June 3, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
[Early Service or Vigil:]
Genesis 11:1-9 A tower with its top in the heavens
or Exodus 19:1-9a,16-20a;20:18-20 They came to Sinai
or Ezekiel 37:1-14 The valley of dry bones
or Joel 2:28-32 Your sons and daughters shall prophesy
Psalm 33:12-22 The Lord watches all the inhabitants of the earth
or Canticle 2 or 13 - Benedictus es, Domine
Acts 2:1-11 The day of Pentecost had come
or Romans 8:14-17, 22-27 When we cry, "Abba".
Psalm 130 De profundis
Canticle 9 Ecce, Deus
or Psalm 104:25-32 In wisdom you have made them all
John 7:37-39a The festival of booths: come and drink.
It does not take much watching of TV or radio talk shows, interviews, or the cattle braying on the McLaughlin Report, to see how it was that our ancient forbears came up with the story of the tower of Babel. "Come, let us go down," God says in the myth of the confusion of human speech, "Come, let us go down and confuse their language, that they may not understand one another." When we see and hear the harm done by the misuse of langage, the deceit, verbosity, and the low and cunning silences, we can appreciate the Old Ones' understanding that all the vanity of humankind might lie in the clever tripping and the cruel dumbing down of the tongue. The voice, made for communication, for poetry and praise, for singing and for sense, becomes a means of mischief. This misuse the Bible equates with idolatry, because through the power of speech, the monopoly of communications, humankind again and again tries to build its tower of power to invade heaven itself, to attempt a coup of God's own ordering of the universe. Disinformation and "infotainment" are the tools of Image Building, wherein the weapons of annihilation are called "peacekeepers," and liars are evangelists in the age of Rupert Murdoch and the Press Lords of Oppression. Aggressive war becomes "Defense". Henry Kissinger, a documented war criminal, wins a Peace Prize. Since Josef Goebbels discovered that the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed, the practice of deceit has been state policy in the modern world. In the United States, the biggest lies are those of Top Secret silences, concealment and evasion, the muffler and the muzzle.
Just today the New York Times reported a "devastating picture of immigrants dead in the Arizona desert"--14 young Mexican immigrants perished in the 130 degree heat of the desert late in May. But the article blamed "a smuggling operation" and a "coyote" who abandoned them there 30 miles north of the border. A violation of benign border protection was at fault. Exodus is libelled as "smuggling". No word in the article that the border had been moved when the U.S. stole Arizona from the Mexican Republic in 1848. It became the 48th state only in 1912, pirated by Manifest Destiny into the Union. The Mexicans were not after all "immigrants", for the land is historically their own patrimony. These young men simply died in the most recent battle of the Mexican war, which Henry David Thoreau denounced and refused to pay his taxes to support; that landed him in jail. The silence in the U.S. about its bloody history is a Big Lie, its re-scribbling of history a strangled Babel babble.
When God's truth and God's purpose collide with the Proud Tower of human ambition, then the project of Human Being is often derailed, and we see what the selfish purpose of men was all along --to build their own name and fame, and not to the praise of God. "Let us make a name for ourselves" is their motive in politics. "Polis" is the Greek word for "City" and politics is the art of building cities, the proud towers that reach into the heavens and are named for the sons of men (rarely for the daughters of women, one might add). But the division of the tribes by diatribes, and into what we so politely call "ethnic groups" -- this is what the myth then speaks of when it says "the Lord scattered them and they left off building the city."
Laurence Weider wrote that after Babel,
"Where once prayers said were unison,
And conversations harmony,
We now mistake our dearest loves;
Crowds muddle in cacophany.
So far from being of one name
We clash, strive, swindle, beat, and blame
The other for not being nearer
To ourselves, or speaking clearer.
Nimrod's grave magnificence
Redounds as naked arrogance
And God, that made of Babel rubble,
We call in many tongues a father,
Light, indifferent, shepherd, mild,
Stern, an absence, or a bubble."
This is the story of why we need the Day of Pentecost. This frustration of the misguided human agenda is the story of why we need Spirit to guide us; why we need the politics of God, the politics of Jesus, the politics of the Counsellor to guide our Councils. The name of Babel today is Chicago, or London, or Moscow, Bejing, Baghdad, or the district of Columbia, each demanding loyalties we can only give to God. But when we baptize neophytes into the Body of Christ, we baptize into the family of God, not into the particular national or ethnic RMO (religious maintenance organization) of our choice, all subsidiaries of Mammon and a fallen world.
Saint Saul changed his name to Paul because of Babel's confusion. He quit that name because "saulos" in a demotic Greek pun also meant "slut-arsed" whereas "paulos" meant only "little guy." "Saulos" was used as an insult to male prostitutes with a swinging gait to their hips. (At least according to T.J.Leary, quoted by Donald Harman Akenson in his new book "Saint Saul" (Oxford). The homophobic rabbi from Tarsus could live with "short stuff", but couldn't handle "Miss Thang."
In his magnificent (except for his homophobia) letter to the Romans our Little Guy reminds us that natural birth did not make us members of God's family. Mere natural birth gets us into the ecosystem, like flora and fauna, and things hatched and whelped or planted or seeded. But it doesn't make us children of God.
I saw a wonderful production of Gilbert & Sullivan's "Mikado" once which had been "translated" into modern drag, as it were, but one of the things that hadn't been changed was the snobbish attitude of Pooh-Bah, the guy who has got all the titles he can manage. He's not only Lord Mayor, but has a whole string of other titles. Pooh-Bah claims that in fact his ancestry goes back before Adam. "You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering."
Well, apparently, every human being has the kind of pride which likes to come up with a Pooh-Bah version of reality. All of us like to think of ourselves as having a different family background, different ancestors than Eve and Adam, perhaps. I recently took an interest in the "arch-heretic" Pelagius, and got his Life and Letters from Amazon Dot Com. I was astonished at his cheerful optimism, his blithe spirit in the face of the disaster of human history. An antidote to clinical depression. I loved him, and nowadays from time to time I am a Pelagian for a holiday, a festive week, and I hope against hope that Pelagius will be resurrected and (like Luther) forgiven by the Pope. But Article IX reminds me that "Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk)but is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man."
Soon sober days my head is clearer, and I see the disaster that free will works in us without Amazing Grace. We are all like Pooh-Bah, and St. Augustine would probably say we are born sneering. (He did remind us that we were born "inter faeces et urinam.") But in Baptism, Little Guy reminds us that we have received not the spirit of slavery, nor are we the children of wrath, but the children of grace. We are not merely the spawn of primordial atomic globules. But we have received a Bath of Blessing, as something we could never have by nature, and we have received the Spirit of daughters and sons, whereby we can talk to God as Amma and Abba, the Aramic words of Jesus' own childhood, with which he talked to Mary and Joseph, and with which he talked to God. Paul-Saul says it is the Spirit herself, breathing in our own lives, that enables us to know God as Kinfolk from Home.
Philip wanted to know from Jesus what the Abba looks like. What does Father-God really look like, he asked the Rabboni. And Jesus, astonishingly says: "Have I been around you so long and yet you claim you haven't seen? Take a look." I remember how surprised I was when I noticed, some years ago, the smile on the face of my Vietnamese infant god-son, and how it was the same smile I saw on the face of his adopted mother, a dear friend of mine from Wisconsin. He had been with her for less than a year, yet he had learned smiles from the face of his new adopted parent. Now that's what Jesus was saying to Philip: "Take a look, if you want to see what God's smile is like, and how he treats his friends, take a look at me." John's gospel tells us that Jesus takes after his Abba-Amma. He's been around God so much you can see God through him, and in him.
Now the Christian life is not simply a matter of outward observances, of course. When John has Jesus say "If you love me, you will keep my commandments," he isn't saying "Keep the rules or you won't get your allowance; go to church or go to hell." He is saying instead, "Live the way I live, love the way I love, in the Spirit I've shared with you, and then something will happen in you that the world will not be able to figure out. What will happen is that I will pray for you to the Abba-Amma so that the Spirit, the Breath of God, will come into your life, into your community. The Spirit will motivate and strengthen you to do even greater things than I was able to do in a few years in Galilee, a few months in Jeruslaem." Whatever in fact you do in my Name, the Father-Mother will do in you. It won't be your own private Proud Tower to heaven. But if the Spirit guides, you'll come fully to Pentecost, you'll have my Shalom, which I'm leaving with you. Now don't be afraid.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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