If Love Be the Language - May 27, 2007
Pentecost SundayGenesis 11:1-9
There is a particularly strong memory I have of the time my family and I spent in California. It was later in our time there; in fact it was the sixth and final year. My father-in-law and his wife had come to visit us for a couple of days and we took them—as we usually did with out-of-state visitors—to Muir Woods.
Muir Woods is a monument not to John Muir, but to creation. Entering the woods themselves from the often crowded and confusing parking lots is like entering another world. It is cooler in the woods, often by about 15 degrees or so. It is calmer, quieter, and peaceful there. As soon as a person enters the canopy of those magnificent Redwoods, the only thing a person can do is this. (look up!) You can’t help it. It’s a reflex. Everyone does it. Even if it seems silly. Everyone looks up to see how far into the heavens these trees reach.
Only they’re no longer trees at this point. To say that the giant California Redwoods are trees is to say that the Mona Lisa is oil on cloth. Standing inside Muir Woods feels like walking into a work of art. But my favorite memory is not really of straining my neck to see the tiny bits of blue confetti sky scattered among the treetops. It is of sitting on a bench near the entrance to the forest, listening to the people walking by.
They walk by in groups. The only people I ever saw at Muir Woods who were there by themselves were people who looked as if they were hiking the ridge behind the woods—serious athletic types for whom the magnificence all around them was merely a backdrop for whatever physical training they were trying to achieve that day up there on that ridge. They stood out for wearing spandex and serious-looking footwear, while the rest of us walked through with our sweatshirts, jeans and sandals.
As the groups of people walked by that day I heard the most marvelous symphony of languages I had ever experienced: French, German, Korean, and Japanese. African tongues I would never be able to put a name to, Scandinavian tongues I can’t tell apart. I’m pretty good at picking apart Australian from British from South African English dialects, and I was having fun that afternoon—there was something from everywhere!
And in my head, I imagined that they were all saying something like this: ” Whoa. Those trees are tall! Whoa. Hey, is there one of those trees you can drive your car through in this park?” (For the record—no there isn’t.)
And the most charming moment of all is realizing that it doesn’t matter what part of the world you came from, the impulse is the same: Look up, and marvel. Say the same thing everyone else says when faced with such brilliance, such masterful creativity, such undeniable beauty. Whoa, indeed.
In our Genesis text for today we find a people seemingly united around a common cause. I say “seemingly” because even though it looks like unity and cooperation, it is cooperation around a cause that will backfire in the end. The people of the earth, all having one language and being all together in one place, decided to build a monument to themselves—a tower which will reach into the heavens.
That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? I tried to figure out what would disappoint God so in this story. I thought maybe the building materials were inappropriate—but it turned out that baked mud and bitumen were common for monuments in the river plain in Mesopotamia. Then I thought maybe it had something to do with the language aspect of it—the fact that everybody on the planet spoke the same one. I don’t know why that would make God upset, do you? Then I thought about how high the tower was—maybe that was presumptuous of them to build a thing so high. But then I remembered—I just spent a week on the 14th floor of a high rise hotel in Nashville and it didn’t seem at all offensive or sinful to me. (Although I was queasy every time I rode in the glass elevators.) There’s got to be some clue in this text as to why God would get so upset at the people that God would scatter them and confuse their language, making the tower of Babel a mockery of human effort.
I had one of the most exciting face-to-face meetings ever this week in Nashville. On Tuesday my friends and I bumped into my all time favorite preaching idol—Fred Craddock. If you are not familiar with the preaching rock star world, if names like Barbara Brown Taylor, Anna Carter Florence, Barbara Lundblad, Peter Gomes, or James Forbes mean nothing to you, you would not recognize Fred on the street. He is a little old man—and by little I mean I can look at the top of his head when standing next to him, and by old I mean…let’s say older…than my dad. But when he opens his mouth, he is a giant among humans. He understands the text, understands the gospel, understands the church in ways I don’t know if I ever will. By the time I get to the end of one of his sermons, tears are streaming down my face, and my heart is burning from the beauty of it all. And it comes on so suddenly. One moment I am chuckling at a universal truth about humanity and its frailties that Fred has pointed out so clearly using just a few simple declarative sentences; the next I am catching my breath in surprise. And then he sits down—sits down! With no benediction, no amen, just 1600 people in a room caught off guard, surprised by love or grace or truth—almost always all three.
So, on Tuesday, I caught up with my two friends as they were standing there with Fred. I walked up to him, and he turned to look up at me. “Well, hello.” he said. (I might have been standing a wee bit close, now that I think about it.) This was my chance, my big moment—Fred Craddock was standing right in front of me. What do I say? In a fit of eloquence, I thrust out my hand, grabbed hold of his, and said something brilliant like “Hi. I’m Julie. I just love you.” And then I think I squeaked.
Yep. My big moment came and went. He was very sweet about it, though. (I think he may be used to being the middle-aged-preaching-woman’s Donny Osmond by now.)
We make idols of things, people, places all the time. What are yours? Sometimes we make idols of ourselves, our own inventiveness, our own strength, our own cleverness, maybe our own ability to reach up to the heavens. Perhaps that is what upset God so much that God needed to scatter the people, to take away their ability to talk so much about themselves by making it just a little more difficult for them to understand each other—making them have to work for it just a little harder.
And when the people kept forgetting how to work a little harder for it, God reminded them that the people do not need to reach up to the heavens, like a tree or a tower. The heavens reach down to us. The language we can always use to understand each other has been there all along. If love be the language we use to communicate—love spoken in simple declarative sentences, love that sets the heart aflame, love that erases differences, love that makes us all look up in wonder and say “Whoa.”—if that love be the language, well…what else can keep us apart?
It is not distance, or language, or theology that keeps us apart—not really. It is that we have forgotten to speak the common universal language. We babble in the language of power, of greed, of idolatrous self-interest, or of maddening self-defeat.
And all the while, the Spirit sings in our midst in the universal language, the language God invented, with a vocabulary that declares this: I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.
This language does not speak of towers soaring into heaven, crashing uninvited into the space where God dwells, but instead sings of heaven coming down to us, of God’s desire to have such intimacy with us, to know us with such love that God would send to us the Son, and then an Advocate.
If love be the language…
Lord, speak to me that I may speak.
Thanks be to God.
