Friday, February 17, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Talkee, talkee, talkee, happy talk
The whole world spoke the same language. They said to one another, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower, and so make a name for ourselves. Otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth.”
This Babel thing. Often I am grateful not to understand the casual conversation around me; if it is in a different language it seems soothing and provides background noise for my own mind, so it can concentrate on its own thoughts. In both Austin and Urbana this happens more often than I expect, since so many internationals are in school or stayed beyond school for a job. Or two.
Jasper has fallen in love with “Sleep on a Train,” which my sister Mary Kay gave me years ago on a CD. It puts him to sleep in his car seat; it puts me to sleep night after night. Tonight I might try a new sleep tool, five hours of  “The Shipping Forecast” on BBC Radio 4. But if I could get a long recording of the sudden language barriers God threw up at Babel, well that would be just fine too. I think sleep would come. What dreams, too, might come.
The Lord said, “Let us go down there and confuse their language, so that one will not understand what another says.” And then the Lord scattered the people all over the earth, and they stopped building the city.
The Austin City Council fired their city manager yesterday, because he had taken to ignoring them a little too often. Austin’s own version of Babel includes current construction on Texas’ highest skyscraper, along with several recently constructed sky scraping towers, stretching the limits of the law prohibiting any building to be built taller than the Capitol. Fat chance anymore of following that 1931 law. The only places it’s enforced are the “Capitol View Corridors,” but everywhere else the buildings reach for the “big wonderful thing,” as Georgia O’Keefe called the Texas sky.
It was from that place that he scattered them all over the earth.
There are rumors that those “scattered over all the earth,” finally ended up in Texas. Murderers, mostly, and fugitives from that outlandish justice which often prevented them from doing whatever they thought right. Judge Roy Bean led the way. And no question, the early nineteenth century Texians uprooted the previous owners’ Mexican Catholic roots. Coming from the Bible Belt of the USA they hearkened unto Methodism and other Protestant solutions.
By now, here in Austin, we live amid a fantastical mix of Mexico and the United States, the food is rightly called Tex-Mex, and many of the preachers are as intense as the ghost peppers popular all around the town. The towers rise to the sky, the City Council strives to speak for all of us, and God looks down from heaven.
From his fixed throne he beholds all who dwell on the earth, He who fashioned the heart of each, He who knows all their works.
Governor Abbott is on the hotseat this week for calling on an end to affirmative action and any focus on diversity rather than merit in hiring practices. In opposition, a group of legislators asked the athletic world to withdraw any championships scheduled to be held in Texas if he doesn’t recant.
I doubt if they understand each other, the governor and his legislative opponents. Anyway, I don’t expect he’ll recant. The US Supreme Court will either help him out or not, later this year. I imagine this lifelong Texan enjoys the battle, win or lose. Who says Babel was just a town in the early days of human history?
Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the Gospel will save it. What profit is there for one to gain the whole world, but lose his soul?
 (Genesis 11, Psalm 33, John 15, Mark 8)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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