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Sunday March 9,
2003
1st Sunday
in Lent
Genesis 6:5-8,7:1-10,
9:8-16, Mark 1:9-15
Continuing Testament
: “Anyone can become angry -
that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right
degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right
way - this is not easy.” Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
Would you fill in the blank for me in this sentence? “One of the issues
I struggle with most as a Christian is __________?” Today marks the 1st Sunday of Lent,
the time when we Christians take a long, hard look at our faith
and how we live our daily lives, what our relationship with God/Jesus
is and how we can more fully live what we say we believe. The issues
you’ve mentioned form the crux of the work we’ll take on over the
next 40 days, ending with Easter. The tradition of the church is
to use Lent and some spiritual exercises like prayer and fasting
and study and the giving up of certain things as a kind of fitness
regime to get our souls into shape; to repent of our sins and turn
to God for a new way of living. Our sermons for next 7 weeks are
going to focus on how we deal with issues such as anger, power,
money, sex, greed and forgiveness as faithful people.
The first story that gets us on track is Noah and the Flood. This
story is near and dear to my heart because my first major dramatic
role was as one of the ravens in our church choir production of
Benjamin Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde.” I was about 8 years old and
got to wear black tights, a leotard and a very heavy big-beaked
headdress while flying around the sanctuary on the shoulders of
one of the high school boys. There’s nothing like a little experiential
learning to stamp things in your memory. While Noah, the ark, its
pairs of animals and the rainbow have become popular figures for
nursery decorating and children’s toys and books, I was impressed
by the drowning scenes I rehearsed for weeks
on end. This story wasn’t all sweetness and light. People died. Worse,
to my young mind, innocent animals died! Can you remember your earliest
hearing of this story? What’s
the message you remember?
I haven’t paid much attention to this story as an adult because I
haven’t had occasion to preach on it for a number of years. But
preparing for this sermon and rereading the story while listening
to the news about the probable war with Iraq, the continuing violence
and drug abuse in Baltimore, the charges of corruption against business
leaders like the executives of Maryland’s largest health insurer, CareFirst,
I was struck by its parallel with current events! It’s a good thing
God made that promise to Noah or we’d all be pulling out the life
rafts about now.
This story marks a turning point for the newly created earth. Just
a few short chapters after having created the world and calling
it good, God looks down on human beings only to find them so evil
that God declares, “ I am sorry that I ever made them.” This
wasn’t the momentary frustration of a weary parent. These were the
words of a creator was angry enough to believe that the only solution
seemed to be wiping the slate clean and starting over again!
2)
Main-line church folks often comment that the difference they see
between the God of the “Old” Testament and the “New” Testament is
that the OT God is angry and vengeful while the
NT presents a compassionate, benevolent deity. Perhaps nowhere
is that first image so clear as here. God is angry. And that anger
at the corruption of human beings is so deep, so extreme that God
decides to “blot out” all life on earth. This isn’t an act of spontaneous
rage. God’s fury simmers through the search for the one man, Noah,
who was “righteous in his time.” God took more time to give Noah
a set of blueprints for a boat, telling him to get busy building
then fill it with his immediate family and two of every animal he
could find. Only when Noah had finished all these tasks
did God’s anger reach its boiling point. And that’s when the rain
fell and the flood came. The water wasn’t bad if you were a fish
but it spelled the end of the land-lubbers. The Hebrew translation
reads, “And all flesh that stirred on earth perished; birds, cattle, beasts,
and all the things that swarmed upon the earth, and all mankind.
All in whose nostrils was the merest breath of life…died. All existence
on earth was blotted out…” (Gen. 7:21-23, New JPS Tanakh)
God’s anger was like anger of the women prisoners in the Broadway
musical/movie “Chicago.” Roxie Hart, Velma Kelly and 4 other women
sing their stories of murdering a husband, boyfriend or lover after
having been betrayed. Their anger isn’t just indignation over having
been humiliated. It’s heart-break at relationships broken by a liar,
a cheat, an abuser. Like those women, God committed a crime of passion
with the flood. But where the refrain to the women’s chorus is,
“He had it coming, yes he deserved it!”, God is appalled by the
destruction She/He has commanded. “It was awful, make no mistake
about it,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor in her sermon “Refreshing
God’s Memory.”
“ We focus on Noah
and his zoo because they survived, but no one nothing else did.
The cleansing was complete. The destruction
was total, and when the waters subsided it was like Hurricane
Andrew had encircled the entire globe. God had willed it, but the
result was so devastating that God willed never again to do such
a thing. ‘ I establish my covenant with you,’ God said to
Noah when it was all over, ‘ that never again shall flesh be cut
off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood
to destroy the earth.’ As a sign of the covenant, God set a rainbow
in the clouds - not to jog Noah’s memory but to jog God’s own. ‘
When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember, ‘ God
said, and the creation was back on dry land.”
(pg. 30, Gospel Medicine)
Anger is one of the most passionate responses we humans have. It’s
a natural and valid response to threat or danger or injustice…until
it’s left unchecked. Anger has fueled remarkable powers like the
Civil Rights movement and anti-war protests. But it also corrupts
power and distorts thinking. Adolph Hitler and Ku Klux Klan lynch
mobs are glaring examples. It’s what we do with the emotion that matters.
In his book Emotional Intelligence, Dr. Daniel Goleman reflects
on Aristotle’s quote. “ In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s
enquiry into virtue, character and the good life, his challenge
is to manage our emotional life with intelligence.
3)
Our passions, well exercised, have wisdom; they guide our thinking,
our values, our survival. But they can easily go awry, and do so
all too often. As Aristotle saw, the problem is not with emotionality,
but with the appropriateness of emotion and its expression. The
question is, how can we bring intelligence to our emotion - and
civility to our streets and caring to our communal life?”
Perhaps God asked those questions as the waterlogged remnants of creation
floated by. Perhaps that’s what prompted the rainbow and the promise
never again to destroy the earth.
Taylor Brown comments;
“The story of the flood is not a story about a change in humankind. It is a story about a
change in God, who swears off retribution as a way of dealing with
creation and chooses a relationship instead. From now on God will
not repay betrayal with betrayal. From now on, God will not let
sorrow lead to killing. (God) will bind
(Godself) to creation in peace, promising to be with it although
it will wound (God.) So be it. With this , remarkable covenant,
God choose to ally (Godself) with the cantankerous creation whatever
the cost. If there is pain in the world, then God will share it.
Never again will God protect (Godself) by killing off those who
have caused it. God’s promise to them is life not death… Of course
bad things continue to happen to us, but this covenant is our assurance
that none of them is rooted in God’s ill will toward us. God is
our ally, not our enemy.” (pg. 32)
Jesus came to reinforce that message, to be yet another sign of the
covenant, to give another living example of emotional intelligence
and spiritual maturity. But he also reminds us of our heritage.
You and I are the children of God and we
are now responsible for using our energies to create and promote
peace, to bring hope and healing to the world. We receive the gift
and we pass it on.
The story of Noah and the Flood is a cautionary tale! “All in whose
nostrils is the merest breath of life” again are threatened with
death because our anger is unchecked, not channeled wisely, not
manifest intelligently! Even after the flood we haven’t learned. We
continue to break God’s heart by refusing to be partners with God
or with each other. And friends, we’re back on the ark. Only this
time its a little bit bigger but still fragile, the ark called earth.
But this beautiful globe is in danger of being blotted out because of
our sinfulness -whether its conspicuous consumption of resources,
pollution that kills off animals and eco-systems, or war that takes
human lives. The last is the threat that weighs on so many of hearts
right now.
God needed that rainbow as a reminder. And we do too. Its a sign of
the futility of violence as a way to solve problems and a sign of
God’s hope that we’ll learn a new,
life-giving way; the way of love lived by Jesus.
Please click any
of the following links to view the other Sermons:
Anger
Harmony
Godmom
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