babylonian empire that enslaved the Jews to help build their capital city with its famous ziggurat.
The Jew's crowning architectural achievement had been their temple which the Babylonians destroyed and carried them away to Babylon where everything was much bigger and much more intimidating than anything they had ever seen. But even though the Babylonian empire was huge, powerful and seemingly suffered no fear of even the gods, they were destroyed by another empire and Alexander the Great had their ziggurat torn down the way that they had previously destroyed the Jewish temple.
So, subtly, perhaps even below the conscious level, this story of the tower of Babel is repeated as a warning against the hubris of empire. There are even "between the lines" insults in the way the story is told.
The proud empire decided that they could do anything, so they would build a tower so tall that they could challenge even the gods. Note in verse 5 that they thought they were building a tower up into heaven but God had to actually come down to even be able to see it. Nations are not very good at seeing their relative importance in the world, often imagining themselves to be much more than they really are.
When you are the king of the hill it is difficult to imagine ever not being the king of the hill. Like the Hebrews, when our nation began we had a very fresh memory of having been bullied by an empire. We sought to create a nation whose moral force was larger than the military force of the empire we had escaped.
We wrote a constitution and a bill of rights that were intended to protect the rights of every person and though our founders had all kinds of racial and gender biases I think that we have to recognize that given the culture in which our founding documents were written, there was a kind of nobility there we would be foolish not to applaud.
Even our art and monuments spoke of blind justice in which everyone, without regard to class or station in life, would be treated equally under the law. We wrote into our constitution that upon arrest anyone had to be charged within 48 hours. We described a legal system that protected the weak and the powerless from the abuses of an arrogant government or ruler who might have otherwise executed or permanently imprisoned you for disagreeing with them or holding differing religious values.
We were the envy of the world. The French celebrated our ideals by giving us the statue of Liberty that boldly proclaims a poetic denunciation of the abuses of aristocracy and empire and insists upon respect for human dignity and compassion for the poor. The inscription reads:
"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,It is not hard to see then why many 19th century Christians came to see America as the new promised land, to claim for ourselves the idea that we were now God's chosen people who would take in the homeless poor and open to them a golden door of liberty, equality, justice and opportunity with religious freedom and racial diversity.
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name,
Mother of Exiles. .......
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
We may never have done it perfectly but this is how we long to see ourselves, this is who we want to be.
The Bill of Rights was written when our survival was anything but certain. The poem inscribed on the base of Lady Liberty was written when the nation was still reeling from the wretched destruction and death of the Civil War and this is who we said we wanted to be, against all odds, against all the arrogance and pomposity of powerful nations and kings.
These are not the values of cowards. Liberty, justice, freedom, these are not values one simply decides upon and then you turn your attention to other things. It is easy to have a very clear vision of liberty, justice and freedom when you are being crushed under the heel of a great empire but when you have won your freedom, prospered under liberty and enjoyed the advantages of equal justice under the law, you can become the very thing that you once hated.
For reasons too complicated to go into now, our nation has maintained a military base in Cuba. That base in Guantanamo Bay has been used since 9-11 as a prison called Gitmo. In the fearful days after 9-11 things happened that should not have happened. Because of the disgrace of hundreds of incidents of torture of prisoners, President Obama promised to close Gitmo as soon as he took office. He did not.
There are 166 prisoners in Gitmo. More than half of them have been cleared of all wrong doing but they are being detained because, even though they may not have been guilty of a crime before being arrested, now they are so angry about having been held for ten years in prison without being charged that they are now so resentful for what has been done to them that they may well join the battlefield.....
They are not guilty but we are keeping them in prison because they might become militant due to our unethical imprisonment.
A hundred of them are on a hunger strike. Twenty are being force fed and several are in danger of dying. More than 50 are presently being held permanently because we don't have enough evidence to put them on trial but we believe that they are dangerous. Obama wanted to transfer them to a high security prison in Illinois but at least one of the problems with doing that is that our prisons are for people who have actually been found guilty of committing a crime.
Now, there are a lot of ways to consider the lack of justice in our justice system, about challenges to the bill of rights, our privacy, our food supply, our environment.... we know that the justice system for the rich is not like the justice system for the poor. The disproportionate ratio of blacks put in prisons compared to whites is not just racism, though that is a part of it.... it is mostly an issue of poverty. As Howard Zinn said, our justice system does not so much determine what is right and what is wrong, it just determines who can pay their attorney the longest.
In my own experience, I have learned that decisions are made more on the strength of the good ol boy system among judges and lawyers than on the merits of any case.
But the real litmus test of any civilization is in how they treat their most vulnerable members. So, sure, the abuse of poor workers, the neglect of children in health care and education, all of these things are telling. But when you look at this group of Muslim Arabs who were picked up in Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, mostly because they were turned over to get a bounty from our overly aggressive CIA. In most cases, there is no evidence of any wrong doing and yet they have been in prison for 10 years.... many of whom where children when they were arrested.
I don't criticize our government because I hate it, I talk about these values because I love who we say we want to be and I refuse to be silent when I see these values being trashed. The arrogance of empire that says that once we have climbed to the top of the hill that we can crush under our heel anyone who is beneath us just begs for someone to topple the tower of Babel all over again.
In the end, our military and our economy will not determine how great a nation we are..... our greatness will be determined by how much we cherish liberty and justice for all.
We don't get to see them, we don't get to vote on it, but we should never forget the most vulnerable prisoners being held by our government and we should never afford this atrocity the tacit approval of our silence. I say to our president and our congress: set the innocent free. Close Gitmo now.
