Let us make a name for ourselves;
otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
Here we are, moving into the Summer season. Perhaps on this Pentecost Sunday, on the cusp of Summer, a story about a family vacation would be appropriate.
A friend of mine1 recently shared his summer vacation story from last year. He called his reflection “Unifying a Scattered World Under One Trademark.” While on a tour through the southern states, his family stopped at the World of Coca Cola in downtown Atlanta. The site was built in time for the 1996 Olympic Games. It is dominated by a tower which tourists ascend, and as they do, they find that they are surrounded by flags from every country in which Coca Cola is sold, which is, of course, most of the countries of the world. The varieties of the soft drink labels marketed in various corners of the globe are on display in the soda fountain room, where tourists are meant to pause in awe over the fact that this one product is the unifying elixir of the nations.
It is an immense marketing shrine where tourists hear such superlatives as “Coca Cola is the world’s most familiar trademark, recognized by 94% of the population of the globe.” It gives us a new common tower and if not a common language, at least a common beverage! Perhaps the modern-day Tower of Babel is constructed from 12-ounce aluminum cans. A murky brown beverage that rots our teeth, fattens our children, elevates our carbohydrates, and will, given time, completely dissolve steel, is the key to nurturing a universal world community?
A few years ago a short theological paper was written for one of those obscure journals for ministers, but inasmuch as the journal was published under the auspices of a seminary that received a large sum of money from donors high up in the Coca Cola hierarchy, the article was pulled and never published. More’s the pity, because it had some good insights to share. So I’ll share some of them with you now:
Our much-vaunted sophistication and ironic detachment are incapable of protecting us from the seduction of images, the idolatry of consumption. The advertisers know who we are; they know where our loyalties really lie. They have made us in their own image, and we cannot conceive what it would be like to lead lives that bear any other likeness. The world we inhabit is indeed the world of Coca Cola, of McDonalds, and Toyota. We like it that way.
Whose world is this? Where is the bread of life that can feed us, the water that can quench our thirst? What is real? Who is the source of the real life that we crave. We know, but we do not know. We speak, but we cannot even hear ourselves. The mighty rushing wind and those tongues of fire are our only hope.2
The builders of the mythic Tower of Babel were eager to secure their community. They had heard the command of God to “fill the earth and subdue it,”3 but they were afraid of such unknowns, they preferred to make their own new version of Eden, a walled, tower-dominated city where they could avoid contact with people who were unlike them, where they could have traffic only with their own kind. They rejected the community of earth’s strange and wonderful peoples that God had in mind, and wanted instead a fellowship of sameness, same city, same age, same type, same neighborhood. They wanted to give up on the idea of the community of God’s beloved people — which is, of course all of God’s people — in favor of a community of same-minded, same-colored, same-languaged people so they wouldn’t have to reach out in relationship to anyone else.
God saw what they were up to and God put a stop to it. A straight line can be drawn from that ancient Old Testament story to the account of the disciples speaking in all the tongues of the earth in the book of Acts.
We cannot afford the temptation to choose who will be in and who will be outside the love of God in the community of the church, for God will surely then turn our tongues to new words so that we shall have to move into the world to which he sends his community of faith. We are only true to the Spirit of Pentecost inasmuch as we move away from that babeling tower of sameness and into the wonderful, varied and frightening world of God’s diversity, where comfy sameness gives way to the amazing and stimulating complexity of the very person of God who is Father of us all.
Today, we move to the table of the Lord remembering that the very first act of the church was to speak in fountains of words from all languages and from all kinds of peoples, so that Christ could be known to all the world. God takes each language of the world and blesses it. We come to share bread and wine, not in cozy like-minded comfort, but in remembrance that Christ calls us to go into every nation, even every neighborhood under heaven, the bread of life, the wine of consolation.
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NOTES
1 - Many thanks to my friend, Bill Carter, for sharing this story in his unpublished paper, presented to the Homiletical Feast gathering, January, 2004.
2 - Iwan Russell-Jones, “Better Than the Real Thing,” unpublished.
3 - Genesis 1:28.
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Copyright © 2004 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved
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