Jack Hardaway
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My first Bible was a birthday gift from my grandparents, when I turned seven years old. It was an illustrated children’s Bible, The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes, by Kenneth Taylor. I still have it.
Mom would read them to me, in the mornings, before I walked to school. We sat on the kitchen floor, with our backs against the cabinet under the sink.
I had never heard any of the stories before. And there were so many of them, each with a colorful illustration, they were wonderful, and dramatic, and usually kind of scary. I loved them.
I loved hearing Mom’s voice reading them to me. I couldn’t read yet. Reading came slowly to me, so the strangeness of God, and the mystery of reading were all wrapped up together.
I then walked to school through the woods. A world full of God, a world full of trees and woodland critters, a world teeming with stories and mysteries, my eyes growing wider and wider.
The Tower of Babel was one of my favorites. That was when I first heard it.
I’ve read it many times since then and my understanding of it has changed. I don’t know if I’ve ever preached on it. It is often one of the options for Pentecost Sunday, pairing the confusion of language at the Tower of Babel with the interpretation of native tongues in the reading from Acts.
It has often been read as God cursing the people so that they could not understand one another, because they rejected God and wanted to replace God, and then at Pentecost the gift of the Spirit brings people back together so they can understand one another again.
I now think that a more careful reading lends itself to a different understanding of the Tower of Babel, and the connection to Pentecost.
The problem wasn’t building a tall tower so that they could take over heaven with new management.
The problem was monolithic conformity and sameness, for fear of being scattered. We all have to be the same or else we are threatened.
The Genesis creation story (only nine chapters before this) is not a world of sameness, it is rather a world with evermore diverse life, every day bringing more wonder and goodness, the words teeming and swarming are used, along with the command to be fruitful and multiply, and to fill the earth.
It is a vision of the world full of ever-growing differentness, and wildness, and freedom.
Not fear. Not uniformity.
The Tower of Babel story depicts a people circling the wagons just after the Noah episode, soon after the world started over. They fell for the lie that unity requires uniformity. A culture that became inbred and paranoid. So they built a tower rather than caravans.
The curse of confusing their tongues was actually a blessing, God restoring the wild diversity of the world teeming and swarming and scattering far and wide.
And the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, is much the same. They didn’t all suddenly speak the same language. It was that the Mighty Acts of God, the resurrection of Jesus, was now for everyone to hear, no matter what language. The good news was for everyone. Many tongues proclaiming the good news, many ears and hearts and eyes growing wider and wider.
The diversity of the Gospel and the fruitful teeming liveliness of life in the Spirit bring the mystery and adventure of God back to the world.
The wildness of the world and the wildness of God, free, unfiltered, unmoderated, like the rush of a violent wind filling the house, like many divided tongues of flame, the good news could not be proclaimed or contained by any one language.
These stories open for us the strangeness of God, they help us read the mystery of the world with wide open eyes and wide-open hearts rather than fearful mistrust.
They show us that God is always working to bring the freedom that is love, the unity that is love, the un-conformed different-ness that is love, the wild teeming and swarming that is love.
May our eyes and ears and hearts grow wider and wider, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.