“Babel”                        Vance L. Toivonen

READING                   Genesis 11:1-9 

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. 

READING                   Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality 

Why were you looking everywhere, when God is the Looker? Why were you constantly seeking something, when God is the Seeker? When exactly were you planning on finding Spirit, when Spirit is always the finder? How exactly were you going to force God to show his or her face, when God’s Face is your Original Face?…Where were you planning on seeing God, when God is the ever-present Seer? How much knowledge did you think you had to cram into your head in order to know God, when God is the ever-present Knower?...feel the simple feeling of Being, feel the Feeler in you right now, and you are feeling the fully revealed God in his or her radiant glory, a One Taste of the divine Suchness of the entire Kosmos…that leaves you breathlessly enlightened and fully realized in this and every moment. 

SERMON 

Two current best-selling books have plastered the word God onto their covers, and both then proceed to use that very same word for target practice. The word God on the cover of these books is like a big bulls eye which happens not to be painted red, but just as well might have been. 

These two books, one by the acerbic Christopher Hitchens, and the other by the devout atheist Richard Dawkins, denounce mainline religions and, I think, inappropriately use the word God to sell copy. In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins asserts that the God of the bible is psychotic, that proofs of God’s existence are fatuous, and that religion in general is simply nonsense. 

Hitchens at least reveals a bit of honesty in his title, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by putting the word religion in the title to offset the word God. He has a very sarcastic and sometimes humorous way of writing about his subject. For instance, he writes, “monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents.” 

Both of these men seem to be angry at God, when the truth is that they are actually upset by the gods concocted by the popular religions of the world, and by the damage that has been wrought in the name of those gods by those religions. I think it is important when we throw around the word God that we take a certain degree of ownership of that word. The construct of God used by religions varies precisely because the religions themselves vary. They each need a God that fits their goal structure. The idea that God would be quite independent of such structures is all but unthinkable for most religious institutions. Yet these same institutions cling to the notion that God is on their side and in their camp, interested in and supportive of their agendas. 

There is a sense in which God is need based. We need God, not because we need the religions that have attached themselves to God, but rather because it is so very easy for us to confuse ourselves with God. Which brings us to this ancient, ancient story of the Tower of Babel. Written about 3,000 years ago, and passed on orally for God knows how long before that, we get a picture of a God who seems to be anxious about the progress of humankind. With human beings sharing a common language, and a joint mission to build a tower to the sky, God and God’s retinue were pacing the sky trying to figure out how to stop this threatening development from evolving any further. 

The answer? God’s heavenly court decides to confuse the languages of human beings so that they will not understand each other. This ultimately results in an abandonment of the development project, and a scattering of humankind throughout the earth. The God of this story insists upon exclusively remaining God. This is the same God that gave the commandment to Moses and the Israelites that there is to be no other God but the one, true God. This is the same God that told human beings not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because in so eating they would become like God. 

This is not a God who wishes to share the universal stage. It is easy to see how such a God could foster elitism and warring in the hands of human beings who claim to represent this God. But the evil that human beings do is the evil that human beings do, no matter how often they associate themselves with God. The ancient Israelites were surrounded by others, others who paid homage to other gods. The picture on the front of the bulletin today is a possible facsimile of the Tower of Babel. It is the great ziggurat (or stage tower) of the Babylonian god Marduk, not to be confused with the cartoon dog of the same name. This was a stairway to the small chapel of Marduk that sat atop the ziggurat. 

The ancient Hebrews felt threatened by the progress of Babylonian culture, and threatened by the polytheism that flew in the face of their monotheism. Here in this ancient story we have a prime example of how human beings project their fears, their anxieties, and their agendas on one they call God. After millennia of this human behavior, Dawkins and Hitchens, among others, have more than enough evidence to make their case. God is a jealous, elite, warring power that flexes muscle in the world  God will not tolerate any agenda other than the agenda espoused by those who claim to speak for God. God will not share the world stage with other ideological representations of God. It’s God’s way or the highway. 

And yet, none of this has anything to do with the real God. For the real God is un-seek-able, unknowable, and, of course, un-view-able. As Ken Wilber reminds us, we are ever in contact with this God. This is not the God of institutions, but the God of all life. This is the God whose breath alone creates all that we do see, and feel, and experience. This is the Divine presence that is simply unavoidable. We do not need a tower to access this God because this God already accesses us, and chooses us as conduits for the co-creation of the universe. 

Wilber recommends that we give up the search and rest in the Searcher. He recommends that we allow our very egos to be blinded by the Self that God sees when God observes and interacts with us. He suggests that we give up the God games that we play and focus on being as God always intended us to be; fully human, fully alive, fully loving, fully gracious, fully caring, fully joyful, and fully at peace. We are all of the these things already, by birth. We do not need to expand ourselves, for we already are. 

We are living in dangerous times. We have not given up this Babeling, these efforts to control the world with power and force, and this incessant need to manipulate others with religious and political affiliations. My freshman seminary advisor said it best. He said, :“I have a God problem…I get up in the morning and I want to be God…I sit down to eat lunch and I want to be God…I go to bed at night and I still want to be God.” 

Somehow, I believe, we will not be satisfied until we have completely and utterly obliterated the real God from this planet, and ultimately from the universe, and replaced the real God with some mock up of God, some God created in our image after our likeness; a God who does our bidding, condones our bombing, and our hatred, and ultimately and ironically presides over the very destruction of the world that God is alleged to have created in the first place. 

The good news is that the real God is not this God so many religions have created in their own images, after their own likenesses, including Christianity. The real God cannot and will not be obliterated, no matter how hard we try. The real God is imperceptible, yet all-pervasive, pure energy and life and justice and unconditional love. If we can find our unity in this real God, we have a shot at truly coming together as a humanity. We will not, and can not, pose a threat to the real God, and that goes for Mr. Dawkins and Mr. Hitchens too. The only threat we pose is to ourselves, to one another, and to our agendas; a threat we may engineer in the name of some kind of God, but never the real God, the God who is according to Wilber, Looker, Seeker, Knower, and Seer. 

The good news, according Ken Wilber, is that we are the objects being looked upon, and that we are looked upon with grace, mercy, and loving-kindness. The good news, according to Wilber, is that we are the ones that the Seeker is always seeking. We are not being coerced into knowing. We are the ones being known. We are not the ones being expected to see the light, or anything else for that matter. We are the ones being seen, and the ones being seen for who we really are at our core, not some mock-up of expectations. We simply are, even as the real God simply is, and that is all there is to it. No towers to the sky, no concoctions, and no pretensions. 

In his book The Book of J, Harold Bloom sums up this ancient story with these words, “We are children always, and so we build the Tower of Babel. J’s Yahweh (God) is a child also, a powerful and uncanny male child, and he throws down what we build up.” 

Until we realize that we are not to be so enamored with what we build, we will continue to miss the point…that the real God is the God who is, and we are the ones that are. It is our being that matters most, our full humanity fully realized in our becoming who we have always been from the beginning, very real children of a very real God. 

I invite you to speak in unison, slowly and deliberately, the words that opened our service. We can read together from the Call to Worship (and yes, we will speak the first line twice just as it is printed). 

Be still and know that I am God

Be still and know that I am God

Be still and know that I am

Be still and know

Be still

Be