Genesis 6:9-22
These are the descendants of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God. 10 And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. 12 And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. 13 And
God said to Noah, “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. 14 Make yourself an ark of cypressb wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. 15 This
is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits,
its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. 16 Make a roofc
for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and put the door of the
ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks. 17 For
my part, I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy
from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything
that is on the earth shall die. 18 But
I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark,
you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you. 19 And
of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind
into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and
female. 20 Of
the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to
their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its
kind, two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive. 21 Also take with you every kind of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them.” 22 Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.
When I was in Elementary School, my principal was Mr. Jack
Herring. He had been at Johnston
Elementary for years and he was loved.
Well I was a part of a group of boys that was threatening to scuffle
with another group of boys. It was
pre-teen posturing. And, I’ll be quick
to add, “They started it.” Needless to
say a teacher intercepted the mounting tensions after school and directed us to
visit Mr. Herring in his office . . . immediately . . . and we went. Mr. Herring sat behind his large wooden desk,
he heard the indictment of our broo-haha.
He reached down and slid open one of the wooden draws of his wooden
desk, and he pulled out a paddle. It was
large and decorated and it looked to unwieldy to be taken seriously. He said this is one of my paddles. You know,
I don’t like using this paddle. It was a
gift. But it’s too heavy to really
swing. Kind of hurts my hand. Then he reached down into his drawer and pulled
out a thin paddle, worn smooth with age,
it had athletic taped wrapped around one end, “No,” he said holding the paddle
in his hand, “This is the one I prefer.
It’s light enough to swing but solid enough to sting.” He laid that paddle down on the desk. He reached down and pulled out another and
said, “I used to use this one but it cracked.”
He pulled out a couple more, holding each one, surveying its size,
weight, velocity, grip. He laid each one
side-by-side on his desk and said finally, “Boys, I don’t want to use any of
these paddles. But I will if I have
to. Do you think I have to use one of
these paddles today?” Silently we shook
our heads, “No.” “Good, don’t make me use them then.” Then he told us to leave his office. That was the end of the scuffling.
Whenever I have to deal with a story like God sending a
flood to wipe out the majority of humanity in order to start over again, or
ordering certain people executed because they didn’t take worship seriously, or
casting people in the lake of fire, I struggle with how to make sense of
it. How do we reconcile our message that
God loved the world (the whole world) so much that God gave his only son for
the world? How do we square these
stories with the affirmation that The Lord, the Lord, is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love?
How do we make it make sense alongside the proclamation that God is love
and those who abide in love abide in God?
Yesterday during Bible and Brunch we talked about a second century
Christian leader who was eventually denounced as a heretic named Marcion. Marcion believed, at least according to the
press clippings, that the God of the Old Testament was a totally different God
than the God proclaimed in Jesus Christ.
The God of the Old Testament was judgmental and angry but that God had
been defeated by this other God—the God of love and mercy. And that’s one way to do it, I suppose, but I
don’t believe it’s true and neither did Jesus by the way. The early church rejected his heresy. It
seems that anytime anyone created a completely coherent system to explain God,
the main church dismissed it as heresy.
God is free and at times in predictable. We do not have permission, I
don't think, to edit out the parts simply because they don't jive with the
version of God we've created in our minds. And at least one way of seeing these
judgment stories for me is to remember that perhaps God is like Mr. Jack
Herring. Laying out the paddles—there’s
destruction by flood (but I promised never to use that), there’s an earthquake
to that opens us and destroys the offenders, there’s striking people with
diseases if they are dishonest, or taking their life suddenly because they
withhold their gift intended for me.
Perhaps the judgmental texts are like that are God’s way of saying, “I
have these paddles, but I don’t want to use them. Children, don’t make me have to use
them.”
We set the scripture readings months ago and chose to use
the story of Noah’s Ark long before we knew what this week would hold. We are in a series called the “I
illusions.” All the texts are taken from
Genesis. We started with the illusion of
innocence—with Adam and Eve. Then with
the illusion of isolation-with Cain and Abel.
And today we move to the illusion of invincibility. It begins with a man not like Adam or Cain
but one described as righteous, blameless, and pious. The opening verse contains it’s own three
point sermon. Noah was righteous—he had
integrity with himself; he was blameless—he had faithful dealings with his peers;
he walked with God. The description evokes the words of Micah—God has shown you
what is good and what the Lord requires—do justice, love mercy, walk humbly
with God.
We imagined then that we would emphasize the nature of
humanity’s sin at the time of God’s grievance with humanity. Noah’s neighbors were guilty of violence. It’s mentioned more than once. Contrary to the Puritanical judgment that sin
is limited to gluttony, debauchery, bad
habits and bad hygiene, the story is clear that what grieved the heart of God
most was humanity’s destruction of humanity.
In contrast with the “good” God saw in creation in chapter 1, here God sees all of creation—and not just
humanity—as corrupt, prone to decay, not
worth keeping around. The earth itself,
and not just the people on it, have stopped acting the way they should. Clarence Jordan sees in this as the first
stage in human development. It is a
stage of unlimited aggression. When the law is given in Exodus, a rule is
created that says and eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for
foot—in Latin its called lex talionis
the law of talion, the law of retaliation.
Which says that the punishment corresponds in kind and degree to the
injury. With the introduction of lex talionis we move from unlimited
aggression to limited aggression. Then
there develops a moral principle that says, “you shall love your neighbor but
hate your enemy.” The third stage is
from limited aggression to limited love.
But finally with Jesus Christ we hear—love your enemy, bless those who
curse you, do good to those who hate you and pray for those who despitefully
use you and persecute you. The movement
is complete from unlimited aggression in Noah, to limited aggression in the
law, to limited love in the commands, to unlimited love in Christ. But it is still hard to believe that God’s
ultimate plan is unlimited love, even of one’s enemies when God’s answer to
humanity’s violence is their complete destruction—with the exception of Noah
and his wife, and their three sons and their wives.
We planned on saying
all of that before this week. Before a
young man, radicalized by racist white supremacy, entered Emanuel AME Church in
Charleston, SC, sat through an hour’s worth of Bible study and then opened fire
killing, Rev. Clementa Pickney, Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., Myra Thompson, Cynthia
Hurd, Rev. Sharonda Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor,
Susie Jackson, and Ethel Lance. That was
before the flood of rhetoric filled what should have been quiet spaces of
lament into stormy corners of advocacy.
We planned on saying that before another group was victimized. Some of us wanting to distance this shooter’s
actions from the racism prevalent in our culture have claimed he was mentally
ill. That kind of language displays the
worst sort of use of the phrase “mental
illness.” Mental illness is a broad
category that contains many complex and difficult disorders like anxiety,
depression, identity disorders like schizophrenia, and eating disorders just to
name a few. The mentally ill have a hard
enough time being treated with the dignity they deserve and getting the
treatment they need. We should resist
throwing around the term mental illness as a way of explaining away the
inexplicable. The mentally ill are not
evil. Let's not burden them with this.
We had planned on talking about the illusion of invincibility
before the events of this week would so thoroughly and painfully reveal our
vulnerability. My heart hurts and I
despair. I am too weary to speak of humanity’s violence toward humanity
right now—not the ancient violence of Noah’s day nor the senseless violence of
our own. I do not wish to speak of God’s
justice or rightness or capacity to judge because the implications frighten
me. We have not advanced so far beyond
unlimited aggression; there’s no way to practice an eye for an eye with someone
who has destroyed so much; I’m not sure I can trust my neighbor much less love
him; and as for loving my enemy . . . . In the midst of the storm we want an
escape hatch that takes us to the rainbow instantly. Get me to some place where
I can assure myself that God doesn’t really act this way. NO, cannot act this way. But the escape hatch isn’t there and if it
was, I’m afraid we’d find that it’s not a rainbow that awaits us—not a promise
that everything will be alright. I am
not certain as to how we reconcile all of this with the overarching view that
God is love. I do think That stories like Noah need to be in front of us
because we risk putting God in a kind of box defined by our own conception of
love. We want to insist that God never
does anything that we do not like and by that we say that’s what it means to
claim God is love. But God is free and
God is just and the God of love is still a God of holiness with high
expectations for how we are to live and treat one another. We cannot harbor the illusion of our
invincibility and live as people defined by violence and pretend that before
God there is no reckoning.
It shouldn’t have taken an aggressive act against a church
to arouse my consciousness but it has. God’s authority stretches beyond the
walls of any religious building. The
violence in Charleston, SC is the latest chapter in a horrific narrative that
includes McKinney, Garland, Baltimore,
Ferguson, Boston, Newtown, Aurora . . . the list goes on. In my lifetime, I’ve
not seen a season as volatile and frightening as the last few years. This includes the difficult years of 1992
(the LA riots), 1993 (Waco compound burning), and 1994 (Oklahoma City
Bombings). Evil people acting in evil ways will be with us. We know
that. What we do not know is whether good people will counteract and
mitigate the evil or simply acquiesce. My sisters and brothers, we cannot
simply hope to simply tread water. There
is an ark to be built and lives to be saved.
We build that ark through forging relationships with people in our
community. We cannot let the fear of who
our neighbor might be overwhelm what our response to our neighbor must be. I have reached out to some neighboring
churches and tomorrow night at 7 pm, we will be at the College Park Center to
hold a prayer vigil for Emanuel AME and for the nation and for ourselves. We’ve also been invited to attend a Men’s day
gathering at Greater Community Missionary Baptist Church next Sunday and I hope
we will nurture that developing relationship. Today, I do not feel that God has cast the rainbow quite yet. Nor do I believe God is pulling out paddles and placing them in front of us. I believe God is giving us the materials and dimensions of an Ark and is beckoning us to build--build connections, build relationships, throw open the doors that others may enter and together we may sail the choppy seas of reconciliation.
No comments:
Post a Comment