Glorious Diversity Genesis 11: 1-9 – 2023/9/10

There is so much hate in this world especially against people who look differently from us, think differently from us, or have different life styles than us. Too often we assume that if we all look alike, think alike, dress alike, live alike, then we will achieve peace while in reality when the Spirit calls to be one, it is calling us to unity, not uniformity.

September 10, 2023

“Sacred Earth, Sacred Worth”
Part 5: Glorious Diversity
Genesis 11: 1-9

Rev. Dr. Heather W. McColl

Genesis 11: 1-9

At one time, the whole Earth spoke the same language. It so happened that as they moved out of the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled down. They said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks and fire them well.” They used brick for stone and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower that reaches Heaven. Let’s make ourselves famous so we won’t be scattered here and there across the Earth.” God came down to look over the city and the tower those people had built. God took one look and said, “One people, one language; why, this is only a first step. No telling what they’ll come up with next—they’ll stop at nothing! Come, we’ll go down and garble their speech so they won’t understand each other.” Then God scattered them from there all over the world. And they had to quit building the city. That’s how it came to be called Babel, because there God turned their language into “babble.” From there God scattered them all over the world.

 

---

 

Glorious Diversity Genesis 11: 1-9

This week, we take a look at the fifth essential idea found in Creation Spirituality which is the Glorious Diversity.  “Creation Spirituality rejoices in and courageously honors the rich diversity within the Cosmos which is expressed in every individual and embodies multiple cultures, religions, and ancestral traditions. Creation is rife with theme and variation and yet fear has driven us to try to tame, label and homogenize it. [In other words, ] Diversity is another name for God and should be celebrated!”

For this fifth essential, we are taking a look at the story of the Tower of Babel. This story is often used to show how our faith ancestors reasoned and explained why there are so many different languages in our world. However, within the Christian faith context, this story is often tied to the Pentecost story and in doing so, it has been used to set up a “where we got it wrong as humans and how God made it right” scenario. What I mean by this is that as Christians, we often look at the Tower of Babel story as punishment and then the Pentecost story is how God corrected things.” When we look at the story of the Tower of Babel in such a way, we are not allowing the text to speak to us as people of faith and unfortunately we are also setting up an unfair understanding of the sacred texts found within the Old Testament. 

So this morning, I would like to invite us to look at the context of what is going on around this story in Genesis to reclaim its gift of diversity for us as people of faith. If we remember back to the very first Creation story, God tells humans to go out and fill the Earth. Then after the flood, in Genesis 10, we are told that the Earth’s nations branched out after the flood. From the very beginning of our faith story, there is movement. There is discovery. There is creation. Then all of a sudden, we get to Genesis Chapter 11 and we are told “all people on the earth had one language and the same words. 2 When they traveled east, they found a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there”. 

Another word for this is that they sat there. The people stopped moving. The people began to settle. The people began to get comfortable, doing the same old, same old. Then in verse 4, we hear the people say, “let’s make a name for ourselves so that we won’t be dispersed over all the earth.”

Many commentators wonder if this being settled also represented a way to control what was happening around them. After all, as humans that is probably one of our greatest flaws…putting ourselves in the place of God, passing judgment, trying to control every situation. And the easiest way to maintain our illusion of control is to cultivate a sameness in our way of thinking, in our way of being, in our way of dressing, in our way existing. Sameness is efficient. Sameness is comfortable. Sameness is easily controlled.

Differences make us uneasy because they are messy. They require us to take time to understand other people. They require us to do some hard work, the hard work of getting to know the other person, to experience different places, of getting out of our routines, and learning the other person’s story, of seeing them as also created in the image of God. 

That’s hard work. That requires something of us. It requires our time. It requires our compassion. It requires we actually engage each other as people rather than sending an email, sending a text message, or dming someone. We as humans really do prefer the illusion of sameness because it allows us to pretend that we can control anything and everything. When in reality all this allusion of sameness and narrative of control has done for us is keep us in the fight or flight mode 24/7, wearing us out, draining us physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

Even in our story, we can see how humans tried to control the narrative. We are told they decided to make themselves famous so they would not be scattered. They decided to choose an alternative narrative from the one God shared with them, from the one God called them to fulfill, a narrative about fame and glory instead of community, connection and creation.

What the people missed, what we miss when we hold tightly to our allusions of sameness, when we get too comfortable, when we get too settled in our faith, and in our routines is that we often miss out on what God is doing in our midst. That is when we need something or someone to break us out of our routines, which is what God does in verse 5. As one commentator puts it, “God seems confused about the oneness of the people and their language because sameness was not and continues to not be God’s will for God’s people.”

Or let me say it this way…. All around us our world is filled with glorious diversity. “We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity. There is not just one planet or one star; there are galaxies of all different sorts, a plethora of animal species, different kinds of plants, and different races and ethnic groups. God shows us, even with a human body, that it is made up of different organs performing different functions and that it is precisely that diversity that makes it an organism. If it were only one organ, it would not be a human body. We are constantly being made aware of the glorious diversity that is written into the structure of the universe we inhabit”

Yet it seems as if the same fear which made the people of faith settle back then all those years ago continues to pop up in our world, maybe even more so now as we look at our world. There is so much hate in this world especially against people we think look differently from us, who think differently from us, who have different lifestyles from us. Too often we assume that if we all look alike, think alike, dress alike, live alike, then we will achieve peace when in reality when the Spirit calls to be one, it is calling us to unity, not uniformity.

Or in the words of one of my favorite spiritual authors, Joan Chittister, “Difference is the gift that unlikeness brings us. Because of our openness to differences we learn to be in the world in new and exciting ways. We learn that there is more than one kind of way to go through life and do it morally, artistically, happily. We discover that other foods are equally as good for us as anything we have become accustomed to eating. If not better. We begin to understand history and economics and even religion differently. 

Differences bring us out of ourselves into a newer, fuller way of being human. We see other models of family life and begin to reexamine our own in the light of them. We begin to recognize likenesses among us that enlarge our understanding of what it means to be human beings together.

Finally, we begin to realize in blazing new ways that no particular people have a monopoly on goodness or a corner on criminal character, an option on God or an ascendancy on godlessness. We come to own that we are all simply human beings together with a great deal to learn from one another if we are ever going to be fully developed, deeply sensitive and wholly human adults. [Through our differences, by embracing and celebrating our differences,] we gift the world with a new definition of home as a union of hearts rather than a union of types.”

Amen.

See also: Theology Tuesday for Sunday, September 10, 2023 – Glorious Diversity Genesis 11: 1-9. 

Listen to the podcast.