The End of Babel

I’m thinking about the cities in the Bible. The seven cities in Revelation are often a touchstone for Christian reflection on the church. Well, usually someone else’s church. And I know that we would like to imagine ourselves as the New Jerusalem. But that just seems unlikely from what I see in the UMC. Who would want to live in war-wasted post-General Conference denomination we have become. What about another city?

There is a story in the Bible worth reading. Genesis 11. The people of the earth, in defiance of God’s command, would no longer be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth. Instead they decide to”make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

You know what happened. God cast them into confusion, causing them to each speak a different language, and thus pushing them back into faithfulness to God’s mission.

I think that this may be happening in the United Methodist Church. Our celebration of being a global church it is largely a valedictory rather than a commencement. Wade Barclay was probably right. The 1919 Mission Conference for Methodists probably marked the swan song for a Methodist vision of being fruitful and multiplying and covering the face of the earth. These days we grow primarily not by evangelization, but by bringing Christian communities we did not originate into our franchise.

What we really see across the spectrum of UM activism isn’t a robust commitment to that fundamental mission given the people of God. It is rather a politics of nostalgia. You can see it in the continual and completely inaccurate references to “civil disobedience” by progressive Christians for whom the 1960’s are still the model for faithful witness. You can see it in the conservative longing for the creeds, discipline, and obedience that prevailed in the past. You see it most in the continual and contested references by all sides to John Wesley, as if the theological corpse of a dead Englishman could provide a firm foundation on which to build our city.

Let’s face it. In the United States we are desperately worried that in the face of declining attendance and an uncertain future we will no longer have a name and will be scattered abroad across the face of the earth. We deeply fear that we will be lost into the multiplicity of cultures and languages and ideologies and lifestyles of world. The language we deploy both as conservatives and as progressives is defensive. We are defending the gospel against the slow corrosive processes of modern culture. Or we are defending the place of the Gospel in precisely that culture lest we become irrelevant. We fear that if we go forth for any real engagement into a culturally complex world we will discover that our smug answers will be dismembered by questions we couldn’t even anticipate would be asked. We are building walls, albeit on opposite sides of the city.

So God has done us a favor. We no longer speak the same language. We can no longer communicate with each other. And we’ll be forced now to abandon the city walls we’ve been building so diligently. And perhaps under God’s imperative we’ll being to go forth, and be fruitful, and multiply, and cover the face of the earth. We cry out in pain when we should be glad. The unity of Babel is nothing to celebrate, and its loss is nothing to grieve.

If that sounds harsh, well at least we’re not Sodom or Jericho.