Unscrambling: A 7-Minute Sermon

And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves—Genesis 11:3-4

Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.—Genesis 11:9

Five years before George Floyd was murdered, back when it was possible to fly coach without catching covid, we were at the Detroit airport waiting in line for the TSA screening when Lindsay started unpeeling her banana. She was moving with a sense of urgency. She put down her bags, pivoted to me and proclaimed that she needed to eat it now. Because if it went through the x-ray machine it might scramble the nutrition. I scanned the perimeter to see if anyone heard her. It was 5:30 in the morning. She had not had one sip of coffee.

I was quite sure that her potassium protection plan was straight from the dream world, the Spirit world, the place where night owl Lindsay would be, should always be, before the sun rises. Spirit spoke to me through her peeled parable, revealing a reality more trustworthy than what the TSA wand read, who Homeland Security said we should dread, how Michigan politicians said there was no lead in Flint’s water. Lindsay was unscrambling the “real world” in a culture dumbed down, numbed out, endlessly being shaped by unlimited anonymous campaign contributions. 

Lindsay’s banana remains a reminder that we live in an era that scrambles our hearts, minds and souls with messages practically every moment of our lives. It is a frenzy. Over the phone, one Baby Boomer recently lamented her current situation: “I am just filling up my time with no big purpose.” Earlier this year, during a Zoom session, my therapist held up a phone charger, a computer power cord and a cable device for the flat screen TV. “This is your life,” he said, “You are doing a lot of good things, but I do not understand how they all connect.” He was basically telling me that I was a ripe, unpeeled banana on a conveyer belt, screened and scrambled.

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The sacred text says that when the humans started building cities and towers to the heavens to make a name for themselves, God scrambled their languages and scattered them all over the planet. I read this as a divine warning that we will lose touch with our humanity when we construct societies based on a human hierarchy of value. When it’s OK to exclude and exploit certain people—and extract resources from there to build something here.

In the Babel story, the builders replace stones with bricks and replace mud mortar with bitumen (asphalt). The substitution of building materials released people from the dependence on limited natural resources of a local watershed. It gave them a seemingly endless supply of bricks. Extracted from somewhere else. Come, let us make a name for ourselves! It is all for us. At the expense of others.

Babel was not back then. It is right now, built with the bricks and bitumen of America’s exceptionalism, the worthiness of white skin, the promise of the profit motive and the primacy of masculine power. Our souls are being scrambled by a society scripted by a supremacy stories. As a result, our souls are paying a heavy price. As Lindsay says, the counterfeit is coming out sideways. We are addicted, anxious, depressed, desensitized, disoriented, entitled, overwhelmed and/or oblivious. No one signed on to this state-of-affairs. It is just how life is. But it does not have to be this way.

Enter the spiritual journey, a commitment to a Lazarus “coming out” conversion, unraveling the linens of empire so we can unscramble our souls and our society. Jesus calls us to come out of the grave. Plato calls us to come out of the cave. The coming out must be intentional and strategic so that we can see reality instead of the same old shadows projected by empire. We can finally break free from Babel by joining Abel (and Abraham, Sarah, Miriam, Moses, Elijah, Elisha, John and Jesus) in the wilderness. Where all the ancient ones got unscrambled.

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Back in the Reagan years, the Chicana lesbian professor and activist Gloria Anzaldua scripted a spiritual consciousness of the borderlands based on a main character she called “the new Mestiza." This multi-lingual dark-skinned feminine icon, negotiates contrasting cultures, constantly code-switches in conversation. On the borderlands, the new Mestiza subversively blurs worlds by shifting habits of formation from Babel-style convergent thinking, analytical reasoning and exclusion to divergent thinking, a tolerance for ambiguity and an inclusive posture. On the borderlands, the new Mestiza can see from different perspectives—instead of being stuck in an algorithm that scrambles through assimilation. 

But here's the thing: the new Mestiza unscrambles Babel, not by standing across the river, shouting defiantly at its supremacy stories. The new Mestiza knows that reactivity makes her dependent upon what she is reacting to: Babel. Instead, the new Mestiza stays present to multiple perspectives, enduring the psychic restlessness, insecurity and indecisiveness that come with the territory. The new Mestiza can only survive by allowing the weeds to grow with the wheat, just like Jesus said. This spiritual place of plurality and perplexity is the way out of Babel because it allows Something to arise from the depths of the subconscious that radically shift paradigms. Alzaldua readily admitted that she could not explain exactly how this happens. Spiritual realities riff off wildness and wonder. But it all moves on trust.

Anzaldua makes it clear, however, that the new Mestiza is not eternally bound by race, class or gender. In fact, she laments that many women of color have been scrambled by the white imperial monoculture that the bible calls Babel. Believe it or not, Anzaldua also proclaimed that it is possible—with God all things are possible—to be white and male and become (trans)formed by communities of color and spaces seeded by women, the working poor and queer voices. Jesus called this victory in variety being “born again.”

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The stark reality is that Babel still possesses me. It has me hustling hard to find value and identity outside of myself. The profit motive, the patriarchy, professional careerism and social media self-promotion have taught me to wear my busyness as a badge of honor. The problem is that doing so much chokes out my presence, playfulness and tenderness. When I try to gain the whole world, I lose my soul. Just like Jesus said. I must migrate to the spiritual borderlands, following the new Mestiza, always risking irrelevancy.

Marriage is a ripe context for a shift to the borderlands. I am breaking rank with that old evangelical Babel script that says the husband should be the spiritual leader of the household. Lindsay’s practice and posture is scripting me to wait for wisdom to approach and wash over me. Perhaps the most inefficient mode on offer! Lindsay's life beckons me to unscramble Babel with what Audre Lorde calls the erotic, a non-european consciousness, a new Mestiza mentality that makes sense of reality through emotional and embodied expressions that are deeper and stronger than head logic and fixed formulas. Our feelings, Lorde wrote, are the fortresses and sanctuaries and spawning grounds for our most radical and daring ideas.

Every one of us is different. We get scrambled by Babel in our own unique ways. The truth is that we will get unscrambled in different ways too. There is not One Right Way to get free. The beauty of the Babel story is that the divine delights in diversity. God subverts Babel by scattering the builders. We walk away from supremacy stories, speaking different languages, cherishing the plurality of perspectives. Otherness always presents an opportunity to break rank with Babel by breathing with a wide variety of beauty and brilliance.