Hilton Head Island, SC – January 9, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 6:5-14; Genesis 9:8-15
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out man from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” – Gen. 6:7-8 (RSV)
The story of Noah and the ark is known by almost everyone in the western world who is over the age of seven. People who never attended synagogue or church a day in their lives are still familiar with this story, because it is so captivating and memorable that nobody whoever heard it can forget it, and almost everyone has heard it.
Quickly to reiterate its essence, after the creation story of Adam and Eve, and the Cain and Abel story, Genesis says that humanity went irreversibly bad over a fairly short time, and God decided He had to start all over again. So He flooded the entire world, killing everybody and everything.
However, after re-thinking things, Genesis says God decided that Noah and his family were worth salvaging. And if they should be saved, then so should all the species of all the animals be saved. So God told Noah to build an ark. Back when Bill Cosby was still in the good graces of everyone, he had a great stand-up comic routine of this story, and he had Noah ask God, “What’s an ark, Lord?” When you stop to think about it, what is an ark? Nobody ever heard of an ark before or since the Great Flood described in Genesis 6-9, but we are told about it there. The ark was a large boat, three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, and twenty cubits high. So, Bill Cosby, speaking as Noah, asked God, “What’s a cubit, Lord?”
A cubit is the distance from the average human elbow to the tip of the average human longest finger, or about eighteen inches, more or less. So the ark was a boat 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and thirty feet high. And if you think there was a Noah, and that if there was a Noah, he was able to take a male and female of every animal on earth into a boat of that relatively limited size for the cargo it would be carrying, with enough food to feed Noah’s entire extended family and all those critturs, for the forty days and forty nights it poured cats and dogs, and then for another hundred and fifty days until the waters receded and the ark came down on Mt. Ararat in Armenia (although it wasn’t Armenia then), and all those creatures got along peaceably with one another for a hundred and ninety days without eating one another up, you are more gullible than I ever could have guessed any of you could be.
The story of Noah and the ark is a myth. A myth is a story that is told in earthly, human terms to explain something in divine terms that God did upon the earth. The point of the story is not what the story says, but what it means. Myths were not meant to be taken literally. But listen to this: apparently there was a great flood, even if there wasn’t a Noah or an ark. According to a group of experts in geological history, there actually was a great flood that occurred about 6600 BCE or so. At that time the Black Sea was below sea level, like the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan or the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan or the Dead Sea in Israel and Jordan . Then, for reasons I shall not take time to explain, the waters of the Sea of Marmara, between the two straits of the northern Aegean Sea, the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, broke through into the Black Sea at what became the mouth of the Bosporus. The experts say that in a period of a hundred days or so, trillions of gallons of water rushed into the Black Sea, raising its level up to sea level, inundating all the villages that ringed the Sea up to that time.
It is claimed that actually happened. Geologists say that for three hundred days two hundred times the water that flows over Niagara Falls rushed through the suddenly open Bosporus. It seems plausible, even if highly unlikely.
The main point of the flood story is that God decided He had to start all over again with humanity and all the other living creatures. Surely not everyone in those Black Sea settlements was evil, but hearing the story does cause us to ponder God more deeply than we might otherwise, and that’s a very good thing.
However, the question is this: might God be ready again to end the world as we know it? In our second reading, we learned that God told Noah He would never again cause a world-inundating flood. God made a promise to that effect with Noah, a contract, or what the Bible calls a “covenant.” The sign of that promise is a rainbow. Whenever we see a rainbow after it rains, we are supposed to be reminded that God will never cause another planetary flood. But is it believable that God was ever so angry with the human race that He wanted a re-do?
Theologically, the weakest notion in the story of Noah is that it was God who caused the flood that greatly enlarged the Black Sea, or which covered Mesopotamia (Between the Rivers --- the Tigris and the Euphrates), as in the Gilgamesh Epic, or wherever this huge flood took place - - - if it took place as described in Genesis. Whatever are hints of historicity to this story, on the basis of the rest of the Bible, it is impossible to imagine that God would ever choose to destroy humanity. Still, the flood narrative makes for a memorable story.
Nevertheless, humanity might destroy humanity. We have become remarkably capable of obliterating ourselves. There are numerous methods we have found to kill off thousands or millions of us in a short time, which we have used in wars or genocides. But we have developed two primary means of killing all of us: nuclear weapons and Anthropocene annihilation, also widely identified now as “climate change.”
Currently there are nearly a dozen nations that possess nuclear weapons. Iran is working quickly to join the club. If they succeed, Saudi Arabia may also produce atomic bombs as a deterrent to Iran or as the potential obliterator of Iran. For over two decades, India and Pakistan were the two nations most likely to initiate the first nuclear war. Before that it was the USA and the USSR who had their fingers on the buttons. If any nation anywhere might start flinging nukes, every nation everywhere in possession of them might join the conflagration. Trying to save themselves, they would do that, don’t you see. And if that happened, it is easily conceivable that the radiation fallout from all those bombs would eventually kill everyone, no matter how far away they were from the actual explosions.
From about the early nineteen-seventies to the early twenty-teens, there was a fortuitous movement in many nations from autocracy to democracy. In the past dozen years though, several democracies have reverted to autocracies. In places like India, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Brazil, Peru, and Chile, heavy-handed rulers have seized the reins of government. In other places like China, Russia, North Korea, Syria, and Egypt, longtime despots have become even more despotic. Should any such leaders decide to wage war against one another, it is impossible to predict accurately what the outcome might be.
There is much to lead us to suppose that earthlings do have numerous seemingly irresolvable problems, and that somehow we need some sort of divine escape mechanism from all our woes. Throughout the world there is growing animosity among nations, especially between autocracies and democracies. Many countries have made great strides economically, but others seem to fall farther and farther behind. In our country, there is dangerous political polarization as never seen before. The gap between the 1% and the 99% continues to grow. Corruption crops up at all levels of government. One of our political parties is taking steps permanently to skew the electoral system so that it can never again be defeated at the polls. The Supreme Court foolishly allowed anybody or any institution to contribute any amount of money to political candidates or parties.
People of color are systematically discriminated against by white people. The poor are neglected or forgotten. The weak are trampled by the strong. The heads of corporations are paid three or four hundred times as much as the average worker. Young girls become sex slaves to wealthy older men, who are occasionally assisted in their debauchery by wealthy older women. Families disintegrate, fathers abandon their wives or significant others and the children they produce. Has the human race become so tainted that we have doomed ourselves?
Despite these kinds of issues, and the ever-present nuclear threat, at the moment climate change appears to be the greatest human threat to the human race that is likely to create havoc. We are causing immense stress on the world’s climate. We know how it is happening, we know why it is happening, and collectively we are doing far too little to stop it.
We have yoked ourselves to internal combustion engines for far too long. Too many cattle are emitting too much methane into the atmosphere. The only kind of cattle the world should permit are dairy cows. Governments should have passed stringent laws to regulate the temperatures in homes and businesses. People who drive alone to their places of employment should be heavily taxed for doing so. None of these actions happen because too many of the wealthy people who make the laws have too much money invested in too many companies whose primary profit is earned from contributing to the conditions that cause the climate to disintegrate.
Elon Musk has the solution to climate change. Assist SpaceX to establish a colony on Mars. Then, if everyone on this planet perishes, at least a few folks from this planet can survive on Mars, our next door neighbor. This notion has equal measures of enormous unrealistic optimism and unbridled hubris. It is a modern version of the Noah’s ark story, but it is Mr. Musk who has decided humanity needs a new start, not God.
After the incomprehensible carnage of World War II, the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a book called Moral Man and Immoral Society. His thesis was that individually human beings are born with basic goodness woven into us. The problem, said Prof. Niebuhr, is that people in groups, especially large groups, tend to corrupt one another, and collective sin leads us to do terrible things. Almost no one individually would engage in a genocidal Holocaust, but when enough people were enticed into Nazism, they participated in unspeakable acts. To put it in terms that much thought has been directed toward in the past week, January 6, 2021 would not have occurred had not many hundreds of politically radicalized, enraged, ill-informed anarchists joined together to attack the capitol. A few misguided zealots would never have invaded the capitol all by themselves.
All of us need to respond to orderly reason, not to overheated reaction. Only when the rioters were united a year ago by their leaders did they do what they would never have done if they had been alone in Washington, DC. Clever fear-evoking charlatans can turn moral humans into mindless members of immoral mobs.
It may feel to us that the world is spinning out of control. Perhaps humanity is now considerably more erratic than we usually are. Nevertheless, the solution to our problems is within ourselves; it does not consist of a celestially-ordered ark. The the oral traditions of the Book of Genesis were finally written down during the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century BCE. At that particular time, the Jewish people felt that their world had collapsed. Therefore they included in those oral traditions a tale of a cosmic flood caused by God to start the world over again. But God did not give humanity the luxury of a species do-over in the time of Noah, because there was no Noah.
It might be comforting to hope that if humanity were almost to destroy ourselves completely, there would be small pockets of people left on the Southern Island of New Zealand or in the highest recesses of the Himalayas or in the upper reaches of the Amazon basin. These survivors would eventually advance and propagate sufficiently to do what we and our forebears did but have failed to keep it going smoothly. And the survivors would need to be wiser and less self-centered and more socially moral than we have been. Such a scenario might be the basis for happy science fiction, but it isn’t really science, although it would be highly fictitious.
Hoping for pockets of rejuvenation is misplaced idealism. We are who we are, and future generations shall consist of the same flawed personal and social impulses that we have always had. So we are left, as we have always been left, with doing the best we can with who we are. We are neither deities not devils. Instead we are mere human beings, ultimately created by God, with the freedoms He intentionally has bestowed upon us, to do the best we can with what we have and with who we are. The myths are fascinating, but it is hard realities with which we must deal. The Bible is always correct in telling us we need to rely on God while we also must strive to rely on ourselves. Otherwise we will turn the world into a permanent hellish war zone, which is pretty much what we have now managed to create. The choice is ours.