Texts: Genesis 11:1-9; Mark 1: 9-15

About ten years ago I participated in a workshop attempting to bridge the suspicions that Black and Latino communities often have of each other. Having been raised in an era when race was what divided people, I was surprised to hear both groups talk about language. Language, or the lack of communication between the groups, was the dividing line. Each group was totally convinced that the other was plotting against them and because Latinos spoke Spanish did not understand English and vice versa that trust became particularly difficult. But, then, as I thought about it, the comment made sense. I remembered my own parents wanting me to pretend not to hear so that I could communicate what hearing persons were saying because they were convinced that they were the targets of comment.

Music may be a universal language in that music speaks to our emotions, but we need language to communicate our needs, our fears, concerns, and desires. Since the time that the ancient editorial committee put together the Book of Genesis and its story of the Tower of Babel, human beings have struggled to create a method of communication that transcends our inherited divisions of race, religion, even national origin. The proponents of the old Latin Mass argue that its use transcends those kinds of boundaries, making Catholic worship universal; Muslims look to Arabic as a transnational language.

My own parents, who had been raised to be suspicious of the hearing world, went to a World Conference of the Deaf in 1980 and came back thrilled that through sign they could communicate with persons from all parts of the world. And I have to admit that when I went to Indonesia in 2004, I was excited to be able to communicate with the deaf because, with just a few exceptions, we understood each other's signs. Esperanto, move over.

This morning's reading from Genesis presents a world unified by language and a deity threatened by that unity for, as the text says, "this is only the beginning of what they will do." Much of our imagery of the Tower of Babel derives from extra-Biblical sources, including rabbinic commentary on the Scripture and the myths that grew up around Babel. There are several subtexts in this story that are worth examining. The plain of Shinar mentioned in the text was a geographical locale of uncertain boundaries. Some scholars believe that the name is a corruption of an ancient word for two rivers, the valley where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come together to empty into the Persian Gulf, the site of Sumer, possibly the oldest city in the world, which morphed into Babylon.

Extra-Biblical sources put Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noah through Ham and Cush, as the builder of the tower, due in large part to the description of him in the previous chapter as "a mighty hunter before the Lord" and king of the cities of Babel, Erech, Accad on the plain of Shinar. Erech, the site of major archaeological excavations, yielded a giant ziggurat. Ancient commentators such as Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE-50 CE), known best for his attempts to fuse Greek philosophy and Hebrew exegesis, crediting Nimrod with the Tower construction, interpreted the phrase "before the Lord" as "in the face of the Lord," or in opposition to the Lord. And the end of the story indicates that the Lord thought Nimrod was clearly reaching too high.

The Tower and its construction became a much painted subject in the middle of the sixteenth century, particularly by Flemish painters. The most famous paintings are by Pieter Breugel the Elder (1525/30-1569), who details Nimrod with the architects during the construction of the Tower. During this period, the Tower was used by the Protestant Northern painters as a symbol of the Roman Church attempting to make itself equal to God. Most of the almost 100 extant artistic images of the Tower are the same, a circular ziggurat, much like the ziggurats of the ancient world and obviously Babylonian.

What can we draw from this story, a myth of the origin of languages and a warning against considering oneself equal to the Lord? And what does this story have to do with our Gospel reading from Mark? First, let's look at the incredibly brief description of Jesus' time in the wilderness. We don't have the stones into bread, the ceding of temporal power, or the temptation to show one's power as we have in Matthew's version. Driven into the wilderness by the Spirit, Jesus remains forty days and is tempted by Satan. This event in Jesus' life is recounted by all three Synoptic Gospels indicating some historical basis beyond the symbolism of forty days and Jesus overcoming temptation and the forty years the Israelites wandered in the wilderness succumbing to temptation.

Self examination reveals our basic temptations: greed and power. The rest are progeny of those basic ones. The consumer culture tells us what we need: stuff, stuff, and more stuff. The words of an ancient confession says: Release us from our desires. Power is the other temptation. It's easy to point at Bashar al-Assad in Syria holding onto power through his brutal bombardment of the opposition in Homs than it is to look at our own national need to be the most powerful nation in the world. The drive for power and greed are not mutually exclusive but are deeply interrelated. Power begets possession of people, of things, of space. And greed feeds the necessity for power for without one you cannot satisfy the other.

Greed and power affect each of us personally as well as it affects national economic and social policy. Domestic violence is often an outcome of the desire for power of one person over another in an intimate living situation; it is fed by the fear of losing control of another seen as a possession. We have this incredible need for control over our lives, understandable in that we do not want to be controlled by others. And there's no simple, "Let go and let God" answer. Life is more complicated than that.

What's most interesting about the Babel story to me is the attitude of the Lord faced with the development of a new urban culture, one that made significant advances in human development. Once people shifted from a hunter-gatherer economic system to an agricultural system, they began to live in groups, groups that require agreement and cooperation. Known as the cradle of civilization, Sumerian culture invented the wheel, a system of cooperation called government, writing, and money. We tend to think of globalization as a modern phenomenon; the only difference between us and the ancient world is the size of the trading universe.

The new urban culture brought new challenges. The Genesis text continues with a list of generations through the end of the chapter and then abruptly begins with the Lord telling Abraham to get up and leave Ur, one of the cities of Sumer, and to begin a long and arduous journey to a new land that the Lord has designated for him and his descendants. So Abraham reverts from an urban culture to a pastoral hunter gatherer culture. That urban culture had other deities just as our contemporary culture does. Those deities were various gods, represented by idols; our deities are the idols of money and power. Unlike Abraham, we cannot just pick ourselves up and retreat to the backwoods of some remote area; we need to learn how to live in our culture without losing our bearings. Living in today's world centered on the essential truths of the Gospel is not easy.

It is like facing the wilderness that sometimes inhabits our souls. .Just as Jesus was tempted not only in the wilderness, but continually had to face temptations so do we. During this Lenten season we should try to take some "soul time," confront the wilderness that sometimes inhabits us, and draw back to grapple with the temptations we face to emerge stronger and more able to overcome them.

Let us pray: Enter our hearts, Holy One, so we may feel your truth and life breathing in us. Help us to overcome the temptations of a society interested in only money and power and open us to the centrality of love. Amen.