Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-21
Pictured above is a 17th Century work of Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher showing his rendition of what he believed the Tower of Babel might have looked like. Since the story is a “prescientific tale ... of ... how the peoples of the earth came to speak in so many languages”1 the picture is just one of ideas many artists thought the tower might have looked like.
''Above is an actual picture taken from a real historical event. It is a photograph by Sebastião Salgado the Serra Pelada, a large open pit gold mine in Brazil whose history began in 1980 when a young child swimming on the banks of a local river found a relatively small nugget of gold. Soon word leaked out and by the end of the week thousands of people descended upon the site. They dug with anything and everything they had. Shovels, picks, their bare hands, digging deeper and deeper into the earth.
In five weeks, it was said, 10,000 workers had dug so deep into the earth that ladders had to be fashioned to lower them down into the open pit that had become so large that at the height of the excavation perhaps 100,000 workers toiled in miserable conditions covered from head to toe in all manner of muck and mire, waste and debris.
By the time Salgado arrived to capture the event with his camera scene was overwhelming. “Every hair on my body stood on edge. The Pyramids, the history of mankind unfolded. I had traveled to the dawn of time.”2
Those figures, that look like ants in the photos, were actually human beings all in search of gold. Some found it. Some did not. Most were just paid 20 cents for each sack of earth they labored to bring to the top with a small bonus if it contained any gold. All worked in brutal conditions in the hope of striking it rich. Few did.
I can’t remember when I first heard about Serra Pelada mine, but I do know why its history has been lost to us. The digging process also unearthed large amounts of Mercury, poising not only workers but nearby rivers and streams and forcing the mines closure. “Today the Serra Pelada mine is abandoned and the giant open pit that was created by hand has filled with water, creating a small, polluted lake.”3
“All that glitters is not gold,” the old saying goes but sometimes the equally old saying, “reach for the sky” can be just as misleading. While the fortune seekers of Serra Pelada dug deep in the earth the building builders of Babel went in the exact opposite direction.
We know about big buildings! Chicagoans take pride in the fact that the first skyscraper was built here in the 1880's when the Home Insurance Building towered a full ten stories above street level. We get so attached to our buildings that we can’t bring ourselves to refer to 875 North Michigan Avenue as anything else but the Hancock Building. And even though Sears has long disappeared from its perch as a retail powerhouse the building that was built during the height of its retailing reign will always be known as the Sears Tower.
Some want others to be so impressed by the buildings named after them that they even have their names mounted on the side in big, bold 20-foot-high letters so that everyone will know what a big, bold, businessman they are.
The key to understanding the motivation of the Babel Towers builders is that when the project began “the whole world had one language and a common speech.”4
Anybody who has travelled internationally is grateful that English is spoken almost everywhere one wants to go. Makes it easier to order off restaurant menus, get to the airport, and get directions to the “loo,” or “bano” in a hurry. It seems to me that always being able to summon up the right word at the right time and have oneself be clearly understood would be a good thing.
The secret as to why the builders in the city of Babel plans ran up against the plans of the divine architect was the reason why they wanted to build. “Anxiety motivates this building project: specifically, the fear of being ‘scattered over the face of the whole earth.”5
The late Dr. Walter Bruggemann, wrote of this “fear of scattering ... is resistance to God’s purpose for creation. The people do not wish to spread abroad but wish to stay in their own safe mode."6
That is our temptation too, isn’t it? What is that Anita sings to her friend Maria in West Side Story about falling in love with Tony? “Forget that boy. And find another. One of your own kind. Stick to your own kind."7
But as Dr. Tom Are warned last year in his sermon on Pentecost Sunday, “the Tower of Babel identifies the temptation to assume that what is a norm for me is a universal norm. When we surround ourselves with people who use all the same words, think the same things, view the world the same way, there is comfort. That’s not a bad thing. But it’s tempting to assume that our view is the universal norm. And the temptation when we meet folks who don’t share our worldview is to assume their difference is deficient.”8
“He watches FOX news! What’s wrong with him?” “Her remote is welded to NPR or PBS! Must be one of those woke liberals.”
But, if I understand this text correctly, it is warning that if I surround myself with only those who talk our talk it may make my not only my worldview but my circle of friends far too small.
I must confess to you as a warning that some of the most fun people in my life did not vote the same way I did in the last presidential election while some of my ultra-liberal, hooked on politics, friends sometimes bore me to distraction.
That’s why “Pentecost viewed through the lens of Babel is instructive. In Pentecost people began to understand one another.
Again Dr. Willie James Jennings in his commentary on Acts leads us in the right direction when he says that “the disciples may have asked for the Holy Spirit to come but they did not ask for this. This is real grace, untamed grace. It is the grace that replaces our fantasies of power over people with God’s fantasy for desire for people. The miracles are not merely in the ears. They are also in mouths and in bodies. God, like a lead dancer is taking hold of her partners, drawing them close and saying, “Step this way and now this direction.”9
And if you want to know just how radical and inclusive this dream is consider with me the modern names of the countries named in our reading that seems to be intentionally designed to trip any well meaning lector up.
Here is where “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs”10 live today.
The people who would have heard what the disciples were saying would have come from Turkey, Syria, Kuwait, Egypt, Italy, Greece, Israel, Palestine. Each with their own culture; their own understanding of the world. Each with their own belief system, and theology, their own encounter with the divine.
Can you imagine people from those countries together in one room today? Can you imagine what would happen?
I can’t even allow myself to think about it because we have dug our holes so deep, built our towers so high, that we may left to wonder if there is even room for the wind of the spirit to blow across our deep divides.
I‘m still hopeful it can because the divisions between people are human divisions. They are of our own making but the wind of the Spirit is still blowing still scattering us to places we never dreamed of going with people we may have never dreamed of being with.
Contrary to all the efforts otherwise the wind of the Spirit is still blowing and still drawing us in, inviting us to dance together and see what happens.
What we find may be more precious than gold in the ground and more beautiful than the sky above. What we find might just be the face of Jesus seen in the faces of each other seeing beauty in a sun that still rises every morning, spring finally turning to summer, and the Spirit still moving in God’s people.
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1. Cameron B Howard, “Genesis 11:1-9. “Commentary: Connecting the Reading with the Scripture,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, 2, no. 2 (Louisville: Westminister|John Knox Press, 2018) 318–20.
2. Phyllis Brown, “The Dark Gold Rush: 20+ Haunting Photos Capturing the Hell of Serra Pelada Mines in the 1980s,” The History Insider, August 21, 2024, https://thehistoryinsider.com/the-hell-of-serra-pelada-mines/.
3. Marshall C Eakin, Brazil: The Once and Future Country (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001).
4, Genesis 11:1. (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]
5. Howard, loc.cit.
6. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Louisville, , KY: Westminister John Knox Press, 2010), 99.
7. https://www.elyrics.net/read/w/west-side-story-lyrics/a-boy-like-that-lyrics.html
8. Tom Are, “They All Spoke in One Voice.” Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, May 19, 2024.
9. Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville, KY: Presbyterian Publishing, 2017). 28-29
10. Acts 2: 9 & 10. (NIV)
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