Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us.
Well, good morning, everybody.
My name is Evan. I'm one of the senior pastors. Great to be with you on this beautiful day. Today we're in Genesis, chapter 11. We've been looking at Old Testament stories. If you grew up in church, that might have come up, you might have learned them in a Sunday school classroom. We're reexamining some of these stories to maybe find out something about who God is, maybe find out something about who we are. And today we're going to be talking about a story called the Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel, which speaks to this human drive that goes all the way back to ancient times to achieve and accomplish and build. And we live in an interesting moment in human history.
Whether or not you use AI tools, it is radically changing the way information is spreading, the way productivity is looked at, the way work is happening. And I don't think it's an overstatement to say that we will look back on this moment with the kind of dawn of AI really becoming mainstream as a pivot point in human civilization.
And do you use ChatGPT or any of the tools? Do you use them? Yeah. So you're like, yeah, I make my shopping list with them. Others of you are like, yeah, I'm currently hacking a mainframe in Europe. Maybe there's all levels of use, right, of these tools. And maybe some of you don't use AI at all. I will tell you this, our kids and our grandkids will be immersed in this stuff, whether they like it or not. And so it's a very interesting moment. And never before have I seen in my lifetime, for sure, a technology that comes to promise godlike knowledge, omnipotence, this instant ability to access answers, and the promise that we can opt out of the limitations, awkwardness, and slowness, the inefficiencies of human relationship.
I got a text from a friend. We've been friends for going on 20 years now. And we talk back and forth and he texts me. And I start reading this long text. And about the second paragraph, I'm like, this is really well formatted.
This text has really good grammar. This text uses the em dash a lot. This text is from ChatGPT.
And I got so angry. I was like, bro, we are friends. Don't send me chatgpt. You just talk to me. I don't care if the grammar's off. I don't care if you're not clear in what you say, you've never been clear in what you say.
Why start now?
But this is where we're at, is that we have this ability now with these platforms and tools, to opt out of the messiness of human relationships.
And today we're going to look at the story that seems so ancient and so far away and a little quirky as far as the story goes. And yet I think it speaks to a moment that we are in, in 2026, where we must, in this moment, rediscover what it is to be humans who are loved by God. Genesis 11, starting in verse 1.
Now, the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as the people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, come, let us make bricks, and we will burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. And 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, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth. Now pause right there. If you go back to Genesis 1, chapter 27, or verse 27, God tells man and woman who are made in the image of God. In the next verse, he tells them to be fruitful and multiply and spread out over the whole earth, so that the glory of God might be expressed through humanity, who is made in his image, not collected in one place, but spread out over the entirety of the world.
And so this is a direct response of humanity to disregard and disobey the instruction of God.
And oftentimes that is the question. And I believe that you're probably here because you were leaning in to saying, what is God's way for my life in what I build or achieve or accomplish or find as my purpose in this life?
What is God's way? Because there will always be this draw to do something that looks like our way.
And so we continue on.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men had built. And the Lord said, behold, they are one people, and they have all one language. And this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. So come, let us go down there and confuse their language so that they may not understand one another's speech.
So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel.
Because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there, the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
Let's pray. Lord, we pray that you would take this story and allow your voice to bring to mind those things that we face, that challenge our ability to connect with you and to connect with one another in meaningful, deep relationships. Pray this in Jesus name, amen. Amen. You know, as people, we have this tendency to think that what we are, what we do, has a lot of permanence. And it's amazing in seasons of transition in your life, how quickly you'll realize that what you thought was long lasting and permanent quickly goes away. Three years ago, Pastor Steve Mickle, who had been the lead pastor of this church for over a decade, handed the reins to pastor Ben and I. And so it was June three years ago, so he left to become the district supervisor in our denomination over about 300 churches.
So we're still connected and all that. So we brought him back about a month later to be a guest speaker here on a Sunday.
And as he came in and was meeting with us before the service, one of our new volunteers saw him sitting there by himself. And so she very kindly went up and introduced herself and said, is this your first time here? Can I help you find anything?
And Steve said that a single tear fell down his cheek. Not really, but it was a reminder, and he was laughing about it with Ben and I. It was a reminder that no matter how important you are to a place or to a space, how quickly things change and how small are permanence.
And so this shouldn't discourage us. And my point isn't to get up here today and say, nothing matters.
Thank you for coming to church. Leave. Nothing you do will ever. No, that's not what we're here to talk about.
That's the worst church. No, that's not it.
It's to realize that we ought not to put our value in what we achieve and accomplish, that our value has to be anchored and rooted to something more permanent than that.
And even the most meaningful things of our lives. If we find our worth only in the output or the productivity of our lives, we will find that those things will slip away. And at some point we will lose our sense of self. And so we have to be anchored in something.
And the gospel would tell us that we have an anchor for our soul. Hebrews tells us in Christ Jesus himself.
And when we anchor ourselves to something that is beyond our achievement or what we can accomplish, we find that permanence that we crave.
So God looks down at this tower that they've built or that they are building, and he comes to frustrate their efforts. Why is God so concerned? Is he concerned that they will actually somehow build a tall enough tower to get into the heavens with their. Their bricks that they've put in the oven for longer, you know, like. No, of course not. He's not worried that they will actually usurp him or storm the gates of heaven. Of course not. But God is concerned that in this accomplishment and this uniformity that they are creating to pool their resources, that they will fall into traps that we are tempted by every day, even now in 2026. And the first problem that God is addressing, I believe, is the problem of exclusion that comes from uniformity.
Exclusion.
The people react to their need for greatness and to make a name for themselves by rejecting this idea that they would spread out over the earth. And instead they gather together. And this is a very natural part of human communities, is that we gather and we create group among people that share common values, common backgrounds, common worldviews.
We find people that talk like us or look like us. We find ourselves in communities with similarities. And there is nothing inherently wrong with this, except when we decide that those tribes that we have formed are better than others or that they should be dominant or that they should be the only one.
And what happens in the Tower of Babel is that there is no distinction or diversity in their culture as they begin to build together. And so what seems like a good thing, God knows will actually turn to a place of exclusion of outsiders.
This is always how it goes, whether you're talking about churches or families or nations that oftentimes we gather around common values or shared background. And if we're not careful, what that becomes is a system that excludes outsiders.
And if you look through what Jesus comes to do in the New Testament is when Jesus shows up and he begins his ministry, he begins to preach in a way that opens the doors of God's family to outsiders.
All through the Old Testament, there is one group of people, one family, Abraham's family, that qualifies as God's people. Jesus shows up and he starts to show mercy to Samaritans that are not on the inside.
He heals a Romans centurion or centurion's servant. And that seems like it's on the outside. And then he starts to preach about how he is the shepherd of the sheep, but there's sheep that are on the outside of, of the flock, and they have to be welcomed in too. And everybody's like, wait a second, how is it that God is now breaking his own rules to be more inclusive of outsiders?
And then you look all through the rest of the New Testament in Paul's writings, and the main, primary tension of the New Testament is how the Jewish people, who were God's people exclusively, now have to be open to Gentiles coming into this new thing called the church.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: And.
[00:11:26] Speaker A: And it creates all kinds of problems.
And the temptation, I'm sure, for Paul and for any of those leaders who are like, let's stop with the tension, and we can just have a Jewish church over here and a Gentile church over here, everybody's happy. Won't that be nice? And Jesus would say, absolutely not.
And so Paul writes so much of the New Testament addressing this one issue that we will not have this segregation of the church, because in this church, we look towards the kingdom of heaven, when in eternity in heaven, every tribe, every tongue, every nation is surrounding the throne of God, worshiping every language.
And so I would tell you this.
If you are only comfortable around people that talk like you, with the same language of you, that look like you, and come from the same background as you, and you intend to go to heaven, you might hate it there, right?
Somebody's like, okay, so Pastor Evans said, nothing I do matters, and I'm going to hate it in heaven. Okay, got it. Some really good theology. At Westside, the picture we have of what God is working us towards as his church is a scale model of eternity and eternity. Everybody's represented.
And so we have this heart. And this has been a value that we wrote down, I don't know, 10 plus years ago that has stayed with us, that we want to be a church that represents our city.
And that sounds like, well, duh, of course. Well, the answer actually is a lot of times churches become a church that represents a very small slice of their city.
And we really have this strong belief and value that whoever God sends to Central Oregon, we want those demographics represented in our church.
We don't want to just only reach a certain socioeconomic group. We don't only want to reach people that look like me or that came from a similar background and upbringing as me. We want to represent our city. And so this was part of the heart of why in 2019, we brought Pastor Gonzalo and Ashlyn onto our team, and we launched Iglesia Westside.
And I looked at the most recent data we have in Central Oregon. About 9% are Hispanic Latino in central Oregon. And so it's our heart that for Westside, that we would have about that percentage represented in our church. Because we are better when everybody who God has sent to this place is represented in this church. Amen.
And so this is really fun. We went, Ben and I, over there to the student center on Easter Sunday morning for their Easter service, which was their sixth anniversary. This is Iglesia Westside.
And this is us.
This is not some other church that rents a room. This is us. This is part of us. And they're preaching right now, I think, in Spanish, translated into English in the chapel. And I wanted to bring that up because oftentimes we can gather in this room in our English only services and. And forget that this is broader than just this room, that we have folks from different backgrounds and from different places and many nations represented there that are all coming together. And so this stuff matters to us. Not in some, you know, just kind of abstract way, but because part of our church is representing places in our city that don't look like me and don't have the same language as me. And this is to our benefit as a church that we wrap our arms around every corner of central Oregon, every place that we go, and even when we gather here on Sunday. Do you know that this is a really important part of church, is coming together on Sunday for worship and to be challenged and encouraged. I'm glad you're here on Sunday. It gives me something to do on Sunday, which is great.
But this is not the whole point. This is not. The ultimate goal of Westside Church is to gather large groups on Sunday morning to sit in this room. We gather to be transformed and changed and find community and be encouraged. And then what happens after this service? We're gonna scatter.
We gather to scatter.
And the idea is that every place in central Oregon would be touched by the love and the mercy and the forgiveness of Jesus. Because we've scattered from this place out into, you know, every CrossFit gym in town has a representation of Jesus. Not that I would know.
Every ice cream shop would have a representation of Jesus. Now we're speaking my language. Okay, there we go. Go to goodies, by the way. Goodies. Ice cream. I just. Here, give me that. Give me that card.
The Strelchecks are here. They own goodies, and they just gave me this free cone. I don't think they were anticipating free marketing here, but, you know, it's 11 o'. Clock. What are we gonna do? All right, so here we go. Free cone from goodies.
Oh, yeah. There you go. I was waiting for somebody.
Speaking of limitations, it's terrible.
Everywhere we go, that we carry with us, really, it's the spirit of God.
In Acts, chapter two, if you remember the story, Jesus sends his followers, the 120, into Jerusalem. He says, I'm gonna send something. So you go and pray, and you wait. So they go into this upper room and they're praying for days in this locked room, hiding in Jerusalem. They're afraid. They don't know what's gonna happen.
And in Acts chapter two, the Holy Spirit falls and it fills that room, and it fills and it rests on those people.
And the 120 immediately after they receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, they don't stay in that locked room, afraid of what lies on the outside. They open the doors, they unlock the doors, and they run into the streets with boldness and courage, because the Holy Spirit is on them.
And what happens then is Peter begins to preach the gospel boldly in the city of Jerusalem. It says that they were living in that. In Jerusalem, people from all over the known world, speaking every language under heaven. And it says when the Holy Spirit fell, all Those believers, those 120, began to move out into the crowd. And they were given this miraculous gift to be able to speak the languages of everyone in that crowd from all corners of the known world. And it was this great reversal of the story of Babel, where God now, with the Holy Spirit that Jesus has sent, he does not gather them all up to create one new mega culture. He doesn't bring them all together and. And abolish all other languages and. No, what he does is he actually sends his spirit on each individual to go out and scatter into every part of the earth to let people know that Jesus was dead and now he's alive as a picture of eternity, when every tribe, tongue and nation will worship the Father. I mean, it's beautiful. It's the great reversal of what our achievement tried to accomplish in. In creating exclusion. Now the Holy Spirit falls and everyone is welcomed in. Everybody's welcomed in.
This is the kingdom of God that Jesus preached.
But what happens when we stay in what people have called the Holy huddle, that upper room with the locked door where we're afraid of everyone on the outside? What it does is it allows fear to call the shots.
And I'll tell you that fear is a very, very potent tool to get people motivated.
You can make a lot of money and generate a lot of interest and get a lot of clicks and a lot of likes and a lot of subscribes right by Stirring fear.
And what I think is so beautiful about the Gospel of Jesus is arguably the most successful, revolutionary, the most long lasting religious figure, the most powerful movement throughout history that has shaped all of Western culture did not do it by coming in to stir up fear. But Jesus shows up and he begins to preach instead of fear, love.
And in First John, John talks about this when he says that there is no fear in love. Instead, perfect love drives away fear.
Because the one who fears does not have perfect love.
To live motivated by fear will keep us in locked places, huddled together, hoping that the big bad world out there doesn't leak in. But perfect love will drive out fear. And it will do what happened in Acts chapter two, where it will push us into the streets, empowered by the Holy Spirit to speak the languages of the world around us in such a way that people come to know and love Jesus. I believe it. Amen.
And so this is the great reversal that we are called into not a life or community of exclusion, but to go into every place that God has planted us. And the second problem that is on display in the Babel story is the problem of isolation.
You know, it's very lonely in the upper floors of the skyscrapers in New York City. I'm just guessing.
I read an article where engineers have now created these mega skyscrapers and they get thinner and thinner and thinner and they call them pencil skyscrapers. The engineering is so advanced now they can make them two, three, four times higher than they could even 50 years ago. And they're just pencil thin.
And I read that because they are so thin and so tall, these mega billionaires will buy these penthouse suites at the top floors and they'll go into their new homes and it's so quiet and they're so alone because they can't even look out and see other buildings. It's just sky.
And so billionaires have sold their penthouse suites. They're empty and they've moved into lower buildings. Cause it's too lonely. Doesn't that break your heart for them?
Can we just say a prayer for the lonely billionaires?
But it's lonely when we build towers. It's isolating when we try to move past our limitations and the things that make us human, we actually embrace isolation and aloneness.
And in this moment, when there is a temptation to embrace the things that get us around our limitations, I believe Jesus provides a beautiful ancient solution, which is the church, the Christian community that we are called to.
We're face to face, we grow and we learn and we're vulnerable. I Want to bring up on the stage someone? He's a Bible professor at Los Angeles Pacific University.
He is the lead architect on a new program that uses AI called Bible Reflect that helps people study the Bible. Is funded through a grant from the American Bible Society.
He is a three times over PhD. He's brilliant. And also you already met him because it's Dr. Brandt. Himes Brandt. Would you come up here?
Only two PhDs. Sorry. And an M. Div.
Yeah, I know.
I wanted to talk to you, Brant, because you're not like a Luddite, right? You're not yelling, everyone stop using technology.
But as a professor, as a Bible scholar, as a pastor, you're thoughtfully looking into how can we use AI in a way that doesn't replace things that really matter.
And I saw the Pope actually came out with I think 300 plus pages on the ethics of AI and how that reflects on humanity. And one thing he said that stuck out to me and I want to hear your opinion on what he said was that the danger is not so much that machines will become too much like humans, it'll be that humans will become too much like machines. Yeah, that was interesting.
[00:23:58] Speaker B: What do you think? Yeah, it's fascinating. I read the AI summary because 300 pages is too long.
No, but it's this idea what AI is doing really well right now is it can just reflect back on ourselves and it can give us a picture of one.
What it means to be human. We have this ideal that it just means to know a lot. And now that our kind of individual human understanding can be surpassed by this technology, it's raising this really central question of indeed, what does it mean to be human? And I think the danger, as we continue to, to interact and to live with this technology, as we become kind of more self absorbed and more enclosed because it can provide so much information that we don't have to rely on other people.
[00:24:57] Speaker A: And isn't that, you know, the new world we live in? Whereas even 10 years ago, but 20, 30 years ago, you needed to know something.
You would call a friend, you would pick up your landline, hope they're home and call somebody, or you'd walk next door and say, hey, can you help me? I don't know how this works. That's all going away. And now we're just at the touch of a button, or on our watches or phones we can just find the answers.
[00:25:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's really fascinating. It's been very interesting for me as a professor, a college educator, being in this world right now where we're just wrestling with how do we help students develop critical thinking when your paper can be written in five seconds, literally, you know, I'm reading the best papers I've ever seen in my life. The grammar's perfect, everything's wonderful. And yet it's this question of how do we know what. How do we help people continue to learn when we can offload kind of this learning and this development so, so easily? And it's an issue that we're facing at my university. I know across higher ed, we haven't given up on helping student learning. We're trying new things. We're actually leaning really heavily back into the Socratic method. AI tools can be really good at helping students reflect back on their learning and help asking questions and helping them go. So there's a lot of room, there's a lot of possibilities.
But if we're not intentional about being involved in these solutions, then we're just gonna. I think what the Pope is warning against is losing our humanity to this technology.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: I talked to Ben this week about how probably in the future, even as preachers, we might get to a point where we have to preach without any notes, just so that you all know, like, hey, we're here. We're in person.
Like, we're not reading this off of AI. And today's AI message, I think, has gone pretty well.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: But so far, so good.
[00:27:04] Speaker A: But, no, I think there is this backlash against the generated content where there's a craving for real vulnerability, real imperfection that feels like humanity.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. This question of what it means to be human, it's an ancient. It's basically theological anthropology. It's this question we've been asking forever of what is human? What does it mean? And AI is actually giving us an opportunity to revisit this question.
And I mentioned earlier, throughout history, we've defined what it means to be human on our intellect.
And now we're having to put that aside because the tools are smarter than us.
But it brings us back theologically to the.
The fullness. The most full kind of example and reality of humanity is in Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ demonstrates his humanness through his suffering and through his vulnerability.
And so as we're talking about and wrestling with our own humanity, I think the challenge and the call is to point us back towards vulnerability and relationship and community and connection.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: Yeah, you talk about how Jesus is that picture, the perfect picture of humanity. And what does God do when we are constantly trying to achieve and to become like God ourselves?
He actually does the reverse in sending Jesus. So you have this perfect, holy, omnipotent, omnipresent God who embraces limitation, humanity, and becomes in the flesh to be close to us. Not to help us opt out of our weakness or our limitations, but to meet us in them. Right?
[00:29:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:01] Speaker A: And that's, that's the grace of Jesus, is that he found us in the low spot. Not that he. He gave us a, you know, a program to get us up to where he was, but he. He came close.
And what a picture of how we can exist in a Christian community where we are not looking for the most efficient ways. You know, efficiency can't be all there is, but we do the long, slow work of inviting people to experience grace at the low places.
[00:29:29] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. You know, and we've both had a couple, a few conversations this morning between services of people coming up to us, and especially for some of the men, admitting that this isolation and this vulnerability is really difficult. Really hard. But that's the piece that we're calling us, that I think Jesus calls us into, because when we just isolate ourselves, even metaphorically being in that penthouse suite, you know, up above everything, and the technology helps us kind of escape so easily, we really need to be called back into the community. And the vulnerability that comes from that.
[00:30:09] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah. He was saying for a lot of guys, friendships are like non existent a lot of times for men. And he said, quick, who's your best friend?
And I said, well, it's Brandt. Brandt, who's your best friend?
[00:30:24] Speaker B: It's Evan. Definitely ignore them. Definitely Evan. Definitely.
Sure. Evan.
Ben, actually. Yeah.
[00:30:37] Speaker A: It's so poignant though. I think for all of us. We felt that in the age we live in, the isolation that comes with every advance and every efficiency, that we maybe lose something. And I do want to encourage us all as Westside as people of faith in community, I want to see us become more vulnerable with each other. Not like we just air all of our dirty laundry all the time and everyone is over sharers, you know, but that in real community, that we bring our real selves to this.
And in a world where it's so easy to present a perfected version, man, what if the church was the place where we could be real and find grace in the. In those moments and extend that to others? Right.
[00:31:26] Speaker B: That's good.
[00:31:27] Speaker A: Brett, would you pray for us as a church this morning that like we're talking, we step out of isolation into this vulnerable space of community?
[00:31:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
Dear Jesus, thank you for your word today. Thank you for your message and your encouragement. Thank you for your truth that you call us outside of ourselves, that in Jesus Christ, the ultimate example of the human existing for other people and for the grace and the love that you bring. I pray that you will teach us and call us as individuals and as a community to step into the depth of your grace and your love as we learn how to be vulnerable and to start to break down these habits of isolation that we can can cultivate. And in so doing, as your spirit scattered us, scatters us across the world, that you will teach us how to embrace those who are on the outside so that they may also experience your love and your grace and your truth. In Jesus name, Amen.
[00:32:31] Speaker A: Amen.
