Something To Hang On To
a sermon based on Genesis 9:8-17
by Rev. Cindy Weber
 

It’s a hard story: God Floods the World. If we read those headlines in the newspaper, we’d throw it down in disgust, wouldn’t we? And yet, it’s a story that has remained, down through the ages, told and retold and claimed and loved by our ancestors in the faith.

Most of us have grown up to read the stories of Genesis as literal—they really happened, and they happened just the way the Bible says they happened. And some of us are still believe that they are literal, though we may acknowledge that the storytellers put their own unique spin on them. Others of us have begun to read them as metaphor, as parable, as myth. And for some of us, as soon as I say the word, “myth,” you’re thinking, “Hey, wait a minute, that’s the BIBLE that you’re talking about.”

Marcus Borg talks about how a story can be true without it being literal, without it ever having happened. He points to those stories that Garrison Keillor tells about Lake Wobegon. Did they really happen? Well, no, he makes them up. Are they true? Well, for some of us, they are. Because when we hear them, we hear truth in them, we recognize the characters, and more importantly, we recognize ourselves.

George Williamson, who pastored a BPFNA church for years, advises us to look for the breakthrough of God in stories like this, in all of scripture, in fact. Where does the face God as revealed through Jesus Christ break through in these stories?

Renita Weems, who taught Old Testament Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee says that she would begin every introductory course by saying, “This is not a course on what God said, this is a course on what the ancient Hebrews said God said.” But then on Sundays, she would find herself standing before church audiences saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servants hear.” She would stand there on Sundays feeling, “naked as a bark,” she says (Listening for God, p. 31).

And if this story strips us naked, makes us feel vulnerable and frustrated and confused, well, that’s not a bad thing, is it?

I was talking to a mother who had recently lost her son in a tragic accident. She was desperately trying to make some sense out of what happened, and she told me that all that she could figure was that God wanted to bring her son home. He was 11 years old.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that line of thinking, nor would it be the last. I heard it again at a funeral for a young man just a few weeks ago, when one of the visiting ministers said that his death was a “wake up call from God.” My husband tells me that I, sitting up there behind the visiting minister, made a rather pained face at those words, though I was consciously trying to look neutral.

Roberta Bondi tells the story of how the medieval German mystic Gertrude the Great, in one of her visions, “asks Jesus what he thinks of the fact that some of the nuns in her monastery were frequently afraid to take communion because they worried about what God would do to them if they weren’t well enough prepared. Jesus answers her plaintively, ‘I wish that my people would not think me so cruel.’” Bondi goes on to talk about how churches are filled with grieving Christians who sit there bewildered, cowering before an imaginary God who they believe has hurt them, tested them, punished them for their own good.

“I wish that my people would not think me so cruel”…It runs through my mind every time I hear I hear such talk, along with Jesus’ good words about how God sends the rain to fall and the sun to shine on the just and the unjust, which I take to mean that God doesn’t cause bad things to happen to people.

But when that grieving mother was pouring out her heart to me, trying to make some sense of the loss of her child, I, by grace, was able to see that the only thing that she was able to hang on to at that moment was that God is in control, and that what that meant to her was that God had some purpose in taking her child. I was able to see that she was hanging by a thread. And I wasn’t about to cut it.

The morning’s story was written during a time when the whole nation of Israel was hanging by a thread, during the Babylonian exile. The people of Israel had been forcibly removed from their homes—much like the Cherokee Indians, who were forced to march from the Blue Ridge Mountains all the way to Oklahoma on what they called the Trail of Tears. The people of Israel were facing a faith crisis—why would God let this happen to them? And perhaps like a mother grieving over the untimely loss of child, all they could figure out was that God must have wanted it to happen to them, perhaps like that minister at the funeral, all they could figure out was that God wanted to teach them a lesson, perhaps like many other people who have suffered over the centuries, all they could figure out was that God was angry with them…

And with that in mind, we turn to our text. The story of the flood is not a story that is unique to Judaism. In fact, almost every culture on earth includes an ancient flood story. European explorers were startled by Indian legends that sounded similar to the story of Noah, and some of the Spanish priests feared that the devil had planted such stories in the Indian’s minds to confuse them (National Geographic).

Karen Armstrong (In the Beginning) tells how in the Babylonian version of the story, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” “the Flood was seen as a turning point in history; it was the moment when the gods and the humanity decided to go their separate ways. Before the Flood, the gods had been enraged by the noise made by human beings, which disturbed their slumbers. For this entirely frivolous reason,” says Armstrong, “they decided to destroy the world.” I can relate to this – we stayed in a tent cabin in Yosemite, and there was one night when this group of young adult tourists talked so loud and so long, that I wanted to wipe them off the face of the earth, too. I don’t think that it was entirely frivolous on the Babylonian gods’ part.

Anyway, “one of the gods arranged for his favorite man, Utnapishtim, to be spared.” Afterwards, when the gods saw what horrible devastation they had caused, they were ashamed, and by common consent, the gods and the mortals parted company, as “it was clearly dangerous and undesirable for divine beings to meddle in mundane affairs.”

You get the idea, in hearing about both stories, that perhaps they were right, that perhaps it is clearly dangerous and undesirable for the gods or God to be messing around in human affairs, certainly in this case, at any rate. The story of the flood, as it is told, leaves us wondering who this God is who would destroy the earth, all human life and animal life, too. Some people say that this is a story about God growing up. At the beginning of the story, God is like a child building a sand castle—build it my way, or I’ll smush it to the ground. But God learns, in the story, God makes mistakes, God learns, God grows, and God promises to act differently.

Karen Armstrong, again, points out that there are a lot of different ideas about what God is like in the Book of Genesis. In the beginning, God is portrayed as all-powerful, as one who creates good, as one who wrestles order out to chaos, separates water from land. We look at this picture of God, and we think that this God would never need to learn anything…But in this morning’s story, God allows the watery chaos to resume control. In this story, the Creator God becomes a Destroyer.

Those of us who have grown up on the stories of Jesus, who taught us to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us, to turn the other cheek, to walk the second mile, who said that “it is not the will of my Father that any of these little ones perish,” find this story incredibly disturbing. But for those who lived in the ancient world, everything that happened was caused by God or caused by one of the gods. There was no such thing as a natural catastrophe. This belief is echoed in most insurance forms, where tornados and floods are listed as “acts of God.”

Indeed, an article that I read recently quoted some missionaries as saying that God caused the tsunami last December so that more people could be saved. “Because they perished many more will be saved from a Christless eternity…For centuries Aceh had been closed to the gospel. God’s mercy could not withstand another generation repelling his grace, his mercy, his kindness. God’s mercy could not, would not, allow future generations to go to hell” (Scott Campbell, Zion’s Herald, March/April 2005). So now, Indonesia, which has been closed to a “Christian witness” for many years, is by necessity, and according to these people, by God’s design, allowing all kinds of aid, along with the gospel tracts, missionaries, etc., to come in, to claim the country for Christ.

“I wish that my people would not think me so cruel…”

Just an interesting aside— (Armstrong points out that) in the Babylonian version of the flood story, “gods and humans alike were overwhelmed when they saw the devastating effects of the deluge. In the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” Utnapishtim, the sole survivor, recalled his desolation when he finally climbed out of the ark:

…stillness had set in,

And all of (hu)mankind returned to clay.

The landscape was as level as a flat roof.

I opened a hatch, and light fell on my face.

Bowing low, I sat and wept,

Tears running down my face.”

She goes on to say, “Like many survivors of the Holocaust, Utnapishtim felt no elation at having been spared.”

Noah, on the other hand, expresses no such horror, indeed, just seems relieved to have been spared.

Abraham Heschel, a famous Jewish scholar, talks a great deal about the pathos, or deep feeling, of God, and says that “the fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos” (The Prophets, p. 31). In other words, what makes a person a prophet is that he or she can feel what God feels. In this particular story, we do not see that Noah feels the pathos of God, indeed, we do not see God’s pathos in the way that we would have hoped.

What we do see is that the people of Israel, all those years ago, in the midst of the darkest hour of their history, as muddled and as confused and as angry as they were about who and where God was, were able to come out on the other side, even as God did in this story, affirming that they and God would continue to walk together, would continue to live in relationship together.

There is a story that one night some of the prisoners in Auschwitz, which was one of the most horrific concentration camps of the Holocaust, put God on trial and found God guilty for allowing the Holocaust to happen. They condemned God to death, and then when the trial was over, the presiding rabbi said, “It’s time for our evening prayers” (Armstrong, p. 47).

They came out on the other side determined to walk with God, and God with them.

“Behold,” said God, “I establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, 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…I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth…”

What we do see is a God, who unlike the Babylonian gods who decide, after the Flood, to withdraw from involvement with human life, who decides, instead, to hang in there through thick and thin, to be involved in human life, in all of its horror and all of its glory, who covenants, not just with humans, but with all the earth, to start over and try again.

“God with us,” you might say.

And that’s something to hang on to.