THE BLESSING OF BABEL
A Sermon by Kenneth W. Phifer, Delivered at First UU Church, Ann Arbor, 
10/31/04

 
“And the whole earth was of one language and one speech. And it came to pass, as 
they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt 
there. And they said one to another: ‘Come, let us make brick, and burn them 
thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they 
said: ‘Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us 
make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ And 
the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. 
And the Lord said: ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; 
and this is what they begin to do; and now nothing will be withholden from them, 
which they purpose to do. Come, let us go down, and there confound their 
language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord 
scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off 
to build the city. Therefore was the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did 
there confound the language of all the earth; and from thence did the Lord scatter 
them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”
                                         Genesis 11:1-9  (Masoretic Text)

The story of the Tower of Babel is the concluding story of the Universal History, 
from Creation to the Flood, found in the opening chapters of the first book of the 
Hebrew Bible, Genesis. After the Flood, the sons of Noah and their descendants 
are named “by their clans and languages, in their countries and their nations.” The 
Lord then repeats the instruction given to all humanity in the first chapter of 
Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and rule it.” In response, these 
people scatter over the earth, speak different languages, have different ways of 
governing themselves.

Then comes the attempt to build Babel by a people now speaking one language. 
The Creator is distressed. He responds by scattering humanity over the whole 
earth, speaking different languages so that we cannot understand one another.

Universal history ends with this story. We are immediately thrust into the national 
history of the Israelites, beginning with Abraham. 

What is the meaning of this story? What can it say to us in the 21st century?

A few preliminary remarks are in order. 

First of all, the word Babel is most likely a play on both a Hebrew word—balal, 
meaning confused, mixed, or confounded-- and an Akkadian (Babylonian) word--
bab-ilani, which means “gate of the gods.”

The tale of Babel is closely related to the flood story, a story found in many Near 
Eastern writings. In all but the one in Genesis, the gods and humanity—so close 
before the waters rose--separated after the deluge. To console themselves, human 
beings built cities and founded civilizations.

Babylon was one such city, as is related in the Akkadian ATRAHASUS EPIC. No 
longer intimate with the deities, the people of Babylon were at least able to climb 
the tower, called a ziggurat, to meet the gods from time to time. 

The ziggurat of Babylon, called Entemenanki, was 300 feet by 300 feet at the base 
and rose to a height of 325 feet in seven stages or platforms of diminishing size. 

If, as some students of the Bible believe, this portion of Hebrew Scripture was 
either written or given its final form during or shortly after the Babylonian 
Captivity, it would make sense that Jews, grieving the destruction of their Temple 
and of the holy city Jerusalem, would imagine the destruction of the sacred tower 
of the Babylonians. Some even speculate that the text was written after Babylon 
fell and the city, including its most sacred religious object, the tower, had been 
destroyed.

If we accept the dating of this tale’s final form as being after the exile in Babylon, 
the most obvious message of the Jewish writer(s) is the failure of the pagan 
religions in the face of the power of the single god of the Israelites. The play on 
words and the apparent location of the tower point up the contempt the writer(s) 
holds for the Babylonian beliefs. 

It is also likely that the tale was intended as a warning of the spiritual dangers of 
cities and civilization. The Israelites were a pastoral people. Of necessity, such 
people must live at some remove from one another to give room for crops to grow 
and animals to graze. Their spirituality is found in nature, in the wind or on a 
mountain or in a garden, not in human structures of any kind. Such people are 
understandably nervous about urban life.

Beyond the intentions of the writers addressing an ancient audience, what can we 
learn from this tale that has survived more than 2500 years? 

Several important things.

First, beware uniformity. 

God may say that as one people with one language “nothing they wish for will be 
beyond their reach,” but in reality one people with one language with only one way 
of looking at things will surely be limited in what they can do.
God has already in three places in the ten chapters before the story of Babel is 
related urged the people to “fill the earth” and to “spread out over all the earth.”  
The deity’s words in chapter 11 may reflect frustration at how limiting uniformity 
is.

Uniformity is certainly a problem for us. Individuals and families and peoples 
religious or ethnic or national who lock themselves into one way of doing things 
without any possibility of change do not grow, do not learn, live in fear that 
somehow if one tiny piece of their narrow hold on reality is changed the entire 
structure will “die the death of a thousand qualifications.” 

This is what happens with religious fundamentalists, with political ideologues, 
with men and women who will not change even when what they are doing is 
hurting them and others.  

Once upon a time there was one Christian church. That unity, uniformity, ended a 
thousand years ago when the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic branches separated 
angrily and hatefully, each practicing the faith in quite different ways.

Then came the Reformation in the 16th century and Christianity was shattered into 
tens of thousands of different interpretations, different polities, different rituals, 
different involvements in society, totaling in the 21st century some 25,000 different 
branches. Today is Reformation Sunday, an appropriate time to remember what 
this event has meant.

First of all, the Reformation broke the authoritarian hold Catholic Christianity had 
on Europe’s Christians. That uniform rule from the Vatican had become utterly 
corrupt At one time there were three men claiming to be the true Pope. People’s 
eternal fate was put up for sale through indulgences. The scandal of the private 
lives of the clergy, had it been widely known, would have been no less horrifying 
and disgusting to the people of the 15th and 16th centuries than the recent 
revelations about some of the actions of 20th century priests have been to us.

Shattering that uniformity was a way to clean house morally. Both Catholics and 
Protestants have been better religiously for being diverse, for challenging each 
other, inspiring each other, and learning from each other.

Secondly, by being scattered abroad so that authoritarianism became less a factor 
in Christianity, all Christians were opened up to the new learning introduced or re-
discovered during the 14th, 15th and later centuries. It took official Catholicism 
longer to honor the great advances in Biblical scholarship, in literature, and 
especially in science and technology, but in time they have done so.

Without the Reformation, it is unlikely that the Authorized Version of the King 
James, a beautiful if often flawed translation of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures 
into English, would ever have been possible. That translation itself is a salute to 
diversity in that tens of scholars worked on it. They sought accurate translations, 
not a uniform rendering of a theologically pure text.

Finally, the Reformation began with a simple premise: each person is his or her 
own priest. No one needs to intercede on our behalf with the Source of our spiritual 
striving. Freedom to develop our own religious posture is the deepest meaning of 
the Reformation.

Too quickly, the major theological groups of the Reformation—the Lutherans, the 
Calvinists, and even the Anglican Catholics—turned back towards rigid doctrinal 
and ritual practices that had the odor of authoritarianism about them. 

A few religious movements, including the ones from which modern Unitarian 
Universalism has emerged, held firm to the original notion of freedom for every 
person. That freedom for individuals implied freedom for the congregations as 
well, so democracy became an important part of our movement. And that freedom 
demanded a separation of church and state in order to guarantee religious liberty.

The Reformation broke up the uniformity of the Roman Catholic Church. The 
diversity of religious ways that flowed out of that religious revolution has served 
humanity well.

Uniformity in politics is no less dangerous and no less common. 

The Communists in the Soviet Union attempted to impose a uniformity of thought 
on every Communist Party in the world. One can see in reading of the twists and 
turns of Party members in this country how minds were distorted, values were 
undermined; emotions were tortured when thoughtful and compassionate people 
were asked to toe the party line. 

Nothing exemplifies this more than the shift Party members had to make when the 
USSR and Germany signed a non-aggression pact in late August, 1939. After 
denouncing the Nazis for years, now they were allies. Suddenly the devil had 
become an angel. What had been evil was now good. 

Not two years later, the Party faithful had once again to turn completely around 
when Germany launched a massive surprise attack on the  Soviet Union.

Uniformity makes us stupid.

A few years after the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, 
Francis Fukuyama wrote a book about the end of history. His point was that 
democracy and capitalism had now proven themselves as the only decent ways to 
structure a society, that history had put its seal of approval on our American ways, 
and that soon the whole world would be either walking by our side or worshipping 
at our feet.

I think Benjamin Barber was more astute in his JIHAD VS. MCWORLD, talking 
about how the world has become more uniform and also more splintered. The 
uniformity, because it has stifled so many regional, religious, ethnic, and political 
groups, has generated small, powerful, often violent movements of dissent. Barber 
described this phenomenon in 1996, but it certainly applies to the events of 9/11 
and the years following that attack. Numerous small groups, defending what they 
regard as their integrity, are, mostly violently, holding at bay the mightiest military 
power on earth.

Uniformity pretends that the world can and should be held hostage to one idea, one 
way of life. Everything in the universe proves the falsehood of this assertion. The 
deeper truth is change and diversity, which always erodes and ultimately defeats 
uniformity.

Uniformity is dangerous. It inhibits growth. It stifles creativity. It fosters 
corruption. It makes us dumb. That is one of the lessons with which the tale of 
Babel blesses us.

A second lesson is: don’t be arrogant.

The text tells us that the people said to one another, “ ‘Come, let us build us a city, 
and a tower, with its top in heaven, and let us make a name...’”

Prior to this point in the Universal History, naming was always a positive thing. 
We read in the second chapter of Genesis how Adam got to choose 
the names of all living things, just as we choose the name of our children and 
sometimes choose a name for ourselves that is different from our birth name. 

Naming has power. Among many indigenous peoples, including the ancient 
Israelites, even knowing someone’s name meant that you had power over them. 
Giving a name is a sacred honor. In many of these societies, everyone has a secret 
name that only the person and/or the spiritual guide who gave it to them know.

In the Orthodox Jewish tradition, the name of the Deity is not spoken or written. 
That is considered presumptuous if not blasphemous, a foolish assertion of human 
control over the divine.

Naming can be positive and powerful, but there is a dark side to naming as well, 
and it is against this that the Babel story warns us.

Making a name for oneself—striving for fame and glory-- carries an ominous 
sense of over-reaching, of presuming, of what the Greeks called hubris, of 
arrogance.

The people of Babel are seeking to make their name known everywhere, to 
promote themselves. Such a striving for prominence is always unseemly. It often 
results not in fame but in either celebrity—being well known for being well 
known, usually for about 15 minutes—or in notoriety—being well known for less 
than worthy reasons. 

As one scholar of the Babel text has observed, “The builders of the tower were 
chiefly motivated by egotism and the desire for self-aggrandizement.” Such 
reasons for doing things are never good reasons, but in the building of a tower that 
was a religious structure, a place where the divine and the human could meet, it 
was particularly inappropriate. 

Worthy spirituality grows not out of pride and self-assertion, but out of humility. 
Worthy spirituality grows out of a sense of one’s place in the universe, out of a 
feeling that one belongs, not that one is the center of all life. 

Religion that claims to know what God wants is arrogant religion. Religious 
leaders who claim to speak for God are arrogant leaders. Individuals who assert 
that they are on a mission from God are arrogant persons. 

Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are religious leaders filled with a sense of their 
own importance. They have made a name for themselves.

Bishop Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King, Jr. did not seek to make a name for 
themselves. They were both given names—like “a modern Moses”—because they 
believed, and acted on that belief, that justice came before their own prominence.

We should not try to make a name for ourselves. We should just try to do what is 
right. Recognize the ease with which pride seeps into our attitudes and judgments. 
Remember what little spiritual worth there is in selfish concern. 

The people of Babel also made the mistake of assuming that their technology could 
be a source of their blessing. That is a common mistake. We build things as though 
things could render our names immortal, could save us from the ravages of time. 
Nothing could be further from the truth.

Early in the 19th century, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote for the ages about a king 
named Ozymandias:
“I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Things will not save us. Things erode, no matter how well or beautifully built. 
Even sturdy structures can be brought down in a few minutes, as we must surely 
have learned from those terrible moments on September 11, 2001.

What endures, what will go on being celebrated, is the spirit with which we have 
imagined, have created, have sustained, and have changed as time calls for us to 
do. One reason I feel such a sense of pride in this congregation is because we have 
had five different buildings, have used them as wisely as we possibly could, but 
have always had the courage to see that the building is not the congregation. The 
people are the congregation, the people and the programs we involve ourselves in, 
the people and the caring we demonstrate for each other, the people and the justice 
we pursue in the world, the people and the spirit with which we live.

Our reputation in this town is precisely that—a congregation that takes care of its 
own and cares for the world. That is a good name to have and it has been 
honorably earned by people who let love be the spirit and service be the law by 
which they live.

If we will live by the precepts of the ancient prophet, to do justice and to love 
mercy and to walk humbly, we shall not need to worry about making a name for 
ourselves. Others will do that, and honorably.

Babel warns us against arrogance.

A third lesson of the story of Babel is the importance of diversity.

The writer(s) sensed that somehow human beings were not intended to be all of 
one language, all of one culture, all of one way of doing things. For Jews, the 
message had been clear that humanity was to “fill the earth.” This meant spreading 
out over all the livable land surfaces. This very act is applauded in chapter ten 
when the various clans and tongues and nations are listed with obvious approval.

Some Jewish thinkers through the ages have pointed to this as a divine blessing on 
human curiosity, human exploration, human striving to go beyond our present 
places and structures and habits to new places and new structures and new ways of 
doing things. 

In this sense, the tale is etiological, an attempt to explain why we are as we are. We 
are a restless species. We have always been on the move. We have always been 
learning new things: how to grow crops so we can live in a settled place, how to 
communicate better by writing things down, how to use tools and how to improve 
them. The very diversity of ways we think and experience and act adds to our store 
of knowledge.

In Barry Lopez’s recent novel, RESISTANCE, one of the tales is of a student of  
the 18 languages spoken in China by at least 500,000 people and of the other 37 
spoken by smaller numbers. Teaching a class of  “culturally complicated young 
men and women,” this linguistic genius observes how all the lines that separate the 
languages were breaking down as the students and their families collided and 
coupled and began “streaming toward a meta-language.”  
 
She does not rejoice in this breakdown, for, she says, “No one language is enough. 
No one can speak for all…Each of these tongues seeks to corral
some bit of the fundamentally incomprehensible nature of the world—shadings of 
smell in the forest as they might be known to a dog, the intention behind a 
stranger’s gesture, the origin of any single thing, the reason the heart breaks.”

We live in an immensely complicated, richly detailed, ever-changing world. It is 
beyond the capacity of any one single person, tribe, nation, conceptual scheme, 
language, culture, or religion to comprehend much less to express an understanding 
of life and how best to live it. We need the hundreds of languages, the thousands of 
cultures, the millions of personal insights that make up the vast diversity of the 
world.

Listening to one another, even across vast gulfs of difference, is a wise, moral, and 
interesting way to live. That is one of the lessons of Babel.

The meaning for us is that we need to expand on what is already a large arena of 
opportunity to listen to and learn from others. The Internet enables us to 
communicate around the world at the punch of a few buttons on our machines. 
Speedy travel can take us places that a mere century ago we would never have 
been able to visit. 

International student exchanges, international conferences, the United Nations, 
books, the many possibilities for learning a language we do not know, interfaith 
conversations, and much else are helping us to become aware of the many different 
ways human beings live and think. It all helps.

And I believe that we can honor diversity by affirming the legal right of same sex 
couples to marry. I intend to vote No on Proposition 2.

Celebrating diversity is one of the lessons to be drawn from the story of Babel.

Three lessons come to us out of an ancient story about a city long buried by the 
ravages of time. 

Danger lurks in uniformity. 

Arrogance is perilous. 

Diversity is reality and morality.


                                                      CODA

Four days after his beloved Boston Red Sox win the World Series for the first time 
in 86 years and he’s not going to say anything about this historic event? 

Yes, he is, but not much.

First, the three lessons I have spoken of today are lessons the Red Sox learned well 
this past year.  I pray they will not forget them.

The danger of uniformity was confronted when they traded Mr. Red Sox himself, 
Nomar Garciapara because, unlike his teammate Manny Ramirez, he was not able 
to overcome the distress and humiliation of last winter.

Whatever arrogance they possessed about their abilities was certainly knocked out 
of them when they lost the first three games of the American League 
Championship Series and were within three outs of their season ending, before 
coming alive and playing fabulous baseball to win the last eight games of the year 
and the World’s Title.

Rarely has a team of athletes had such a diverse character, from straight arrow 
tough guys like Curt Schilling with his military bearing to free flowing, long-
haired, bushy bearded Johnny Damon, and a soft-spoken manager who loved them 
all and let them be themselves, the result of which is the great victory they 
achieved.

Now we members of Red Sox Nation pass into a new reality. May we be wise 
enough to heed the teachings from Babel and the blessings of this past season.

May we learn how to be gracious winners after decades of mastering the art of 
losing and still coming back for more. 

May we all practice the gentleness and humility of the manager of this team, Terry 
Francona, who never lost sight of the fact that this was only play, games, fun. 

It feels good to be where we are now, World Champions. I intend to enjoy this 
winter as I have never enjoyed an off-season before.   

It is also my intention, with one exception, not to speak of the Red Sox again from 
this pulpit until next April and the start of the 2005 season. If I slip, all you have to 
do is to say one word to me: Babel!


Copyright 2004, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved