Leah Kranz 6-28-26

Good morning, church. It is so wonderful to be with you this morning. And thank you to Calvin for reading our text for this morning. So well, I'm delighted, as always. This is my second time ever preaching at Highland at my home here on the platform.

The last time I was here was just, I think, a week over three years ago. So it's just so wonderful to be back as Shane begins his study break again. But it's also wonderful to continue this sort of unofficial series on Genesis that we've been in. Shane was obviously preaching in Genesis last week, and I get to kind of take up the sphere. We actually did not plan that, but I like to think that God had other plans for us.

And this text is really unique. And as I was encountering it this week, one question kept coming to mind. What language will we speak in heaven?

This is the question that I asked myself at age 8 when I first read this story. And I found myself again this week asking that very same question. For many of us, we know the Babel story. Maybe you're sitting out there and you've never heard it before, at least in its fullness, but I think all of us have some degree of familiarity with opening a children's Bible and seeing, usually in big gold bricks, the tower right cartoonishly huge. It echoes in pop culture, even outside of religious circles.

But all of us in this room, I think, are due for a fresh reading, a fresh hearing of this text. We've probably all wondered, too, after the stories of Adam and Eve and of Noah, how did the world get populated? How did the entirety of the human population grow out of just these few people? And this is what this text is attempting to answer. It's kind of an interesting method, though, because in the chapter just preceding it, we actually get a complete description of Noah's descendants, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, his sons and their sons and their sons and their sons.

We get the account of Nimrod, this great warrior. We get Egypt and Canaan, both two people mentioned by name, who have children that develop into these tribes and clans and nations. And so it's funny to turn the page to chapter 11, and it's almost like you hit rewind. We're doing a flashback, and the author's going, hold on. But before we talk any more about that, you got to know why we don't speak the same language anymore.

The Babel story is attacking, is unpacking something very specific. There are two issues at stake here. In our first part of this story, we see all of humanity. The text says all people moved eastward together. And anytime you see east in your Bible, you should pay attention.

Anytime people move east, you should be listening. They settle in this land called Shinar. Not like the most popular biblical place name or name of your child Shinar. But you might also have a little note in your Bible that says Shinar is Babylon. This is the first name for the place that later comes to be known as Babylon.

And if you have read your Bible, you know Babylon is an important name. That is something I should pay attention to. So the people gather around. I like to picture this sort of huddle, this group of people settled around in a circle going, okay, we, we found this land, everyone on Earth is here with us. And now we got to figure out what we're going to do.

And here's what we're going to do. We're going to build a tower and we are going to make it out of this cool new technology called bricks.

And if you're an Israelite reading this story, you laugh because obviously everyone knows stone is a way better building material than bricks. Every good Israelite knows that. So the humans say, we're going to build this tower. Specifically, the word in Hebrew is in reference to something more akin to a fortress, a defense tower, something that's built up to look impressive. And I don't know about you, but when I first heard this story at however young I was, I was trained to read it a very specific way to respond, a very specific way.

And that way is, how crazy do you have to be to think you can build a tower to heaven? How crazy do you have to be to think that you can pile brick on top of brick and somehow reach the firmament? How crazy do you have to be? But on reading the text this time around, I was struck. I was struck by one thing.

And maybe this is just the adulthood moving into my life. How the heck did they all come to this decision so quickly? How did this group of people band together and pull off this huge construction project with seemingly no issue? If we're all honest, I think we might envy a little bit this efficiency and unity and single mindedness of action. And I think, how amazing would it be if the committee of Babel set their minds to the roads in Abilene?

I mean, can I get an amen?

But this first issue, this tower that they're building, is not what I want to talk about today. Because there's a second problem that these people anticipated, a second thing that sits at the root of why they wanted this power. They didn't just want the fame. Our Bible says that they seek a great name, right? But it's not the great name for its own sake.

Verse 4 At the end tells us the people of Babel want all this power not for its own sake, but because they don't want to be scattered. At the core of this decision is a fear. It's a fear of being split up from the people that you love, the people that you know, the people that you have traveled eastward with probably for years and years and years, not knowing where you're going to end up, not knowing where you're going to settle, not knowing which God is with you. Their question is, how do we stick together? How do we stay safe?

I don't know if you've ever experienced walking into a baby shower or a movie theater or an elementary school playground, but when I walk into all those places, the first thing I do is I look for my friends. I step into that room and I go, where are the people that I know? And this is natural, right? We all want to find the people who are like us, the people that we love the most, the people that help us feel safe in environments and that are chaotic or unknown. This is a very normal and human thing to do.

It is natural to want to find in the middle of the unknown what is familiar. In the 1970s, a man named Donald McGaveran coined a concept in church planting called the homogenous unit principle. This is the idea that churches work best. Churches are most successful when they target a particular group or demographic of people and build their church around that demographic. If I am a church planter in the 70s, maybe I'll say, oh, I want my church.

My church will primarily be made up of mostly white, middle class young families. And those young families will bring their friends and boom. Before long you've got a 1500 member church.

Your church will grow, says McGaveran, in proportion to how similar your people are to one another. The best growth strategy, the best upward mobility, is proportional to how similar you are to your neighbor. After all, remember a elementary school, Remember meeting that new kid on the playground and being like, I don't know if we really speak the same language. I don't know if we're really all that similar. When you're 10, when you're 8, when you're 7, it's hard to walk up to that kid on the playground that you don't know and you kind of think, somebody else will take care of him.

Somebody else probably speaks his language.

But these feelings get carried into adulthood, even when we don't realize it. Sometimes we find ourselves in spaces like this and we go, there are other people here like me. There's other people in my age and stage, and I'm so thankful for that. I finally have a place to rest with people just like me. We become comfortable and we become safe.

And before we know it, we've started to associate the house of God with that feeling of comfort and safety. We've started to elevate that. And sometimes when this impulse goes too far, we baptize the same fear that the people of Babel had.

The impulse to stay with the people just like us.

So it's at this moment in our text that God steps in. Harkening back to the garden with Adam and Eve, God comes down from presumably the same heaven that they're building toward. Isn't that ironic? God comes down to walk among them. God sees this grand project, this grand skyscraper, and he walks among them, evoking memories of the garden at the beginning of Genesis where God walks among Adam and Eve and says, where are you?

But instead of dialoguing with the people, this time, God does not do that. God walks around and sees their project, sees their people, and says, I don't really care about this tower. But these human beings, they are something and they can do whatever they set their minds to. This is not praise. This is not God impressed with humanity.

This is not God saying they can do whatever they set their minds to and giving them a gold star. The tone here is one of trepidation. What can humans do when we put our minds together? We can build a tower all the way to heaven.

But instead of getting angry, instead of smiting them, God does something else. He says, let's go down. I like to imagine God the Father speaking in his own trinitarian self to himself. Let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand one another.

This efficiency, this single mindedness, this direction has been dismantled in a moment. God has thrown a cog in the wheel of progress.

This is a little side note from me, but I have been reading my Bible all my life, but it was really only in college that I started to. It clicked with me that the Bible is not actually written in English. I don't know if anybody knows that. It was written in Hebrew and in Greek and in Latin in some cases. And that really stuck with me and kind of confused me.

Why would God want that to happen? Doesn't the amount of languages the Bible is in, doesn't that kind of make Things a lot more confusing.

Aren't we supposed to read our Bibles and be able to understand exactly what the words say?

If there's anything that God or church, the gathered body of believers, isn't supposed to do, it's confuse us, right? Like, that's, like, not the point. We're supposed to get it.

It's supposed to reveal in black and white the plain truth.

Except that I would venture a guess, if you're anything like me, that you have flipped to a chapter or page in your Bible and just kind of gone, I don't know about that one.

And it's not because we don't think it's important, right? It's not because we're flipping through our Bibles and we go, well, that page just doesn't matter.

We don't skip past the psalms that call for the downfall of our enemies, or the grand lists of ancestors and descendants, or the narratives about armies marching from here to there because we don't think they matter, but because they confuse us. They're strange. They're in a language that even English can't really make clearer for us.

We become confused, and then our confusion often turns into fear.

And reading the Bible alone in our rooms, our unanswered questions get folded up neatly and tucked next to those old shoes in the back of your closet that you don't wear anymore, and they gather dust and you forget about them until the next time you open to that page and you go, wait, I've never learned about this.

It's language that seems to create this problem. And it's language where God draws his line. In our story. God realizes the power of speech, of words, of language, or perhaps just we do. God has known all along.

But we have to reckon with church. The fact that God in this story doesn't make things clearer for us, he actually makes them more confusing. He calls the place Babel, which is a funny English pun now, but is connected to this image of Babylon, the one that carries on throughout Scripture. We have to reckon with the fact that God didn't make everything clearer, but actually made it more confusing. And then does that mean that God creates confusion for no reason?

I thought that God was a God of order and goodness, not a God of chaos.

And I want to argue, Hyland. I want to push forward and say, no. God is a God of goodness and of order. He is not the God of confusion and disorder for its own sake, which means that there must be here a purpose. Growing up, my parents spoke another language at home.

They both Lived as missionaries in Hungary for five years right after the wall came down. My brother, who's here today, was actually born there, but he, as he left when he was a year old, doesn't speak it either. And. And so both of us would listen to our parents speak Hungarian and just sort of go, okay, we don't know this language. And they loved having their secret language.

Likewise. My first ever church potluck was at my grandparents church in Mineral Wells, just an hour and a half from here. These potlucks, kind of like ours here at Highland, are in the gym. They've got good fluorescent lighting. You come in and at age 8 or 10 or however old I was, I just remember looking at that long table and going, I don't know what any of that food is.

I'm not sure I'm really interested in trying any ambrosia salad.

And I remember my mom saying, put some things on your plate that you know, and then put a few things on your plate that you don't. So I'd load my plate up with a ton of fried chicken, because I love fried chicken. And then I'd get some salad, I guess, out of resignation, and then a dinner roll. And then following my mom's advice, I got myself a big old scoop of ambrosia salad. And it was interesting because as I sat down at the table to eat, as I ate everything and avoided the ambrosia salad until the end, I realized something on that first bite.

One, it was good. I don't know if you know, this ambrosia salad is pretty much just Cool Whip and fruit. There's really nothing wrong with that. But two, I realized I had the illusion of choice at this potluck. But in reality, I was subject to what everyone had brought, the gifts that everyone had brought to the table.

It wasn't really a choice. It was a gift to get to try the thing I was scared of. To get to try things I'd never seen before. What a gift.

Listening to my parents speak Hungarian, a language I don't and still don't understand, is a gift.

And my friends, the hope here in our story of Babel is that God's great story does not stop there. When the name Babel is given and the people, eventually some of them leave and are scattered and God leaves and we don't know what happens to the tower. The story does not end there. And in fact, there's another story in scripture. I don't know if you know this, in Acts 2 at Pentecost that deals with this same Issue of language and shared speech.

It brings us to the day of Pentecost, to Peter's sermon, the apostles sermon, to a listening crowd just after Jesus has ascended. And on that room the fire of the Holy Spirit descends. And you may have heard that upon being given the gift of the Spirit, all people are speaking in tongues and languages. But I actually want to bring your attention to verse 6 where it's revealed that the true gift is not that people are speaking in all these languages, but that they can hear their own language being spoken.

The first gift to the community of faith that God gives after Jesus ascends to heaven is the ability to listen to one another. It's the ability to hear again. They aren't given the same language, they aren't given the same speech. They are given the ability to hear what they can understand.

It's not that everyone is made the same, no. In verses 7 through 11 we see that the Parthians and the Medes, the Elamites and those from Asia, Egyptians and Libyans are not only given their own distinction, but that the people around them are able to listen to them. Their gift is not to speak, it is to hear.

My grandfather, who is almost to 90, is losing his hearing. His ears are simply not what they used to be. But when I sit down to speak with my grandfather, he usually tucks his head to get closer to me and says, granddaughter, say that again. And I know with all my heart that despite what it seems that he is capable of, he is listening to me, however imperfectly. And it makes me wonder Church.

It makes me wonder if. If God's confusion of our language in the beginning, God's intention for the scattering, for our differences might not be so terrifying after all. That it is a gift, a chance to listen that we with the Spirit. Because the Spirit of God dwells among us. We are able to lean in and tuck our heads even in the moments when we're not sure what we've just heard and say.

Say that again.

Just a few weeks ago, I had the privilege of getting to go to Italy, to Rome, with my best friend. If you've been around me at all in the last few weeks, you know this. And you can probably tell the story better than I can, but I was a plus one for her graduate program. We saw some incredible churches. We stood in a room with the relics of hundreds of Christian martyrs.

We spoke with people living and working on the ground there with the marginalized. And yes, we even experienced going to Mass in St. Peter's on Pentecost. Presided over by Pope Leo himself, which was very, very special. And I'm sure in this room there are a broad variety of opinions on the Pope and what the Pope should say to us good church of Christers in the room. But I want to challenge and invite us this morning to listen to our brother Robert Prevost, who just released during our trip a letter, an encyclical outlining his hope for humanity in the age of changing technology.

This is from the introduction. Rebuilding the world today for Christians means recognizing that precisely from the plurality, from the diversity of voices and visions, which, even though they sometimes remind us of confusion caused by diversity, a bright possibility emerges. Within this shared task, Christians discover their unique role of guiding actions toward God so that in his light, pluralism does not dissipate into disorder, but instead becomes the space in which humanity rediscovers its solid foundations and final end. What he's saying, my friends, is that there is no fear in love, in God's grace. The things that would by our flesh and by our difference, by our natural impulses, send us away from one another are the very things that God is going to redeem and use to unite us.

And make no mistake, there is a way of reading this where we think that we all become the same, where we have to put away the things that we truly believe deeply in our guts, where we stuff them in some corner for the sake of. Of uniformity. This is not the gospel. The fire that burned at Pentecost was given by the Spirit of God. It is God's grace alone through which this is possible.

But the Good News church is that the potluck will have both chicken thighs, it will have green salad, and it will have ambrosia.

In that which the world calls weakness. We are made strong through the love of Christ. Revelation 7 concludes my little theory as we land our plane with a greater vision for this reality than any of us could imagine. For how this will be at the restoration of all things. John writes in verse nine, after this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count from every nation, tribe, people and language standing before the throne and before the Lamb.

They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice, salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne unto the Lamb. Church, we sing this all the time. Do we believe it?

Restoration work means that I do not show up as Gail or Marlene or Robert or or Reggie. Nor am I Ashley or Deborah or Roland or Ada, Jane or Ellie. I am Leah and they are them. But God calls all of us in our unique selves, in our minds, in our hearts, in our bodies, however perfect or imperfect, before the throne of God. We need not be afraid of the scattering of Babel.

The call of the people of God has always been ultimately to the scattered. What language will we speak in heaven?

I think, I hope and I pray that the answer is all of them. But even more than that, I pray that in the here and now we are formed in listening to them.

CHURCH I'm going to pray, but I'm going to do something a little different. As we end, we're going to hold a moment of silence together in this room, and then I will send us out. Take a deep breath and bow your heads with me, God, as we listen together for your voice, as we listen to the tiny sounds in the room, let us not be afraid. Let us not let confusion lead us to fear God, but let it lead us to curiosity, to love. Because in your goodness, we will all one day sit before the throne.

It is in your name I pray. Amen. Church Go in peace.