“Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” This is the go-to greeting of the Star Trek villain which both frightened and fascinated me most as a child—the Borg. For those who didn’t spend hours in the 80s and 90s watching the continuation of the Star Trek franchise, the Borg are a group of terrifying cybernetic beings. Replacing their organs with mechanical implants, and linking their minds together to form a hive mind, each Borg’s identity is suppressed. Individuals become drones—mere extensions of a collective consciousness. And as this collective sweeps across the galaxy, it assimilates whole societies—absorbing them into the hive mind. “You will be assimilated,” they declare, “We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.”
The Borg are scary… And they should be. They represent the absolute antithesis of the diversity and distinctiveness which makes humanity (and all God’s Creation) so beautiful. But as the Star Trek canon unfolds, we learn that the Borg are actually driven by a motivation that is deeply, deeply human. The oft-repeated line—“You will be assimilated”—leaves out an important bit: “You will be assimilated…We wish to improve ourselves.”
“We wish to improve ourselves.” It seems that, at its core, this collective’s horrifying mission to assimilate everyone and everything isn’t motivated by cold, mindless hatred of individuality after all, but by the pursuit of improvement—the pursuit of greatness, and ultimately perfection. If you stick with the Star Trek franchise long enough, you learn that, in a real sense, the Borg are just trying to overcome loneliness, disorder, division, and vulnerability. They’re actually seeking a kind of peace—but it’s a peace that depends on uniformity, a unity that depends on absorbing and erasing difference and diversity; a security and sense of togetherness that depends on power and domination. They are trying to “make a name for themselves”—trying to become more perfect, more powerful— so that the name “Borg” would fill others with awe.
This really is a profoundly human drive. It’s the logic that steers by pretty much every empire and worldly power today. And as the story of Babel in our first reading suggests, that has always been the case in human history. “Let us make a name for ourselves,” the people of Babel declare, “Otherwise we will be scattered.” Fearing separation and division—and the vulnerability and weakness that come with that—they set about building a city and a tower—a monument to their power and unity as a people bound together by a single language and a singular purpose.
This is the same impulse behind every attempt to shore up our own strength, to make ourselves great again, to return to the glory days, to find peace in “making a name for ourselves” through size, prestige, and accomplishments. These efforts—this drive to find peace in accomplishment, notoriety, and growth is so deeply, utterly human.
But the problem is that the only kind of peace that can come from these efforts to make a name for ourselves—it comes at the terrible price of denying who we are and what we are for as human beings. In striving to make a name for ourselves, we seize control from God once again, just like we did in the Garden of Eden. We deny that we are creatures and not the Creator. We stop looking to the Lord—not to ourselves—to even give us our food in due season (let alone to give us security, unity, and peace). We forget that we aren’t here to make a name for ourselves, but to call on the Name of the Lord and be saved—to ask for everything in the Name of Jesus and in accordance with God’s will.
And when we get lost like this in our efforts to make a name for ourselves and we forget that peace comes from God, not ourselves—all our accomplishments eventually fall apart. In the story of Babel, we see this falling apart happen suddenly and dramatically—through divine intervention. I think more often today it simply looks like the gradual fracture, atrophy, and decay which have brought an end to every empire and human institution in history. But, however the consequences unfold, engineering peace through our own accomplishments ultimately results in the very division, scattering, vulnerability, and conflict that we were trying to avoid by making a name for ourselves.
Now, in this moment in history, I think most of us probably don’t actually need to be reminded of the consequences that follow from humans forgetting who we are and what we are for and instead trying to make a name for ourselves. We are living smack-dab in the middle of those consequences as a society. And if that were it—if the fate of humanity was summed up at Babel, with God scattering humanity, confusing our languages, dividing our peoples, and letting us reap the consequences of our vanity—if the story ended there, I honestly wouldn’t fault you for walking out that door and never looking back.
But the story doesn’t end there. As we have been reminded throughout Eastertide, our God is the God of the whole story—start to finish. Our God is the Alpha and the Omega—active throughout all of history, gathering up the threads that we break and weaving them back together into a tapestry that displays the glory of God’s Name—not ours. Our God is the God of both Babel and Pentecost, and the Church retells those stories together today to remind us that God has both the first word and the last in this story.
At Pentecost, we see God setting right all the division that we humans create when we forget our role in the drama of Creation and strive to make a name for ourselves. This time, God sets things right through an intervention even more dramatic than the fracture at the Tower of Babel. Gathering the nations that were scattered across the earth, God replaces the destructive spirit of humanity’s hubris with the creative power of the Holy Spirit. And that Holy Spirit repairs the confusion and division of Babel, not by creating an illusion of peace, based on human greatness or false uniformity, but by taking the divided peoples of the earth and turning them into the People of God—by knitting together their wonderful diversity into a new kind of unity—a new kind of peace that emboldens them to proclaim the glory of God’s Name.
At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit makes good on Jesus’ promise to give us his peace, to leave his own peace with us so that our hearts may not be troubled. But true to Jesus’ word to his disciples in the Gospel today, God does not give us this peace in the way the world gives. The peace of Christ is not a peace that holds us together by melting us down into a forced uniformity of identity and custom. It is a peace that rejoices in God-given difference and gathers up our scattered diversity. The peace of Christ, poured out at Pentecost, is not a peace that promises security through engineered growth, placing us and our desires at the center. It is a peace that unites us in genuine communion with God and each other—making us secure in God’s will and intention for the flourishing of all of Creation.
The peace of Christ is poured into our hearts day after day as it was poured out on the Church by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. It isn’t peace like anything the world offers—not peace like the people of Babel sought to construct through buildings and monuments or a peace like the Borg in Star Trek sought to enforce through assimilation and growth. It is a peace that surpasses all understanding, freeing us from futile efforts to resist who we are and ignore what we’re for. It is a peace that does not exalt our own name, but lets us boldly proclaim the Name of Christ with hearts that are not troubled. It is a peace that keeps us secure—wherever we are, however far we’re scattered—in the knowledge and love of our Savior, Jesus Christ. To his Name be glory and honor, forever and ever, in every generation. Amen.