Learning Curve (Proper 4A; Genesis 6:11-12; 7:24; 8:14-19; June 22, 2014)

Learning Curve

Proper 4A

Genesis 6:11-12; 7:24; 8:14-19

June 22, 2014

Rev. John M. Caldwell, Ph.D.

1^st United Methodist Church

Decorah, IA

I want to talk about Noah and his flood, but first I want get two more stories in front of us, two stories from the Hebrew Bible.

In the eighteenth chapter of Genesis we find an odd tale.  God decides to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the stench of whose crimes has reached God’s nostrils.  These crimes, incidentally, have nothing to do with homosexuality and everything to do with their lack of hospitality to strangers.  To God, hospitality is a big deal.

The oddness of the tale is contained in two debates.  The first is a debate that God has with Godself about whether or not to reveal to Abraham the plans to destroy these two cities.  God decides that this needs to be part of Abraham’s education.  So God reveals the plans.

Abraham, though, does not respond as we might expect.  He takes God to task over the injustice of this plan.  Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? he asks.  What if you find fifty righteous people in the city?

Well, in that case, says God, I would spare the city.

How about for forty? 

Okay, I’ll spare it for forty. 

How about for thirty?  How about for twenty?  How about for ten?  In each case God promises to spare the city for the sake of the righteous.

Abraham apparently decided not to press his luck with the Almighty and in the event the cities were destroyed, although God did go to a good deal of effort to get Lot and his family out before it happened.

That’s the first story.

The second story comes from Exodus 32.  Moses had gone up the mountain to receive the law.  While he was there the Israelites got bored and decided to write Moses off.  They demanded that Aaron, Moses’ brother, make them an image so that they could worship God.  Aaron cast an image of gold in the form of a calf and the people threw a party.

God tells Moses what the Israelites are up to.  God tells Moses that they are a stiff-necked people.  (This is not news to Moses.)  Furthermore, God tells Moses that God is going to kill them all and start the chosen people project all over again with Moses this time.  But Moses will not let this happen without objection.  “Why are you angry with the people?  You brought them out of Egypt.  If you kill them all the Egyptians will say that your intentions were evil from the very beginning.  Besides, you’ve already made promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Do you really want a reputation as a promise breaker?”

And so God was persuaded to spare the people.

Those are the two stories.  Now, let’s turn to the story about Noah and the flood. 

God looked at the earth and saw that—with the exception of Noah—all of humankind was thoroughly wicked, so God decided to destroy all of humankind, while sparing Noah and his family.  God came to Noah and said, “All of humankind is thoroughly wicked, so I’ve decided to destroy them all, but spare you and your family.”  God gave Noah the plans for the ark, a plan for saving the non-swimmers among the animals, even—for reasons that are unclear to me—the mosquitoes.

And so Noah did what God had told him to do.

Placed with these other stories, the story of Noah’s flood is disturbing, not because of what’s in the story but because of what isn’t.  Noah uttered no word of protest.  God planned to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet, and Noah said nothing.  He is history’s first and perhaps worst case of bystander syndrome.

Not a word, Noah?  No protest, no objection, no moral outrage on behalf of your fellow children of God?  Let alone the creatures, both wild and domesticated, who were not chosen to go into the ark.

You know, we decorate our babies’ rooms with pictures of this fellow and his wife (who in the story is nameless, so let’s call her Niamh) and his boat and the pairs of animals (but never the mosquitoes).  There’s real money in the Noah’s ark decorative motif.  You can tell that a Bible story has been domesticated when there is a Precious Moments® version of it.  It has become a sort of visual nursery rhyme that we tell without thinking about it much.

We see the ark with Noah and Niamh and their floating zoo maybe as a demonstration of God’s care for us.  Of course, we have to place ourselves in the ark for that to be true.  Noah and Niamh were the exceptions—for almost everyone and everything this is a story of death by drowning, but that doesn’t show up on the walls of children’s bedrooms.

Nor does Noah’s moral cowardice.  Noah can perhaps be excused since it was early in this story and Noah didn’t know much about God (and, if the story is anything to go by, God didn’t know much about people).  Noah didn’t know that he could or should take a stand for justice, even with God.  Especially with God.

The tragedy of Noah’s story is that, after the flood was finished, and God looked around at the mess that it left behind, God had a change of heart.  “I’ll never do that again!” God said. “And just to make sure that I won’t forget if ever I am tempted, I’ll put a rainbow in the sky as a reminder.”  However we handle this in our theology, in our story, even God can learn from a mistake.

We, of course, don’t have Noah’s excuse.  We know our responsibility to protest.  We Protestants should be good at it.  It’s in our bones.  And it’s in our prayer.  The first four petitions that we make in the Lord’s Prayer are demands for justice.  Jesus did not bring the community of his followers into being in order to teach us to be bystanders in a world where awful things happen.

I think maybe Noah figured that out, belatedly.  Did you know that he was the Bible’s first wine maker?  He was also the Bible’s first drunk.  I wonder if he drank to forget the time when he stood between the world and a terrible injustice and responded by keeping his mouth shut and doing “everything that God commanded him.”  If we tell the story of Noah and the flood, let’s tell it as a reminder never to that again, never again to face injustice with silence. 

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