”What happens when mission comes home ?”
The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 captures for me the essence of the answer to this question. It begins with the Shems. Long ago, they came to the great plain of Shinar and they settled there. Now the Shems were an industrious people. They were clever & resourceful and they said to each other, “Come let us make some bricks and fire them in the fire…”. So the Shems got working and in time they built a safe and a functional town with a wall all around.
The Shems took great pride in what they were able to achieve together. Their confidence grew and so did their vision. They said to one another, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches up into the skies”. So they got working. And as each building was completed, the Shems grew in learning and wisdom and civic pride. Finally, they had the courage to begin working on the centrepiece of the city – the Great Tower. Day after day they worked on the foundations. Then, they began working on the tower itself and soon the tower was dwarfing every other building in the city.
Spurred on by their ever-expanding vision, the Shems grew bolder still. They said to one another, “Now that we have our city and our tower, let us make a NAME for ourselves, so that we are not scattered over the face of all the earth.”
In this moment the Shems came to the particular attention of God. God descended from heaven and God saw their handiwork. Heisenberg’s principle says the act of observing a phenomena changes it. God saw the city of the Shems, with its tower reaching up into the skies and God discerned the future. He said, “This is only the beginning of what they will do… soon nothing they propose will be too hard for them”.
So God acted. He said, “Come, let us go down and confuse their speech so they will no longer understand each other”. God drew near to the city, he confused the speech of the Shems and they stopped building their tower. God confounded the words of the Shems and he scattered them over the face of the earth. That is why the city is named Babel – ‘City of Confusion’ and why people speak with such a diversity of languages.
I really like that this narrative makes abundantly clear what happens when the Spirit of God comes near to a group of people who have become self-satisfied, complacent and who have closed the circle. It’s a missional story because this is what happens whenever people allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the Spirit of God.
Traditionally we tend to view God’s scattering of the Shems as punishment. Yet for me, this idea of the Spirit of God drawing near and breaking open the circle… this image of tremendous energy and diversity being released; of the Shems moving outwards, speaking a great diversity of languages… all of this sounds like an amazing outpouring of God’s blessing. It sounds like Pentecost in Acts 2.
This is what happens when mission comes home.
What I loved about this account was the confirmation of the Principle of Agreement. When people commit to the same vision, work together in agreement, they are unstoppable. What if we applied that principle to our churches and communities??
This surprises me. I was under the impression that ‘Shems’ was a scholar who met the prophet Mohammed. There were some (even more) vague references to Abraham but never directly to the Christian god.
Shems.
If you read Genesis 10:21ff, Shem was one of the descendants of Noah. In Genesis 11:10ff the descendants of Shem are the ancestors of Abraham .
The word Shems translates in english to sons of the name !