We're Number Three! We're Number Three!

I recently saw an article about The United Methodist Church.  Among the details actually relevant to the story was some background info about the UMC, including the fact that we are the third largest denomination in the U.S. in terms of membership.  A part of me felt a certain amount of pride in the size of the UMC, as though it mattered, I had anything to do with it, or the fact that I picked my denomination based on size and not things like theology and the fact that this was simply the church I was raised in.  It felt good to be a part of the a "winning" team.

This week I have been reading the story from Genesis about the Tower of Babel.  What struck me as I read the story this time was that the reason God scrambles the language of the people is for no other reason than they are being too successful.  We are not told they are forgetting to worship God, or anything else, but a plain text reading seems to imply that the success itself is the problem.  God has a problem with success.

Maybe the problem is that once more we are failing to measure success in the right way.   We assume a civilization is successful when it is building huge buildings and displaying outward signs of progress.  What if that is not the right measure of success?  God might be worried that our focus on building bigger and better buildings might distract us from what really matters.  Maybe God is scrambling our language, not as a punishment for success, or for some other sin, but simply to reroute us towards more important tasks, liking communicating with each other and building community.

If community is meant as our measure of success than the scrambling of languages forces us to work more on how we are going to get along together with people who are not like us.  If we are all the same, community is easy.  We can just see the challenges facing our government and our nation to know the challenges of creating community when we are different.  To say nothing of the challenges of creating community across global cultures.  To put it in video game terms, maybe God was just turning about the difficulty setting because clearly things were to easy for humanity.

To stir the pot one more time, what if the real problem is that success itself is a red herring.  What if the problem is not we were focused on the wrong things, building structures instead of building community, but that we were focused on any measure of success.  We don't just need to switch from counting money to counting Facebook friends to see who is most successful, we need to realize that the very concept of success itself is flawed.  If we change how we measure success, we have reoriented ourselves to a new task, but we have still created the comparison between X and Y.  Maybe Y is now better than X because of our new metric but there is still a comparison.  What if God doesn't want the comparison at all.  What if the problem with success is that we are doing that which we are not called to do, judge.  We are creating a standard for what is good and what is not.  Instead we need to return to the original standard of the good, that which is loved by God.  God looked at creation and called it ALL good.  We tend to look at ourselves and try and determine what is not good.

It does not matter if the UMC is the third largest denomination or not.  The comparison itself is a flawed attempt to do what God has already done, judge.  We are like fans, screaming at the television upset with the call of the umpire because we see things differently.  Scream all we want about what is good and what is not.  God has already passed judgement on us, maybe we need to learn to live with that.