Sermons

---

Building Towers
November 3 , 2002
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
Ninth in a sermon series,
"Back to the Beginning," on Genesis 1-11
Genesis 11:1-9

I’m so glad to be back with you. I really am. Since I last saw you, I have stood in a rural village in Inner Mongolia. I have stayed overnight in an underground Christian school, without really knowing where I was, and without one other person who could speak a word of English. I’ve been a long way away from home…and I’m glad to be back.

But I have to say…I’m also pretty excited to share about where we’ve been.

You know, every Sunday morning before worship, our musicians and worship leaders and I gather in the little prayer room behind that door, and we pray for the service, and for you. And often, I find myself praying something like this: “Lord, let us leave today as different people…because we have been together, with You.” That’s something of what I feel…I feel like I went to China, and came back changed…from being with God, together.

Our scripture reading this morning is really the last reading from the early chapters of Genesis, the ones which contain the story of ALL people, of ALL creation. After today, we’ll stay in Genesis, and head for a couple of weeks into the story not of ALL people, but of a PARTICULAR people, of God’s people. Join me in Genesis 11:1-9

This has been a huge year for me as far as traveling goes. Prior to this summer, I had never been out of the country, East or West…just North and South. But our family went to Europe this summer, and then this Bethany trip to China. And if there is one thing I have seen…it is building projects. The Eiffel Tower, and the soaring cathedrals of France. Big Ben and Parliament, and the massive churches of England. The unbelievable skyscrapers all over Hong Kong. The Great Wall of China. The Forbidden City of Beijing. Incredible towers and buildings from all parts of human history.

In Genesis, the Noah story is done, and Noah’s ancestors began to populate the earth after the time of the flood. They migrated towards the east, found a place and decided to settle. Significantly, we are told several times, they all spoke ONE language, they used the same words, they could speak to each other and they could hear clearly when a voice from the crowd said “Let’s build ourselves a city…let’s build a tower with its top way up in the heavens!” Let’s climb our way…right up to God.

Why?

The reasons are given pretty clearly:
A) The people want to make a name for themselves.
B) They want to avoid being scattered all over the earth.
So they built and they built…but they didn’t finish.

I don’t know if you check the Bethany website very often, but it is really excellent for information, events, Briefs, bulletins, etc. And lately, Joleen Burgess has been putting famous artwork on it that is connected to the week’s sermon. This week, it is a piece by the 16th century Flemish painter Bruegel. Even I recognized the painting! It’s a famous picture of the Tower of Babel. A huge mound of a building that looks almost like a city going right up to the sky. When you look closely, you can see that the background landscape is actually the Netherlands, where the painter lived. And you can see that all over the tower are ordinary, everyday workmen that you might see in any city…laying bricks, pounding, lifting, sweeping. Ordinary, everyday human enterprise going on. “Let’s build a tower…let’s make a name for ourselves.”

Nothing has really changed from the Garden of Eden! God wants his people to be with Him, to depend on Him. But the people want to make their own way into the heavens. God wants to give His people a name, GOD’S PEOPLE, but these want to make a name for themselves. God wants His people to populate, scatter and care for all of his creation, but these people want to huddle together where it seems safe and familiar. So they start to build a tower. The Tower of Babel was an engineering marvel, an architectural wonder, a testimony to human ingenuity and accomplishment. It was EXACTLY what God did not want.

I’ve never seen a city like Hong Kong. Lots of business, lots of money, lots of cell phones, lots and lots of people…and lots of huge skyscrapers. So many you can’t count them. It would be like looking at Seattle from an Elliot Bay ferry, and from Magnolia all the way over to Alki…you could see nothing but buildings that are 20-30-60-90 stories tall. The whole city is built upwards.

The people of Genesis thought their building was so tall, so significant that it reached all the way up to God’s heaven. But as great as they thought it was, God looked down from heaven…down, down, way down…and said “What’s that teeny little speck? Are they building something? Better go down and see.” The people thought they were getting somewhere by building up towards the realm of God. What they needed was for God to come down to them.

They wanted to make a name for themselves. They wanted to take their own name, give their lives meaning, accomplish something big.

I think everybody, in every age, needs some CENTER, some PURPOSE to rally around. Don’t you? We all long for that center. Something to focus on. A scientific accomplishment, an achievement, a career, a reputation, a foundation…something that will identify us, make us stand proud and tall and say “This is who I am!”…and I suspect YOU have a tower. Some of them are socially acceptable, some are not. These are the kind of towers that God knew would prohibit the human from ever going to live the way he had intended. And so to keep them from destroying the way life was supposed to be…he confused their language. A lot of time and energy would have to be spent in just trying to talk…and listen…to one another. Making their own name and staying safely together…is not what God intended or desired.

The Great Wall of China really was a marvel. Over 1500 miles long, following rivers and mountains. Wide enough on top to allow an army to march. Guard towers every ¼ mile. It was started in the 3rd century…BC! Incredible.

You ought to know I love history. Our trip to China was absolutely fascinating because of the wonders of ages gone by….Hong Kong, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City. I could have spent days there, marveling and studying. But in the end…those things won’t have 1/10 of the impact that the Chinese Christians have already had on me. They are a people intent…upon allowing GOD to build them…and depending on GOD to keep them safe. I feel inadequate to describe these people for you…but I will give you a few snapshots.

I don’t know if I can convey to you…the environment that these Christians are in. They believe in the same God you do, they worship the same Lord, they follow the same Spirit. Two different times we asked groups that we were with “How many of you have already been arrested at least once for your faith in Jesus?” Remember, these are people mainly between 17 and 24 years old. Two thirds of the people we asked had already been arrested.

We had dinner one night with Pastor Moses, a man who is now in his eighties. Twenty-five years he spent in prison. TWENTY-FIVE Years! Not for being subversive, or a threat or dangerous…but for being a pastor. They took away his house. They drove away his wife. They beat him and put him in chains. His chains rubbed his wrists so badly, that when skin started to grow back, it began to grow OVER the manacles. Twenty-five years in prison…for being a pastor…for doing what I do every day without once stopping to think about it.

One day I stayed in an underground school to teach the Bible all day…seven or eight hours! You guys NEVER let me talk that long! After lunch, I said “Let’s sing a little bit…I’ll teach you a song.” And they said “Great!,” because as you’ve heard, they absolutely love to worship. But before we could sing…somebody had to go out and make sure the outside door to the street was closed tight. And then the doors to the hallway. And then the doors to our room. And somebody else had to shut all of the windows in the room we were in…all to make sure that no sound would drift outside. And THEN we could sing.

In the late afternoon, the translator said something to the students, and it got extremely quiet in the room. Then he turned to me and said “Someone just spotted an armed policeman with a German shepherd nosing around the neighborhood.” And let me tell you, it was VERY quiet.

That’s the environment that these folks are meeting in. It’s almost as though every day, they wake up and must say to themselves “Am I willing to be a Christian today? Am I willing to take the risk, and pay the price…to follow Jesus?” Every day. Every single day.

Each group we were with, we asked these mostly young people: “What is your vision for ministry? What is God leading you towards?” The answers were amazing:
“I feel called to go start churches (totally illegal). I feel called to go to Afghanistan as a missionary. I want to tell the world about Jesus. I want to one day preach in Tiannemen Square,” which, of course, is the LAST place you could EVER preach in China right now…but that was one person’s vision.

China is a dangerous place to be a believer in Jesus Christ. Yet here were people unconcerned about huddling together in the safe and familiar…they were listening for God’s call on where He might send them. They weren’t worried about building a name for themselves…they were looking for signs of the Kingdom of God. They weren’t building buildings at all. No cities, no towers. There was something bigger.

I’ve been struck in my traveling these last months: in Europe, most of the cathedrals that were at one point, arguably, built to honor God…are now being restored on the outside. But apart from tourists, they’re pretty empty on the inside. The church is not the center of life in the villages and towns…the buildings are empty skeletons. The Great Wall of China was one of the building feats of all of history…yet its 1500 miles never really fulfilled its purpose of protecting China from invasion, and now most of the wall is crumbling old rock that is deteriorating rapidly…except for the restored sections where the tourists go to walk and take pictures. The Forbidden City of Beijing, with its 9,000 rooms and its sacred, holy places to deify the emperor…is now a museum one enters by walking past a thirty-foot portrait of Chairman Mao. Even Bruegel’s painting from the 16th century…makes it clear that the Tower of Babel is never going to be finished…the huge blocklike stone in the middle stretches on and on. The Tower project will soon be abandoned. It is not what God is after.

And on the plane on the way home, when I asked myself “How can we help the church in China?,” I practically laughed aloud at the American thought of throwing money into building buildings. It’s totally illegal to even gather as a church unless you register with the government! What good would the means to build a building be?!

And yet. Some people think that the church in China is now upwards of 50 million people. The persecution of the church has been accompanied by explosive growth. Not in buildings…but in people. Not in towers, but in people’s lives and hearts. Not in a name for themselves…but in identifying as God’s people…not in the safety of obscurity, but in allowing God to take them to places they never thought they’d go.

And so, in Genesis, God confused the languages of the people, and so they called the structure the “Tower of Babel,” which actually means “Confusion.” It was not God’s first choice. Not God’s intention. It’s what had to happen to try and bring the people back to God.

It’s fun to try and imagine the earth we live in if there weren’t so many languages. If there was one language that all Christians could communicate in. Actually, we don’t have to totally imagine it. We get these glimpses, foretastes, I think, of what heaven might be like in this regard. One of them is in the scripture Cal read earlier, from the book of Acts, the Day of Pentecost. The believers gather, the Holy Spirit comes upon them and wild things happen, and maybe the wildest is that everyone there hears the gospel proclaimed in their own native language…they all understood each other! A little picture of heaven, maybe.

I think I had some glimpses in China as well. I can’t tell you how fervently, how energetically, how desperately the Christians we were with…PRAYED. We had enough different times of worship that there were all different sorts of prayers, but the most common style…was that when it was time to pray…everybody PRAYED! Everybody prayed, out loud, at the same time. This huge, energetic wall of sound would rise up, as every single person present would begin to praise God, to shout, pump their fists, to offer thanks, to make requests…a huge, pulsing bundle of prayer shouting up into heaven, and it was so powerful it carried you right along with it! It might go on for 15 or 30 minutes, or 45 minutes without losing steam. Some were praying in Chinese, some of us in English, some people speaking in tongues…and you know what the amazing thing was? It just didn’t really matter! Everyone was calling on the name of the same God, revealed in Jesus Christ, everyone was asking the same God to heal, to lead, to guide, to direct, to forgive, and even if you couldn’t understand most of the words it was clearly what was going on…so the words themselves didn’t really matter! A glimpse of heaven, I think.

I’ve had a hundred people ask me this week “What was the most profound thing that happened to you as a result of this trip?” I don’t think I’m ready to answer that question yet. But I have thought of this. I felt like…I went to China…and discovered members of my own family…that I never knew existed. Each time we worshipped and prayed or that I spoke, for a minute or for seven hours…I would look around the room and think “My God…these are my brothers and my sisters…that I have never, ever known about!” And when we prayed together with these brothers and sisters…without a common language, yet understanding one another’s hearts, I would think: “This must be what it will be like in heaven.”

And so I’m back in the United States, the most powerful, materialistic nation that exists today. And each day of the six I’ve been home, I’ve asked myself: “Dan, what is it that you are building here? Is it a building, a career, a reputation…that ultimately will never be enough, never satisfy, never be completed? Or are you investing in the lives and hearts of people…for the kingdom of God?” That’s my question for you this morning as well. What are you building? What are YOU building? Let’s pray.