What's a Body to Do?

Aging was not easy for my grandfather. He had always been a very active man and always liked to be on the go. That was always very unsettling to me when I was growing up. Whenever I went to visit him he would constantly be moving. To the golf course, to the cantaloupe patch, to some friend’s house in North Carolina. There was no sitting and be-ing with my grandfather. There were too many things to do.

One of his favorite activities was bird hunting. He worked for the Union Camp paper company, which meant that he knew where there were a lot of cutover fields, perfect for rustling up quail or grouse or better. I really knew that aging was an issue for him when I went to visit him with one of my college roommates during a school break and he took us hunting.

We set out on an overcast day with one of his favorite hunting buddies, Rennie. The really interesting part of the trip was that my grandfather and Rennie could not see. Both of them had rapidly declining eyesight at this point and it was annoying both of them to no end. When my roommate, Mike, and I went down there they saw a perfect opportunity. They would take the guns and we would be their eyes.

So we sat out there for the better part of an afternoon, sitting on a rough pile of leftover tree trunks, me by Granddaddy and Mike by Rennie. Then when the birds would flush we’d extend our arms toward them and yell, “Birds,” at which point they would sling their guns in the general direction of our outstretched arms and fire wildly. It was my one and only experience as a pointer.

I see more of my grandfather in myself all the time, especially his frustration at the perils of getting older. He knew that his life was changing but he didn’t know what to do with this body he found himself in. In his mind he could still drive straight through to Canada, hunt for two weeks eating salted meat, and come back none the worse for wear. But reality was taking its toll. What was he going to do with all of that youthful passion still stored up inside him? What purpose was he going to serve at this new age?

The biblical lesson that comes to us from Paul’s letter to the Romans today is one that is meant for Christians who are asking similar questions. It’s not a lesson for those who haven’t encountered Jesus; it’s a lesson for those who have had their lives turned upside down by Jesus and who now are left asking, “So now what?” As Christians we know that Jesus changes everything. Having come face to face with God’s love for us on the cross…a love that will go to death itself in order to reclaim us from sin…we know that we have been transformed. Our destination is clear. God’s intentions for us are clear. We have gone from death to life, but we still have these bodies and we still live in this world. Because of Jesus something must change about us, right?

But maybe you know this same dynamic in your life. I know that I have given myself to Jesus. I know that my identity has been founded upon this rock. I remember it every time I baptize someone in this water because I was baptized, too, in the name of the Trinity and I am now a child of God. But the older I get the more mystifying I become.

When I was younger I didn’t think so much about who this body was. When I was a teenager I knew that I was fighting temptations. I was working with what it meant to be an independent person, to be a responsible person, to be a sexual person, but there were hormones and social structures to blame for what the teenaged years are like. It was confusing, but I could see the point of the struggles.

Now I look within and I see a much richer and yet even more challenging set of questions. The passions which seemed so natural when I was young have changed but they now are directed in new ways. I have given this body over to Jesus, but what will Jesus do with all these parts of me now? What is it that I still strive for and desire? Whose purposes shall I serve?

Christians know, or at least we discover, that falling in love with Jesus doesn’t change the fact that we are still human. And Christians, more than any others, ought to look upon the frailties and failings of others with great compassion. We have no room to be judgmental because we know that sin ever present and giving ourselves to it is what we do as human beings. God may have claimed us from its clutches, but we keep giving ourselves back, even when we think we’ve rooted it out. The troubling thing for us is that even when have been transformed, we are always wondering in new and different ways, with each new and different life stage and life circumstance, “What’s a body to do?”

This was the challenge Paul was addressing with the Roman Christians in the passage we read this morning. Having just described for them how they had been transformed through baptism and how their old self had been put to death and their new self was found in being raised with Christ, Paul goes on to call them to a continuing life of rejecting sin and claiming God’s grace. “Don’t let sin reign in your body,” Paul says. “Don’t let it make you obey the body’s passions.”

What a strange way of putting things! Paul makes it sound like we humans are somehow disconnected from our bodies…as if there is a ‘you’ that stands apart from our bodies and can hand them over to this alien force of sin. And this alien force can make us do things we don’t really want to do if we didn’t have these passions.

Paul admits later on that this is a human way of talking. God sees us in a very different way. But it’s what it feels like sometimes, isn’t it? Sometimes I feel very disconnected from this body I’m in. And it’s not only because it is doing strange things now like refusing to grow hair in places where hair used to grow and growing hair in places where hair never grew before. It’s also because we are so frequently fighting against strongholds that lie within us. How do I overcome bad habits that have now become well-worn ruts of behavior? How do I struggle against my addictions? How can I live up to my best intentions? Why can’t I love others in the way I know that I can?

I was reading a novel recently called Lush Life and one of the characters is a man who has really never lived up to any of his potential. He has come to New York City as an aspiring actor and never made it. He is working as the manager at a restaurant and bar on the Lower East Side, skimming the tips from his waiters and busboys. But he is the witness to a shooting and breaks down and confesses to the murder, even though he didn’t do it, when he is interrogated by the police. Later, when the police have realized their mistake and he is helping them out after having realized how broken and empty his life is, he pulls one of the officers aside and tells her, “I’m so much better than anything I’ve ever done…I need you to know that…I need to know that.”[i] I hear in that the cry of every human being who longs to be whole. Confronted by the reality of sin and the goodness of God we want to say, “I need to know that I am so much better than anything I’ve ever done.”

That is the promise that God holds out to us in Jesus Christ. God knows that when we give ourselves over to the worst of our nature…when we let sin continue to break us apart so that we are separated from our truest selves…then we are always slaves…always beholden to what our passions want to do with us. But there is a different kind of service that is offered to us in God’s grace. God has done the heavy work and sin has no more power over those for whom Christ lived and died.

You might be tempted to think then, “Well, if sin has no more power then can I just follow my passions…do what I will since God has taken care of the consequences?” That apparently was what some early Christians thought. All the rules were out the door. It was party time all the time.

That was not what God intends, though. Anyone who has lived to excess knows that there are prices to pay for breaking the rules. In the end you end up with a lot of messes to clean up and a lot of things to atone for, if only to those who are hurt by your lifestyle. If you live like that, Paul says, you are still a slave because you have willingly given yourself up to a way of life whose end is death. But if you have really given yourself to Jesus, then you will serve a new way of life that really is life. The payoff of sin is always death, but the gift of God is life in Jesus. From our human viewpoint this seems like a loss, like something unnatural. But service to God ends up being the way to freedom.

I want to share with you a poem. You know that one of my recent discoveries is how much I love poetry. Back in April I was at a conference with Franz Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 with a collection called Walking to Martha’s Vineyard. Wright is one of those people who know how closely demons can cling to us. He was diagnosed as a manic depressive at an early age and has struggled with alcohol and drugs throughout his life. He also has had prolonged periods of homelessness. Looking at him you can see the toll that his difficult life has taken on him.

But Franz Wright is in recovery now and Franz has converted to Christianity. At the Festival of Faith and Writing he talked about how he imagined that his baptism was going to change him completely. He even wrote about it in a poem called “Baptism” where he talked about drowning his old self so that it wouldn’t come back. “Look/ he has a new life/ a new name/ now/ which no one knows except/ the one who gave it.”[ii]

Of course his old self keeps threatening to come back, though. He has a new life and a new name in Jesus, but Wright has discovered what all of us who love God and remain in this life know – that while we’re walking this earthly journey we are engaged in a battle to the death with sin. So Franz Wright still contemplates death. He has struggled with suicidal thoughts and that theme still creeps into his poetry. But something else is there, too.

Here’s part of a poem he calls “Walden:”

...Then I saw again
the turtle

like a massive haunted head
lumbering after the egg laying toward
the water
and vanishing into the water, slowly
soaring
in that element half underworld, half sky.
There is a power that wants me to love.[iii]

It’s a scene prompted from an experience in the woods. A man contemplating a world in which there is death and pain and change sees a turtle lumbering into the water and is reminded that there is something stronger than inevitable death. Is it too much to wonder if Franz Wright sees his own baptism in the same way? As a movement into water and then slowly soaring in that element half underworld, half sky? As a realization that there is a power that wants me to love?

He’s right, you know. There is a power that wants you to live, that wants you to love. You, even you who have claimed to love Jesus, you have been held too long by passions that are not adequate to your soul. You are longing for things that are not worth your true self. You are being called to be possessed by a greater passion that tells you who you are and what you are meant for in this world. And when you listen for that voice, things will change. You will find life and wholeness and joy. You can’t spend one more day as a slave to sin. You can’t waste one more moment not serving the love that runs the universe. You are waiting to be found.

I never really appreciated it when my grandfather would wake me up early in the morning to go on some wild chase to find the perfect cantaloupe, a fruit I have never appreciated. But I pray that I may have inherited just a little bit of his drive to know what it is that is worth the striving for and who is it is that I must serve. Thanks be to God.

Romans 8:12-23
So, do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey it in its passions. Neither give over your members to sin to be a tool of unrighteousness, but rather give yourselves over to God like dead people coming to life, and let your members be tools of righteousness for God. For sin will have no dominion over you because you are not under the law but under grace.

So what then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? Of course not! Don't you know that if you give you give yourself over to be a slave and to obey, you are a slave to the one you obey - whether to sin, which leads to death, or to the obedience that leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, you were slaves to sin but you obeyed from the heart the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. Freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.

I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you gave your members over to impurity and to lawlessness upon lawlessness, so now you have given your members over to be slaves of righteousness unto sanctification. For when you were slaves of sin you were free with regard to righteousness. And what was the fruit of that period of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.

Now you are freed from sin and enslaved to God and you have the fruit of holiness and the end of this is eternal life. For the payoff of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

[i] Richard Price, Lush Life, [Farrar, Straus & Giroux: New York, 2008], pp. 418-419.
[ii] Franz Wright, Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, [Alfred A. Knopf:New York, 2003], p. 44.
[iii] Ibid., p. 70.

The Unexpected Pleasures of the Long Journey Home

Call me Abraham. Abram if you wish. That was my name before. “Great Father” it means. Imagine that. A 75 year old childless man with a name like Abram! It’s like calling a big man Tiny or a man with no right arm Lefty. Abram – the great father – right.

I guess I should have been more patient. After all, God had proven over and over that age was no obstacle to doing great things. Noah was 600 years old before he started living up to his name. And after he came off the ark he lived another 350 years. What’s 75 compared to 950? My own father, Terah, was 70 years old before he had children. But at 75 I didn’t exactly feel like a spring chicken. And I was unprepared when God came calling.

Now my family is prone to wandering. I remember the day when my father told us we were going to Canaan. It seemed like insanity. I had heard of Canaan before, but it was on the other side of the world. To leave Ur and travel the arc of the Fertile Crescent? It was the journey of a lifetime and there was no coming back and no assurances that we would find anything worthwhile when we got there. Canaan was a small strip on the edge of the Great Sea, between the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. To go to this place would be like going to…the Eastern Shore.

There was something in my father’s eyes, though, that kept us silent. He never talked about the reasons why we had to go, but he was a bundle of vision and fear. Some wild and terrifying thing had gripped him. With each mile we traveled beside the Euphrates River he would grow more anxious, scanning the horizon as if to catch a glimpse of a coming cloud and looking back over his shoulder at the home we had left behind.

By the time we reached Haran he had had enough. Canaan would have to wait. We settled in that new place and I came to know it as home. No one talked about Canaan any more. Canaan was my father’s folly. But at night I sometimes dreamed about it. Without even knowing what it looked like, I would see myself there – a stranger in a strange land. A stranger with two sons. Once Sarai woke me up from one of these dreams. A fierce wind was blowing from the west across the dusty hills. “Wake up,” she said. “You were having a nightmare.”

“No,” I said, “I was only seeing what God put in my heart to see.”

“But you were crying out.”

“Yes, but not in fear, Sarai. In joy. I was crying out in joy.”

Then one day it happened. I was sitting beneath a tree on a hillside in Haran. I had just finished transacting some business with Elihud-ben-Jacob. I am a pretty shrewd manager of flocks and properties and I had become very successful in Haran. This little deal was particularly satisfying and I leaned back against a tree to enjoy the moment.

I was just beginning to think about the new workers I would have to get to manage my new acquisitions when Yahweh spoke. Who knows whether it was out loud or not? I suspect only I heard it because I remember looking around me. The goatherds down the hill continued to swap stories. The flocks didn’t start. The hillside didn’t melt away. Surely something more would have happened if God had spoken out loud. But I heard it as clearly as you are hearing me speak to you now. There was no mistaking the voice. It was as familiar as scent of my mother’s cooking. As ancient as the rocks. As intimate as Sarai’s laughter in my ear.

“Leave.” That was Yahweh’s first word to me. Leave. No introductions. No formalities. No explanations. Just get up and get out. “Leave your land and your kin and the house of your father and go to the land that I will show you.” But I didn’t really need any introductions. This journey that God was sending me on was the one I had been dreaming about since my father had packed us up to leave Ur. I even knew where we were going.

The blessing was something else. Yahweh said, “I will make of you a great people and I will bless you and increase your name and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and those who curse you I will curse. By you all the clans of the earth will be blessed.” It was too much to take in and it made no sense. God promised descendents – that I would live up to the name that was given to me – but there was the obvious question of ‘how?’ And then to be a blessing to all the clans of the earth? It was more than any one person could be. I got the feeling that God knew a lot more about what the promise meant than I would ever know.

So then what? Well, then I went home. Sarai found me giving instructions to my nephew Lot about how to arrange for the sale of our property. She didn’t say a word. She knew. When I asked her about it later she said, “I always knew we weren’t finished.”

“You knew?” I asked her.

“I knew. You’re not the only one who has dreams, you know.”

“But what Yahweh told me was so impossible. The blessing was about descendents and my name and none of that can be unless…”

Sarah laughed. She put a hand to my cheek and said, “Unless we stop thinking that the way things are is the way Yahweh wants them to stay. Are you saying that you’re too old for God to use?”

We packed a ridiculous amount of stuff. Looking back on it now I know that it was insurance…my way of saying, “Just in case this doesn’t work out…Just in case Yahweh is wrong.” All the property I could load on donkeys and hand carts. All the people I had picked up along the way. They had no say in this. They didn’t get this call from God. I did. But I needed them to go with me.

Because deep down I felt my father’s anxiety. What I had never understood before suddenly became very clear. The vision and the fear. The wondering and the uncertainty. Suddenly I knew that when the river ran out, my father had to stop. All that were left were the hills and then Canaan beyond. But he couldn’t take the risk. Who knows what assurance he had relied on to get him that far? What blessing did Yahweh give to him? Or was his stopping really just the beginning of my journey?

It never really stopped. Even when I got to Canaan it wasn’t over. It wasn’t like the land was empty. It was called Canaan because the Canaanites lived there. So there were conflicts and battles. And there were famines. Almost as soon as we arrived we had to go to Egypt to seek out food. But at each place we stopped I built an altar.

Beneath a great tree I heard Yahweh speak once more. “To your offspring, I will give this land.” It came like a whisper but it had the weight of stone, so I gathered some together and made an altar. Later near Bethel, I build another altar.

Then there was that final altar. When the child had come. When the promise finally seemed possible. When it was all coming together. That’s when God came again and asked me to make a sacrifice of Isaac, that promised child. In the end God stayed my hand. I guess Yahweh knew I was still learning the courage that would allow me to stand up for the promise, but I remember that moment. I stood on top of that mountain before that makeshift altar with the knife blade raised and it was all there – the wild horizon and the deep terror. No, it never got better, but Yahweh never left me.

What I came to learn is that the ways of God are mysterious and the journeys God asks us to undertake are not easy or safe. They demand our entire selves, our very lives. They take us far from the places we know to places we never imagined ourselves going.

But here is something else that I have learned: There is always a blessing, even if its full realization lies off beyond the rim of the world. It was that that I came to trust. That caravan of things and people that I dragged with me over the hills to Canaan? Those were signs of the person that I had been. I had been Abram the son Terah, the one who made deals and collected wealth. Now I had a new identity – Abraham – father of nations, blessing to the world, blessed by Yahweh. And Yahweh had a new identity as well. Forever after, this God would be the God of Abraham.

That’s pretty arbitrary. Yahweh could as easily have been known as the God of Harold or the God of Nahor or the God of Rebecca. There was nothing special about me in the long run. But I wonder how many other times God has spoken to a person sitting under a tree, or standing by a road, or working in a field, or on a boat, or in a dream, and called them to leave what they were doing. And how many times did they not hear? How many times did you not hear? How many times did I not hear? And nobody took a risk that the world and their lives could be different. What blessings have we missed because we didn’t believe that God could be speaking to us? Or maybe we didn’t trust that God would be there if we did listen and follow.

I remember one day in the Negev. We had traveled through the whole of Canaan. I had built altars and heard God talk to me once again. I knew that this was going to be home now. We were traveling through the desert – the most barren desert you can imagine. Just rock and sand and dirt and bare hillsides pockmarked with small caves.

Off to the west a dark cloud suddenly appeared and began to move toward us. We could watch it coming for miles and there was lightning flashing from a thunderhead. We climbed up into a small cave to wait out the storm.

It was incredible to watch. The rain came down like a waterfall. Darkness covered the whole valley in front of us but when the lightning flashed we could see that a wadi below had turned almost instantly into a raging river. As the thunder passed into the distance, we heard that river roaring below us.

The sun reemerged and we came out from the caves. The air quickly became as dry as it had been before. The water receded in the wadi. But something else happened. All around us flowers bloomed. Small yellow flowers carpeted the ground. Sharp, spiny plants broke out in orange blooms. All throughout that desert there was life waiting to break forth. All it took was a little bit of water and what seemed dead was alive.

I can’t help thinking that God did the same miracle in me. Me, who was used to thinking of myself as a dry, dead desert. Me, who saw no seed, no future, no hope. Me, who could only dream about something new. There were flowers in the desert yet for me. All it took was that voice, that little bit of water, and a dead man came to life.

Seems like God has a habit of doing that. I don’t think I’m the only one who ever started traveling again when he thought his traveling days were through. Home is not what I left. It’s where I’m headed. And there are unexpected pleasures on the long journey home.

When we left Haran…when we had all that stuff we didn’t need packed and ready to go…Sarai looked over at me. I looked off towards the hills that we would soon be crossing. Then I looked back at her with what I’m sure was the same look my father had on his face. All she said was, “Abram, don’t look back. Just don’t look back.” Thanks be to God.

Genesis 12:1-9
Then YHWH said to Abram, “Leave your land and your kin and the house of your father for the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great people and I will bless you and increase your name and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and those who curse you I will curse. By you all the clans of the earth will be blessed.”
So Abram left, just as YHWH told him to do and Lot left with him. Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran. Abram took Sarai, his wife, and Lot, the son of his brother, all the private property he had acquired and all the people they had acquired in Haran. They set off walking to the land of Canaan and they arrived in the land of Canaan. Abram passed through the land as far as the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. The Canaanites were in the land at that time.
Then YHWH appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So Abram built an altar to YHWH, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country east of Bethel, where he pitched a tent with Bethel to the west and Ai to the west. There he built an altar to YHWH and called on the name of YHWH. Then Abram pulled up stakes and went to. He pulled up stakes for the Negev.

Noah and the Fragile Freight of Life

In the Middle East, on the West Bank, there is a zoo. It’s in a Palestinian town called Qalqilya and it is the last zoo in the Palestinian Territories. Everything else about the town speaks of despair. Since the last intifada the West Bank has been sealed off and the town of Qalqilya has been almost completely surrounded by the tall concrete security barrier that Israel has been constructing along the West Bank. There is one way in an out of this town and you have to pass through a checkpoint. So it is very difficult for any of the 40,000 people who live there to get out and no one else can come in. But there, in the middle of this town is a zoo with a giraffe, some lions, a hippo and few other animals.

Dr. Sami Khadar came back from Saudi Arabia, where he had trained as a zoo vet, to start this zoo. It was a time of peace – before the latest troubles and before the wall – and he wanted to do something hopeful for his hometown. Then things got worse. There were battles between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants. Brownie, the giraffe, broke his neck when he ran in fear from an attack. Zebras died from teargas that was fired. As poverty increased in the town, people couldn’t even afford the 50 cent admission. As animals died Khadar would have them stuffed and placed in a special display.

But he wouldn’t let the zoo die and neither would the town. Farmers brought food for the animals. On a regular basis Khadar has free admission days and the zoo is packed with children. They come to see the monkeys and to play and to dream of a world that is larger than the one they can see from behind concrete walls. And Khadar himself dreams of the day when this zoo could become an “international zoo,” one of the best in the world.[i]

So then there’s this other zookeeper. Noah. You know his story, don’t you? It’s one of our favorite Bible stories. We paint rainbows and animals on the walls of our Sunday School classrooms. Hollywood is still making movies about it as last year’s Evan Almighty shows. Bill Cosby did a great comedy routine about Noah talking with God and his neighbors:
“Listen, what’s this thing for anyway?”
“I can't tell you”
“Well, I mean can't you give me a little hint?”
“You want a hint?”
“Yes, please.”
“How long can you tread water?”[ii]

But what does this story really tell us? I mean, we like the animals. We like the rainbow. We like the humor of a 600 year old man being asked to build a huge boat for a floating menagerie. We like the dove coming across the waters with an olive branch to signal the end of the flood. But what does this story tell us about God and what does it tell us about us? And why should we care?

If you remember this story comes early on in the Bible. God has created the earth and all the creatures of the earth, including man and woman, and God had said, “This is good. This is very good.” But something happened. Humans started to forget who they were created to be and they started to do things they weren’t meant to do. They began to forget God and the result was murder and chaos and corruption.

By chapter 6 some things are pretty clear. Human beings are prone to evil and violence. In fact, not just humans but all creatures are prone to corruption. Verse 12 says that “God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth.”

Why should those days be any different from our own? We’ve had centuries of change since then. We’ve increased human knowledge many times over. We’ve seen fantastic new inventions that have made our lives easier. We’ve had advances in medicine that have saved and extended and enriched our lives. We’ve seen new forms of enlightened government, like liberal democracy, that have made us freer and opened up all kinds of opportunity. But you know and I know that change doesn’t always mean progress.

Murder? We’ve still got that and in fact we raised it to a level of ruthless efficiency in the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz. Immorality? Centuries of moral teaching have not removed our tendencies toward cheating, lying, and adultery, among other things. Respect for life? We debate embryonic research as if it is a manipulation of cells with no consequences for what it means to be human. Corruption? The Pentagon reported last week that it made $8.2 billion of payments with taxpayer money to contractors in Iraq and for $1.4 billion of those dollars we have no record of what happened with the money.[iii] From where I stand, and looking into my own heart, I know it’s still true that human beings are prone to wrong.

So what to do about it? Well, here’s where we learn something about God. If this story is giving us a good picture of who God is, then there are two conflicting tendencies within the heart of God. On the one hand, God is offended by all of this corruption. How could it have gone so wrong? God is holy and just. God created humanity with the inbuilt capacity to seek God out, to love God and to find joy and happiness and holiness in God. We were created to be related to God.

But God is not the author of evil. God cannot tolerate wrong and violence. In the community of heaven there is no place for the sin that we all find in our lives. There is no place for the bad decisions we make. There is no place for the hurt we cause and the pollution, of all kinds, that we produce. There is no place for the injustice we perpetrate or our silence that allows it. We have no excuse and no justification and no place or claim on heaven.

So God looked out over the earth and decided to destroy it. In verse 7 of chapter 6 God says one of the scariest things in the Bible. “So the LORD said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created-- people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’ “I am sorry that I have made them.” That’s heavy stuff. The God who made us cannot tolerate our tendency to evil and so regrets making us. If that was the only thing to be said about God or us – there would be no hope.

It’s like the disciples felt when Jesus told them that it would be harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. The disciples were terrified when they heard this. “Then who can be saved?” they asked. “For human being it is impossible,” Jesus said. “But for God…all things are possible.” [Matthew 19:24-26]

And there is more to be said about God and about us than verse 7 says. Because this is also the story of God and a man named Noah. Noah tells us about that other tendency in God. He had been born as a child of promise. At his birth his father, Lamech, had said, “He will be called Noah,” which means ‘rest’, because “Out of the ground that the LORD has cursed this one shall bring us rest from our work and from the toil of our hands" [Gen. 5:29]. Noah was supposed to restore the relationship between God and the land.

So in his 600th year God came to the old man Noah and told him what was planned. “I’m going to wipe out all flesh because the earth is filled with violence. I’m going to destroy every living thing.” Only God wasn’t going to destroy every living thing, because God was going to call Noah to build an ark. And into that ark Noah was to take his family and two of every creature. Not just the cuddly ones like red pandas and marmosets, but fierce ones like lions and stinky ones like skunks and critters that seem entirely useless by human understanding like mosquitoes. They were all supposed to be on the ark.

So God gives Noah the dimensions of this ark and it is immense. Three hundred cubits long and fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high. Do you know how big that is? Neither do I, but it’s pretty big. A cubit was probably the length from a person’s elbow to the tip of the middle finger. This is what Noah was supposed to build.

After giving the building instructions, God goes back to the warnings of destruction. “I am going to bring a flood on the earth to destroy all flesh in which there is the breath of life. Everything on the earth will die.” But. But not everything will die. Noah will survive with his little zoo. And God will establish a covenant with Noah.

This is that other strange and wonderful tendency in the heart of God – to make covenants with individuals who find favor with God even though they are subject to all the same failings as the rest of creation. Noah was described as a righteous man, a blameless man, but he would show himself to have some weaknesses, too. God chooses him.

From the cold logic of God’s holiness and justice, what God does here doesn’t make sense. Why shouldn’t God just start over? Why keep working a flawed creation that keeps failing to live up to potential? It is because God’s holiness and justice coexists with and is ultimately ruled by God’s love. It is love that has its hand on the plow, setting the lines of the crops.

Leif Enger, has a new book out called So Brave, Young and Handsome and in it he quotes 1 Corinthians to talk about this. “Love is a strange fact,” he writes. “It hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. It makes no sense at all.”[iv] But the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of the world, and so God loves and makes covenants with old men and calls them to build boats for beavers and bullfrogs when justice demands total destruction. I guess hope does float.

At the end of it all, Noah and the animals come out of that ark and something has changed. The command God gives is the same as before. “Bring out all those living things so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth” [Gen 8:17]. It’s the same thing God had said to the man and woman at the beginning of creation. Be fruitful and multiply. But something new happens here.

God sets a rainbow in the sky and it is a reminder. But look at who the reminder is for. God says, in Genesis chapter 9, verse 14, “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." The rainbow will remind God of the covenant.

From here on out, God has established a new way to deal with violence and corruption. God will overcome evil with the covenant formed in love. And ultimately God will overcome sin by coming in the flesh as Jesus and suffering the violence and corruption of this world and revealing to us the depth of our neediness and the depth of God’s love for us. God will bear all things, believe all things, endure all things. It makes no sense at all. But in the end love will prevail.

So what do we do with this story? We can recognize ourselves here as the fallen people living in a fallen creation and know that this is not what God intends and that God’s justice demands an accounting for our sin. We can recognize the fragility of life and community and even our planet, which in our day is so threatened by so many things, including human activity. But we can also recognize that God is continually making promises and remembering covenants and offering God’s very self for the redemption of the world.

The question for us is what we will do to model the world God intends? How can we create zoos here? Places where hope and life can be nurtured and where children can know themselves as part of a miraculous world filled with God’s glory? Places where we accept our responsibility as fellow creatures with all life and as co-creators with God? Places where we can share the good news of what it means to be saved by wild and holy God who does not know how to leave us alone and who wants us to live? There are plenty of concrete walls on this earth. You probably live behind some yourself. Perhaps you have built some between you and those you are called to love. But where are the zoos? Thanks be to God.

Genesis 6:11-22; 8:14-19 (NRSV)
Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. And God said to Noah, "I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth. Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch. This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and put the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks.

“For my part, I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you. And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive. Also take with you every kind of food that is eaten, and store it up; and it shall serve as food

for you and for them."

Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him…

In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day 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. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh-- birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth-- so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth."

So Noah went out with his sons and his wife and his sons' wives. And every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out of the ark by families.

[i] “A West Bank Zoo Struggles to Survive”, http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=90006859
[ii] http://www.jr.co.il/humor/noah4.txt
[iii] http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080523/news_1n23audit.html
[iv] Leif Enger, So Brave, Young and Handsome, [Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008], p. 32.