“Our parents refused to accept this gift as a gift and
instead used their separateness as a club, hoping to force all peoples to speak
their tribe’s language. Thus, at Babel war was born, as the fear of the other
became the overriding passion that motivated each group to force others into
their story or to face annihilation. The killing begun in Cain was now
magnified as humankind’s cooperative ability unleashed a destructiveness that
is as terrible as it is irrational. Humans became committed to a strategy of
destroying the other even if it means their own death. Better to die than to
let the other exist. To this day we thus find ourselves condemned to live in
tribes, each bent on the destruction of the other tribes so that we might deny
our tribal limits. Our histories become the history of war as we count our days
by the battles of the past.” (Hauerwas, Stanley. The Hauerwas Reader. Page 145)
In a great Pentecost Sunday sermon, Stanley Hauerwas
suggests that at some level, the purpose of Pentecost was to undo what happened
at Babel. He creatively links the “confusion of tongues” at Babel with everyone
hearing the good news at Pentecost in their own language. What happened at
Babel, undone at Pentecost.
But what draws me to the quote above from that sermon is
that if we changed but a word or two, it could appear on the editorial page an
any American newspaper today. “The killing begun with Cain” . . . happens all
too often in our country - in “mass contexts.”
Every time we experience tragic moments like what just
happened in El Paso and Dayton, we hear the clamoring of voices with quick
solutions. No doubt some of those solutions would be helpful. No doubt some
would make little or no difference. I don’t think I’m smart enough to make the
call but am smart enough to know that God’s long-term plan for humankind was
not as Hauerwas aptly describes Babel. Yet it seems like so much of the world,
not just our own country, seems “condemned to live in tribes, each bent on the
destruction of the other tribes.”
What is disturbing to me, in addition to the awful evilness
of these acts, is how small a voice the church has in our national
conversation. I know many believers are speaking about gun control, the kind of
tribalism that generates hatred of one another, and similar ideas. But you can
say all of that and then some with little or no authentic Christian voice.
At least part of the uniqueness an authentic voice can bring
to the table is the worth of every human being. Others don’t have to share my
skin color, my language, my worldview, my gender, my geography, or even my
values to be people of worth. The Genesis way of talking about that would be to
simply say “we are all created in the image of God!”
But it isn’t just mass shootings. I live in metro-Atlanta.
Most mornings I listen to the local news while getting read for work. We have
lots of “killings” in our city that are the result of people just driving
through neighborhoods and shooting up houses, apartments, and the like. People are
too often killed in robberies where the amount taken is a pitiful exchange for
a human life. Georgia prisons,, like is
true for many of these United States prison systems, are over-crowded
warehouses that are poorly cared for – both the facilities and the prisoners.
We seem to operate on an “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” mentality that denies the
humanity of those who are there. Then we are perplexed at the recidivism rate
in our prison systems.
Would it make a difference if we followers of Jesus were
more known for declaring “we no longer need to live in Babel” instead of a
voice that often sounds as though some lives either have no value or aren’t as
valuable as others?
Would it make a difference if we were more known for the
kind of behavior Jesus models which seems to suggest value for every human
life, even people like adulteresses, foreign women, crooked tax collectors,
occupying army leaders, and more, instead of being know for how tightly we can
draw the circle to include our tribe, but not some others?
It seems to me that if the gospel doesn’t transform our
Babel-like world into the joy and hope of Pentecost, maybe we aren’t preaching
it as we should. After all, Paul declared that “the gospel is the power of God
unto salvation!” (Romans 1:16)
There’s a Christian singer by the name of Jeremy Camp who
recorded a version of Give Me Jesus.
When I rise, when I eat, when I go to bed, when I die – give me Jesus.
What if . . . instead of offering condemnation, distain,
judgment, and condescension, we decided “to give the world Jesus”?
Would that make a difference?
