God's Wide and Wonderful Welcome-Part 4-7-17-11

THE READINGS (Contemporary English Version))

First reading: Genesis 11: 1-9
At first everyone spoke the same language, but after some of them moved from the east and settled in Babylonia, they said: Let's build a city with a tower that reaches to the sky! We'll use hard bricks and tar instead of stone and mortar. We'll become famous, and we won't be scattered all over the world.
Then the LORD came down to look at the city and the tower and said: These people are working together because they all speak the same language. This is just the beginning. Soon they will be able to do anything they want. Come on! Let's go down and confuse them by making them speak different languages--then they won't be able to understand each other.
So the people had to stop building the city, because the LORD confused their language and scattered them all over the earth. That's how the city of Babel got its name.

The Gospel Reading: Matthew 15: 1-16
About this time some Pharisees and teachers of the Law of Moses came from Jerusalem. They asked Jesus, "Why don't your disciples obey what our ancestors taught us to do? They don't even wash their hands before they eat." Jesus answered:
Why do you disobey God and follow your own teaching? Didn't God command you to respect your father and mother? Didn't God tell you to put to death all who curse their parents? But you let people get by without helping their parents when they should. You let them say that what they have has been offered to God. Is this any way to show respect to your parents? You ignore God's commands in order to follow your own teaching. And you are nothing but show-offs! Isaiah the prophet was right when he wrote that God had said, "All of you praise me with your words, but you never really think about me. It is useless for you to worship me, when you teach rules made up by humans."
Jesus called the crowd together and said, "Pay attention and try to understand what I mean. The food that you put into your mouth doesn't make you unclean and unfit to worship God. The bad words that come out of your mouth are what make you unclean." Then his disciples came over to him and asked, "Do you know that you insulted the Pharisees by what you said?"
Jesus answered, "Every plant that God in heaven did not plant will be pulled up by the roots. Stay away from those Pharisees! They are like blind people leading other blind people, and all of them will fall into a ditch." Peter replied, "What did you mean when you talked about the things that make people unclean?" Jesus then said: Don't any of you know what I am talking about by now?
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God’s Wide and Wonderful Welcome-Part 4 7-17-11
God, You call us to see You in all of creation. Give us new eyes and new hearts. Give us the wisdom to greet each person as a possibility of Your revelation. Amen
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God’s wide and wonderful welcome just keeps getting better and better. God invites us to places as yet unknown and sends people into our lives to both lead the way and walk beside and behind us. And sometimes, the Truth comes in the strangest packages. I hope that today we can think together about some of those precious packages of grace also known as “somebody”.
Taken out of context, it may seem that the story of the Tower of Babel makes little sense in our tracing of God’s wide and wonderful welcome throughout history and time. But if we look again, it makes very much sense indeed. The story of God’s people told in the Bible takes many twists and turns, some of them confusing indeed. In the beginning of the Old Testament, in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the stories focus on the creation and story of humanity in general. Right after the story that we read today, God calls Abraham and the stories focus on one people—the people of Israel. That nation is the focus of the rest of the Old Testament. With a few exceptions, the Gospel narratives of the New Testament also focus on God’s chosen people, the Jewish people or Israelites. Pentecost, which we celebrated a few weeks ago, brings the story full circle and the rest of the New Testament reaches out into the whole world, or at least the whole world of that time. You might think of it as a story that is thick at both ends but thin in the middle. And this story is all about language and culture and difference. So, if we are to understand fully, God’s wide and wonderful welcome, we must understand all that we can about difference.
Let’s look at what actually happened in this place called Babel or Babylonia. It’s actually a simple story with extremely profound ramifications. It seems that everyone spoke the same language, so they were all able to understand each other. They got this idea to build a tower that would reach the sky. Since they were all the same, no one disagreed with this plan. They set out to make a name for themselves, to become very famous and decided to use the finest, sturdiest building materials they could find. They were quite pleased with themselves and planned to have great power. God, though, looked at what they were doing and became concerned. God knew that no good would come from the people all being the same. No one would challenge what they were thinking and they would soon believe that they no longer needed to believe in God. So, God, the Bible says, ‘confused’ their language and scattered the people all over the world.
And just how does this almost not-so-nice story fit into God’s wide and wonderful welcome, you may well ask. We know for a fact that sometimes God has to speak pretty loudly to be heard above the clamor of our everyday lives, and I suspect that God had to do just that what with all the noise of building and hammering, and all those folks chattering about how famous they were going to be when their tower reached God’s heavens. Suddenly, God acted, and they had to work to communicate—to even come together in the same place—to know what the other wanted or hoped for, dreamed or thought about. And this is where it gets good.
These folks in Babylonia had completely missed the point—they thought that they could be God, could reach as high as God, could be so famous that they were independent of God, that, in fact, they simply would not need God at all. But God called them to return to a real relationship of worship and trust in God, not in themselves. And, at the very same time, God gave to us the gift of difference. Letty Russell calls it “riotous difference”. And so this wide and wonderful welcome invites us into a community of difference—of different perspectives, languages, cultures, histories and dreams—a difference that encourages us to seek out the gifts and joys hidden behind the everyday realities of all of our lives and the lives of those who look absolutely nothing like us at all.
Think about it for a minute. If all birds looked like bluebirds, would we ever appreciate the exquisite blue of the bluebird itself? If all the trees were weeping willows, would we truly admire the sweeping sway of the willow in the wind? If everyone talked like everyone else, would we not be bored in an instant? And, worse yet, if everyone thought and believed like everyone else, how in the world would we ever grow, ever be called to live into more than we currently experience? But God knew better—knew that we needed each other to challenge and prod and even argue at times. Whether you experience this story as truth or myth, think of the grace that God allows us to experience when we take seriously our need to learn to communicate and appreciate each other.
And yet, we are oh so afraid of difference. No matter how hard we try to open wide the wonderful welcome afforded to us by God, we stumble as we run head long into ‘somebodies’ that don’t always see eye to eye with us.
There’s something from our Gospel lesson that we can take into our growing place this day. It seems that there were some very strict teachers of the Law of Moses called Pharisees. They were part of God’s chosen people we spoke of earlier and they were very serious about obeying every teensy-tiny letter of the Law. They confronted Jesus. “Your disciples eat with dirty hands. You know that is against what our religion teaches. Why don’t you make them obey the law?” Jesus turns it back on them and accuses them of perverting their own laws when it benefitted them. He denounced them and, in general, ticked them off pretty badly. Jesus had a knack for pushing the envelope of his time. He taught the crowd and said, “Don’t you get it? It isn’t what you put in your mouth that puts you out of relationship with God, it’s the words that come out of your mouth that breaks that relationship down.” His disciples, always trying to make nice with the powers that be, say to him, “You’ve gone and made the Pharisees mad again, Jesus.” Jesus, frustrated again, says, “Stay away from the Pharisees—they don’t know the way, and they will just lead you down the wrong path.”
Jesus calls us to a higher understanding of difference. He wants us to know that difference—those people who do things differently from us are not inherently wrong or bad. What really matters is what they say, what kind of relationship with God they exhibit. But we, much like the Pharisees, seem to get caught in the Law of What We’ve Always Done, or the Law of What Keeps Us Comfortable. Jesus calls us to open our eyes and ears to what people are saying and doing rather than whether or not they conform to what we’ve always known and look like what we think they should look like. And that’s a wide and wonderful welcome indeed.
Nevertheless, we must push ourselves to understand why we struggle so much with those who are different—those who are “stranger” to us. We are so quick to label folks as ‘strange’ rather than looking for the gifts their ‘strangeness’ brings to us. Each person who walks into our sacred circle—a circle we say is open to all—brings new ways of worshipping God, new ways of expressing who God is in their lives, and new ways of being the hands and feet and voice of God to each of us. We must push through the decades, even centuries of self-serving comfort that tells us that it is ok to reject those who don’t look or sound like us. We must talk with each other about how to make this place a place of welcome for those who are different from us. And we must have a plan for never letting ourselves off the hook, when someone’s challenge takes us by surprise or dares us to look at God in a new way.
Think back to God’s original plan—God intended for humankind to multiply and fill the earth—the glories of difference a direct reflection of the glorious multitude of the ways God sends love to the earth. As far back as the tower-builders in Babel, people thought they had a better idea. Nevertheless, God challenges them again—gives them and us another chance to rejoice in the ‘riotous difference’ in creation, in perspective, in gifts and in understanding. God gives them and us another chance to celebrate the expanse of creation—to push beyond our comfortable viewpoints and embrace all that God has for us to experience. Let us go forth to enter into the fullness of God’s wide and wonderful welcome this day and all the days to come. Amen and Amen.