Babel Builders

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Genesis 11:1-9

A new week, a new-ish month, and a new season (spring!) just ahead – and the start of a new series.

These weeks leading up to Easter have some contrary currents.  On the one hand, winter is ending, spring is blossoming, the days are brighter, longer, fairer.  On the other hand, we are moving inexorably towards Good Friday, towards a man crucified, dead and buried, towards a death that is “for us and for our salvation,” a death that was “for our sins and the sins of the whole world,” a death that is about sin and its forgiveness.

This new series is entitled Fractured.  

Sin fractures.  It fractures us, our families, our churches and our communities, our environment, our world.  Sin is a reality both deeply personal and widely distributed throughout everything that is human.  Sin is not the breaking of a few seemingly petty and arbitrary rules, it is the fracturing first and foremost of relationships: with God, with my own self, with my neighbors.

Sin fractures relationship with God, and from that fracture flows an almost never-ending toxic river.  No good thing is left untouched.  We imagine sin to be fairly small and manageable (how we love that word manageable!): we have pharmaceuticals, self-help books, anger-management classes, addiction recovery programs, educational initiatives, governmental programs: sure, the world needs to be made right, and who better to do that than us?

This week, we read the Tower of Babel story (Genesis 11).  A terrific Sunday School story for kids, especially if they get to act out the part after God has “confused their languages”!  But it’s actually a story for and about adults, grown-ups – us.

God has created and commanded the humans to “be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and cultivate it into fruitfulness.”  The Babel builders have a better idea: why not build a city, so that (a) we can make a name for ourselves and (b) so that we won’t have to scatter.  Then, an even better idea: not just a city --let’s build a tower to heaven!  And guess what: wonderful new technologies are at hand, hand-made bricks instead of laboriously hand-gathered stones.  Natural stones are all different sizes and shapes, and scattered all over everywhere.  Ah, but those beautiful, hand-made bricks, each and every one the same size, the same shape!  Now we’re getting somewhere!

The point is not that we should still build only with stone, or not live in cities, or not develop and use technologies.  The point is, once we fracture our relationship with God by ignoring what God has told us to be and to do, our vaunted technological achievements and advances serve mainly to further the fracturing and fragmentation of our lives and the life of the world.

We cannot build our way out of the towering city of Sin.  Even if we move out of town, into the sticks and off the grid, we’ll bring that city with us.

What are you busily building – attitudes, habits, preferences, priorities, commitments – that aren’t aligned with what God has called you to be and to do in Christ?  How might you lay down your tools and turn attentively to the Lord?

2 Comments

Thanks, Jan -- powerful pictures of fracturing. I especially liked how some fracturing paint can indicate major structural issues!
Thank you Brian and Kathy. Your post reminds me of how insidious sin is. A tiny nick in a windshield can lead to a large fracture and th windshield disintegrates. Or a small crack in the paint on a wall lsignifies structural damage and the whole house falls apart. We must ask the Holy Spirit to go in deeply to repair the fractures and lead to mending the breaks and bringing about righteousness. God bless you.

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