Good morning, everyone! My name is JJ, and it is lovely to see you here today.
Today is the first Sunday of lent, which absolutely made me feel like the year is moving very quickly. Lent means different things to different people in this congregation – some of you may pick up a focused study, some may take up a fast or cut something non-food-ish from your lives, and some might not really notice it is happening.
Lent, like advent, is a kind of waiting phase in the church year. But in the same way that easter is a bit more emotionally mixed than Christmas, lent is a bit more mixed than advent. The roguish younger brother to your prince charming. Where advent is joyful eager waiting, lent is penitent, lent is reflection.
In a move that is more serendipitous than calculated, by the end of our lenten waiting, fasting, reflecting, we will have received not only the joy and sorrow of Easter, but a new minister. So today I want to invite us to do some reflecting – to sit in the posture of reflection – as we make the slow trek towards welcoming Hugh and Yoonhee into our community, and prepare to build the next bit of our story together.
For today’s reading, we had the very end of the story of Noah. A story that is old, in itself, a lineage story of the ancient Israelites, but also a story that is likely to be old to many of us – taught in illustrated ‘first bibles’ and Sunday school; built into toys and songs for us to play with in childhood.
Its animal focus tends to get it put in kid’s hands when they’re too young to ask about all the death. But we’re not, so we are going to stop for a second and reflect on that.
Genesis 7:17-24. 17-18 For 40 days the rain poured down without stopping. And the water became deeper and deeper, until the boat started floating high above the ground. 19-20 Finally, the mighty flood was so deep that even the highest mountain peaks were about seven meters below the surface of the water. 21 Not a bird, animal, reptile, or human was left alive anywhere on earth. 22-23 The Lord destroyed everything that breathed. Nothing was left alive except Noah and the others in the boat. 24 A hundred fifty days later, the water started going down.
The lord destroyed everything that breathed.
A bit after that, we get today’s story, where God says: 9 I am going to make a solemn promise to you and to everyone who will live after you. 10 This includes the birds and the animals that came out of the boat. 11 I promise every living creature that the earth and those living on it will never again be destroyed by a flood. 12-13 The rainbow that I have put in the sky will be my sign to you and to every living creature on earth. It will remind you that I will keep this promise forever. 14 When I send clouds over the earth, and a rainbow appears in the sky, 15 I will remember my promise to you and to all other living creatures. Never again will I let floodwaters destroy all life. 16 When I see the rainbow in the sky, I will always remember the promise that I have made to every living creature. 17 The rainbow will be the sign of that solemn promise.
I listened to a podcast this week, where a woman said of the Noah story: ‘you know, the rainbow feels like a bit of a bandaid on top of the gushing wound of God’s violence.’
Taken at face value, taken at what it says, this is a story where the lord destroyed everything that breathed. (Minus the rounding error of Noah’s family and the ark.)
Sometimes there can be an impetus to look at this story and ask questions of history: When could this have happened? Was there a flood around then? Could that flood have covered the whole earth or just an area around where Noah would have been? If it’s 7m above the tallest mountains, is that everest? Modern archeological and scientific advances give us the technical ability to ask and answer questions like that, and sometimes give us the pride to presume we are the first people capable of discerning the true facts of the matter.
And maybe that distracts us, from sitting with a story full of gushing violence.
I would propose, instead of a focus on the history, we consider the historiography. Where history is an event or period and the study of it, and historiography is the study of how history was written, who wrote it, and what factors influenced how it was written. In the case of genesis we may go as far to ask, did the writers of this think of it as history the way we think of history?
So when looking at Noah we can ask: what is this story for? Who is it for?
We know that, as with the rest of genesis, Noah’s story was passed down in a highly conserved oral tradition long before it was written. We know that for the ancient Israelites who did write it down, managed to pass it along for thousands of years more. We know that it described a lineage, that it explained ‘this is where you come from.’ This story only got to us, because people felt it was important.
You may have heard that there is a very similar flood story to that of Noah in other ancient writings, such as the epic of Gilgamesh, which predate the writing of the old testament. Sometimes this is framed as a ‘gochta!” “Throw out the bible – its stolen someone else’s story, it can’t be true”.
That is a critique based on a ‘history’ reading. If we put on our historiographical hats, instead, this might lead us to ask: why did the ancient israelites want to fold an existing story into their lineage?
Some people bristle at this idea. At asking these kinds of questions. And that makes sense.
You might have heard me talk before about brittle belief. Belief that is certain, hard, strong. But it cannot accommodate change. Anything new, any pressure, will make it crack. It is interesting to discover our most brittle beliefs, as we tend to be quite defensive of them. Don’t look into that! Don’t ask questions! You might break it.
For a long time, that was how I felt about being a queer and queer affirming christian. I knew that I needed this to be true, and i didnt want to be asked about it, to have it contested, or even looked at too hard, because I was afraid of what it would mean if I did not believe it.
Brittle beliefs tell us information about ourselves. Often they tell us something we are afraid of. I was afraid that if my clumsily put together arguments in support of homosexuality weren’t True, then it meant I was bad. More specifically, that it meant I was dissapointing to god. I was afraid and ashamed of the idea I may be dissapointing god, and so I built a very strong but brittle shell around myself. And inside that shell I felt vulnerable, squishy like a peeled crab.
Similarly, I think that people can easily have a very brittle belief in the factuality of genesis. It’s how we get new earth creationism, it’s also how we get defensiveness when scholars come out and say that an earlier narrative probably inspired the story of Noah’s ark.
Now, none of those might be your brittle beliefs, like how now days neither are mine. But I wonder if you do have one, somewhere.
The first problem with brittle beliefs is that we will always be wrong about something. But we dont always have to be wrong about everything.
If belief in God, if the value of the gospel, if a moral structure and quest for justice and sense of your own value – if all of these things are dependent on Noah’s Ark being the One True Flood Story, then to be told that there’s an older one in gilgamesh is an attack on the self. And that’s huge. Brittle beliefs create inevitable vulnerability, because everything is hinged so tightly together that one new fact can shake your entire world and self.
And the second weakness of brittle beliefs is that they hide us from all the rest of the questions. When I took a look at myself, and discovered that hiding underneath my beliefs about queerness was my fear of disappointing god, suddenly I could ask new questions – I could poke my head out of my anxious brittle shell.
If Noah’s ark being the One True Flood Story is no longer a foundation upon which all of faith resides, then we can have some interesting follow up questions. We can take a poke at historiography. If Noah is a story built in the ancient Israelite community, then it lets us ask: What did it mean for them? How was it connected to them? How were they connected to it?
Did they choose to make it different from other culture’s flood stories? What do the same-ness-es say? What do the differences say? If we are inclined to reject the Noah story because it is not the one true factual account of a flood, what does that say about us? What does it say about what we think of the ancient Israelites, who put so much work into retaining that story? Who must have found it valuable?
And for us, who have received the Noah story handed down to us in a lineage ourselves, likely in our first childhood illustrated bible – what does it mean to us? How do we feel about the devastation of flood and the covenant of peace?
That’s a lot of questions, so forgive me for a few more.
As we head into our lent, as we head into a new minister, I would like us to think about our stories. Not just the Noah story, or even all the stories of genesis, but the world of stories and history we tell ourselves about ourselves. As individuals, as families, as a Church. What do the stories we tell tell us about ourselves? Are we defining ourselves in opposition to anyone else? Who? Why? Where are our beliefs brittle, and what are we protecting ourselves from?
I am going to leave you with those questions for a moment, before I shift hats and we move into a time of prayer for others.
Please pray with me.
Dear God,
I offer you my heart, Lord God, and I trust you.
We sit with your word, which promises us the truth of you, but not necessarily facts.
Give us peace, to soothe our fears and anxieties. Where we defensively reach for the brittle shell to protect our vulnerable softness, place your gentle hand there instead.
In this time of lent, give us the space to reflect upon you, and push us to take it.
The world you have created is full of harm. We are inundated with images and messages of violence. Sometimes we may long for a reset, a restart, to have the world washed anew like Noah. Let us see your rainbow as a promise for us as well, that we shall not force a clean slate with violence. Sit with the part of us that sees pain done and wishes to respond with further pain. Sit with those in power, those with the power to enact violence at a scale far beyond ours. May our hearts be soft, may your mercy reign. May there be true peace that does permit the rot of injustice, or come at the cost of violence.
Amen