The Illusion of Control - Sermon Transcript

Good morning, friends.

I am Joe Stabile, one of the associate pastors here.

And as Elizabeth said, we're continuing our Recoloring the Bible series this morning and looking at some of the stories of the Bible that perhaps we learned when we were children and

 and maybe have always wondered about.

So today we're going to look at the story in the Bible about the Tower of Babel.

 The Tower of Babel is one of those great mythical stories that we use to explain why people on earth all speak so many different languages.

We certainly have experienced that in these last weeks and days with the World Cup.

And the Bible is filled with so many wonderful stories

 that you may want to just ask the question, did that really happen?

So I love what my good friend Father Richard Rohr says in talking about the Bible.

He says, everything in the Bible is true, and some of it really happened.

 And I think this is one of those kinds of stories.

It's short, it's abrupt, it's a story that is very easily overlooked when we're reading the Bible.

However, like so many biblical dramas, it hides a depth that we seldom consider.

 What we have this morning is not just a story about bricks and towers.

It's not only about God and humankind, but rather it is about the very nature of human ambition and pride and those fault lines that run through both societies and souls.

 The Tower of Babel is less about architectural ability and it is more about what happens when we try to secure ourselves against fear or when we strive on our own somehow to get to heaven through human endeavor.

 or about when we confuse unity with control.

I invite you to hear the story from Genesis chapter 11 verse 1 through 9.

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.

 And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.

And they said to one another, come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.

And they had a brick for stone and bitumen for mortar.

 And then 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.

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which mortals had built.

And the Lord said, Look,

 They are one people and they all have 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.

Come let us go down and confuse their language there so that they will not understand one another's speech.

 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.

Therefore 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.

 For the Word of God in Scripture, for the Word of God among us, for the Word of God within us.

My brothers and sisters, what we have here this morning is not only about bricks and towers.

Would you pray with me?

 May the Lord be in our hearts and on our lips that we might worthily proclaim Him both by our words and by our deeds.

Amen.

 So here we are after Noah and the great flood.

And the population has grown and everyone has gathered on the plain of Shinar and they decided to build a huge city with an enormous tower that would reach to the heavens.

And they have two purposes.

First, to make a name for themselves.

And the second,

 to prevent from being scattered over all the earth.

Now the problem is that God sees this ambition and recognized the danger of such concentrated power all in one place, people speaking one language.

 So God comes down and confounds their speech and scatters them across the whole of the earth.

Now I hope you all will remember with me back in the very first story of Adam and Eve and God says, be fruitful and multiply.

 And then again in chapter 9 of Genesis, just after the flood, Noah and his family is told again, be fruitful and populate the earth.

And this language confusion now leaves the city and the tower unfinished and abandoned

 and perpetually left as a monument to frustrated aspiration and the limit of human pride.

 We're in the midst of the heat in the summer, and Europe has experienced a lot of heat this summer, so I would imagine it's pretty easy for all of us to picture the hard, sweaty work of baking bricks in the sun, and then the determination and the labor of a united people to begin building the city and tower.

 And then can you imagine all of a sudden there's silence?

Words spoken to one another turn to nonsense.

Companions in labor are now strangers.

And all they're left with is confusion where there was clarity.

 and scattering where there was solidarity.

So, church, we might ask ourselves the question, what drove them to build the city and the tower in the first place?

But I don't think it's hard to imagine.

They were survivors of a huge flood, and now they've been given a second chance.

 So perhaps, perhaps it was fear.

The fear of being erased, the fear of being scattered, the fear of being undone.

So what do you do when you have that kind of fear?

You build so you can stay together.

You do something that brings us cohesion.

You ward off dispersion.

 and they decided, let's make a name for ourselves.

Let's never ever be fragile like that again, and let's make sure that we can be in control.

Three impulses become interwoven, fear, ambition, defiance.

They're caught up with the desire for security,

 The longing for immortality and the will to just be independent.

Now church for me on the surface seems like a pretty good outcome.

One people, one language, one shared goal, cohesion in an age of endless division.

 And perhaps that appeared to be safety, but it also leads to compulsion.

You see, when there is no room for difference, when there is no room for dissent, when there is that, the result could be that what begins as solidarity

 risked hardening into tyranny.

So as we see in the Scripture, and as happens so very often in Scripture, God intervenes.

God intervenes not because unity is dangerous, but because unity can become uniformity

 and uniformity can become oppression.

So we have to consider that what happens in Genesis chapter 11 is not judgment at all, but liberation.

You see it's an insistence on plurality.

 It's an insistence on messy, creative, frustrating diversity which allows true freedom to breathe.

Unity is not the problem.

But unity becomes toxic when it silences difference in the name of security.

 Babel has reared its ugly head many times throughout history.

Humans attempting to build their own towers either personally or corporately or nationally.

Communism sought to bind vast populations together under a single ideological language.

 Fascism's vision was not of many voices, but of one people, one destiny, one leader, and the result was war and genocide.

In our own lifetime, there have been countless utopian projects, communes, cults,

 all of them asking people to conform to one way of life, one belief system, or one interpretation.

And even most recently, globalization and big tech, they dream of one marketplace, one digital language, and one algorithmic logic.

 So much so that even Pope Leo has referred to AI as the new Tower of Babel.

So if Babel explains the scattering of nations, I think it also highlights something much closer to home, the scattering of the human heart.

What is a tower?

 but the ego's monument.

Now I'm aware some of you don't know my history as a former Roman Catholic priest.

Forty years ago, along with Suzanne, who is now my wife, as a priest and layperson in the Roman Catholic Church, we started a nonprofit ministry.

 And the role of the ministry was to go to Catholic churches and conduct revivals for a week at a time in those churches as a priest and layperson working together side by side.

And when we started the ministry, we went from church to church and we never advertised for ourselves word

 just went around, and somebody would hear us in one city, tell a relative in another city, and we'd get invited from city to city, and we were doing fairly well with the ministry and filling churches.

And then in 1986, Pope John Paul II was coming to the United States, and he was going to visit in New Orleans.

 and the order of priests that I belonged to owned the third largest Catholic church in the United States, in New Orleans.

So I got the brainy idea, why don't we invite ourselves to New Orleans, to this church, which holds three times as many people as sitting in this church here,

 we'll conduct our revival and we'll invite people from all over New Orleans and it'll be such a great thing before the Pope ever gets there.

We got to the church on that weekend to begin our week-long revival and the very first night of the event in the church that seats 3,000 there were 50 people.

 And they didn't even sit together the whole week.

You see, sometimes, sometimes we build our own towers, creating our career, our reputation, our family legacies, our philosophies of control.

 And maybe it's not so obvious in the moment, but what we're saying is let's make a name for ourselves.

Consider for just a moment the executive who's building his tower of career success, only to find that it's shattered by burnout and disillusionment.

Or maybe it's the parent

 invests her identity wholly in her children only to face the scattering of self when they grow and leave home?

Or what about the believer who just clings to one rigid creed of

 only to be undone by theological questions that refuse to be silenced.

Each one of those is a Babel story.

It's the ego constructing a monument and then life scattering the bricks.

You see, church, true integration is not sameness.

 But harmony and true wholeness, whether in society or in business or in a family or in a relationship, is the voices of many languages, each one carrying a part of the truth.

And to be truly human is to host a babble within.

 something that is messy, polyphonic, and alive.

So here, church, is the paradox.

What looks like judgment is in truth mercy.

God's intervention is not punitive, but protective.

 protective from entombing ourselves in false security and mistaking cohesion for unity.

You see, the confusion of languages is really a gift.

It forces humility.

It compels us to encounter the other.

 And it enriches the human story with difference and dialogue and translation.

And it makes life dynamic and open and surprising.

And for all of us who follow the Christian tradition, this comes full circle in Pentecost where the Spirit allows many different languages all to be heard as one message.

It is the birth of

 of deeper harmony in diversity.

And so what I think it is, my brothers and sisters, with all of us, the scatterings that we resist, the breakdowns, the contradictions we experience, the fragmentations of our lives,

 may just be redemptive, leading us into a more human space.

The Tower of Babel is more than just a story about the origin of 7,170 different languages spoken on the face of the earth.

It's a parable of human pride and fear

 It's a parable of the temptation to mistake unity for uniformity and control for security.

And it warns us of efforts, it warns us of any efforts that erase difference in the pursuit of sameness.

 And it reminds us that the ego's quest for control must be unsettled in order to grow whole.

What we think of as divine judgment is in fact divine mercy.

God

 protecting us from the tyranny of one voice, whether that voice belongs to a regime, a government, a culture, a faith belief, or an ego.

 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.