Speaking in Tongues and Bio-diversity

Read Genesis 11 and this will make more sense.

I have always loved the multitasking of the Biblical writers. They tell rich stories that make a whole variety of important points, while sneaking in some general mocking of their enemies. Christians, morally above this sort of behavior, like to pretend the mocking is not there, and skip right to the moral of the story. Actually, modern Christianity works a whole lot better if you don't actually read the original stories and just summarize the nice points. More on this later, when we discuss "getting back to the family values of the Bible." Oy.

Anyway...the story of the tower of Babel is a VERY thinly disguised thumbing of the nose at the Babylonians, who take our heroes into exile hundreds of years later in the story. Which makes it a bit of an anachronism, unless you stop to think that the exile was the impetus for writing all these stories down in the first place. The religious tradition and the culture of the exiles was threatened, so they had to be more intentional about passing their tradition and stories along to the next generation.

So...

Babel=Babylon....

Tower of Babel=Babylonian ziggurat tower.

Hmmmmmm. Draw your own conclusions.

But aside from that...you have a story of people banding together in a common effort to prove the greatness of human accomplishment. When we work together with our technology and effort, we can climb to the very heavens! Who needs God?

When the movie "Titanic" came out in the late nineties, it became the Babel movie for me. People, proud of their scientific and engineering prowess, build the humongous and "unsinkable" ship that sinks on its maiden voyage.

Perhaps it is the same people who decorate their children's rooms with Noah's ark who can watch "Titanic" and see only romance and ignore all the drowning. Regardless, it all goes down to a lack of humility ending in disaster.

But lately, I've begun to think there is more to it than just pride.

This summer, having read Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," I am struck more by the similarities between Babel and our food industries. Our great industrial and scientific minds are decreasing the diversity of our food supply. They are engineering the genetics of the plants that we eat, so that we are increasingly dependent on a few companies and their particular seeds. To really think this through, you need to read Kingsolver's book. Don't worry, it is very funny and delightful to read. That helps with the disturbing parts about the narrowing of our biodiversity.

So here's my thought. I have come to believe, partly with Kingsolver's help, that the different languages given to the people at Babel are NOT A PUNISHMENT. Rather, I believe that God digs diversity, and wants us to dig it too.

Look at the plants. God invents hundreds of types of potatos. Hundreds. If you grow hundreds of varieties, letting them mingle happily together, then when blight comes, some 'taters will be resistant to the blight.

Or look at it in the realm of economics, as an argument against monopolies. In fields where you've got lots of competition and lots of different think tanks, people come up with more innovations. Perhaps it was back when I was being brainwashed in high school in my "Americanism vs. Communism" class...but I remember learning at some point that American computer science had progressed more quickly than that in the Soviet Union, because of the competition in the free market.

Anyway, don't sue me because I'm tap dancing in so very many fields where I have only enough knowledge to be dangerous. But think about it. What if the languages are not a punishment? What if they are a return to God's joyful plan for humanity?

Diversity = good.
Babylonian-there-is-no-proper-way-to-think-except-the-way-the-empire-tells-you = bad.

Power to the hack theologians everywhere!

Begat

Genesis suffers more than most Biblical books from a bad case of the genealogies. You'll be cruising along fairly nicely with the narrative, only to bog down in a list of alien names strung together like popcorn on a Christmas tree.

There are occasional little unexplained snippets of stories...Jubal the musician...Tubal-cain the metalworker...Lamech the killer in self-defense...Enoch who walked with God...Nimrod the potentate and mighty hunter. But mostly just names, one after another, in father to son succession.

While I don't tend to linger too long in the genealogies and generally skim right over them, I'm glad they are there. They serve to remind us that these are not independent or isolated tales, but are instead all part of the BIG PICTURE. By tracing all of humanity to Noah and Mrs. Noah, or farther back to Adam and Eve, we're reminded that at the family reunion, we're all part of the same clan. Even the people we love to hate are tied into the same genealogical web.

All the great enemies of the Old Testament show up in these early chapters of Genesis. The Canaanites (9:22), the Philistines (10:14) and a whole mess of other folks with funny names and a violent place to hold in the story ahead.

The ancient people who told these stories understood something basic: no matter how reprehensible your enemy might be, in the long run, they are no more than distant cousins. Sometimes the family connection is even closer than that.

We go about our business of oppression and warfare by dehumanizing our enemies. What would it mean to adopt them back into the family tree...to look into their faces and trace the family resemblances...to look into their hearts and see parts of ourselves?

God's Time Management -- Sabbath

And on the seventh day, God threw a monkey wrench in the whole business and took a day off. Most of the time, we consider ourselves and our ongoing activity more crucial than the creator of the universe. If we stop moving, life as we know it will explode into mess of thermonuclear proportions.

Back in the days that I taught senior high school students in Sunday School, they calmly discussed everything from sex to the nature of the trinity without ever breaking a sweat. But upon the casual mention of the sabbath, they grew red faced and threw up exasperated hands. "Who has time to take a day off? Do you have any idea what our lives are like?"

Oddly enough, this part of the creation story made it into the famous TEN COMMANDMENTS. Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy. Right there in the midst of not murdering and not sleeping with other people's spouses and not worshipping other gods.

Pastors break this commandment regularly. Work on Sunday leading worship. Then work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. And then it is Sunday again.

Who has time for a day off?

Today, after a mad rush all week at work, and after a delightfully insanely company filled Easter weekend last week...today I attempted a day of rest. I drove myself a little nuts looking for the right book to read, the right project to start, the right subject to study, the right way to rest. It is only now, as darkness falls, that I'm beginning to realize that somewhere in the midst of my rest day anxiety, I actually began to let my soul catch up with my body.

There is a combination of ingredients...rest and worship...that must be mixed together to keep the commandment in full. Rest without worship tends to head us into the shallow waters of self absorption and silly pursuits. Worship without rest tends to make us cranky and unbearable, incapable of loving deeply.

With the high school students, so sure that sabbath was an impossible ideal, I encouraged them to take tiny sabbaths in the midst of their rush. If not a day, then a few hours. If not a few hours, then a few minutes. Starting small...just to pause in the midst of the chaotic rush to breath, to think, to gell.

This week, I'd consistently gotten myself whipped into a frenzy trying to get to everything that needed doing. Several times I found myself forced to stop...once or twice in traffic...once waiting for another person. I found the small pellet of common sense that rattles in the centrifuge of my mania...and relaxed in the peace of the moment. When the pace picked back up, I was a little more ready to run, less anxious, more focused. More centered on the who and why of my existence.

Remember the sabbath. Keep it. Let it keep you.

God's Time Management -- Celebration

I took an extra long weekend this week, leaving my day job for a while to catch up on other portions of my life. On Friday, feeling slightly winded by my journeys of the day, I stopped to count the number of completed errands...ten...and then looked at the long remaining list of jobs and tasks. The list seemed heavy in my hand, weighted by places to go, things to do, people to see.

We always face the temptation to ignore our accomplishments and to focus all of our attention on the things that lie yet before us, but the Time Management system advocated in Genesis chapter one advises us otherwise. God first breaks the act of creation up into more manageable pieces, and then pauses after each managed piece to say "hey, that's pretty good."

Whether we have cooked a meal, worked a day at our job, cleaned a bathroom, or weeded a flower bed, we're invited to pause, to contemplate the before and after of this simple moment in our lives and celebrate its basic goodness.

I spent most of Saturday in the garden, hoeing weeds, framing raised beds, spreading mulch. Last night I was too pooped to take it in, but today, instead of tearing back into the pile of mulch in the driveway, I walked around the garden and examined yesterday's work.

Not only does this pause for celebration break up the endless desperate hurtle into the future, it also renews and reaffirms. When I pick the pitchfork and four pronged hoe back up tomorrow, it will be with energy renewed by my pleasure at the work already accomplished.

Pause every little bit. Look back with affirmation.

I've accomplished something here. Something pretty good.

God's Time Management -- Seven Days

Why create the universe in seven days?

First, let me be clear that I think the seven days are symbolic, metaphorical truth -- not history or science. People of faith who insist that the creation story of Genesis One is a descriptive account of how it really happened find themselves doing odd gymnasics to make scientific findings fit with their absolute conviction of the literal seven day creation.

My personal favorite: "God put the dinosaur bones in the earth to test our faith." Right.

Instead, I believe in a much more complex God...a God who dances at the subatomic level, who continues to create through the ever evolving cosmos, who loves the wonders of scientific and mathematical truth. Religion explores the question of who while science explores the question of how.

That said, why seven days? Seven is a symbolic number, from the beginning to the end of the Bible...showing up again in the book of Revelation. Seven represents wholeness, completion. Ancient people grooved on symbolic numbers. (More on that later, when we explore the number forty....)

Beyond that, I think the seven days are meant to be instructive: God modeling through good example how to undertake a humongous project of intimidating scale.

When the project seems too much to do...break it into managable pieces. No one said you had to create the whole universe in one sitting. Start with something easy, like light. Do a little bit every day until you look back and realize the whole project is done.

One of the formative stories of my life: the boy sent by his uncle to clear a field by hand. Every day he goes to the field, becomes exhausted by the immensity of the job, curls up and goes to sleep. Finally, after several days, the uncle comes to check his progress, wakes him up and tells him, "If you had cleared a spot the size of the ground you slept upon each day, you would be almost done by now."

This story, and the story of the creation of the universe, have helped me march through life, one step at a time. Most of the time, remembering these tales, I've been able to stay focused on the job at hand without becoming too overwhelmed by all that needs doing.

It has made all the difference.

Mad about Monotheism

Being the hack theologian that I am, I have no intention of proceeding in logical order. So now, four blogs in, I'm going back to the first verses and first chapters, putting "In the Beginning" somewhere in the early middle.

I love the first chapter of Genesis, the great liturgy of creation, light and shape and living things springing into being through the means of poetry. I grow quickly weary and frustrated with modern people trying to read their literalistic, historical, scientific biases into this magnificent material. What arrogance to think that the ancient people sat around their campfires saying, "Now, we've got to get this creation stuff 100% scientifically and historically accurate, because thousands of years from now, that's how people will define truth." Bah, humbug on that.

Ironically, like us, the ancients had little care for folks outside their time and philosophical frame of reference. They had their hands full with the conflicting thoughts and philosophies of their own day and time.

The creation story is radical liturature, not because stands up against modern scientific thought, but because it stands bravely up against the religious thought of its own time.

To read this poem of God speaking stars and sky and sun and moon and waters and living creatures and humans all into being...that's cheeky stuff in a world where people generally only gave their gods domain over small neighborhoods of influence.

The creation poetry of Genesis 1:16 thumbs its nose at the Egyptian sun god. The lines about creation of earth and plants and creatures stick out a proverbial tongue at the fertility gods of the early middle east. One God. One God creating, one God over all.

Even the ancient people portrayed in the writings of the Bible don't quite buy it. They themselves are more comfortable with the traditional understanding of a whole vast company of gods, battling for influence, skirmishing for power. Monotheism doesn't catch on in a big way within the Jewish community until much later in history and much later in the Bible.

We're still not terribly good monotheists. We worship our little imaginary god who lives locked in the church, coming for visiting hours once or twice a week and then locking the little dude (or dudette) back up. We worship the god of the national religion, the god of material wealth, the god of comfort, the god of security, and the god of pleasure. We give them each a portion of our time and energy, hoping that they will give back to us generously in return. If anything, the god locked in the church building is one of the lower deities on our list.

What would it mean to really focus...to see all of our lives and all of our purpose and all of creation as cut of one great cloth? What would it mean to hear the poetry of one God who speaks us into being and carries us through all of each day?

What would it mean to become monotheistic?

Full Frontal Nudity and Ethnic Cleansing

Back in the days when I was a camp counselor at a church related summer camp, we used to sing an impressively annoying song about Noah and the ark. The song had many more verses than seemed reasonable. After proceding for much too long, it came crashing to an end with God sending out the sun to dry up the landy landy and everything being fine and dandy dandy.

I would never have wished for more verses, but I have come to believe that by ending the story at the first sign of a rainbow, we miss the whole point.

I was an adult before I learned what happened after the flood waters receded and the rainbow faded from the sky: Noah, weary of all the death and destruction, weary of living with his family at close quarters, weary of cleaning up after pairs of every animal imaginable, made a plan. He couldn't just wander down to the corner liquor store. It took him months, yea verily even years, but he had a plan.

He planted a vineyard...nurtured the grapevines...tended them....pruned them....harvested the grapes....fermented them....and after long anticipation, he tied one on. Saint Noah, the most righteous man on the planet, the only one worth saving, got stinking drunk.

Then, soused on his homemade wine, he took off his clothes and lay naked in his tent.

Biblical scholars don't make too terribly much of this. They focus on the reactions of Noah's sons and his subsequent blessings and curses. Commentaries blather on about the beginnings of conflicts between nations. Americans spent an embarrassing few decades using this story to defend the institution of slavery, since there is a handy piece about slavery in the curse on Noah's son who snickered when he found dad naked.

I think they've all missed (or at least underplayed) the point...and it is a really humongous point....the most important lesson we can glean from the flood story.

Think about it. God, in the story, finds people too evil and violent to keep around, so God washes all the bad people away and keeps the good ones. When the flood waters recede and the ark lands, God sets the rainbow in the sky...WHY? As a reminder to God to NOT try this again. WHY? BECAUSE IT DIDN'T WORK.

When Noah and his family, the righteous ones, get off the ark, God makes this observation on the new and improved human race: "the inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood." God promises never again to wash away the bad people from the planet BECAUSE WE ARE ALL BAD PEOPLE.

Don't get me wrong...I know lots of swell folks. I'm pretty cool, myself.

But if you take the very best of us, wash away the rest, you still end up right back where you started.

In the story of Adam and Eve, the point where they realize their brokenness is described in the following way: "Their eyes were opened, and they realized that they were naked."

Noah, the chosen one, is right back at the exit ramp from the garden of Eden. Naked.

What would it mean for us to really understand the Noah story? To once and for all realize that you can't sort the good people from the bad, that you can't solve the problems of the world by getting rid of "THOSE PEOPLE."

Instead, the battles between US and THEM continue all over the globe. Good guys and bad guys. Insiders and outsiders. If only we could just wash those other people away, all would be well with the world.

And we would wake up the next morning and find ourselves NAKED.

Filtered Water

Living in the Southeastern United States renders it almost impossible to read the Bible and actually see the words on the page. The "Bible belt" culture seeps into our imaginations, adding layers of interpretation to the text long before we open the book.

We picture Adam and Eve eating an apple in the garden of Eden, and the fact that there is not (and has never been) an apple in the story seems incomprehensible. Relatively few people can tell you the name of the tree that stood in the center of the garden...the forbidden fruit.

In case this comes as a surprise, and you don't have Genesis 2 & 3 handy...forbidden fruit comes from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Not as simple as an apple, and a lot more specific in its meaning.

As often as we add images and ideas into the text, we also screen things out. We become so familiar with the names and vague outlines of the stories that we lose the truly important details. Sometimes we filter out the vast majority of the story line.

Many of us learned our Bible as children, with stories cleaned up and sanitized to the rated G version of the story. We learned the basics at age 6 or 7 and never went back for more.

Case in point: Noah and the ark.

I am consistently stunned by the use of Noah and the ark in decorating baby nurseries. People make ark lamps and ark wall hangings and ark bookends and ark toys and ark Christmas tree decorations. We surround our infants and toddlers with images from the most horrific story in the Bible.

If you read the story of the flood in Genesis 6-8, you'll notice a disturbing detail. Aside from a small handful of people and a few animals, EVERYBODY DIES. All the people outside Noah's immediate family and all the animals except a select handful DROWN.

The story depicts the most comprehensively destructive natural disaster imaginable. Far worse than the southeast asian tsunami. Far worse than the devastation of hurricane Katrina.

But why concentrate on that little detail when you can focus your artistic efforts on the cute boat and sweet little animals? What child doesn't like boats and animals?

We've become so overly familiar with the idea of the ark that we've lost the underlying story.

Next time we see a toy ark, or a baby blanket covered in animals walking two by two, here are some things to ponder....

* How do we teach our children about the role of evil in human life and civilization?

* How do we take responsibility for the harm we daily cause ourselves, each other and the whole natural order?

* How can we read the story of Noah without tearing our clothes and crying out in horror?

* What kind of God sends forth the flood?

* If we were in the story, would we be on the boat, or part of the multitude in the waters?

* What manner of people are we, that we can read this story, la la la, and completely ignore all the death and suffering?

* Who is drowning right in front of us today while we play with our toy boats and line up our toy animals, two by two?

Will It Float?

When I stay up late, I like to watch David Letterman play "Will It Float?"

The first time I caught the sketch, the item in question was a jug of milk. Will a jug of milk float in a great big tub o' water?

While the object of the day changes, the basic format stays the same: lots of debate, followed by the official guesses, then, with much pomp, drama and some strange fireworks on the side, the item in question is placed into the big ol' tub o' water.

I don't remember if a gallon of milk floats.

But how thrilling the question...

This week I made an interesting discovery. David Letterman did not invent "Will it Float?"

Nay, it came from Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers changed into his sweater and tennis shoes many years ago, invited his young viewers to join him at his turquoise blue bathtub, took a bucket of bath toys and looked into the camera...and asked the immortal question. "Will it float?"

Plastic blocks and boat floated. The toy rocking chair sat on the bottom of the pretty blue tub.

But even Mr. Rogers, back in the 1970's, was not the original "Will it Float?" guru.

Thousands of years ago, the oldest man ever to grace the planet...the one and only, original, "will it float" guy.

Methuselah was 187 years old when he became the father of Lamech. When Lamech was 182, he had a son named Noah. When Noah was six hundred years old, he ducked into an ark full of stinky animals to escape flood waters covering the face of the earth.

187 + 182 + 600 = 969

Genesis 5 tells us that Methuselah died at age 969, which by my math...drumroll, please...was the year of the big flood.

Methuselah did not float.

I've never found a commentary or a biblical footnote about the death of Methuselah, but the math is right there in the text for anyone to see.

Was Noah's great grandpa evil like everyone else? Did God smite him off the face of the earth?

Was he basically a good fellow, and God rewarded him by saving him from all those months trapped with family members and animal poop in a confined space?

Why hide this little detail in the story?

One of the things I truly love about the Bible...there are always layers upon layers of weird details...layers upon layers of opportunity for discussion, for interpretation, for debate....

Layers upon layers of hack theology just waiting to happen.