June 15, 2008
Pentecost 3, Genesis 6:9-8:19
Last Sunday we went into D.C. to see Rolling Thunder, the huge procession of motorcycles that rides through the city every Memorial Day weekend. We were still a good half-mile away when we heard the thunderous noise of thousands of Harleys roaring down the road. It was truly a sight to see, all of those bikes with their flags streaming behind them. But it felt like more of a curiosity than anything else until we got to the Vietnam War memorial. Hundreds of people waited silently to walk down into the memorial. Many of them were veterans from that war, in formation once again, as they passed the names of friends and brothers killed or gone missing. Leaving red silk flowers or photos or flags. We could hear snippets of their stories, told in reverential tones, as we drifted by.
The memories and the losses are so tangible as you walk through that memorial. In a way I felt like I was an interloper in what should have been a private gathering. When we rose out of the memorial, we wondered what the veterans and the family members who lost loved ones in that war must think about what has happened since. Whether it pains them to see us still fighting. Fighting on new fronts, but still fighting and dying. And once again involved in what may be un-winnable wars against people whose tactics and motivations we don’t really understand. Our country’s well-being no more assured than it was 40 years ago when so many young men died thinking they were defending it.
We passed the Korean War memorial on our way out. And the World War II memorial. And the World War I memorial. The human cycle of horror and death goes back and back and back….
All the way back to our Old Testament story for this morning of Noah and the flood that wipes out every living person and animal that was not ensconced in that infamous ark. I find this story to be as morally troubling as just about any in the Bible, although you’d never know it from the images you see cross-stitched on baby blankets and drawn on the pages of children’s Bibles. My kids turn to this story again and again because it is inevitably illustrated with pictures of smiling Noah and his smiling family, happy monkeys and lions and sheep hanging out in harmony on the boat, with jolly whales playing nearby in the water. A sanitized version of the story, to say the least, and all under cover of a big, beautiful rainbow.
We didn’t get that rainbow in our story this morning. We also missed Noah sending the raven and the dove to scout things out. And we didn’t hear God establishing the post-flood covenant with Noah; God’s promise “that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” The powers-that-be in charge of our lectionary for this morning apparently wanted to get in the whole story, so out went the dove with its olive leaf, out went God’s covenant with Noah, out went the rainbow. Which makes the difficulty of this story even more stark.
All flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth, we’re told, filling the earth with violence. In only 5 chapters of the book of Genesis, we go from a place where God created the earth and everything living on it and saw that, behold, it was very good -- to a place where God undertakes to destroy the earth and everything living on it because it is all corrupt. It only took 4 pages for people to manage to undo all the goodness of the world. To provoke God so completely that God is just about to reverse the creation story. To annihilate all of humankind except for righteous Noah and his family.
Sure, at the end God promises not to wipe out the world with a flood again. But God seems to have chosen those words awfully carefully. How about a promise not to wipe out the world with any kind of disaster? Or better yet, a promise not to even partially wipe out the world. Because even if the whole world hasn’t been wiped out in one fell swoop by a flood lately, that’s small comfort to the 225,000 people killed by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. And the 130,000 people killed by the cyclone in Burma. And the 56,000 people killed by the earthquake in China. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of others displaced and mourning.
I heard a speech by Desmond Tutu, Archbishop and crusader against apartheid in South Africa, where he said: “When we look at the state of the world sometimes we wonder whether God had any plan at all. When you read of disasters – floods over there, drought over there. You wonder, God couldn’t you have organized this slightly better? I mean, couldn’t you organize so that there was just about enough water for everybody? Not a great deal of water over there drowning people, and then on this side no water and people dying of thirst. God, we know you are in charge, but can’t you make it a little more obvious?”
It’s hard to even get our heads around the scope of the kind of suffering being experienced right now in so much of the world. In the U.S. we lost just 3000 people on September 11 and it turned our country on its head – it’s changed our politics, our international diplomacy, our very way of being.
I rebel against the idea that God made any of those disasters happen. The Jerry Falwell type of argument that September 11th was a punishment by God against certain types of people or behavior sickens me. I don’t think of God as being responsible for the disasters that befall us. I know that my God wants nothing but good for me; that God is the first to weep when my heart breaks. And yet there it is, plain as day in our reading this morning. God’s confession couldn’t be any more direct: “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth.”
When I read the Flood story in Genesis, I have trouble getting past the fact that God is said to cause the horror and destruction of the Flood. No matter how evil the people had become, the idea of a vengeful, bloodthirsty God doesn’t fit with everything I know and experience about God. But then I wonder how much of my problem with this passage stems from my reading it with modern eyes.
Myths about the creation of the earth and its near-destruction by a flood existed long before this biblical story. Scholars say that when Israel immigrated into its promised land it was met with a Near Eastern tradition in which there were stories about the world being created by the waters of chaos being set apart – the heavenly oceans separated from the primeval sea to create the earth somewhere in between. And then stories about how the floodgates broke, and the two halves of the sea which had been separated by creation were again united, and creation began to sink once again into chaos.
It seems that Israel reshaped and altered these myths to tell a bigger, more wonderful story. They turned these images of creation and flood from the culture into a background for revealing something about their God. They started with the story about the flood and the near annihilation of creation, but then moved beyond it. For them, this story was about a God who puts down chaos, who makes an eternal promise to be in relationship, and who allows blessing to flow back into the world despite our actions.
It’s still not the light and rosy story from a children’s bible, but it’s definitely more hopeful than it sounds at first. The ancient tellers of this story had an experience of God that they wanted to preserve and share. And their experience of God as never giving up, always creating anew, is one that we see again and again throughout the Bible -- through the lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs of our religious stories, and of course, in the Easter story.
I’m sorry that we didn’t get to hear God’s covenant with Noah this morning, because we are included along with the survivors in the ark in God’s promises. It is a covenant between God and Noah “and every living creature of all flesh, for all future generations.” God binds God’s self unilaterally – God makes no obligations on Noah or his family or us future generations. And God binds God’s self eternally. So no matter what we do or don’t do, no matter what happens to us, or whether we acknowledge God or not, God is in covenant relationship with us. It doesn’t save us from experiencing disaster and pain and heartbreak and darkness any more than it did Noah, but it does mean we are not alone in those experiences.
My kids have a book called Where Does God Live? It’s one of a series of interfaith children’s books that explores hard questions in a pretty approachable way. This particular book talks about all the places where we find God even though we can’t see God – in our heart, in smiles of other people, in our adventures and fun. But also “in our tears when we’re sad or we’re scared.” That page had a photo of a little girl with tears running down her cheeks.
“What is she sad about?” my daughter asked when we read it most recently.
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Maybe someone wasn’t nice to her and it made her sad. Or maybe someone that she loved got hurt and that made her sad.”
And then my daughter said, “I’ll never be sad.”
I was stunned at the thought that she was young and innocent and lucky enough to still think such a thing was possible. And at first, I must admit that I wished it could stay true. I wished that my little girl could somehow avoid the sadness of life. That she could escape experiencing hurt and betrayal and loneliness and grief. But then, I realized, that probably wouldn’t be best for her, even if it were possible. Because experiencing the depth of emotion that comes in the hardest times is part of what makes us who we are. Our saddest experiences can make us more empathetic and loving toward others. Plus, without the harder parts of life, we might not know the true depth of joy.
So instead of escaping all tragedy, maybe our prayer instead for ourselves and those we love might be that at the end of it all, when we look back, we can see that God was with us through it all, even when we may not have felt it at the time.
When disaster strikes, when we have one of those dark nights of the soul, maybe Noah can be our model for what to do. You hunker down for a while and wait for the worst to be over. And then, when you’re ready, when conditions seem hospitable, when you have the strength to do it, you open the door of the ark and you head back into the world. You get out and you keep on walking with God. And start looking for that rainbow.
Amen.
Elizabeth