And the waters swelled on the earth for one hundred fifty days. In the second month, on the twenty-seventh of the month, the earth was dry. Then God said to Noah, “Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with you.” (Genesis 7:24; 8:14-16)One of Johnny Cash’s several autobiographical songs recalled a flood he and his family experienced when he was a boy in Arkansas.
How high’s the water, mama?
Three feet high and risin’
How high’s the water, papa?
Three feet high and risin’
Well, the hives are gone,
I’ve lost my bees,
The chickens are sleepin’
In the willow trees,
Cow’s in water up past her knees,
Three feet high and risin’There’s even a hint of biblical allegory in Cash’s song:
Hey come look through the window pane,
The bus is comin’, gonna take us to the train
Looks like we’ll be blessed with a little more rain,
Four feet high and risin’(Listen below)
It may seem odd that on the first Sunday in Lent the Revised Common Lectionary leads us to the story of Noah and the flood. Perhaps it is because Lent, concluding with Easter and April showers, is a good time to reflect on the Great Flood as it is recorded in Genesis. The flood is basically a story of God’s anger with human sin and God’s early efforts to wipe sinners from the face of the earth. The notions of sin, death, and repentance are also on our minds during this Lenten season.
Okay, the whole idea is funny. Or is it horrifying? An ark filled with a frazzled human family and hundreds of rapacious and prolifically defecating animals, tossed about on high seas, without benefit of cabin stewards to serve you drinks or sculpt your towels into charming bunnies and monkeys? When you think about it, the ark would have been a hell beyond imagining, even for Southern Baptists.
Even so, how many thoughtful Christians still believe in the Great Flood? By the time we got to the seventh grade our Sunday school teacher hinted the flood was mere allegory, a myth to remind us that God wants us to maintain a certain standard of behavior – or else. By the time we get to metaphysics classes in college, we’ve discovered that the flood myth – far from being the creation of iron age Jewish mystics – is repeated in dozens of climes and cultures and countries all over the world.
But what if it really happened? Some geologists think it did. As recently as twelve millennia ago, the Ice Age began to wane and the great glaciers – those irresistible forces that deposited the immovable rocks we see strewn across Westchester County – began to melt. The water level of oceans and seas began to rise. According to the National Geographic Society:
About 7,000 years ago the Mediterranean Sea pushed northward, slicing through what is now Turkey. Funneled through the narrow Bosporus Straight, the water flooded into the Black Sea with 200 times the force of Niagara Falls. The Black Sea rose, flooding coastal farm land. Seared into the memories of terrified survivors, the tale of the flood was passed down through the generations and eventually became in Hebrew scripture, among numerous similar legends from other cultures, the Noah story of Genesis 6-9.There is no hard proof this really happened, so both the scientific theory and the biblical myth will have to remain unconfirmed. But these legends should never be entirely dismissed because many have their origin in some long forgotten human cataclysm.
I don’t mean to be glib about whether the ark was metaphor or reality. A lot of smart people who accept the Genesis story as literal fact. One of the celebrities who attended the Southern Baptist Convention in Philadelphia in 1972 was James Benson Irwin, an Air Force colonel and astronaut who was the eighth human being to walk on the moon. Irwin was the lunar module pilot for Apollo 15, which in July and August 1971 was the fourth moon mission of the United States. Irwin, a devout Christian, often said his many trips to space had strengthened his faith.
Irwin was a relatively short man, as was required of astronauts so they could squeeze into economically designed spaced capsules. Recently retired from the Air Force when he came to Philadelphia, he wore his hair long, not unlike a wooly lampshade, and was dressed in a brightly colored sports jacket, plaid baggy pants and the requisite Southern Baptist white belt and shoes. He declared his retirement would give him the “opportunity to get out and share a message of science and religion with persons all over the world. My flight through life has been sustained by my knowledge of Jesus Christ.”
Irwin was one scientist who believed Noah’s ark and the flood were real, and soon he began organizing search parties on Mount Ararat in Turkey where the ark was supposed to have grounded. He never found it, but there are satellite pictures of the terrain around Ararat that – if you have sufficient imagination to see Jesus in a billowing puff of Donald Trump’s wind-blown hair – might make you think you see the outline of a large boat. There are even reports of expeditions that discovered a large wooden structure on Ararat that could be a boat. But the object suffered the same forensic humiliation as the shroud of Turin: carbon dating revealed it was far too young to play its intended role. Maybe it was an old barn.
One thing is clear: if we try to read the story of the flood as a real event, we’ll get bogged down in literary and quasi-scientific debate. Yet despite the murkiness of the physical evidence, there is a clear message in the story: humanity sinned; God despaired that creatures so beloved by their creator could turn away to sin and resolved to reboot creation; God meticulously preserved what was best and most promising of earth and deleted the rest; and God promised never to do it again. It’s a morality story that calls human beings back to righteous living and a loving relationship with the God who loves us more than we can comprehend. On the one hand, the story is a myth; on the other hand, there is more truth in it than we can handle.
Happily, though, the story ends with a comforting assurance.
God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.’ (Genesis 9:12-16)What a relief: no more floods. Or perhaps we should put it this way: no more floods initiated by God to reboot creation and make it better.
More recently, however, we’ve become aware that our future may not be exactly flood free.
According to 99.9 percent of all scientists, the warming of the earth’s atmosphere due to greenhouse emissions is causing the polar ice caps to melt into earth’s seas. If there is a sin worth stamping out by another intervention by God, it would be the arrogant ignorance of Trump appointees who think climate change is not caused by humans.
The water level of the oceans is rising measurably. The International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, predicts the steady shrinking and imminent disappearance of low-lying islands. The retraction of island habitats will result in the destruction of 20 to 30 percent of the earth’s species. Evaporating water resources will affect millions of people in Africa and Asia, and the retreat of U.S. coastlines will create millions of environmental refugees. It’s unsettling that these predictions come from an international organization that has no political ax to grind but prides itself on its careful research and fastidious research. It’s also unsettling that that the IPCC is not predicting events that will happen some day. It’s already happening.
Tuvalu, a Polynesian island nation in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Australia, is home to more than 11,000 people, whose very existence, which at one time was tied to the ocean and its bounty, is now threatened by rising ocean water levels.
The world’s fourth-smallest country – at 26 square kilometers – is shrinking, and the people of Tuvalu are facing a future as environmental refugees. The injustices in this situation – and others like it worldwide – were at the heart of discussions at the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation (IEPC) in Jamaica where the theme was “Peace With the Earth.”
According to a World Council of Churches news report, the Rev. Tafue M. Lusama, general secretary of the Congregational Christian Church of Tuvalu, said his country is now facing longer droughts, and that saltwater has intruded into the underground water table. “Now we depend on rainwater only, and we are facing unpredictable weather patterns.”
A once-sustainable existence is now endangered by forces beyond Tuvalu’s control, Lusama said. “The people are not able to use their traditional skills in order to survive.”
The cause of the rising waters around Tuvalu rests far from this south Pacific paradise, finding its roots in the industrial heartlands of the northern hemisphere. It is here from which the greatest contribution to climate change is being made and the greatest challenge rests for reversing its negative impact.
For Lusama, the rising seawaters threatening Tuvalu mean the loss of home, culture, lifestyle and dignity. And it’s not just happening in Tuvalu. People in Tonga, Guam and other islands of the Pacific rim are watching their beaches recede more and more each year.
Many millennia ago, according to scripture, God allowed the earth to be flooded because of the sins of humanity. Now, God is not flooding the earth – we are. And scientists have been pleading with politicians and polluters for years to stop pouring poisons into our atmosphere. If we don’t stop, scientists tell us, no continent on earth will escape the effects of a worldwide flood that will dwarf to insignificance the sea on which Noah sailed. And if we don’t stop, we must shoulder the moral burden it was our sin – and our faithless disregard of God’s gift of creation – that caused it.
The coming flood is not God’s judgment upon us. It is our judgment on ourselves. God’s promise to us is inviolable:
Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, ‘As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.’ Genesis 9:8-11God will keep the promise.
Now the question for humanity is, do we have the will to keep our end of the bargain?
No comments:
Post a Comment