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S. MW Pentecost.25 Gen. 11:1-9

And they said, “Come let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves…”

Which seems, to nearly every modern person and most right-thinking Americans, a laudable and commendable goal! Make our Name great, again! This is the capitalist-entrepreneurial religion of the Enlightenment Adam Smith authoritatively proclaimed. It’s the Protestant Work Ethic of Jean Calvin. And it fits hand in glove with Christianity, right?

Uhm… well. How shall we put it? NO!

God is not jiggy about it at all. And while he is a God of clarity and peace, not confusion and chaos, in this case he resorts to causing a little confusion and a bit of chaos in order to keep them from accomplishing their grand plans. Confusing the language throws quite a monkey wrench into the proceedings!

Fortunately, Chat GPT and Google Translate have pretty much got us back to realizing the Babel Project.

But I don’t think God is any happier about this. Why does he allow it then? Well, I’m not sure that he does allow it. It has certainly progressed quite far, back to having no language barrier, but the rampant errors that AI is generating (it can’t even add correctly all the time, anymore) have a little bit of deja vu all over again for me! And I think the chaos—if God throws a big wrench into this system—might be a good bit more extreme, something in the Terminator vein, perhaps?

The only thing about the Zombie Apocalypse that will be difficult for us is pretending we’re not excited… 😉

Anyway I’m not here to prophesy. I’m here to tell you why building our cities and towers whose top is in the heavens and making a name for ourselves is a bad idea.

Quite simply: God said, from the beginning, that our pursuit of self-interested knowledge is evil and will end in death and hell! And so it has. And yet we keep on pursing it anyway. To make a name for ourselves. Because; who else’ll make a name for us? I mean, if you want it done right, you have to do it yourselves, right?

And… NO!, again!

Pentecost doesn’t just reverse the language barrier (a reversal that was only temporary anyway, for the Jews present in Jerusalem that Pentecost in 30 AD). Language still divided people after Pentecost!, even the Jewish people as we saw today in the daily LW lectionary with Paul speaking Greek to the centurion who wasn’t understanding him and then Hebrew to the Jewish people—which the centurion didn’t understand, and the Jews became furious over. Pilate had to write the sign hung over our Lord’s cross in 3 languages: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and still, it seems no one really quite got it—that Jesus really is the King of the Jews!

What Pentecost really reverses is who is running the verbs in this name-making business! God promised to make a name for Adam and Eve and Babel is their children’s rebelling against that. They don’t want the Name God puts on them to define them. They want to make a name for themselves by their grand works of industry, finance, and literature. And God will let his word be corrupted for these purposes to some extent…

But at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes with tongues of fire and a rushing mighty wind to blow all of that away and to make a Name for us, himself, by…

PUTTING THE NAME OF JESUS ON US!

This is God’s signature move. When we let him run the verbs, he makes a name for us by putting the Name of Jesus on us, which remakes us in his divine image as we were meant to be in Eden before the fall.

He does this by the Word coming in through our ears which names us Jesus’ little lambs who live by faith in him alone, and who only desire to be with him and to be like him as little kids pretend to be Batman or other lesser heroes as we discussed last Sunday.

He puts his name on us—the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in Holy Baptism, washing away our sins and making us new creations, true children of the Heavenly Father. And as a Father always feeds his children, so Jesus feeds us his own body and blood in the holy supper, making us one Body with him and sealing this identification by naming us all little Christs—anointed ones by the Anointed One, himself!

The Name God makes for you by his means of grace, the Name Above All Names is so much better than any name you could make for yourself by cities or towers you build and put your name on.

Because those cities and towers will crumble one day. The whole world will burn up in smoke and ash. But what will remain then will be the Name of Jesus. And all who let him put that Name on them will have Peace, surpassing all understanding, guarding our hearts and minds, in the Name of Christ Jesus. Amen.