How Did I Get Here?
a sermon given by Rev. Claire Phillips-Thoryn
on Sunday, May 27, 2007
at The First Parish in Lincoln
First Reading: Genesis 11: 1-9
The Tower of Babel
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 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; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 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.
Second Reading: Acts 2: 1-13
The Coming of the Holy Spirit
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’ All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’ But others sneered and said, ‘They are filled with new wine.’
A former parishioner of mine once told me this story. When he was a young man, he joined the Navy so he could fight in World War II. He was just a kid, really, and as he stood on the deck of that huge boat for the first time, looking out over the vast expanse of ocean, he said to another young man near him, “Look at all that water!” And the man replied, “And that’s just the top of it!”
That’s what Memorial Day feels like to me. We remember and honor those whose lives have touched ours, those who gave their lives in service and in love. Our lives, and the people we have known, are just the top of it. There are so many more, the people who helped the people who helped the people who helped us, whom we remember on Memorial Day. All those who lived and loved and changed the lives around them, from time immemorial, all leading up to us, in the here and now. Memorial Day connects us to each other and to an invisible cloud of witnesses.
The aboriginal people of Australia have ancient folktales that they sing to each other, songs that tell the myths and history of their people. They call these legends “songlines.” One songline that you and I have is the Bible, which gives us the stories of coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the Tower of Babel. The stories give us a window into our how ancestors of the far, far past tried to understand how it came to be that there were different languages and different cultures, and how we could all get along with each other despite those differences. This Sunday, Americans honor Memorial Day and all over the world, many others along with us are honoring the ancient holy day of Pentecost as well. We remember the recent past and the far past, woven together in one long and beautiful songline.
I read the story of the Tower of Babel from Genesis because in many ways the story of Pentecost is its counterpoint. The Tower of Babel story was written down at least 700 years before Jesus was born, and the writer was probably retelling a much more ancient folktale that had been passed along through oral storytelling. This story is decidedly anti-urban. As Genesis tells us, people were changing their behavior. Instead of being nomadic herders and hunters, they were getting together and forming small cities. And according to the folktale, city people are uppity. They think they are better than they really are. They try to compete with God. And so as this old songline goes, God punishes them by scattering them to the winds, giving them many different languages and cultures, separating a once unified people. The folktale is both a morality lesson—don’t get uppity with God—and a creation story of how it is that people came to be so different. About a thousand years after this folktale was written down, someone wrote down a story with a different perspective. This was the story of Pentecost. As we heard from the Book of Acts, at this point in human history, many human beings were living together in cities. One of these cities was Jerusalem. People came to this city from all over, bringing their language and culture with them. The story of Pentecost sings us a tale of the days following Easter. Instead of smiting the city-dwellers, God blesses them. God sends the Holy Spirit to the new Christians living in the city of Jerusalem, and allows them to understand each other’s speech. They still have different languages, but now they have ears to hear, and understand, no matter what language is being spoken. They can speak their truth, and listen to another’s.
The Tower of Babel is one explanation for our human differences. And now science has come up with a long and intricate songline, one that sings more fully of the triumph of the human spirit, and how we came to live and survive on this planet. To quote one song, by the 80s band The Talking Heads “And you may ask yourself—well...how did I get here?” The National Geographic Society is trying to answer that question with something called the Genographic Project.1 They are going all over the globe, collecting blood and cheek cells from human beings, and tracing our heritage, our human family tree, through our DNA. This DNA test doesn’t tell you who your second cousin is, or if you have some rare genetic disease. What the scientists are doing with the DNA is finding these incredibly small and harmless mutations in our genes that have been passed down for thousands of years. These mutations are like spelling errors that help us follow the trail of our ancestors backwards in time. At this point, scientists believe we can trace our mitochondrial DNA, which is in is our X chromosome passed down from our mothers, all the way to 150,000 years ago, to one early woman named “Mitochondrial Eve.” Similarly, scientists can trace the Y-chromosome back about 60,000 years to one early man, named Eurasian Adam. What we know about these early people is that at some point, around 50,000 years ago, a small band of them decided to leave Africa. There were probably only 10,000 humans alive at this point in time. Over the course of those 50,000 years, the descendents of these early human beings traveled the entire globe and grew from a species of 10,000 to a species numbering over 6 billion. The fact that we can trace these many branches of our human family tree down to one strong trunk that originated in Africa truly does mean we are all connected, all one, despite the differences in languages, appearance, and culture.
The Genographic Project is trying to collect DNA samples from regionally isolated groups of people, and one of the ways they fund their international work is letting folks like you and me get our DNA tested for a fee. I figured it was a sure-fire sermon topic and besides, it was pretty cool to be able to learn how my ancestors had traveled. I bought the kit, swabbed my cheeks, sent back the swabs in little vials, and a few weeks later my results were available online. Turns out my ancestors traveled north out of Africa in one of the earliest migrations, did a difficult march through Central Asia during the Ice Age, and finally turned westward towards Europe about 15,000 years ago. Other groups left Africa and turned east, somehow making their way to Australia; others populated India and China; and South America may have been populated by as few as 10 people whose genetic markers made the trip from the Arctic Circle to the Bering Strait to Alaska, down through North America and onward to the equator. Scientists speculate that the only way homo sapiens managed to populate the earth was that somewhere along way, tens of thousands of years ago, we had a “Quantum Leap in Thinking.” Human beings became capable of imagining the future and creating plans—which might seem like a small mental exercise to us now, but was a huge step for our species!
So the question “How did I get here?” doesn’t just ask about our mothers and fathers, our mentors and friends. It asks about the cradle of our species, the many millions of people whose history lives, literally, in our blood, reminding us with every heartbeat that we are here because of so many others.
How did I get here? We are where we are today because of those no longer living who planted the trees whose shade we enjoy, who built the houses we live in, who founded the country that we gratefully inherit. We have language, tools, shelter, art. All these things we inherited from those gone before: from Mitochondrial Eve and Eurasian Adam; from ancestors whose names we may never know; from our grandparents and parents; and in return, we pass on these gifts to our children and grandchildren. We pass on our songline, our story of the past and present, and we lead the way into the future.
In the songline in our blood, we hear a story that tells us we are all related, second cousins by about 2,000 generations. The songline in Genesis, tells us a similar story, that we are all related, that once we were unified with one language and home, and then we were forced apart. And another songline comes up, a new melody, the song of Pentecost that says we can come back together. This song says that even with all the distance that has grown in our family tree, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of life and love, can grow in our hearts and move in our hands and be voiced on our lips. And each of us is a note in this long songline, music that will continue long after our own note dies away.
Writer Anne Lamott has this image, about being in church early on Sunday mornings. She writes:
When I get there on Sunday and pass the room where the choir rehearses, I can hear their muffled voices behind the closed door. I love hearing them, no matter how hushed, but every so often, one of them has to leave practice for a moment and opens the door just as I am passing by, and a beam of singing falls directly on me.
I love that image, a beam of singing. Each of us is like that one brief moment of song, and the whole choir that created the song is behind a closed door. We can’t see them any more but we can hear the song they left in our blood, beating the rhythym in our songline of ancestry.
As we research and remember the people who have gone before us, we are also building a future we will not live to see. I recently read this poem by Elizabeth Spires that made me think of how quickly our present becomes our past. The narrator of the poem sits reminiscing on a porch with old friends. Their young children are playing in the yard as dusk falls. The narrator watches the children and wonders to herself:2
They do not ask, as lately we have asked ourselves,
Who was I then? And what must I become?
Like newly minted coins, their faces catch
the evening's radiance. They are so sure of us,
more sure than we are of ourselves. Our children:
who gently push us toward the end of our own lives.
The future beckons brightly. They trust us to lead them there.
Just as we have followed so trustingly the paths of those who have gone before us, so we shall be followed, by many more than we can imagine. Perhaps, if we are good to each other, the 2,000 generations that came before us will be followed by 2,000 more. What children of humanity are we creating in our days on earth? What codes are we sending forth into their DNA, for scientists to puzzle over 10,000 years from now? How did we get here—and where are we going? On this Memorial Day weekend, may we remember the many hundreds, thousands, even millions of humans who came before us and made us who we are, whose genes shaped us and whose hands raised us. And on this Pentecost Sunday, may we pray that we have ears to listen and eyes to see, and an open heart to the love the differences between us. We are all God’s children. May we honor our ancestors, pray for peace, and work for justice, on this day, and in all our days to come. Amen.
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https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html
“The Faces of Children” in Now the Green Blade Rises by Elizabeth Spires.