GOD’S GRIEF AND GOD’S GRACE
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Text: Genesis 6:5 – 9:17
Who knew that the beloved story of Noah and his ark is actually such a confusing collection of texts from a variety of sources? These are barely woven together into a single story spread out over four chapters in the beginning of the book of Genesis, first written down in the time of the Babylonian exile. Not only do we have material from the Yahwist and Priestly sources of Hebrew scripture, we have an even older tale based largely on a Babylonian myth with touches of Canaanite religion thrown in to add a little color. How anyone could read this loosely integrated concoction and argue for biblical literalism is beyond me.
Did it rain for forty days or 150? Both figures are given. Were there just single pairs of critters in the ark or were there seven pairs of clean animals and single pairs of unclean? Both are reported. And how the heck did Noah get all those animals, birds, and supplies, along with his extended family, on a boat that was 437 feet long, 73 feet wide, and 44 feet tall? Then were they cooped up in the boat for 40 days and nights plus 3 weeks or were they there one year and 10 days? Both are recorded here. And either way, how did the supplies last long enough to feed them all without refrigeration? As someone quipped in Bible study, it’s no wonder the dinosaurs became extinct.
Beyond the obvious, there are also questions about whether or not Noah knew what was coming. Did he build the ark because God told him that God was flooding the earth as one version indicates or did he build in complete faith and blind trust without knowing what God intended, which is also offered here? Did God act in capriciousness or anger or deep disappointment? If it was humanity that had messed up, why did God destroy every living thing? And if every living thing not on the ark was destroyed, where did that confounded olive branch come from? Oh, and don’t forget, Noah was 601 years old by the time the waters finally subsided.
OK, enough playing with the questions that a literal reading raises. This is a great text of faith. Walter Brueggemann insists that we read this text not as an historical account of what happened in the world, but as a story deeply embedded in the faith tradition of a particular people. It is not at all uncommon for Judaism or Christianity to function in a syncretistic manner vis-à-vis the larger culture in which we are embedded. So we find Christmas and Easter both linked to ancient festivals of winter and spring time, and we find both the story of creation and the story of the flood linked to Babylonian myths. But these links always come with a twist that allows us to claim the older traditions as our own in new and creative ways. Such is the case with today’s text.
One thing we must understand as we approach this or any biblical text, this story is first and foremost God’s story. Humanity may play a major role and the stories are practically all relational ones, but they are all oriented finally toward how we come to experience, know, understand God and God’s will for creation. James Muilenburg said that “To apprehend the significance of biblical persons…we must apprehend the nature of the religious faith which lies within and behind them. They cannot be understood without this faith. The one subject of the Bible is God, and it is only in relation to [God] that the Bible can be understood” (James Muilenburg, “The History of the Religion of Israel,” The Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1, p. 293.)
This primordial tale of the flood is closely linked to the creation story. In fact, if one were to follow closely the older Yahwist source, it would move fairly directly from the beginning of Genesis 2 to Genesis 6. “In the beginning God created…heaven and earth, day and night, sun, moon and stars, oceans, rivers, streams and dry land, every living thing – plants and animals, fish and birds, snakes and human beings.” And the next thing we know, God is disillusioned with creation.
In the Hebrew scripture, there is no god of any sort to match the majesty of Yahweh. As the psalmist sings, “‘Be still and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth’” (Psalm 46:10.) Or as we sang this morning, “Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest, sun, moon and stars in their courses above, join with all nature in manifold witness to [God’s] great faithfulness, mercy and love.” “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.”
However, coupled with God’s greatness is God’s sense of righteousness. God created with purpose and central to that purpose is how creation glorifies its Creator. In today’s text we find God wondering if it was a mistake to create a being in God’s own image with the capacity to imagine and to choose as God does. Peter Leithart tells a tale of the author of “A Mighty Fortress.” He says “Luther contemplated the righteousness of God and recoiled. ‘Love God?’ he wrote years later. ‘Sometimes I hated Him.’” Leithart goes on, “It won’t do to tell Luther not to worry because we’ve discovered that God is cuddly after all. Brother Martin knew his Bible too well to fall for that kind of subterfuge. The God revealed in scripture is a God of flood and fire, whose storm tears down houses built on sand. Luther was right: to speak of the righteousness of God is to speak of judgment” (Peter Leithart, Blogging toward Sunday, Theolog: the Blog of the Christian Century, 5/25/2008.)
Still, God’s sense of righteousness is tempered with goodness. Within the confines of this collected tale, the compilers of the text seem to show a change in the mind and heart of God. Ultimately, God’s is not a harsh and arbitrary judgment. We really bring the judgment on ourselves when we allow ourselves to wander from the God who made us and loves us and really desires to be in close communion with us. Daniel Deffenbaugh says of this passage that “Creation was coming undone…In the time of Noah, the very cosmos was falling apart at the seams due to the corruption of ‘all flesh’; it only took God’s command to finish it off for good” (Daniel Deffenbaugh, “Creation Undone” Seeds of Shalom web site, 2008.) As Cuthbert Simpson argues, “Sin is the result of [human beings] fixing [their] imagination[s] on [themselves], or on some other person or thing short of God” (Cuthbert A. Simpson, “Genesis,” The Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1, p. 538.) In the end, it is sin, that which separates us from the source of our very being, that undoes us and everything around us.
Another unique aspect of this Hebrew spin on the ancient Babylonian tale is God’s love for and care for creation. In the Babylonian myth, the earth is formed in violence when Marduk slays his mother Tiamat, slicing her up to give the earth its shape and create its various elements. It is an act of sheer power and domination, creation from destruction. In the Hebrew account, Yahweh creates not by the sword but by the word, lovingly giving form to the chaos. At the end of each creative day, God sighs in satisfaction, “it is good, very good.” And even in this story of destruction, God grounds the new creation in repentance and compassion. Walter Brueggemann says “This God is not timeless and immune to the flow of human events… The issue of being forgotten is a genuine pastoral issue. Every person knows times of the dark night of being forgotten. In this narrative, the whole creation comes to that time of being forgotten by God as the waters surge. But the gospel of this God is that he remembers. The only thing the waters of chaos and death do not cut through…is the commitment of God to creation” (Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation: a Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, Genesis, p. 85.)
We don’t really know how creation had come to such a state that God wanted to wipe the slate clean. The later Priestly source, which cannot conceive of God acting out of any motivation but righteousness, adds the tales of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, Cain’s jealous murder of his brother, and Lamech’s slaying of “a young man for striking me” (Genesis 4:23) between the creation and the flood. Clearly, from this perspective, humankind had turned away from God and turned its attention to its own petty affairs. The resultant wandering from the Creator was disastrous in itself not only for humanity but for all creation. God is not so much an angry and vengeful tyrant who turns on creation without cause as a grieving creator who decides to do away with a failed creation. Genesis 6, verses 5 and 6 say “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was very sorry he had made humankind on earth, and it grieved him to his heart.”
But wait…there was one, Noah, “a righteous man, blameless in his generation…” Why? Probably because “Noah walked with God.” The point here is that God is not so arbitrary as to destroy the one who is faithful, who lives rightly, who maintains his connection to his Creator. For such a one there must be a means of escape. Brueggemann again says that “Noah regards God’s commands as promises of life…He is a model of faith such as has not yet appeared in the biblical narrative…It is ironic that at the moment of pathos and impending death, embodied faith first appears in the world” (Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation: a Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, Genesis, p. 80.) Here God finds hope for creation after all. And, in the end, God is so moved by the faithful witness of Noah that God vows never again to destroy the earth by flood. He makes a covenant with his servant Noah and seals it by placing his own bow in the sky facing away from the earth. In the end, God is a God of grace and, through Noah, the progenitor of the new creation, that grace is extended to all creation in perpetuity.
Now I know it is a risky thing to focus on this ancient text in the face of the natural disasters that have hit the earth in the past few weeks – the cyclones and earthquakes, tornadoes and wildfires. I do not believe for one minute that God literally sends such storms as punishment for bad behavior. Pat Robertson was wrong; Katrina was not punishment for the immorality of New Orleans. And Sharon Stone was wrong to imply that the earthquake in China was karma for the Chinese conflict with Tibetans. God does not work that way, and, today’s text notwithstanding, never has.
Clearly the origin of this text was an attempt to make sense of some great flood that affected people in the valley of the Tigris or Euphrates Rivers. And just as clearly the compilers of these ancient texts were taking even older stories, passed down though generations of oral tradition, to explain, or at least offer a measure of comfort, to those caught up in the agony of exile from their homeland. The pain of being uprooted and carried away to a foreign city was enough in itself, but it would have been compounded by the gloating of the Babylonians, jeering that their gods were clearly superior to the Hebrew God who could not save his people from defeat and captivity. “By the rivers of Babylon - there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion…For there our captors asked us for songs and our tormentors asked [mockingy?] for mirth…How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” they lamented (Psalm 137: 1, 3-4.)
What have we known of such pain and loss, of such agony and despair? On a global scale our lives may never have been flooded. Oh yes, we have felt the earth quake and smelled the smoke of wildfires. And God has felt our suffering and turned to us with the same compassion she turns toward our sisters and brothers in Myanmar and China and Kansas and Coralitos. Beyond that, she turns her gracious, loving, rainbow presence toward the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, of Darfur and Haiti, the immigrants at our borders and those seeking a better life within our borders. She turns in deep concern toward her rivers and mountains, her oceans and prairies, her seas and skies, her forests and her creatures and she weeps as she looks to us to help her save our planet. In our words of preparation, “The world rests on a graciousness not subject to the waxing and waning of historical initiatives, or even the rising and falling of waters (Walter Brueggemann, Interpretation: a Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, Genesis, p. 86.) Today’s complicated, cobbled together text teaches if nothing else that we serve a God of grieving and a God of grace. May we be faithful, even righteously so, in our allegiance to and our service for such a God. Amen.