Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“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.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Thursday, September 17, 2026
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
This need for external validation must be fundamental to our humanity in some way. Because here it is, pretty much at the beginning of human history. Yes, it’s a story written by people centuries after it was supposed to have taken place, but the writers are acknowledging something deep in us that somehow flies in the face of God’s intention of our flourishing.
It’s an explanation for why, if we are all related, as I pointed out in yesterday’s devotion, we have come to be so diverse in language, culture, and appearance. The truth is that from our common ancestry we just spread out, and the further away we got from one another, the more diverse the environments we encountered, the more we responded to those external difference in ways that varied from our original way of interacting with the world. But Genesis collapses tens of thousands of years of human pre-history into a couple thousand years. So, you know, it had to happen a lot faster.
And the explanation for why God chose to scatter us from one another? Hubris. As a single, united people, we proposed to leverage our unity to turn ourselves into gods. Why? Because we didn’t trust God to take care of us. Same story as in the Garden of Eden. I mean, can you imagine a complete unity of understanding? (Not that I think we should all speak one language—far from it! Our diversity of communication is beautiful and we can learn so much from one another because of it!) But if we could all be perfectly understood by one another all the time we might have a far better chance of actually listening to each other without judgment, of seeing one another as “us” instead of constantly trying to make people “them.” Wouldn’t this be what God would want from us? Why would God take such a gift away from us? Well, because fear and insecurity drove humanity to abuse this gift and, instead of using it to bring love into the world, they used it to act out their selfish pride. What a shame.
When have I allowed my own pride to drive my need to separate myself from others?
