And The Walls Came Tumblin’ Down

August 23, 1992

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Scripture: Genesis 11:1-9

We’re at the end of the line now, down to the last ragtag end of a sorry, unraveled history of almost complete degradation. How sad! It started so heroically, with such potential, way back there, and now look where we are. By the time this story ends, there’s nothing left but CHAOS AND CROSSED WIRES. The highways for miles around littered with the debris of dissolution.

People can’t even communicate with each other....WHAT A FALL, what a tumble from the

tranquility and order of the Garden.

This is a troubling story, this Tower story. We call it the Tower of Bābel, or maybe you’d rather say Băbel, to make it correspond to the “babble” of language with which the narrative ends. Băbel seems well suited.

It’s a noisy story, somehow, an unruly, raucous kind of story. Now by that I don’t mean sloppy, and I certainly don’t mean disorganized. It’s a well told story, remarkably well told---crisp, concise, succinct, graphic--There is even balanced phrasing in the reporting of the speech patterns....

“Come, let us make bricks, Come, let us build”, say the people. “Come, let us go down and confuse...” retorts the Lord.

SOMEBODY WORKED ON THAT....Somebody had to. It’s too neat for it to be otherwise. It’s a sure sign of a master story teller----It’s like the story of the Three Bears, remember?

“Somebody’s been eating my porridge, Somebody’s been eating MY porridge.” Children love that. I love that. Everybody loves that. It’s the way you tell a good story. This is obviously a carefully constructed account.

But it’s NOISY, somehow, if I may say it that way. When you read it, you can almost FEEL the banging and cacophony of disruption.

Those of you who follow Orlando Magic basketball know Greg Kite. He’s one of the players on the team, one of the alleged players. They traded him once, but he came back. Now that Shaquille O’Neal is here, Greg Kite probably won’t be playing much center, but he stands a full 6 ft, 11 inches in his stocking feet. That’s way on up there. You could without much exaggeration call him a tower.

Greg Kite is raw boned and angular, lots of elbows and knees. His particular forte on the court is to bang around inside and clog up the middle on defense. He’s mobile...sort of, that is he can move...after a fashion, but not even his mother would describe him as the epitome of grace. I don’t personally know his mother, but I’m confident she would be in closer touch with reality than to thus characterize him.

The other players have given Greg Kite a nickname. They call him “Clank”---wonderfully apt---AND I COULDN’T HELP BUT THINK OF “clank”, I couldn’t help but think of that word as I was studying this nine verse vignette from early Genesis...it clanks and rattles, it clangs and clatters, noisily, with the bumping together, the clashing of human assertion against the will of God.

The outcome of that clashing, of course, is exactly what you’d expect, and exactly what, in fact, we find...human assertion spent and scattered all over the field...with only the babble of futility left.

I’m jumping ahead, though, excuse me. Let’s not run too rapidly. Let’s look a little closer this morning at this noisy, well told, troubling story. It contains some pretty potent stuff. Come inside and let’s poke around and sniff.

The obvious Babylonian influence is probably worth noting. We talked last week in connection with the Flood account about the use of other materials in Biblical narrative, and here it is again.

The very name Babel suggests Babylonia, Israel’s neighbor and for a long time fiercest enemy. The idea of a tower seems to be taken from Babylonian architecture, and specifically from those funny shaped buildings called “ziggurats.” I like to say that word “ziggurat”, and I try to work it into a conversation whenever I can, which, unfortunately, is not all that frequent.

The Babylonians had a great culture, outstanding in commerce, mathematics, astronomy, architecture. They built out of dried mud bricks gigantic structures, that must have appeared to a nomadic people to stretch all the way to the sky. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World.

But to a Hebrew, anything Babylonian was anathema...the pits. They despised Babylon the way loyal Gators hate...well, that’s ugly...I’m not going to say that.

They despised Babylon the way librarians hate page rippers, the way cosmetologists hate acne.

Babylonian culture didn’t mean a triumph of the human spirit to them. It meant urbanization, commercialization, secularism, the dilution of family values, decay, internal rot, and hollow meaninglessness. Those massive towers, so impressive as products of human ingenuity, represented all that was different, all that was bad, the absolute polar opposite of simple reliance on God.

 So they took this symbol of a tower, a tall, gaudy, lifeless, impersonal structure, to depict in still another image the sterility and ultimate futility of life apart from the Creative Spirit....

Here is form without substance, husk without nourishment, sound without significance, movement without meaning, pattern without purpose, existence without life...and consciousness without God. In a way, it’s worse than death, because it’s all so pointless. Here, indeed, is the end of the line.

It’s no accident, you see, no accident at all, that this Tower of Babel story is placed where it is in the Genesis sequence. It comes right at the tag end of the long, descending chronicle of disruption, dissolution, decline, and degradation...the record repeated over and over, in version after version of life coming apart when it’s lived out of synch with the Almighty. Here’s how it ends, inevitably, chaos and confusion.... That arrangement in the narrative couldn’t possibly be just the result of happenstance.

Draw Genesis 1-11 as a graph, and it would look like this, if you can make a mental image----Way up at the top, on the left hand side, where it starts out, in the beginning....(I’m doing it backward for me, so it’ll be left to right for you...the people in the choir will just have to compensate....)

Way up high---there’s the start...harmony, order, peace, purpose...everything in place, everything working in God’s good creation. That’s 100%. That’s how it’s supposed to be.

But then the line starts to sink---rebellion, treason, refusal to stay within the boundary. When you play God, you lose God, because there can’t be but one God.

That’s why the Garden story keeps replaying, why it’s still replaying even after all these centuries. It’s not a record of history, it’s a record of perennial human experience. What Adam and Eve did, we all do. Ol’ Pogo[1] had it right on target when he said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That’s it! Give him an F for grammar, but, brother, give him an A in theology. Bad syntax, but an extraordinarily accurate analysis of SIN.

We...you...I...all of us, want to be Number ONE, insist on being Number ONE, but only God can be Number ONE for life to cohere. That’s not some arbitrary manifesto, not even a suggested guideline, IT’S JUST THE WAY IT IS. Anything less results in fragmentation....and the rest of these chapters document it....

Over and over, with relentless consistency, the graph continues to drop.

Remember W.B. Yeats’ poem: “Things fall apart, the center will not hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the earth. The ceremony of innocence is drowned.....The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I suspect any day now they’ll discover that Yeats was an Old Testament scholar.

It’s from his poem, “The Second Coming”, but it could just as well have been entitled “Post-Eden Developments”, or “After the Fall”. This whole section of Genesis, from the snake on, lays out with stunning accuracy Yeats’ “drowning of innocence.”

We see it in the murder of Abel---brother against brother, the eruption of violence....We see it in the corruption described so painfully in the Flood story---AND NOW, WE SEE IT HERE---if anything, in an even more virulent, more insidious, and certainly more subtle form, because now it has progressed, or regressed, to a collective social stage.

I think, though I admit I haven’t yet found any reputable scholar saying something similar---I’m still hoping, and still looking---but I think these old writers of antiquity put this account of the Tower last in their unfolding catalog of the downward human spiral because it represents the most deeply entrenched of all, the most clinging, the toughest of all sin to root out---corporate sin, collective sin, the sin for which there is no one, single person to be blamed, but is the result of a network of iniquity.

The sin of Adam and Eve was individual, personal rebellion against God, and, of course, that’s the opening wedge.... I come first, I’ll play God...no one else involved.

Cain, too, acted alone. He couldn’t blame anybody else for his banishment. Even the multitude who perished in the Flood were guilty of personal moral turpitude.....corruption, the Record says, violence, individual acts of degeneracy.

Something more widespread, more solid, more interlocking, and hence, more diabolical, shows its face in the Tower story....Look! What did anybody do wrong here? What specific wrong, what specific deed of iniquity is there to designate?

To whom do we point the finger and say, “There’s the culprit in the scenario, there’s the one we can blame?”

THERE AREN’T ANY FACES...that’s just it...no individual people. It’s all the impersonal “we”. And what’s more, there aren’t even overt deeds to condemn. Who is hurt by the building of a tower?

Does that contribute to the delinquency of a minor? Does it subvert moral standards? Does it rob anyone, or violate anyone? Does it take bread from anybody’s table? Construction jobs, after all, put money into the economy, they don’t take it out. WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL? Maybe you can make a case here for the argument that God, after all, is being just a tad touchy.

But you see, something more subtle than wicked deeds is being delineated here, and something more insidious. As we’ve said over and over, and as the Bible consistently maintains, MORE SERIOUS THAN SINS, with a final “s”, is SIN, with a final jolt of subversion.

Sin, in the Bible, is what lies behind sins; the canvas, or screen, on which they play, the inclination of the soul from which the individual sins spring, the attitude from which the individual sins emerge.

It’s putting the self---the self-assertive self---in the center, and living as if God didn’t exist.

That’s what’s going on here, devastatingly portrayed...borrowed from a Babylonian motif, but laid out as a mirror image of a universal tendency...all the more diabolical because it’s collective----the clutching tentacles of corporate iniquity, which poisons everything it touches, and in which it’s so easy and so dangerous to be caught up.

“Come, let us make a name for ourselves....” Let’s show off; let’s impress people, let’s do something that will knock their socks off. We can do it, on our own. We don’t need to ask if it’s what God wants. What difference does it make? If we’re all in it together, what can GOD do?

Isn’t this sin in its most acute and most dangerous form, because what it represents is the perversion of some solid achievement, what it represents is the distortion of some positive good.

It’s more subtle than gross sins of the flesh, more complex than lust, or greed, or hate....The sin of the Tower is sophisticated, cultured sin...not blatant evil, but good, gone sour...the sin of pretentiousness, the sin of group arrogance, the sin of guarding your turf, the sin of wanting to hold on tightly to the reins of power...the very things Jesus condemned with the most scathing rebuke He ever uttered.

Prostitution got off fairly light under Jesus’ evaluation; it was the snooty and the “know-it-alls” who felt the sharpest sting of His tongue.

It’s pride we’re talking about, of course, MISDIRECTED PRIDE, pride turned in on itself, pride which takes the credit itself for accomplishments achieved, rather than acknowledging any indebtedness elsewhere, pride which tends to shut the door and bar those who don’t quite “measure up”, or who don’t join enthusiastically enough the chorus of adulation.

It becomes especially insidious because within the group, among the insiders, the individual is anonymous. Everyone wears a mask, so everyone is protected. You sometimes can’t even see the seriousness of what you’re doing.

From the human perspective, isn’t it what makes the story of the Cross so tragic? When you look at the Cross, the crucifixion of Jesus, the thing that strikes you with such force is that there is no one person you can blame for it. There ought to be a specific villain, but where is he?

Who is the ultimate enemy in that story? Who crucified Jesus?

Well, you say, Pilate was ultimately responsible. And, legally, that’s true. He was the governor. He gave the order. But Pilate was just a functionary, a Roman bureaucrat, carrying out Roman policy as best he could, and trying his bests to do it efficiently. He had no idea what was really going on. You can’t blame him entirely.

Or you can finger Caiphas, the high priest. He did understand what was going on. But Caiphas was just protecting a religious institution...what’s so wrong about that? And when he said, “It is better for one man to die than that the people die”, that makes a kind of sense, doesn’t it? You can’t blame him entirely.

Or you can say it was the mob’s fault, or the Sanhedrin’s....You can blame Peter, who denied Him, or Judas, who betrayed Him....But again, it’s more complicated than that.... WHICH IS EXACTLY THE POINT.

The tragedy of the Cross, humanly speaking, is precisely that it was so impersonal. It was more than just what one person did that was wrong, it was THE COMPOSITE OF THE TOTAL SITUATION, the networking of a corporate iniquity that closed in on Him from all sides.

It was the relentless machination of assertive self-will, when misplaced goodness took the place of faith, and subtle idolatry took the place of God.

What makes it so sad is that not one of them at the time thought that what they were

doing was wrong.

The perverted pride and arrogance that led to the building of a tower of human ambition is a forerunner, in a way, an adumbration, if you will, of the very kind of blindness that put Jesus of Nazareth on the Cross.

Now, application as we race toward the conclusion. DO WE STILL BUILD OUR MODERN DAY TOWERS OF BABEL? Where do you want to start?

The Materialist, who rejects any value other than what can be physically measured and weighed, is a Tower builder....The Imperialist, who sees other people only in terms of how they can be exploited for personal benefit, is a Tower builder....So is the Chauvinist, who demeans the worth and dignity of the opposite gender with crude, or even not so crude putdowns....And the Racist, so bent on maintaining the purity of a bloodline, which is always HIS bloodline, that he relegates to an inferior status anyone else who doesn’t belong.......

Or raise it to a higher level...the higher you go, the more painful it is. Scientism---not true science---but the cavalier dismissal out of hand of anything beyond the scope of empirical evidence.... That can be a tower.

The “bottom line” in business----Does it make a profit?---That can be a tower.

 Patriotism---without limits---when it blinds you to seeing any fault in your nation. “My country right or wrong” is a tower already tottering.

Any “ism”...in fact, any relative, partial value which is made into an absolute, pushed up into the place reserved only for God, becomes a TOWER, with the result that God’s rightful supremacy is usurped, and God’s good plan for harmony and fulfillment is thwarted.

Even religion can be a tower, when it’s allowed to become an end in itself. It happens. It’s so tempting to convince ourselves that OUR truth is THE truth, that because WE believe it, it must therefore be so.

Please don’t hear this wrong, but sometimes I think that the most devastating enemy we

have in the Church is not the reprobate, the backslider, the mud-caked, blatant sinner, but the other end of the spectrum...the super pious, blue-nosed, self-righteous member. I know a lot of havoc has been wreaked in the Church by worldliness, but I suspect at least an equal amount of mischief has been done by those who have deceived themselves into thinking that their goodness reaches all the way to heaven.

“Come, let us make a name for ourselves.” How effectively those old writers poke a needle into the pretentiousness. There’s no sin so subtly dangerous and so finally dead ended as the self sufficiency of those who know without question that they have all the answers.

Listen to Reinhold’s Niebuhr’s comment on it. It’s dated, I know, but it still stings with the truth: “Man is mortal. That is his fate. Man pretends not to be mortal. That is his sin.” Human pride is greatest when it is based on solid achievements; but the achievements are never great enough to justify its pretensions. In every Tower of Babel the foundation is more honest than the pinnacle.

And so we come to the end of the line, down to the last ragtag end of a sorry, unraveled history of almost complete degradation. What a tumble from the beginning.

THIS IS DEPRESSING, isn’t it? This is really depressing. We know in our hearts it’s accurate, but it’s still depressing. Is this where we have to end? If there were no more than this, what would be left? What possible hope would there be? Corpses strewing the field, and the babble of chaos and confusion.

I’m glad the Bible doesn’t end there. Thank God it doesn’t end there. But we need to see that it begins there, against the background of that realistic, honest prelude....This is what happens when we try to make a go of it with nothing but our own resources.

Maybe, up ahead, there’ll be a man named Abraham, waiting and responsive to God’s call to begin a rescue mission....

Maybe, up ahead, there’ll be a revolutionary breakthrough into history named Jesus, who will come and lay down His life for our Tower foolishness.

And maybe, up ahead, there will come a Pentecost, an outpouring of the Spirit of God’s unifying graciousness to undo the babble of our confusion, and to bring us together and empower us as one people again, as we were meant to be.

I know we don’t deserve it. But I hope that’s what God has in mind, don’t you?

--

 [1] Pogo was a daily comic strip that was created by cartoonist Walt Kelly and syndicated to American newspapers from 1948 until 1975.