Soul Force

Flooded Out!

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

November 16, 2008

The story of Noah and the flood as told in Genesis has an extraordinary resonance. It’s about the animals, of course, especially for children; it’s about punishment for the wicked and salvation for the righteous; it’s about something that echoes in the ancient myths told by almost every civilization of the world; it speaks with particular urgency when devastating floods happen, as they do with almost too much regularity. Modern retellings of the story typically emphasize one aspect or another and often elide the full breadth of the story. Thus, last year’s film Evan Almighty features Steve Carell – perhaps better known from The Office and Saturday Night Live – as Congressman Evan Baxter, who, for no apparent reason, receives a call to build an ark from – Morgan Freeman, actually, who bears a striking resemblance to at least his own notion of God. In this story, it’s not the wickedness of all the earth that’s being punished but the wickedness of one particular congressman, who is intent on developing the national parks and who ultimately gets his comeuppance when a dam which has allowed the building of an idyllic community bursts and brings a tidal wave through, lifting Evan’s ark and propelling it right to the steps of the Capital; left unexplained is why all the animals needed to be on the ark, but you do have to have animals to have a good ark story.

Then there’s David Maine’s recent recounting of the story in The Preservationist, which takes great pains to consider what happens to the characters of the story. From the account in Genesis we don’t know if Noah said a word to his neighbors about the impending catastrophe, though later traditions attribute a fervent round of preaching to him – jeremiads, if you will, such as our puritan forebears were inclined toward on election days and at other times. Here’s how David Maine imagines one interaction; Noe goes out to see the crowd of people gathered around in curiosity over the odd spectacle of an ark growing before their eyes:

Finally a short, thin man, so small that Noe had taken him for a child, speaks up.— We came to see your labor. You've grown quite famous, you know.

Some smirks at this among the crowd. A reedy-voiced, cross-eyed teenager calls out, It's not every day you see a ship growing in the desert.

Noe can barely restrain his trembling.—I have been called. — Yeah, you been called lots of things, the boy says.

Everyone laughs.

—Have you forgotten God then? demands Noe.

A small-boned woman, curly-haired and pretty, steps before Noe.—Look around, old man. Seems to me that God has forgotten you.

—That's not true, Noe says petulantly.

—God threw Adam out of Paradise for eating an apple. Or so your story says. Does that sound like someone you should put your faith in?

More laughter, much nodding.[1]

Or this, from Ilya, Noe’s daughter-in-law, unnamed in Genesis:

Men are so amusing. Show them a pack of wolves, dominated by the males, and they will say, See? It is natural for men to rule. Fine. But produce a beehive, controlled by the queen, with males used for menial labor, and they protest, Human beings are not insects. Yes, well.[2]

Or what could Noah’s wife have thought? Perhaps this:

So when Himself starts with the visions and the holy labors and the boat full of critters, what am I supposed to do? Talk sense? Ask questions he can't answer, like, How do you propose to keep the lions from eating the goats? Or us for that matter? No thanks. I just fuss with the stew and keep my thoughts stitched up in my head where they belong. Long ago I quit asking questions.[3]

As I say, there are endless variations on this story. In fact, there are two variations in Genesis alone. Biblical scholars determined several centuries ago that the story we now read is actually a mixture of stories told by two traditions in Israel which we can disentangle in part because the writers used different names for God. In fact, disentangling this particular story helped scholars to understand that we hear as many as four distinct strands of tradition – themselves drawn in turn from earlier oral traditions – in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. We read a translation of one version of the story this morning, this one attributed the Priests who probably put the story in writing over a thousand years after they believed the flood had happened – hence the ‘P’ version.

But I keep getting stuck on the state of humankind at the beginning of the story; as our translation from the reading this morning puts it:

This is the story of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, the one blameless man in that age. Noah walked with God…. And the earth was exceedingly corrupt and filled with violence. And when God saw how corrupt the earth was and how corrupt humankind had become on the earth, God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to humankind, for the earth is filled with violence because of them: I am going to blot them out from the earth….”[4]

The King James Version of the Bible includes this even more striking image of what’s gone wrong:

[Gen 6:5-6] And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

Great wickedness; every thought evil! Strong words; and more than that, God regrets having created human beings in the first place. It would seem that God has made a mistake, if you can believe that. If God is really all-knowing, how could God make a mistake, after all? Ah, yes, that old free will again! Give human beings the power to make their own decisions and they’ll decide wrong, it seems. Here’s another retelling of that part of the story, this by David Bumbaugh, long mister of the UU congregation in Summit, NJ, now professor of UU History at Meadville/Lombard, our seminary in Chicago, from his book The Education of God:

One fine April morning, on a sudden whim, God leaned over the ramparts of heaven, making a quick check on the world he had fashioned. Everything seemed to be as it ought to be: A billion stars sparkled brightly, dotting dark, immeasurably vast space…. All was in motion—regular, orderly, predictable motion….

God leaned over the ramparts of heaven, checking on the glory of his creation, deeply satisfied with what he saw.

"A place for everything, everything in its place," said God to himself (creating the world's first cliché).

Even seeming disorder was ordered and appropriate when viewed from a great distance.

"There is nothing more satisfying," said God to herself, "than a well-made machine, functioning as it was intended to function." ….

[And then God noticed earth, “a fly speck off in the corner of the universe.” She remembered that whole unpleasant business of Adam and Eve and the serpent in the garden – something about an apple or some fruit or other. She put on her glasses and brought her bifocals to bear.]

"My, how things have changed," thought God. "The last time I was there they were simple farmers, barely scratching an existence from the soil. Now the place is all built up: cities everywhere, suburban tracts devouring forests and fields, asphalt highways, like the web of some monstrous spider, linking place to place. And the sky, my beautiful, sky-blue sky! I spent ages getting just the right shade, adjusting the angle of the light as it passed through small particles in the atmosphere; now it is stained a greasy gray.

"Something has gone wrong," thought God. "It isn't what I had planned," said God.

"Maybe it is time for a tour of inspection," decided God.

In a twinkling, disguised as an old man with a long, white beard, dressed in a flowing white robe, God found himself upon Earth. Close up, things were even worse. The air smelled so foul God could scarcely breathe. The landscape was littered—trash and beer cans, paper and garbage everywhere. And the noise—machines clanged, people shouted, harness clattered.

Making a note to himself to institute a bottle and can return law and a noise ordinance, God put his hands over his ears, stepped into the street, and was almost run down as a galloping horse pulling a speeding chariot raced down the street, swerving from side to side, driven by a driver whose curse left Almighty God's ears ringing.

Wherever God went the situation was worse.

"Where are my animals?" thought God…. What happened to the variety I planned for this world?"

God soon discovered the answer: except for those useful to man, God's vast menagerie was hidden away in remote corners of the world, clinging to life, or had perished utterly.

"And Man and Woman," thought God, "I made them caretakers of this place. What have they done to it? The cities are filled with every imaginable vice—and some vices even I never imagined. Murder and violence everywhere, profound disrespect for my world, my creation.

"It is too much," thought God. "It really hasn't worked out."

"I hate to admit a mistake; mistakes are not consistent with omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and all that. But this is clearly a mistake," said God. "I must do something about it before these miserable creatures spread like a contagion throughout my universe."[5]

Now there’s an account of wickedness I could begin to get my arms around. In fact, it seems to me we see something like that regularly if we read or watch the news too obsessively.

But let’s return to the story in Genesis. One commentator notes that a careful reading of the preceding chapter, a long genealogy replete with begats and lengths of days, reveals that Noah is the first human born after the death of Adam – until his birth, no human beings except Abel – slain by his brother Cain – have died. So Noah knows that he, too, is mortal, and perhaps that is why he is said to be “righteous in his generation.” Noah also listens when God speaks; in fact, he is not recorded as saying a single word until after the flood, when he curses one of his grandsons and blesses his other sons. He was a simple, obedient man, and he “walked with God.” Whatever God told him to do, however odd it seemed, he did it without apparent complaint. He was, in short, obedient.

If one believes in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, then the story of Noah and the Ark has to be taken literally, and indeed demonstrating the plausibility of the story is something of a cottage industry among creation “scientists.” I recently received an email from a relative which tells the story of a man who built a full-scale model of the ark to demonstrate that the story is in fact plausible. Actually, investigations to prove or disprove the story were a significant factor in the development of science in the nineteenth century, especially in the fields of geology, zoology, botany, and linguistics. Unfortunately for Biblical literalists, those studies showed that the diversity of the animal kingdom was too great to have occurred in the supposed amount of time since the flood and that the sedimentary layers of the earth are far, far older than the Biblical account suggests. The dimensions of the ark also exceed those of any wooden vessel which has been seaworthy – though perhaps the recently constructed model will yield new nautical engineering results.

The other discovery we have made in the last several centuries is that flood stories are nearly universal, and that many civilizations from China to the Americas, from Africa to Northern Europe, have similar flood stories with heroes who built some form of refuge – boats, caves, magical reeds – and thereby saved themselves and their families. One fundamentalist web site takes it as a given that the historical truth of the story of Noah is proven by the fact that it is referred to by Jesus and elsewhere in the New Testament, and deals with that variety of accounts from other traditions in this way:

Traditions of the Deluge are found among all the great divisions of the human family; and these traditions, taken as a whole, wonderfully agree with the Biblical narrative, and agree in such a way as to lead to the conclusion that the Biblical is the authentic narrative, of which all these traditions are corrupted versions.[6]

A more Universalist vision might acknowledge that floods occur in every culture because the majority of human civilizations grew up either along rivers or coastlines, which by their nature are prone to flooding. More fascinating is the Ryan-Pitman hypothesis, propounded by two earth scientists who have specialized in the study of climate change and in particular in the effects of the melting glaciers on the rise in the level of the oceans. They suggest that rising level of the Mediterranean Sea caused its salty waters to burst through the Straits of Bosporus around 7,600 years ago and almost instantly flood the Black Sea, wiping out an idyllic civilization – a kind of Garden of Eden – and scattering its inhabitants literally around the world. They propound significant evidence from geology as well as from linguistics and genetic relationship among peoples in diverse parts of the world.[7] While controversial, this hypothesis has sparked significant new findings on many scientific fronts.

When bad things happen, we often make up explanations to ourselves about why they happened, and we are tempted to see survivors – winners – as righteous and those destroyed – losers – as deserving their fate. Noah was righteous in his generation, but not therefore the best of models for us. He invented the cultivation of the grape and the creation of wine, and he quickly succumbed to the ill-effects of excessive wine. The real point of the story, in my mind, is that God made a covenant with Noah after the flood that imposed laws on human beings – no murder, respect for animals, and punishment for misdeeds proportional to the wrongdoing. Up to this point, there was evil but no standard against which behavior was judged. In other words, up to this point men lived in a state of nature, in which human life was, as Thomas Hobbes put it, “nasty, brutish, and short.” This story records the beginning of civil society, the beginning of our emergence as human beings to the state of obedience to laws, whether imposed upon us by force of written in our hearts.

There was, of course, more to be learned. There is learning to be empathic, to walk in the shoes of another, to do onto others as we would have them do onto us. But the first step is obedience, following the rules, respecting each other and this creation of ours on some fundamental level. Morgan Freeman, speaking as God to the hero of Evan Almighty at the end of his great adventure, writes in the ground the letters A R K – Ark – “Acts of Random Kindness.” Now there’s a lesson we can all take from this grand old story.

Amen.