Dismantle Your Towers

It is the natural way of human beings and societies to build high towers, strong walls and impenetrable fortresses.

We build these to establish our egos, our identity, our ethnicity, our culture, our nationality, our class. It’s what we do in the first half of our personal lives. It’s what we do in the first half of our national life.

But there comes a time, when we must realize that this is not all there is to life. We must deconstruct that very tower in the bright light of wisdom or it will destroy our peace, our lives, our families and our communities. There was a young man who built such a tower. He came to Jesus asking how he might have eternal life. Not only was his tower wealth but his tower was youth. His tower was leadership. Jesus told him, “If you are to gain eternal life, you must come down from the tower of wealth. Give it away. You must come down from the tower of youth. Embrace maturity. You must come down from the tower of leadership. Follow me.

Towers are strong and defensible. Towers declare:
This is us. We are here!
That is you. You are there
We are not you. You are not us!
We want advantage over you
God designed the world for us!
God wants us to win!!
When I win, God is happy.
When I lose, God is sad
When you win or lose, God is indifferent.
When we are safe, God’s mission is complete.
When we are rich, God’s world is perfect.

The secret in life is to understand that at some point in our journey to build, to become the best and brightest, we must face the spiritual dilemma of our relationship with our humanity, our bigger divine selves, that is connected to every other person and to our maker. Now that we stand firmly on the small tower of our self-definition and our accomplishments, it is perfectly timed to step on to the larger definition of self, which includes everyone. It is not a suggestion, it is not a notion, it is not even simply a necessity. It is inevitable! The question for us as individuals, is whether we will go willingly to that new place where hubris is replaced by humanity or whether we resist, calcify and spend our days, in discord, fighting reality.

In the national sense, we face the same dilemma. America is now asking; how should we move forward? We are a rich young nation, but we have achieved much at the expense of many, excluding them from our identity and our economy, in the name of progress. We have been blinded by our mercurial growth among our older sibling nations. Now we are the tallest, biggest, strongest and we stand in the face of destiny and ask, how can we gain a place in the history of just and durable nations.

I went to Savannah last month to take Asante to college. I toured the historic home of a wealthy builder. In that family were 5 white members of the master class (two adults and 3 children) and 8 black enslaved people (four adults and four children). The tour was 95% about the 5 people and 5% about the enslaved 8, in a city that is 58% black and to this tour member that is 80% African. Needless to say, I was 5% happy and 95% grumpy. The architecture was restored to its original grandeur but the story of 8 of the enslaved humans who lived there, remained unrestored. It was as disproportionate in its telling as it was in its living.

If you are to move into your mature years and if America is to move forward into hers, we must face the shallow, self-centeredness of our youth. A self-centered woman can become a great lawyer. A self-centered man can be a great athlete. They can become leaders in any field, admired by all. But there comes a time in life, when we must dismantle our towers of achievement or we will become odious towers of Babel. High achievements cannot make a life, they cannot parent a child or build a marriage. Greatness cannot lead a community of people or a community of nations. Pretty soon, greatness becomes an obstacle to human progress and it must be traded for submission to higher principles.

Our towers of greatness might be Ethnic, with some people being better looking, smarter, cleaner, more civilized and refined.
They might be racist, with white or whiter people being more decent, honest and more human.
They might be sexist, with God seen as a male, men seen as better, LGBTQ seen as sinners or women seen as pawns.
They might be classist as in the scorning of the common good and hoarding of benefits for a few.

However we build and whatever we build, our towers are designed to shape and protect our identities from the dilution and threat of the other person or the other people.

You can see this tendency both in our young children and in immature theologies, arrested cultures and retrograde nations.

We are living in interesting times. The veneer is chipping from our gilded towers. The naked sexism and sexual misconduct of our towering political and cultural icons are being revealed. Men, whose values and achievements were the best of us are proving the inadequacy of singular selfishness.

Cosby, Ailes, O’Reily, Lauer, Rose, Weinstein, all towers of our own making have toppled from the momentum of the giant wrecking ball of women’s collective freedom-cry, “Me Too!”.

We see the clay feet of a homogenous adult-male spiritual, monolithic tower crumbling under the weight of pathological pedophilia exposed, and the demands of marginalized womanhood.

Ubiquitous cameras are shining bright lights in the cavernous dungeons of systemic racism, revealing police brutality and legalized murder.

Incisive research is digging away at the walls of obfuscation that disguise disproportionate suspensions and expulsions, ADHD designations and graduation disparities in a system fine-tuned to promote some and fail others.

The twin towers of our two-party, political homogeneities are crumbling under internal discord as silenced constituencies demand equal time.

We have two options. We can be scatter in cynical disarray or we can descend willingly, in submission to each other and to God. We can simply give up on the human community or we can give in to a new, divine version of unity.

Humans learn lessons through great love or great pain. Today, we are in the classroom of Great Pain because we have failed the course of Great Love. We are being painfully called to build new structures of humility, a new version of unity, based not the strength of our singularity but on the value of our diversity, on our common divine nature.

Let us now will build structures of service, mutuality and generosity. Let us be inclusive, class-defying, international, inter-personal, empathetic, mutualistic. In our new structure, we will have one floor because I reach God when I reach you. Here, children will be honored for their feelings, their value and their prerogatives. Doors of opportunity will perpetually be open to the poor, the effectively-discouraged and the historically-wounded.

Your sensibilities, values and actions will shape that world because you can recognize and discourage plans for new towers of exclusivity. You can reinterpret the present frightening discord as God’s call to a mature, humane and just world. You can say, “Let us build a new Kingdom, where the King comes down to us as the poor child and gives up his very life for the least of us.

Let us say together:
We give up all for Christ.
We give up all for each other.
We will not build towers.
We build relationships.