A sermon preached by Lee Cheek, Lay Preacher at St. James & St. George Churches, Lent 1B 2-26-12
From the time I was a little girl, my dad had several stock phrases that peppered his conversations. He was widely known as a practical joker which was kind of a nice balance to his day job as the county juvenile parole officer. He often poked fun at himself, so when he greeted someone, he would point to his bald head and say, “I used to tell people ‘grass doesn’t grow on a busy street’ until someone told me it doesn’t grow on a doorknob, either.”
When I was preparing this sermon, I was reminded of another phrase that became his favorite during the last decade of his life. It went like this: “The Man Upstairs is in charge and I’m sure glad I’m not because I would make a mess of it!”
Sometimes I could hear the self-criticism in his inflection, but most times I heard a cheerfulness (and relief) in his conviction that there was someone more capable than he of holding together the threads of human society.
Dad was well acquainted with human mess-making, both his own and that of others. As a young sergeant in the army corps of engineers, he was horrified when he arrived at Dachau shortly after its liberation, even after having spent the previous two years ferrying live soldiers across the rivers of Europe and picking up the dead ones on the way back. Later, his work brought him into daily contact with violence-torn families in rural Arkansas.
A flood, as in Noah’s story (and older versions such as Gilgamesh) is a poetic way of speaking of human mess-making which begins with desire (often tinged with resentment) for an object or acclaim possessed by another, intensifying competition, seizure of the object (possibly by elimination of the rival), and revenge for what has been taken. If these events are not managed carefully at their different stages, violence accumulates and spreads like flood-waters that will destroy everything in its path.
Archaic communities survived such crises by channeling the violence in a single direction—on to someone whom everyone could agree was guilty of all the trouble. Ideally, someone who was a little different and easy to isolate.
The accused, in truth, was a victim, not the perpetrator, who became a human sacrifice which served to return calm to the community. Violence to cure violence.
The book of Genesis is a collection of stories about the theological origins of a particular group of Semitic peoples whose God Yahweh enabled them to recognize the victim as innocent, such as in the story of Joseph. Over the years Yahweh would give them two other ways to keep peace among them: the practice of animal sacrifice and its attendant rituals that would regularly siphon off any accumulated violence, and the law that managed the behavior that would lead to such a crisis. These more merciful and just solutions are seen in the stories of Abraham and Isaac and Moses.
Though accurate dating is impossible, the version of the Noah story we read today is ascribed to writers of the Priestly tradition who lived in the 5th century BCE, in the period after the return of the Jewish exiles from captivity in Babylon. The story portrays Noah as the one human who says Yes! to God’s desire to wipe violence from the face of the earth and yet save a righteous remnant of humans for a new beginning.
The ark then is the image of God’s laws of mercy and justice, carefully constructed to be sturdy enough to keep the last people alive, safe from any future flood of violence. Noah’s Yes! is his trust in following God’s instruction, which would bring him to safety and a new creation where God never destroys. The Babylonian exiles, by their Yes! to God’s laws of mercy and justice, were safely returned to their homeland.
From the perspective of the newly returned Babylonian exiles, the story is a reassuring and hopeful theological reflection of a people whose world had indeed been destroyed by the corruption of the human heart—not only the cruelty of their conquerors but their own lack of mercy and justice that the prophets warned would herald their demise.
God’s unequivocal and binding covenant with Noah represented exiled Israel’s opportunity to start over with the God who loved them and brought them to safety. Whenever they saw the bow hung in the sky like a rainbow, they would remember that God would remember his promise to never start the world over without them. There would always be safety in the ark of God’s laws.
Five hundred years later, we meet John and Jesus on the banks of the Jordan River at a time of unrest in the land under Roman occupation. If we look closely we are struck by something similar to Noah’s story.
“And just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart.”
What John offers to Jesus as a purity rite, Jesus experiences as the occasion to surrender—to trust and say Yes!--to a fulfillment, a kind of filling out, of the spirit of God’s laws of mercy and justice which always pointed the way to self-giving compassion, forgiveness and love of others including enemies, and the absolute refusal of retribution. This Way of Love would be the new ark, the new vessel of safety for humanity’s survival of its violent and dangerous waters.
So Jesus emerges from the waters into a new creation of open heavens—safe as Noah in his ark emerging to God’s new creation of undestroyed earth. But Jesus, unlike Noah, emerges with a new identity: the Beloved Son, Love’s first son.
But of course, no one on the shore that day would have seen anything like Mark described. This story—or for that matter, any story about Jesus—would and could only have been written after his post-resurrection appearances described by Matthew and Luke.
You see, even his closest friends who had been with him daily for three years did not really understand his teachings of the ways of Love because they—as the gospels honestly point out-- they thought they were in charge of making things turn out like God wanted.
But only after they had those peculiar experiences of being ever so casually greeted by a dead man (“Greetings!”), a dead man now alive who only wanted to love them, and who wanted to make sure they knew they were forgiven for their abandonment, betrayal and disbelief—only after being met by someone they thought would love them the least, did they finally understand that when evil is not repaid with evil, Love will survive even death.
Jesus’ mission—Love’s mission—had succeeded in exposing the lie since the foundation of the world that violence cures violence. Only love survives in the end. Love is in charge after all is said and done.
Can you imagine their desire to say Yes! to Love and Love’s ways?
Can you imagine their joy to be able to surrender to what Love would ask of them?
They were on fire to tell the world the extraordinary good news that
Love really is in charge after all and there is nothing, absolutely nothing that we can do to negate that.
Now, today, I ask you, can you imagine what this church—any church--might be like if we began to understand our real vocation in the world as awakening the desire to trust that Love is in charge?
Can you imagine what this church might be like if we were to wholeheartedly embrace Love’s “mission possible” of subversive tenderness toward each other and toward each person we meet in a day?
Think of it: if we embraced our identity as a band of crazy, mystical secret agents who really do desire to give it all up for Love, might we not see Sunday mornings as the time when we get together for a banquet and let Love have a big laugh at how we’ve messed things up the previous week?
Oh, would that we could come to embrace the hilarity and the pathos of it all!
This embrace of both pathos and, well, mirth are beautifully reflected in a little poem by a joy-filled, mystical lover of God and creation who said Yes! to giving it all up for the sake of Love.
As a Roman Catholic archbishop to Recife, one of Brazil’s poorest districts, Dom Helder Camara stood up to Brazil’s military dictatorship to champion human rights by linking the gospel to human liberation. Here it is:
When I stand before customs-officers and police-commissioners,
I smile mischievously, for no one detects
the divine contraband, the stowaway,
whose highly discreet presence is visible
only to angels’ glances.[i]
What is so utterly delightful here is that Dom Camara becomes the ark! I leave the rest to your imagination.[ii]
AMEN.
[i] Quoted in Dorothee Soelle: The Silent Cry (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), p. 292.
[ii] The preacher is gratefully indebted to the following authors for much of her sermon: James Alison (The Joy of Being Wrong and online article, “The Portal and the Halfway House, http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts/eng66.html); Anthony Bartlett (Virtually Christian); René Girard (Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World).
The woodcut of De Kaste Noe is from Martin Luther: Enchiridion piarum precationum : cum calendario & passionali, ut uocant &c. (Wittenberg, 1560), courtesy of the Digital Image Archive, Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University http://www.pitts.emory.edu/dia/woodcuts.htm
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