The Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel. It's a fun Sunday School lesson. We get to play with blocks and knock things over. But grown ups often wonder why this story is here. The Wikipedia entry (it does have some cool pictures) refers to a "vengeful God" shutting down the building project. Why thwart humanity so?
After the flood and the new beginning for humanity, the people had one language and seemed to be able to unite long enough to get something done: "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." Humankind wanted to glorify humankind, reaching up to the heavens with their power. The venture makes Yahweh nervous: "this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them." Now, God could have sent some fire and brimstone and destroyed the whole thing, I suppose. Instead, God confused their language so that they could not understand one another's speech, and God moved them around the face of the earth. The people stopped building and called the city Babel, meaning "to confuse."
Is God's action here some autocrat's petulance, or is it a gift of some kind? Maybe what we already "know" and have decided about God influences the spin we put on God's motive here. I believe God loves humankind and has great dreams for us. It seems to me that the building of the Tower of Babel was a lot of unified effort into the wrong cause: "let us make a name for ourselves." A common motive for human behavior, but what does it really get you?
Thousands and thousands of years later, there will be another time of babbling, a time when it seems like tongues are confused. On the day of Pentecost, Jews who had been scattered all over the Mediterranean and around the vast Roman Empire each hear the good news of God's kingdom and the power of the love of God in Jesus Christ in their own language. (see the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles) It is a huge sound of "babel" and yet there is meaning in it. Meaning because each can understand, and meaning because what is said is not about human glory, but about life lived in the power and freedom and joy of the Holy Spirit. This confusion causes Jews from all over to gather together to listen to the Word of God. When the Spirit of the Living God enters the people, they become an amazing building, a Temple of the Holy Spirit. They are united in Christ and knit together in God's love. They will come to see that there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free, no divisions that can block the freedom and power of life in God.