Recovering Noah

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, September 19, 2010

The Bible is not a children’s book.  It is full of R-rated, even X-rated, adult fare, and when we tell it to our kids, we have to cherry-pick and gloss over and tiptoe around 90% of it.

Take the story of Noah, for example.  Lots and lots of people think they know the Noah story because of what they were told when they were little:  man builds ark, man fills ark with pairs of animals, man survives flood in ark, man lives happily ever after.  But there’s more to the story that is totally inappropriate for children.

Would you tell your little kids that the story involves a God that was so uncaring that God chose to drown every living thing on earth except for one man and his family and a few lucky animals?  Would you tell your little kids that the story involves a parent who chooses among his kids and says one will be blessed, one will be beholden to the other, and one will bear children that will be enslaved generation after generation? 

Would you tell your little kids that this guy who built the ark became the first drunk and was found “uncovered” by his children?  These are not appropriate topics, in my parental opinion, for smaller children, and so we tell them this particular Bible story without getting into such lurid details.  But that shouldn’t be where we stop developing as human beings. 

If you remain a child holding onto the children’s version of the story and as an adult never address the deeper questions raised by this story;  if you don’t come to this whole story as an adult with an adult sensitivity, then you won’t realize that with all the other stuff that’s going on, this is essentially a story that says:  it is up to each and every one of us imperfect, unprepared mere human beings to save the rest of humanity and the world every day.

But let‘s back up and begin at the beginning.  The Noah narrative is in the sixth chapter to the ninth chapter of the first book of the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament.  It comes after the creation of the world, after Adam and Eve leave the Garden of Eden, after Cain kills Abel, and after a bunch of begats and begots and husbands knowing wives and such.  This is still the beginning of Genesis, though, before Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, before Isaac and Jacob and Esau, before Rebekah and Dinah, before Moses - which I guess must seem a little odd because Moses supposedly wrote the first five books of the Bible, even the part in Deuteronomy where he dies and is buried by God.

Right there we’ve gotten to a problem:  this text makes no sense when you try to use it as history.  Plenty of people have tried through the centuries to mash what the text says into what we know from history and archeology.  They still try.  But it should be clear that this text is not history in any modern sense;  it is, however, the history of the human struggle to make sense of the difficulties of life.  And just because it is not a chronological account of actual events doesn’t, in my opinion, make it any less important or any less sacred as a body of work.

If you read the first chapters of Genesis, you may note that the name used for God dances back and forth in the English version between God and the Lord (or Lord God).  This is no translation anomaly;  it is this way in the English version because the Hebrew moves back and forth between Elohim and Yahweh.  As it turns out, this is no anomaly, either:  when you look closely, it is apparent that the finished product is a composite of at least two and maybe four authors or sets of authors.

It is in the Noah narrative near the end of chapter 6 and beginning of 7 that the stitching of the stories becomes obvious.   (Short digest - remember the children’s moment.)  Listen.  (Gen 6:19 thru 7:3)  You hear there the two stories stacked together - the first section using the name Elohim and the second Yahweh, the first ordering a pair of each and every animal, the second a more confusing count by sevens and twos.

Another thing to remember:  If the separate pieces of the narrative seem to have their own distinct origins, the overall story cleaves to a raft of other flood stories floating about in near-east cultures of the day.  The best known, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is a Mesopotamian poem about the heroics of one Gilgamesh who seeks to learn the meaning of life from the immortal flood god, Utnapishtim.  The Epic of Gilgamesh likewise borrows from earlier myths and folk tales.  We humans seem to have an insatiable urge to pass along wisdom in the form of re-appropriated stories.  Which is what we’re doing today.

If the flood portion of the story is common knowledge in our culture, the rest of the story may be less so.  Three items in particular, all from chapter 9:  the covenant God makes with Noah and his offspring;  Noah’s shameful behavior after getting drunk;  and the blessing and cursing by Noah of his sons.

First, the covenant.  You’ll recall that the character of God - it helps to always remember that in this text, God is always a character;  this is a set of stories and the entity called God is one of the characters - the character of God makes several covenants with his people.  The Noahic covenant comes in Genesis 9 after God kills all of Creation except for Noah;  God says the rainbow will be the sign that God will never again kill all of Creation.  The Abrahamic covenant is that God will bless Abraham and his descendants and make of them “a great nation.”  The Mosaic covenant is the covenant with the people of Israel.  The Davidic covenant is that the Kingdom of Israel will last forever (I’m not sure that one’s still in force).  And God’s New Covenant in Jeremiah reiterates the previous covenants with Israel, but is seen by Christians as foreshadowing the coming of Jesus.  The second item from the story of Noah is his getting drunk and getting naked in his tent.  After the flood, Noah settles down with his family and starts keeping animals and tending vineyards.  As the first vintner, perhaps he could be excused for not knowing the effects that too much wine might have on a person.  As the first vintner, he also becomes the first drunk.  In many contexts, this would be shameful enough, but Noah takes it one step further:  he passes out in his tent where he is seen naked by his son Ham.  (Gen 9:20-23)

The stories in this text are old, ancient, prehistoric in any modern sense of the meaning of history.  The Exodus of the Hebrews from enslavement in Egypt might have taken place - if it occurred at all, which many scholars say is open to question - in about 1250 BCE.  The Noah story supposedly happened before that, so we’re talking about more than three thousand years ago.  We can’t even imagine what it was like to be alive a hundred years ago much less 3000.  We can read these stories, but we can never, ever put ourselves back in this place, so some of the things they talk about we are never, ever going to understand like they would have.  Why seeing your parents naked is such a cultural taboo, we can’t know for sure.  Oh, we can speculate.  It may have some of that eww! factor, but we can’t understand why it was such a big deal in that day and time.  We can only project our own phobias onto the canvass of the narrative, and lots of people do, suggesting that Noah’s drunkenness means he turned evil in his old age, or accusing Ham of lingering just a little too long gazing upon his dad and thereby loosing the sin of homosexuality onto the world.  I’ve read commentaries that say such things, but I’m not willing to let them define my religion for me.

The third item in Genesis chapter 9:  the blessing and cursing of Noah’s sons.  (Read Gen 9 24-27)  After Ham sees Dad in his tent and comes out to tell the brothers all about it, the brothers do a lot of fancy footwork to cover him back up - maybe this is the beginning of his “re-covery.”  Noah then awakes to discover his shame (whatever that is in his day and time) and takes it out on his kids big-time (before they get into recovery and when they’re first there, drunks do that sometimes).  The hung-over Noah blesses Shem and all his descendants, he says Japheth’s descendants will live with Shem’s, and he curses Ham’s descendants to be servants of servants, or slaves.  These are the verses used time and again in the last four hundred years to legalize the enslavement of Africans and to justify racism in all its forms.

This last is a dangerous misinterpretation and misapplication of the biblical text.  The fact that Noah cursed his son Ham into slavery does not mean that this is how God intended us to treat each other then or now.  It is not as if God wrote these words in the King’s English and handed them out as a rulebook to be obeyed every jot and tittle.  It means, rather, that slavery must have existed when these stories were first being told, and this little piece of the Noah story is a way of explaining the origins of slavery.  To turn this explanation of origins around and use it as justification for perpetrating evil is, in fact, evil itself.

So this is not a simple flood story the way we tell it to our kids.  It is a more complicated story, of complicated events that have been further complicated by their misinterpretations and misapplications down through the ages.  It would not be appropriate to tell the full story to our little children.  But neither is it appropriate for us to disregard it simply because it’s complicated.

 

I want to leave you today with two observations I take from the Noah story.

Observation number one:  God chose Noah - drunken, broken Noah.  Regardless of Noah’s imperfections, God chose him to save humanity and to carry on. 

Whether or not you’d use that kind of ‘God’ language, the point of the story is still true.  Whether you are a Bible-believing Christian or an avowed atheist, a secular Hindu or a practicing Buddhist, you are Noah.  You are broken.  But you are called.  As I said earlier:  it is up to each and every one of us imperfect, unprepared mere human beings to save the rest of humanity and the world every day.  You’re not alone, but you are chosen, and you do have a responsibility.

If that’s hard to hear this morning, here’s observation number two:  Noah was stuck on an ark surrounded by kids and animals and in-laws, only some of whom he liked.  Some days life on that ark must have stunk - literally and figuratively.  Some days, life on this ark stinks.  But there are others here, and they can be here for you, and you can be here for them.  We’re in this together.  You are not alone.

 

If the Bible is not a children’s book, if the story of Noah is not a children’s story, there are still truths there that we must teach our children when they are ready:

that some days it will feel as if the rain will never stop and you will feel adrift at sea like Noah, no land in sight, not knowing where you’re going, and not knowing what will happen next;

that it’s not the heroes who save the world but the broken and the imperfect and the unprepared among us who are called by God or Goddess or the Ground of All Being or the Universe to save the world everyday; 

and that some days life will stink, but you are not alone.

 

So may it be.