The video was frightening, wasn’t it? I mean the pictures of the Jerusalem hotel ballroom falling through the floor with hundreds of guests dancing at a wedding reception. One minute they are happy souls all celebrating the new union, and the next minute they are just mangled bodies tragically scattered in the rubble. Twenty-five dead, 350 injured.

Why? Not a terrorist attack, enemies from without. Bad workmanship. Shoddy building. Fraudulent construction. It didn’t have to be; it could have been prevented with better planning and proper integrity.

Same with the tower of Babel. Nothing wrong in itself with building what amounted to a temple to the heavens. But what might have been a noble project was driven instead by unholy motivations.

On this Pentecost Sunday, when we think about the birth of the Church, and on this week before the 50^th anniversary of the birth of Wilshire church, we do well to stop and consider where they went wrong and how we can go right instead. We say in our mission statement that we are building a community of faith shaped by the Spirit of Jesus Christ. How do we build beyond Babel? And in our individual lives, what can we glean from the failure of Babel that will prevent us from the same fate?

Look first at what moved these people to act. Let us build ourselves a city and a tower reaching up to heaven. Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered across the whole earth. What do they want, these ancient peoples? They want what we all want: success and security.

So what do they do? They gather themselves together in one place. They draw themselves in from other parts. They organize themselves into one homogeneous culture with one language and one set of values. They build their own little insulated community with a tower to protect them. The tower they built may actually have been an ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat, a temple of sorts reaching to the heavens. Babel means "Gate of God." A big– steeple church, don’t you know?! They want to make a name for themselves, which is another way of saying they want to make some fame for themselves. They don’t want to pass through life without making an impact. They want to build a legacy that will last.

Specifically, what they don’t want is to be scattered. Lest we be scattered across the earth, they say. They fear–and that is the root of the problem, fear–if they don’t pull together and build this complex, they’ll end up mixed in and confused with all other peoples and dilute their identity. So they organize against outsiders and protect their borders.

This is a temptation for any church, and ours is no exception. Let us build a fortress against the world. Let us organize ourselves so that we have a church where everyone thinks alike, talks alike, acts alike. We’ll keep the forces of chaos at bay. We’ll protect our children from other children who speak other languages and don’t behave as we want our children to. We’ll keep outsiders out and be careful to monitor what it means to be an insider.

I am happy to say that we’ve spent 50 years building a church with porous walls and lots of doors by which people may enter. We haven’t always succeeded, but we are not interested in building Fort God. We don’t have a gym here or a family life center, not because we can’t afford it, but because we know that that is just one more step toward becoming a fortress. In some places, in some communities, that might be a good decision. But there is no shortage of recreation centers or YMCAs around here where the community can mix and play ball or work out. If Christians keep leaving the world at large and homing in on the church as their insulated community, how will we be able to accomplish what Jesus told us we must? You are the salt of the earth, he said. You are the light of the world. But how can we be salt and light if we run away from earthlings that live in darkness?

We face this kind of thing in our families. Increasingly, parts of America are retreating behind the walls of gated communities. The impulse is partly honorable: to have a safe community in which to raise cucumbers and rear kids. We want the little ones to be able to play down the street or by the creek the way we did when we were kids, without fear of strangers whisking them away.

Same thing with schools. I can think of some good reasons why people might choose to put their kids in other than the local public school. But one of them is not just so they will be able to avoid bad influences. What is lost in that is sometimes social education, the ability to learn character over against those who do not share the same values. Even our kids can be salt and light. It’s up to church and family to see that they are prepared to engage in the wider world.

Robert Frost put it well in his poem "Mending Wall": Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in and walling out, and to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. Something indeed. Or Someone?

God judges with divine poetic justice. The inhabitants of Babel get the very thing they most wanted to avoid– scattering. Since the first of creation, that has been the calling and mission of the people of God. Scatter. Go across the world and be a sign of God’s presence. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, God tells Adam and Eve. Your descendants will be like the sand of the seas, and I will make you the father of many nations, God tells Abraham. I will give you as a light to the nations that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth, God says through the prophet Isaiah. Go into all the world and make disciples of every nation, Jesus tells us. He doesn’t say, withdraw in fear of the world, build a church and a family that is safe from strangers and makes you feel secure by your own hands.

This can be a temptation for us individually, too. We think we are entitled to a certain kind of life, and if the people we belong to are interfering with our talent or vision or happiness, then we should separate ourselves from them. Can’t have our ambitions scattered. Have to have focus. If you want a new dream home, then think about, talk about, plan for it, work for it until you get it; don’t let anyone put negative thoughts in your head. If you want a certain kind of life, associate only with people who will support your plans.

It’s not for the faint of heart, but the French film playing now called With a Friend Like Harry is Hitchcock-esque. Harry is an old classmate of Michel. He is loaded with money and has no responsibilities. So he decides to help Michel, who is a French teacher and an aspiring writer. He buys things for him and his family to make their lives easier. When it appears Michel’s parents and brother and wife and kids are distractions to him achieving his goals, Harry counsels doing away with them all, cutting them loose, freeing himself of any and all that get his way. I’ll let you see how it turns out.

Who hasn’t sometimes looked at work and family and friends as obligations that seem to consume all one’s time and energies and wondered what it would be like to be free of them to pursue a dream? But, this the temptation of the Evil One, making us believe that we should withdraw into the selfishness of our own small world to find freedom. Babel is a warning against that lie. True freedom is found in the midst of relationships, in stretching and expanding our lives in rich and meaningful ways rather than contracting and ensmalling them.

The second thing to notice in Babel is the language thing. When God confused their tongues so they wouldn’t understand each other, the word in the Hebrew for understand is Shema, as in the Shema Israel, we said earlier. Hear, O Israel. The thing God did was to make us hard of hearing by confusing our languages. It is not that we cannot communicate with one another; it is that we have to learn one another’s languages to do so. It’s that we have to want to know one another enough to speak in a way that others can hear.

Being in Europe last summer, I can tell you that many, if not most, Europeans know at least some English, but they like to see Americans try to speak their language before they help us. If we go over there demanding they communicate on our terms, we will soon be brushed off. But if we just give it a go– especially with the French–they will quickly come to our aid.

What languages exist all around us in our community that require work from us to build true community? More than 100 languages are spoken by students in DISD. We are working with Dan D. Rogers Elementary School just up the street. One of the biggest challenges they have is that when they try to communicate with parents, they can send home letter only in English and Spanish. There are more than 30 other languages spoken by recent immigrant families in that school. No wonder they are ever in danger of being a low-performing school. Communication is a first step toward community.

This is true in the church, too. When we wish to share the good news of Jesus Christ with people, we cannot simply give them a rote formula of what they need to know. We learn to listen to the language of their hearts, so that we can choose the words that find a home in their souls.

Father Ramon Alvarez is pastor of the Roman Catholic Cathedral downtown. He was here at Wilshire the other day, and we were talking over coffee about preaching. He was telling me about his diverse congregation, though most of them speak Spanish. Depending upon the education level and where they are from originally–whether Mexico or other parts of South or Central America–he has to choose different words to get through. And this is just the kind of loving act expected of the church by God.

The miracle of Pentecost is God making new community through new communication. The community was spiritual rather than geographical–scattered peoples became one in the Spirit of Christ. And God allowed them all to hear the good news in their own languages. God reversed the curse of Babel by bringing community and communication to diverse peoples and making them one people across the earth.

It’s up to us to pick it up from there and do likewise. Shall we?