Genesis 11:1-8 Moving Out of Scare City: The Myth of Scarcity

         The tower was gigantic and was constructed from carefully crafted bricks and mortar.  It reached upward as far as the eye could see until it was lost in the wisps of cloud that scuttered by overhead.  No matter the time of day, no matter the position of the sun, the tower cast a dark, brooding, and forbidding shadow somewhere across much of the land. 

         The tower I am referring to, of course, was the one written about in the passage in Genesis that we just read – the Tower of Babel as it is famously called.  However, in spite of its notoriety that has come down through the ages even to us, it was not a real tower that was actually built sometime in the ancient past.  You see, the story of the tower was never meant to be taken literally.

         In fact, the story is in the part of the Bible that most reputable scholars call “pre-history.” It comes at the end of the collection of stories that attempt to explain the origin of everything and just why the world is the way it is – from the creation of the earth to the beginnings of suffering and sin, to the formation of different languages, to the constant interplay of God’s judgment of, and grace toward, all humanity. 

The story we read is the last significant one before the saga of Abraham, which marks the official beginning of the history of the Israelite people.

         We might also categorize this story as mythology.  However, that term has gotten a bad rap over the years with people believing that a myth is simply a tale that is untrue. 

         Yet, I side with theologian Frederick Buechner who wrote, “The raw material of a myth, like the raw material of a dream, may be something that actually happened once. But myths, like dreams, do not tell us much about that kind of actuality. The creation of Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel, Oedipus- they do not tell us primarily about events. They tell us about ourselves.  In popular usage, a myth has come to mean a story that is not true. Historically speaking, that may well be so. Humanly speaking, a myth is a story that is always true.” 

         The question for us this morning then is this:  What does this story of the building of a tower reaching all the way to heaven tell us about ourselves?  And, more importantly for us right now, how does this story begin to point the way for us out of Scare City?

         To answer those questions, we first need to put this tale into its Biblical, pre-historical, and mythological contexts. So – here goes…

         Imagine a fantastical time long ago and far away. The great flood was over, and a rainbow had arched across the sky.  The earth felt washed clean as it most assuredly was. The animals had marched off the ark two by two (or maybe as trios now) and gone their separate ways.  Noah and his family had also emerged, tremendously glad to see the sunshine after being cooped up in a large boat with a bunch of four-legged creatures of all sizes and shapes, not to mention all the birds flying about, a now dirty and cluttered ark that had protected them all from the torrential rains that had lasted forty days and forty nights. 

         The first thing Noah and the kids did when they had put their sea legs behind them and warmed themselves in the sunshine was to build an altar to God (Good thinking on their part!) as a way to thank the Holy One for her protection and safe-keeping.  The next thing they did was to figure out where to settle, lay down roots, and start farming the land. 

        So, in typical migrant fashion, they moved – like refugees, if you will, with no place to call home - and began exploring the grand and brave new world around them.  They set out like spokes on a great wheel, and one branch of the family eventually came to Shinar, a fertile and level plain that lay between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. 

         They decided it would be a good place to live, so they unpacked their tents and set up their cook stoves.  Even though God had clearly directed them to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth”, they figured they could fudge God’s commandment just a bit, multiply among themselves, and hang together in Shinar (Bad idea on their part!).

         No sooner had they set up camp, made a chore chart, and started planting wheat for next year’s harvest than a few of them looked around, nodded their heads, and remarked, “Farming is OK and tents will do, but how much better – and more permanent - would a city be?  It would keep us in – and the riffraff out.  What we need is a tower to mark our presence – and nobody else’s - here in this fair land.” And before you know it, they had mustered up enough creativity and ingenuity to develop a building plan and – with a bribe here and a wink there - railroaded it through the local planning board. 

         When they began excavating the site, they did not find rocks and stones and tar for building as had been common where they had lived before.  However, that did not deter them.  They adapted to their new environment and instead learned how to make bricks out of dirt and clay and even how to burn them – first in the sun and then in specially made ovens – until the bricks became hard and impermeable. 

         And day by day the tower rose higher and higher in the sky until one day God shook his old holy head and queried to himself, “What’s going on down there?  I told them to fan out to the ends of the earth, and here they are just staying in one spot – building a city to protect them from who knows what.  I want them to be one people – living in harmony and not in fear of one another. No telling what they’ll come up with next—they’ll stop at nothing!” 

         And, of course, we all know what did happen next.  Against their wishes, God scattered them to the far ends of the earth. They had to desert the city they had envisioned and the tower they had built.  And for good measure, God also garbled their language until it only sounded like babbling.

         To understand this story in the context of our worship series – “Moving Out of Scare City” – we need to look closely at why these nomads wanted to build such a permanent structure, a gigantic tower, in the first place.  The story outlines three reasons. 

         First, the people did not want to be scattered – even though their desire was in direct contradiction to God’s command to “fill the earth.”  They wanted to stick together – safety in numbers, as it goes.  They wanted to be with their own kind, knowing down to the last grain of wheat how much they needed to prosper.  They wanted to not have to worry about outsiders, not have to live in fear that someday there may not be enough to go around. 

         The tower, you see, was a place to hide – and should come as no a surprise to us.  All of its permanence and strength symbolizes a need we all have – and that is to protect ourselves from uncertainty and from a fear that if others find out what we possess, we will have less – and we may not have enough. 

         Yet, God says no to such fear-based living.  God says no to protecting ourselves from scarcity by building towers and walls to protect us from one another.  God’s plan is for us to live in harmony – with no need for towers to hide in.  God’s plan is for us to trust that there is enough to go around, trust that in our sharing rather than in our hoarding we will find joy.  As Winston Churchill once noted, "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." 

         There is a UCC pastor who now serves a church in California who challenged her congregation to tithe (give away 10% of their income).  She even said that, if doing so did not change their lives for the better, the church would refund their money to the level of their previous year’s pledge.  A few people took her up on the offer.  No money was refunded.  No one went to the poorhouse.  God says no to fear-based living.

         Second, the people built a tower because they wanted to reach the heavens.  They wanted to have God’s ear all the time.  They figured that a lot of bad things had happened – the flood, for example – because they had been separated from God. 

And, as Reformed Church pastor Kenneth Benjamin noted, “And so what better way to fix the problem than to make a stairway to heaven, go right up to God, be in heaven with God, and talk things out!”

         However, though we certainly reach God – wherever God is – through prayer, we find God not at the tippy top of a tower reaching heavenward, but in the eyes of those all around us with whom we share our resources and whom we serve through the ministries of our church.  We find God in the folks who come to us needing fuel assistance or a grocery card to make it to the end of the month, those here in Raymond who pick up Thanksgiving baskets, those in Texas and Florida and Puerto Rico who will use our 16 Church World Service emergency clean up buckets to clean up the mess left behind by the hurricanes.

         As Episcopal priest Michael Marsh noted in his blog, “We try to experience God on our terms. We build walls and structures and try to raise ourselves up to God telling God to work within the walls and structures we have built. But that is not how God works. God does not work or act within the walls and structures we have built. Instead, God lives, works, and acts within us.” God says no to looking for her only in the glories of heaven or within the four walls of a church building rather than in the detritus of the broken lives all around us.

         Third, the people wanted to build the tower because they wanted to make a name for themselves.  Unlike the rough-hewn altar they had constructed fresh off the boat in gratitude for God’s grace, they were intent on building a tower that spoke volumes about who they really were:  “We’re cool!  We’re cool!  Will you just take at gander at that tower?  Yeah, we’re cool!”

         As Max Lucado wrote about in his book, God Came Near, and a blogger I read this week paraphrased, “The tower was built for 100% pure selfishness.  The bricks were made of inflated egos and the mortar was made of pride…They built it so someone’s name might be remembered – theirs!  We have a name for that: blind ambition.  Success at all cost.  Becoming a legend in one’s own time.  Climbing to the top of the ladder.  King of the mountain.  Queen of the domain.  Top of the heap.  “I did it my way.”

         We make heroes out of people who are ambitious.  (Granted,) this world would be in sad shape without people who dream of touching the heavens.  Ambition is the grit in the soul (that) creates disenchantment with the ordinary.  But left unchecked it becomes an insatiable addiction to power and prestige; left unchecked it becomes a roaring hunger for achievement that devours people as a lion devours an animal, leaving behind only the skeletal remains of relationships.” 

         Left unchecked, our lives become an unending cycle of more, more, more.  That is how we think we will be remembered – the more money we flaunt, the more hotels we own, the more guns we have, the one who dies with the most toys wins.  But, when all is said and done, it does not work that way. 

         It is like the two Texans who wanted to impress each other with the size of their ranches. “What’s the name of your ranch?” one asked.

         The other boasted, “I own the Rocking R, Bar U, Flying W, Circle C, Box D, Rolling M, Staple Four, Rainbow’s End, Silver Spur Ranch.”

         Impressed, the first rancher responded, “Woooweee! With a name like that, how many cattle do you run?”

         The other confessed, “Not many, actually. Very few survive the branding.”

         As Lutheran pastor James Huebner wrote, “We live in a world that defines success by how much money a person makes, so we have determined that others aren’t as good as we are because they live off government funded programs or sleep in cardboard boxes. We live in a world that bows down to the idols of materialism and convenience so we have bought into the lie that life is all about me being happy and if I’m not happy I can buy things until I am. We live in a world that sees (ourselves) as invincible so we have convinced ourselves that our skill and strength is, at times, greater than God’s.”

         But God says no to making a name for ourselves at the expense of those we walk over to get to wherever we want to be.  God says no to defining our success as human beings by the stuff we have and the lattes we drink and the donuts we eat rather than by the service we give. 

         God says no to towers – towers of power, towers of affluence, towers of influence, towers that permanently protect us from seeing the world’s need around us, towers that keep out the riffraff, towers that cause us to hold tight rather than let go, towers that cause us to live in fear rather than in joy, towers that seal us into Scarce City, casting dark and brooding and forbidding shadows over all the land. 

         Because those dark and brooding and forbidding shadows will be our undoing.  As Frederick Buechner so poignantly noted, “If darkness is meant to suggest a world where nobody can see very well—either themselves, or each other, or where they are heading, or even where they are standing at the moment; if darkness is meant to convey a sense of uncertainty, of being lost, of being afraid; if darkness suggests conflict, conflict between races, between nations, between individuals each pretty much out for himself when you come right down to it; then we live in a world that knows much about darkness. Darkness is what our newspapers are about. Darkness is what most of our best contemporary literature is about. Darkness fills the skies over our own cities no less than over the cities of our enemies.”

         We need to tear down the towers and swallow our fear of not having enough – and instead we need to give away more.  We need to tear down the towers and let go of our “more, more, more” mentality and replace it with “we have more than enough”.  We need to tear down the towers and let in the light, bringing that light to those we care for and share with.  We need to tear down the towers and together begin to move out of Scarce City.