Name: Jeffrey Carlson

Dean, Rosary College of Arts and Sciences

Professor of Theology

Title: Come Together
September 8, 2009

Well believe it or not I had to preach at today’s opening Mass of the Holy Spirit, so here’s what I said.  First the two readings and then the homily.  
 
Genesis 11:1-9
 
The whole world spoke the same language, using the same words.  While the people were migrating in the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, “Come, let us mold bricks and harden them with fire.”  They used bricks for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth.”  The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built.  Then the Lord said: “If now, while they are one people, all speaking the same language, they have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do.  Let us then go down there and confuse their language, so that one will not understand what another says.”  Thus the Lord scattered them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the speech of all the world.  It was from that place that he scattered them all over the earth.
 
John 15:26-27; 16:12-15
 
Jesus said to his disciples: “When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth that proceeds from the Father, he will testify to me.  And you also testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.  I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.  But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth.  He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears, and will declare to you the things that are coming.  He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.  Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.”
 
What on earth is God thinking in that first reading? The whole world has … come together, right now, speaking the same language, united in purpose, building a city, reaching for the sky.  What could be better?  Isn’t this what we all hope for, what we all dream of: humanity coming together, understanding each other, being united?  
 
So what’s God’s problem in that first reading? I think it’s that the unity they’d achieved included everybody but God.  I think God was probably humming along with their song for a while, but then sort of said, “you’re coming together, right now” alright, but it’s not “over me.”  
 
God had made the world, including all these people. God had made them in God’s own image.  Their very existence was a gift of the creator, their very anthropological structure was one of orientation toward God since they had their being in and through God, and yet they intended somehow to violate their core identity and try to go it alone.  They were made by God to be in relationship with God, and thus also in relationship with all God’s creation including each other in all their variations.  And yet, they were turning away from their life’s true meaning and purpose.  While they tried to build a soaring structure, their edifice testified to the shallowness of their lives.  
 
The people had said “Let us make a name for ourselves,” and God said not so fast.  What about me?  Where do I fit into your plans?  I’m your God, you’re my people. Why do you want to break us up?  Delusions of grandeur: you think you can have a solo career.  So you want to go it alone?  OK then, scatter, because if I let you do this now, then later nothing will stop you from doing whatever you presume to do.  Left to your own devices, then, with a freedom become license to kill, disconnected from me, you’ll be denying your very nature, ignoring the best part of yourselves, the part that connects you with me, and connects you with each other because you’re all my creation.  So scatter.
                                                                                                                                          
What were they supposed to do out there, scattered and confused?  I think they were supposed to find each other, and many others, across and through their differences.  They were supposed to learn how to love and appreciate the magisterial beauty of the vastly varied creation of God, including in their own pluriform lives, languages and cultures.  They were scattered because the oneness they had constructed was shallow and artificial and unworthy of God’s richly complex creation and of their own fullest life trajectories.  I think this story continues and deepens the creation, already begun in Genesis chapter one, in which God said the world was “very good.”  
 
Today’s story suggests that the vast panoply of different languages and peoples and cultures is also very good, and very much a part of God’s creation, of human destiny and life’s true purpose.  Babel’s homogeneity constitutes nothing less than a failure to relish each and every aspect of God’s world, a world that is a sacrament for us, a world in which each and every person, place, text, object and event is a point of contact between the human and divine.  All point to and manifest the creator, if only we could recognize it.  Babel short-changed that.  Babel settled for so much less.
 
By the time we get to Jesus, humanity hasn’t done much better.  But what Jesus represents is Babel gone right.   Babel come full circle.  Babel on the verge of being ready, maybe, just maybe, to build the city of God and not the city of Godless separateness and superficial unity. What Jesus represents and what he has done is precisely to venture forth, beyond the boundaries of in-group sameness, single language homogeneity and single family ziggurats, across lines of class, race, gender, religion and nation.  Jesus’ life and work and message has been a boundary-crossing itinerant movement of seeking out, quite deliberately and strategically, precisely those who are different.  Tax collectors and fishermen, Samaritans and Romans, women, children, gentiles and Jews.  It is a movement that says you are loved, that with and in your differences, you are abidingly loved by the God Jesus calls his father.  
 
The simple and superficial and secular sameness of that first tower of Babel is not the kind of oneness we are called to discern and experience.  Instead, we have been given a gift and a challenge.  We have been evicted from Babel and scattered far and wide so that we might, after all, find each other, precisely in and through our differences.
 
And yet.  Jesus knows that, for all our talk, we really don’t want this gift or seek this challenge.  For all our posturing, we don’t really like dealing with those who are significantly different from ourselves, at least if it means having to actually hear and respond to that difference in a way that might make us have to change in a more than trivial way.  It’s too hard or too threatening, or both.  We prefer to surround ourselves with those who “seem” different but really are not allowed to “be” different.  This turns difference into sameness, and we’re back at the original Babel all over again.  
 
Sometimes we “make a name for ourselves,” like they wanted to do in that first reading, and we call that name “diversity” or “multicultural.”  Sometimes we prefer to be thought of as “ inclusive,” but too often the way we include entails granting the other an assigned role in our current, dominant and unchallenged story, a predetermined place at our fixed and stable table, a persona in which they get to be, not themselves, but merely slightly altered versions of what we already know, of what we’re already comfortable with.
 
Jesus knows we don’t really want to venture out, that we crave the easy sameness of Babel but with the added post-Babel bonus of the appearance of “celebrating diversity,” so long as our contrived sameness isn’t ever concretely or severely threatened.  But one thing we can always count on with Jesus, Jesus, that parabolic aniconic boundary crossing idol denying manifestation of the very God of love and truth, is this: he’ll tell us the truth.  More precisely, more often than not, he’ll invite us into an experience of the truth by his skillful means of orchestrating the undoing of our all-too-human contrived and comfortable and reified positions.  He’ll break those up and disorient us radically and in today’s second reading he admits just how hard it will be for us.  “I have much to tell you,” he said in that gospel text, “but you cannot bear it now.”  
 
Cannot bear it, indeed.  We want the Babel of easy sameness and we’re called to something more, called to a deep dialogue and openness to difference that puts our comfort at risk, called to a loving embrace of God’s creation in all its variability since, truly, all of that, all of the vastly varied forms of not just the nonhuman physical world, but also of humanity, are part of what God called “very good.”  They can be sacraments for us if only we would be open to them, to them as they really are, and not to alienating distortions of them, which we engineer so that they fit more easily into our preexisting schemes.  But how to render ourselves teachable, how to overcome our boundary drawing and creation distorting narrowness?
 
We want the city of ourselves and we’re called to the City of God.  We want sameness disguised as diversity and we’re called to the real deal.  But the beauty and splendor and wonder of today’s second reading is that, as Jesus said, “the spirit of truth will guide us to all truth.”  The radical openness to the really different is what this spirit can inspire us to engage.   This spirit can render us teachable, can prime us for a genuinely dialogical life that might just transform our hearts and minds, and compel us to enact the selfsame boundary crossing love this itinerant and scattered Jesus proclaimed and performed.
 
We don’t want it, we can’t bear it, and we don’t seek it out.  Not on our own.  Not left to our own devices.  But the good news is that we’re not alone; this is the very good news of today’s gospel reading.  We’re not left to our own devices.  May the spirit of love, make us one indeed.  May the spirit of truth, and not the phony sameness of Babel, make us one indeed.  
 
And so whatever part we play in this university community, we have to ask ourselves if we’re constructing a tower of Babel, seeking the comfortable sameness of who and what we are and know already, or if our educational vocation is truly one of going forth, of submitting ourselves to the disorientation of being scattered away from more of the same, if we seek to be scattered and itinerant as a deliberate method and strategy, so that we can find each other, out there, and, in the spirit of truth, find our real common ground, as many and different creations of the one loving creator.  
 
God stopped the music in that first reading.  The good news is that God’s bringing the band back together, but only through, in, and with God’s spirit can our engagement with difference be real. Otherwise we’re back at Babel.  When we accept an itinerant and boundary crossing invitation like the one Jesus extends, and other great religious and spiritual figures have extended, maybe then we have reason to hope that we can truly come together.  But it’s God who gets to sing that last line, and we get to hum along, or maybe dance, but God gets to sing it, and it sounds like this: Come together, right now, over me.