2026.05.31 | Babel to Belonging

 “Babel to Belonging”
Genesis 11:1–9 and John 16:12–15
Preached by 
Rev. Dr. Marvin Lance Wiser
Eden United Church of Christ  
Cherryland, CA 
17 May 2026

There is a plain in the ancient story, between two great rivers, Shiner, where all of humanity gathers. One people. One language. One tongue — though we will return to that claim in a moment, because the claim itself is worth questioning. On this plain, the people look at one another and see themselves perfectly reflected. They understand one another completely. And what do they decide to do with this perfect unity?

They decide to build.

Not homes. Not gardens. Not a place of welcome for the stranger — because on this plain, there is no stranger, because everyone is already the same. No, what they build is a tower. A tower whose top will reach heaven. A monument to their own name, lest they be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.

We have heard this story told as a story of punishment. God, apparently threatened by human ambition, descends to confuse the builders and scatter them to the winds. The diversity of human languages becomes, in this reading, a curse — the sin of overreach repaid with the chaos of miscommunication.

Many of us have been taught that Babel is a story about human pride. But I want to suggest we may be asking the wrong question. What if the more important question is: what was already wrong before the first brick was laid?

Listen again to what drives the project: "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." The fear is not failure. The fear is difference. The fear is dispersion. The fear is the world in all its wild, ungovernable variety. Empire always fears difference. Empire prefers one language, one story, one identity, one sexuality, one center of power. Not merely a shared tongue, but a shared way of naming reality. A shared hierarchy of values. A shared understanding of who belongs and who does not. Empire demands sameness.

Babel is not ultimately a story about human beings reaching too high. It is a story about what happens when uniformity and supremacy become idols. The tower is not merely an architectural achievement — it is an imperial project, a monument to the dream of one city, one name, one way of being human. And so God does what God has always done when imperial power consolidates around sameness: God scatters. God diversifies. God insists that the earth is wider than any tower can contain.

The confusion of tongues is not God's punishment for diversity. It is God's protection of diversity.

En la historia de Babel, toda la humanidad se reúne en un solo lugar, con un solo idioma y una identidad compartida. Juntos construyen una torre, con la esperanza de hacerse un nombre y evitar ser dispersados ​​por toda la tierra.

A menudo interpretamos esto como una historia sobre el orgullo: personas que aspiran demasiado alto y a las que Dios castiga confundiendo sus lenguas. Pero, ¿y si nos hemos estado planteando la pregunta equivocada?

¿Y si el problema de fondo fuera el miedo a la diferencia?

Los constructores desean un solo pueblo, idioma, historia y un solo centro de poder. Babel no trata simplemente sobre la ambición humana; trata sobre la uniformidad y la supremacía convertida en ídolo.

Dios interrumpe ese sueño. Dios dispersa. Dios diversifica. Dios crea espacio para muchos pueblos, muchas culturas y muchas voces.

La confusión de lenguas no es un castigo de Dios a la diversidad; es la protección de Dios a la diversidad.

Now — and I promise this is theology, not a lecture — I want to pause on the question of language itself. Because how we understand language changes how we understand both Babel and what comes after it.

Most of us assume language exists primarily to communicate information. Under that assumption, many languages look like a problem, and Babel looks like a story about a broken system. But translator and late Princeton Professor David Bellos has proposed something more interesting. If communication were language's only purpose, he argues, our ancestors "got it badly wrong — they should have dropped it on the spot." Human beings have produced thousands of distinct languages and dialects not because communication kept failing, but because language does far more than transmit information.

Language tells us who we are. Language carries memory, culture, identity, kinship, geography, and history. George Steiner resisted the myth of a single primordial tongue from which all diversity descended: “languages are less like branches from a single tree and more like a multiplicity of springs, wells, and snow melts furrowing down into valleys to meet and merge into broader rivers.” They emerge from the particular ground of particular peoples in particular places.

If that is right, then the "one language" of the plain of Shinar was never simply a natural state — it was an enforced one. A uniform tongue is not an Eden. It is an empire. God's disruption at Babel is not punishment for human creativity. It is God's resistance to the totalizing project of sameness. Translation — the holy work of making the foreign familiar without pretending the difference was never there — is not a consequence of Babel's curse. It is, it turns out, the Spirit's vocation.

Quiero detenerme en la cuestión del lenguaje en sí mismo, porque la forma en que entendemos el lenguaje cambia la forma en que entendemos Babel.

La mayoría de nosotros asumimos que el lenguaje existe, ante todo, para comunicar información. Pero el erudito David Bellos sostiene que el lenguaje hace mucho más que eso. El lenguaje porta identidad, cultura, memoria y sentido de pertenencia; nos dice quiénes somos y de dónde venimos.

Si esto es cierto, entonces la existencia de múltiples lenguas no constituye un problema que deba resolverse. La diversidad no es un fracaso de la comunicación; es parte de aquello que nos hace humanos.

Y si esto es cierto, entonces Babel también adquiere un aspecto diferente. Esa «única lengua» de Sinar comienza a parecerse menos a un paraíso y más a la uniformidad. La intervención disruptiva de Dios no es un castigo a la creatividad humana, sino una resistencia al sueño de la homogeneidad.

La labor del Espíritu no consiste en borrar nuestras diferencias, sino en ayudarnos a comprendernos mutuamente a través de ellas.

Now this brings us to Trinity Sunday. Every year preachers feel pressure to explain the Trinity. But perhaps the Trinity, like language, is not a puzzle to solve so much as a relationship to enter. Renowned theologian Mark Heim — my own professor of theology — observes that we often assume the highest form of unity is one in which differences eventually disappear. We imagine that true community requires convergence. But the doctrine of the Trinity pushes back against that assumption at the level of God's own being.

The Trinity’s distinctiveness is not a problem to be solved — it is part of the very life of God. Father, Son, and Spirit exist in mutual giving, mutual glorifying, mutual love. And their unity comes not from sameness but from love.

This is a remarkable claim. It means diversity is not merely something God tolerates in creation. Diversity is rooted in the Creator. The deepest reality in the universe is not uniformity. It is relationship. We are made in the image of this God. We are made in the image of a communion — which means we are made for interconnectedness, not isolation. We were created for the kind of belonging that difference, held in love, makes possible.

Hoy es Domingo de la Trinidad. Quizás la Trinidad no sea tanto un enigma por resolver, cuanto una relación en la que entrar.

El Padre, el Hijo y el Espíritu permanecen distintos, y sin embargo viven en perfecta comunión. Su unidad no proviene de la semejanza, sino del amor.

Y si hemos sido hechos a imagen de este Dios, entonces fuimos creados no para la uniformidad, sino para la pertenencia: esa clase de pertenencia que hace posible la diferencia, mantenida unida por el amor.

Many Christians describe Pentecost as the reversal of Babel. But I am not sure that is quite right.

When the Spirit arrives, notice what happens — and what does not happen. The Parthians remain Parthians. The Medes remain Medes. The Egyptians remain Egyptians. The languages remain. The cultures remain. The ethnic differences remain entirely intact. What changes is not diversity. What changes is understanding. People hear the mighty works of God in their own languages. The Spirit does not erase difference. The Spirit creates communion within difference.

And perhaps this is what Jesus means when he tells his disciples: "The Spirit of truth will guide you into all truth." Not one culture's truth. Not one language's truth. All truth. The Spirit moves through the full range of human experience — all the springs and wells and snow melts — gathering them into a deeper river of understanding.

Pentecost is not God's assimilation project. It is God's belonging project. The miracle is not that everyone becomes the same. The miracle is that people learn to hear one another without demanding that they become one another. The Spirit is the divine translator — not the kind who erases the original language, but the kind who holds both languages in mind at once, honors the particularity of each, and finds, miraculously and faithfully, the place where they touch.

Muchos cristianos describen Pentecostés como la reversión de Babel. Pero no estoy seguro de que eso sea del todo exacto.

Cuando llega el Espíritu, las lenguas permanecen. Las culturas permanecen. Las diferencias permanecen. Lo que cambia es la comprensión.

La gente escucha las obras poderosas de Dios en sus propios idiomas. El Espíritu no borra la diferencia; el Espíritu crea comunión dentro de la diferencia.

Pentecostés no es un proyecto de asimilación por parte de Dios; es un proyecto de pertenencia. El milagro no consiste en que todos se vuelvan iguales, sino en que las personas aprendan a escucharse mutuamente sin exigir que se conviertan en el otro.

And Church, this matters, because we live in a world still building Babels.

Every system that demands conformity before it grants belonging is a Babel project. Every nationalism that requires cultural sameness. Every institution that says, explicitly or implicitly, you can belong here, but only if you become more like us. These are all towers. And like a roaring wind, the Spirit continues to challenge them. Amen?

Here at Eden, we worship in English and Spanish not because we have failed to choose a common language, but because we believe something sacred happens when we make room for more than one. Every act of translation is an act of hospitality. Every bilingual prayer is a declaration that God's kingdom is larger than any one culture's vocabulary. Every effort to hear one another across difference is Pentecost.

Y, iglesia, esto importa, porque seguimos viviendo en un mundo que construye Babeles.

Todo sistema que exige conformidad antes de otorgar sentido de pertenencia es un proyecto de Babel. Toda voz que dice: «Puedes pertenecer aquí, pero solo si te vuelves más como nosotros».

Pero el Espíritu continúa desafiando esas torres. Aquí en Eden, adoramos en inglés y en español no porque no podamos elegir un solo idioma, sino porque algo sagrado ocurre cuando hacemos espacio para más de uno.

Cada oración bilingüe es un acto de hospitalidad. Cada esfuerzo por escucharnos mutuamente, a pesar de nuestras diferencias, es Pentecostés.

There is an ancient icon by Andrei Rublev — three figures seated around a table, leaning toward one another in love and conversation. Art historians have long noted the open space at the table's near edge. The open space is for us. 

Existe un antiguo icono de la Trinidad que muestra tres figuras reunidas alrededor de una mesa. Y hay un espacio vacío en esa mesa. Ese espacio vacío es para nosotros. La Trinidad no es un círculo cerrado; es una invitación.

The Trinity is not a closed circle. It is an open invitation. The journey from Babel to Belonging is not made by finding a common language. It is made by receiving a Spirit who can translate across every language we have ever built to separate ourselves from one another — and who does not ask us to give up our language to make the crossing.

El viaje desde Babel hasta el sentido de pertenencia no consiste en encontrar un único lenguaje común, sino en recibir un Espíritu que nos ayude a comprendernos mutuamente sin borrar aquello que nos hace diferentes.

We bring our mother tongue to the table. We bring our dialect, our accent, our particular way of naming what is holy. And the Spirit weaves it into something none of us could have made alone.

Aportamos nuestras propias historias, nuestros propios lenguajes, nuestras propias formas de nombrar lo sagrado. Y el Espíritu las entreteje para crear algo que ninguno de nosotros podría crear por sí solo.

That is the Trinity. Eso es la Trinidad. That is Pentecost. Eso es Pentecostés. And by the grace of God, that is the Church. Y por la gracia de Dios, eso es la Iglesia.

Not uniformity. Belonging. No uniformidad, sino sentido de pertenencia. Not assimilation. Communion. No asimilación, sino comunión. Not one voice, but a glorious chorus. No una sola voz, sino un coro glorioso.

Que tengamos la valentía de ocupar nuestro lugar en la mesa. May we be brave enough to sit at the open edge of the table. Amen.

Works Cited
Bellos, David. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. Faber & Faber, 2011.
Heim, S. Mark. The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends. Eerdmans, 2001.
Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford University Press, 1975.