Our youth are not Babel-ers

One language. One people. One focus. The Tower of Babel starts out sounding like a kind of utopia: everybody working together for a common goal. It seems like an image of the Kingdom of God.

We like the idea of unity. We like coming together to get things done. The idea that we can create something great as a single unified people impacts our politics, our social movements and certainly our churches. Take the Olympics. A couple weeks from now the Summer Olympics will be starting up in London with some 190 countries and thousands of athletes. The event, as always, will be described as a great unifier. We come from one world with one distinct goal in mind. For the Olympics it's to win a medal or simply to represent your country. For political and social movements it may be some concept of world peace. For everyone, it is something bigger than ourselves that achieves greater meaning because of unity of purpose.

There's nothing wrong with world peace or for that matter the idea that we should be a united people, but there is something wrong with the Babel picture. We might not be able to quite put our fingers on it at first because the Babel builders share some of our misconceptions. Our idea of unity is so often not about lifting up the lowly, bringing justice for the oppressed, hope for the hopeless, or peace to the war-torn. Our idealism of unity does not match our expressions of it. We have a Babel problem. We want to climb a tower to heaven to demonstrate our righteousness. We want, in short, to be God.

This might seem like quite a leap, so allow me to illustrate with an example courtesy of our youth. Fifteen of our young people just returned yesterday from a mission trip to Cortez, Colorado where we spent a week working in one of the poorest areas of the United States. Over the course of our time there we encountered heartbreaking situations: kids whose only meal is from the church once a day, homes that looked more like dilapidated trailers, and people impacted by violence, absent families and inadequate education. This was, in every way, a long way from the experiences we have on a daily basis here in the northwest corner of Minnesota.

I found myself wondering what unity looks like in light of that trip and the Tower of Babel. What does it mean to be united with people whose life experiences are so drastically different from our own? What does unity look like between the youth of Kittson County and the kids we met in Cortez?

With hugely apparent social and cultural divides, let me start with what unity does not look like. True unity is not the Tower of Babel. You see, the Tower of Babel starts out looking like a story about uniting together for a common purpose; the exact kind of story that speaks to our inner idealism, but unity without a deeper purpose is finally just shallow. Babel unity looks like trying to become like God--perhaps the shallowest of any endeavor. It is unity in name only, not in purpose.

Babel demonstrates that there is a difference between unity and group-think. To say that we are united does not mean that we think the same way, act the same way, speak the same languages, or have the same or similar life experiences. If so, then our youth and the kids of Cortez would have no hope for unity; a chasm separates our life experience and theirs. But if unity is more than group-think, if it's more than believing the same things or speaking the same language--in short, if unity not only tolerates disagreement but embraces it--then we can be united with people who bear no resemblance to us.

What I saw this past week taught me that this kind of unity is not only possible, in fact it is necessary to embrace one another across those things that divide us. Our youth walked in to a situation they could not have been prepared for and they did the most remarkable of things: they treated kids who looked and sounded nothing like them as if they were the most important people in their lives. They showed love without regard for their own well-being or for what they would get out of it. Our youth had no Babel problem--they had no God complex. Maybe this is why Jesus was adamant that to enter the kingdom of heaven we  would have to become like children. We have to give up our desires for the sake of someone else, and that is something that children excel at far better than the rest of us.

One example: One day at snack time before the kids returned home one of our youth had a young girl on his lap as she was eating her sandwich. The girl was five years old, though she looked more like three and seemed half-likely to be blown away by the first swift breeze. It was obvious enough that she was going without food on a regular basis. So it was important for her, more than anyone else, to have that snack--a peanut butter and jelly sandwich--before heading home. But something remarkable happened during that snack time, something that just doesn't square with our innate sense of self-preservation. That girl, closer to starvation than is fathomable in the developed world, turned to our young man and said, "I'm really hungry but you can have some if you want."

That is the kingdom of God. That is what Jesus would have us see in one another. It looks nothing like Babel, because it is selfless, its intentions are pure. True power is not found in reaching for God. It is not achieved by building a towering city to heaven. It is not becoming more like God. It is not even about doing what is right. True power is giving up your desires for the sake of somebody else, even when your desires are for something as basic as food that would otherwise leave you starving.

This kind of power also flows both ways. Everybody who has ever done mission work knows that often the most profound change happens not in the communities we go into but in us when we depart. That is grace in action. It is why Jesus puts such a high price on humility. It's not about us. It's never been about us. Sometimes it's only when we head off to a strange and distant place that this message is brought home. Our own towers of Babel suddenly start to look just a little self-righteous, and it changes us.