Part
2 of the Sermon Series on great stories from the Book of Genesis.
Today—Noah’s Ark. And how wonderful it is to be digging
into the Bible on the day we have our annual Bible Presentation to
our 4th graders. We pray that this gift will further them down a life-long
path of reading and studying the Bible. Parents, grandparents, aunts
and uncles…sit down with your kids, and read their Bible with
them. They need to see that you love and cherish its words of life.
It’s so important to not only give Bibles to each generation
of our fourth-graders, but to nurture familiarity and love of its
content as they grow into maturity as adults and as Christians.
How many of you
brought your Bibles today? I brought the one my grandmother Farris
gave my Dad as he was shipping out in WWII. “To Stephen. May
8, 1943. With all our love.” He credited it with saving his
life the day he was shot down over Italy. I don’t really know
if that was a literally true story, but I do know that it was truly
for him the Word of life. He gave it to me when I was ordained in
the United Methodist Church more than thirty years ago. And it is
for me the Word of life, as it was for him. If you have a special
Bible, tell someone about it at Coffee Hour today following the service.
If we turn again
now to the very first book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis, we will
find the story of Noah’s Ark that we heard Lauren & Colin
read parts of for us. Probably most all of us have some passing acquaintance
with this story, but here’s a quick recap. God became angry
at humankind’s violent ways. He told Noah to build and ark,
a big ship, big enough for his whole family and for 2 of every kind
of animal. It was a really big ship. An aside here—that ark
becomes in religious symbolism the ship of the church and its salvation.
(see stained glass window) And, if you look straight up at the inside
of our ceiling, you’ll see that we are in the inside of a big
ship every time we come into this sanctuary!
Now, that’s
not really my main point today—but remember it, because we’ll
come back to it in the very last sermon in this series when we look
at the story of Moses and midwives. But today our first point is that
Noah was faithful. He believed God when God told him to do this crazy
thing. Good thing. Because we know what happened next. God made it
rain for forty days and forty nights. As I’ve said before, you
always know something important is going on in the Bible when it uses
the number “40.” The Israelites wandered in the desert
for—40 years. Jesus was tempted in the wilderness for –40
days. The number 40 is like a big exclamation point or bold print.
It means—pay attention, reader. This story is important.
And after those
40 days and 40 nights of rain, everything was flooded and washed away.
Noah sent the dove out from the ark and she came back with an olive
branch in her beak and Noah knew that the dry land had emerged again.
And that life could start anew.
Now, before we
go much further here, let me just say, because I promised you last
week that I would, that we need to clear up this question about Noah’s
wife. I’m sorry to report that a careful reading of the text,
in several translations, reveals no conclusive evidence to support
that theory that Noah’s wife was “Joan of Arc”,
as one out of ten Americans purportedly believe. I’ve searched
high and low. I’ve read all the footnotes and annotations. The
Bible gives us the names of the Noah family sons--Shem, Ham and Japheth.
And maybe Mrs. Noah had a name popular in her day that was sort of
like “Joan”, such as Joanna or Judith. But, like so many
women in the Bible, Noah’s wife and the mother of their three
sons has no recorded name. So we’ll have to let Joan of Arc
be the great heroine of 15th c. France, Jeanne d’Arc, and honor
Noah’s nameless wife, the remarkable woman who organized life
on that crazy ark for 40 days and 40 nights, for being the best homemaker
and household manager the world has ever known.
Well anyway, we’ve
got the basics of the story as we know it outlined here. Or as we
think we know it. What happens next actually reveals that there’s
more going on here than meets the eye. You know, a few years ago,
I realized that there were many things about this story I’d
never really considered. It came to me when a good friend of mine
who lives in Australia sent me a card with a painting of Noah’s
Ark. Animals going aboard, two by two. But in the place of the familiar
sheep and lions and giraffes and elephants and so forth were all kinds
of strange Aussie animals: the emus and the wombats, the kangaroos
and the wallabys, the bandicoots and the koalas. All those animals,
too. I’d never thought about it! The ark must have been much
bigger and more complex than I had ever realized.
And that really
is my point this morning. The whole story takes us to insights we’d
never considered before. Because what happens next is really quite
astonishing.
You know that
the flood waters recede, and Noah and his family and all the animals
are so happy to find themselves on dry land once again that Noah leads
them all in the worship of God. They give God thanks and praise. And
all that makes God so happy that God paints a big rainbow across the
sky. The biggest and most beautiful rainbow anyone had ever seen.
And it went clear across the whole sky. And God spoke, just like at
the creation. Because this was a moment of new creation, really. And
God said: this will be the sign of my covenant with you, that I will
never again let the waters destroy the whole of creation. Hallelujah!
But here’s
what’s most amazing. And it was Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his
marvelous book The Dignity of Difference that we read in our Book
Study series who brought this point home for me in recent years.
The covenant God
makes with Noah is a covenant with all the creatures and with all
humankind. The God of the Israelites, Rabbi Sacks asserts, is the
God of ALL humankind. The rainbow goes across the whole of the sky.
All God’s children and all God’s creatures are sheltered
in its span. Within this overarching covenant, God makes the Hebrew
people a special people and gives them a particular way of living
out their faith. The demands asked of the Israelites are not asked
of all people. But that very distinctiveness, Rabbi Sacks maintains,
is not to say that their way is the only way to God. But rather that
their very distinctiveness reveals the diversity of the whole.
As Rabbi Sacks
puts it: “God, the creator of humanity, having made a covenant
with all humanity, then turns to one people and commands it to be
different, [thereby] teaching humanity to make space for difference.
God may at times be found in the human other, the one not like us.”
Now, we will talk
about all this much more through next weekend with our Worship Renewal
guest, Dr. Thomas Thangaraj of the Candler School of Theology at Emory
University. If you’d like to come to the workshop with him on
Saturday, just let me know today. And then you might want to stay
Sunday for our Book Study on his book which he will be leading: Relating
to People of Other Religions—What Every Christian Needs to Know.
After the flood,
God makes a covenant with ALL humanity and sets in the sky the rainbow
as its sign. The Bible account itself reveals to us the wide inclusiveness
of God’s love, for in it we read of many who are clearly loved
by God and important to the story yet who are not themselves Jews.
We read of Melchizedek, not Jewish, yet called “a priest of
the most high God.” We read of Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law,
a Midianite. We read of Tamar and Ruth, one a Canaanite and one a
Moabite. And in the New Testament we read of the Magi, the Three Kings,
Zoroastrians. Again and again in the stories of Jesus, we read of
non-Jews who reveal to us the love of God—like the Good Samaritan—and
the holiness of Jesus—like the Samaritan woman at the well.
These are but a few of the many “others” who are woven
all through the biblical story. They are all part of our family album
that is this book.
It’s amazing,
really. We are an interfaith people from as far back as the first
chapters of Genesis. It shouldn’t surprise us, although I’ll
bet it does, that the Hebrew Scriptures command us once to “love
our neighbor as yourself”, but in no fewer than 36 places are
we commanded to “love the stranger.” This sense of God’s
covenant being for all humanity—no “us” and “them”—wasn’t
any easier to grasp or to live out then than it is now. We always
want to divide the world up into them and us, friend and foe, the
people that matter and the people that don’t, the people we
love and the people we love to hate. But God isn’t doing that.
One covenant. One rainbow. Big enough to embrace us all.
And so we find
ourselves—to go back to our symbolism of the ark and the ship--all
in the same boat. And more than ever on this planet earth, it’s
increasingly obvious to us that we will sink or swim together. As
someone once pointed out: a hole in the boat is a hole in the whole
boat. There are many things making holes in the boat—ethnic
tensions, religious conflict, the disparity between rich and poor,
the use of religion to justify terrorism and war. In such a time as
this, in this world of fear and suspicion and violence, God calls
us to be signs of peace and agents of reconciliation. I firmly believe
that as people of faith, we have a special vocation and calling to
lead the world in embracing diversity. I believe that we have a witness
to make to the fact that we are all created in the image of God, that
we are, in fact, sisters and brothers. And I believe that the future
of our world depends on our leadership and our faithfulness.
It doesn’t
mean that we cannot be different. It does not mean that we must abandon
our deeply-held beliefs. Understanding and respect begin when we reach
to see beyond our differences—when we are, at last, and through
the grace of God, able to see ourselves in “the other”
and “the other” in ourselves. For then we realize that
our common humanity is more important than all our difference and
diversity.
This is the gift
of God’s arc of multi-colored bands, the great rainbow covenant,
binding us all within its lighted glory. Pointing us towards the vision
of the Book of Revelation, the very last book of the Bible, in which
we see the rainbow around the throne of God and the new Heaven and
the new Earth are revealed where God dwells among humankind as their
God and they as God’s peoples, and God is with them to wipe
every tear from their eyes. For death will be no more; mourning and
crying and pain will be no more. And there a great multitude from
every nation, all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before
the throne, singing: “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving
and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!
Amen!
Notes:
Jonathan Sacks.
The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations.
New York: Continuum, 2003.
©Patricia
Farris, 2007. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution.
All other rights reserved.
Noah's
Ark "Who Was In the Ark or Under the Arc?"