House and Home

As I begin this sermon, I want to alert you that I will be posing some difficult questions regarding the Bible and ask that you listen objectively to what I am trying to say.

I will admit to not having been the brightest star in the Seminary firmament during my years of study. Like most of the students who attend seminaries today, I was a late starter with family and responsibilities needing to be balanced with seminary. I’d go to class, spend an hour in the library if I had time; rush off to work; attend my children’s sports activities; help with their homework and go off to meetings. With any luck, I would manage to stay awake long enough to do the required readings for the next day’s class. Therefore, when I raised my hand during the Genesis Seminar I was taking, the professor looked rather surprised. I commented on how I found it interesting that the animals went into the ark two by two but they came out in families. “Where does it say that ?” “Chapter 8, verse 19, I said, smugly.” “I never noticed that,” he said as he looked at me with amazement. That, my friends, was the highlight of my seminary career. I noticed that in the ark, the animals didn’t waste any time repopulating the earth.

The lectionary invites us to read the whole Noah story. I have chosen not to do so. There are some stories in scripture that we were introduced to as children and continue to keep in the place of childhood. We love to hear the cherub choir singing: “Who built the ark? Noah; Noah.” There are toy arks that can be wonderful teaching tools, helping children name the animals as they put them in the ark. There are countless picture books featuring the ark floating on the water. Often you will find the giraffes poking their long necks out of the window. It’s all cute, isn’t it. And it ends with a lovely rainbow in the sky.

I think that The Noah story is better kept in childhood memories because, the truth is that the Noah story is a dark tale taken almost directly from Babylonian creation stories. Scholars believe that it is based on the cultural memories of a terrible flood that inundated the area of the Tigris-Euphrates from which the peoples of the middle east had their beginnings. As I re-read the Noah story, I wondered what stories are now being told by poor folks in the small, coastal uneducated communities in India, Thailand and Indonesia about the terrible devastation from the Tsunami. What kind of a cultural and religious memory will there be in 100 or 500 years? Will God be prominently featured? Will Allah or Ganesh have become angry at the unfaithfulness of the people? Will Buddha have finally given up on drawing humanity to Nirvana? And if so, is the wave rising from the deep an instrument of divine destruction? How terrible to contemplate this idea; and yet, with all our knowledge and understanding of the works of nature, when terrible events happen we still find ourselves asking the question that has been asked since human beings sought beyond themselves for the divine: “Why did God allow this?” When we turn to the bible, we do not always find comforting answers.

Perhaps because it is Memorial Day week end and like everyone else here, I am praying and hoping for the end of war and the safe return of those who have been sent into battle, I have found myself pondering a question that cannot be easily answered. How much do the events in the Bible influence the collective actions we take in communities and as nations? Where does God fit into the landscape of pain and suffering we humans perpetually inflict on one another? In my heart I find resolution to such questions but when I read those Genesis and Exodus stories; I wonder. I truly wonder.

The fact is, the various descriptions of God that we find in the Bible are confusing and sometimes unsettling. Who really is this God we believe in? Who is God to you; to me; to us as a community of seekers? Can we say without fear of being struck by lightning that certain depictions of God found in scripture might be human rather than divine in origin? We certainly can.

In fact, to return to today’s reading, the depiction of God in the Noah story is not cute. It is frightening. In this account, God could almost be described as a petulant child whose toy, the created order now disappoints rather than delights. In a fit, the child God destroys the toy and then is sorry and promises not to do it again. This story, more than almost anything else in the Old Testament, has helped me to understand that the humans who wrote the bible, were themselves, struggling to define their own concepts of God, just as we continue to struggle today. Those efforts to describe and define are heroic yet very human.

There are several ideas or understandings of God that appear in various books of the Old Testament. For instance, the powerful creator God of Genesis One who made humans in the image and likeness of God and who looked with delight at all creation saying “It is very good;” was transformed into a Middle Eastern father figure in Chapter 2 and 3, who walked and talked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. First tempting them with a mysterious fruit and then punishing them for eating it, this version of God sent them out of the garden as punishment but cared enough about them to make them clothing before they went. The God described in the Noah sequence was unhappy with the results of creation and massacred all living things; innocent and guilty alike.

How did these different depictions come about? I invite you to use your imagination and picture with me what might be those ancient but very human attempts to describe the interaction of the divine in a world that could not and still cannot be neatly wrapped up into a logical whole. One scenario might be someone who is living in peace and prosperity. Perhaps he is a farmer and looks out at the plentiful harvest he has produced. He praises the Creator for such a beautiful and bountiful world. It is, indeed very good. Thus, Genesis 1. Another idea is a mother who both loves her children and finds them driving her to distraction. She remembers the pain of giving birth and wonders why there is such pain mixed with joy in her life. When she says no to her children and they disobey her, she punishes them by sending them outside in the heat and the dust to grind wheat until they learn the lesson of who is boss. So we have Genesis 2 and 3. Perhaps a religious scholar becomes increasingly angry at the antics of the people around him. People don’t pray or do good works. It seems as though everyone ignores the commandments of God in their lust for wealth and power. A terrible cataclysm happens. It might be a flood or an earthquake, that doesn’t matter. Thousands are killed and the scholar sees the hand of God in the devastation. His reflection of the terrible event results in the conclusion that God has grown tired of the faithlessness and responds in divine rage. The Noah passages are born.

Through human eyes and with human words and imagination, the books of the Old Testament tell inconsistent tales of a God who creates and destroys; who demands obedience and sacrifice; who tests and argues and complains. Yet also within these stories is a description of a God who passionately loves the people of Israel and vows never to abandon them. Having freed them from bondage, God cajoles, punishes and leads the people to the Promised Land. Once there, faithfulness is constantly rewarded and faithlessness, punished. In the words of the psalms, poets celebrate victories and grieve defeats always at the hand of God. Power, abandonment, love and loss are also reflected in those ancient words. When faithlessness is so endemic that prophets rise up to summon the people back to God, the prophets are ignored and war, destruction, death and exile are the result.

The author of Job cannot accept the simplistic theology which proclaims that bad things only happen to bad people. He has seen good people lose their savings, become mortally ill, have their homes destroyed. For the author, Job becomes the symbol of all those good people. The author can find no other explanation than that God is testing them. But this does not satisfy him. At the conclusion of Job, the author has Job ask God why God would bring such pain into his life. The only answer that the author can put in God’s mouth is a non-answer. God asks Job: “Where were you when I created the heavens and the earth?” Having no answer, the author submits to the divine authority; the mysterious will of God.

Please do not misunderstand me. I love the Bible. I love it for its wisdom and poetry. I love it for the breadth of its vision of God’s power and love. I love it because of the surprises that turn accepted orders upside down as God always chooses the younger over the older; takes pity on the poor and demands justice for widows, orphans and strangers. I also love it because in attempting to capture the essence of God, all those writers perfectly describe the inconsistencies of human beings. We love. We are loyal. We care for the lowest among us. We use our power wisely and well. We are also given to anger. We single out our favorites. We demand loyalty. We want to be told how wonderful we are and we pout when we are ignored. We use our power to hurt and to kill. In the bible and in life we humans have a tendency to hold up a mirror to ourselves and call the reflection God.

Do you remember the old story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant?

There are four blind men walking down a road. They discover an elephant in their path. Since the men have never encountered an elephant, they use their hands to explore this phenomenon. One grasps the trunk and concludes it is a snake. Another explores one of the elephant’s legs and describes it as a tree. A third finds the tail and announces that it is a rope. The fourth man touches the elephant’s side and concludes that it is a wall. As Paul implies in his writings, human imagination cannot begin to comprehend the sublime essence of God. In our blindness, we resort to human analogy. And in our minds and spirits, we each write our own descriptions of God and build from those descriptions our own safe and comfortable internal sacred spaces. That is as it should be. But let us learn a lesson from the bible. There should be no mirrors in our sacred spaces.

It really does not matter if the vision of God you hold is that of a loving father, or a powerful ruler, or a compassionate judge, or perhaps a bright and comforting light or pulsing silence. What does matter is that in your sacred place, you find peace, joy and profound love. What does matter is that in your encounters, you are strengthened, challenged, stretched and loved. What does matter is that when you emerge, you are nourished, wiser and more just and more loving. What finally matters is that you begin to be a reflection of God’s love, openness, care and surprising choices among all those with whom you share this beautiful earth. When we begin to reflect God; we are like that person in Matthew’s Gospel who built his home on rock. Raging storms will never touch our safe home because our mysterious and compelling God is within and though the storms may roar; God dwells there and all really is well. Amen.