Unitarian Society of New Haven
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
January 21, 2018
Readings: One Love by Rev. Hope Johnson
Genesis 7: 11-23, 8:6-12, 9:8-17
Sermon:
Why are you preaching on Noah’s Ark? You hate Noah’s Ark! You’ve always hated on Noah’s Ark!
That’s my Dad. He’s here, today visiting, actually. Told us he had some kind of “meeting” in New Haven tomorrow, but I think, really, he just wanted to see what I’m going to do with Noah’s Ark this morning.
It’s a good question though, why did I choose to preach on Noah’s Ark? And it’s true, I have always hated the story. Since I was a child and first heard it…where? I’m not sure. Unitarian Universalist Religious Education at First Unitarian Church in Birmingham Alabama? I’m not going to bet on it. School maybe? Bible as literature? Or maybe it was my Dad who told me the story, it being one he had heard as a kid in Baptist church school in Decatur, Georgia. But, I’m not going to bet on Dad being the source either.
I don’t know where I first heard it, but Noah’s Ark is a story that imbues our cultural landscape.
As a parent, I’ve noticed Noah’s Ark motifs in children’s bedding, in games and puzzles for the youngest of kids. It surprises me.
People are drawn to the animals, the poetry of two by two, the beauty of the dove bringing back an olive branch, the rainbow spread over the sky. That part about the entire human race except for Noah and his family being wiped out? Oh, we can just skip over that.
But I never could! As a child, my question was, as it often was: what about the children? What did they do to deserve that? The death of innocents was a show stopper for me, a deal breaker in any inclination I might have had to believe in God. And I wanted to believe. But, the fact was, I could never believe in a God that would do such a thing. For that matter, I could never believe in a God about whom people would tell a story that involved doing such a thing!
And then, skipping quite a few years, I went to seminary. That’s how so many good stories begin…or end, as it were…And then I went to seminary.
In seminary, I was introduced to a book called Old Testament Parallels in which the editors laid out the ancient Mesopotamian stories that corresponded with biblical texts.
The first creation story in the book of Genesis and the Hymns to the Egyptian gods Ptah and Ra.
The Sumerian Code and the book of Deuteronomy.
The story of Sargon I, who lived from 2371-2316 BCE and ruled an ancient city in what is now Iraq, as a parallel to the story of Moses.
Here is an example. The annals of Sargon I read: [my mother] left me on the bank of the Euphrates river in a basket woven from rushes and waterproofed with tar. The river carried my basket down to a canal, where Akki, the royal gardener, lifted me out of the water and reared me as his own.[i]
Later, stories would be told of another leader, Moses, who was also placed in a basket woven from rushes and sent down river to the palace of the king. That is just one example of how these parallels work.
Then there is the story of Noah’s Ark and the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian poem from the 21st century, before the common era or BCE. The hero Gilgamesh asks one of the immortals, Utnapishtim, how he and his wife came to be immortal. As it turns out, they had been instructed by one of the gods to escape a plot by the other gods, the entire divine assembly,
to exterminate humanity.
“Pull down your house,” this god told them surreptitiously, “Build a barge. Abandon all your possessions. Save your life. Take specimens of every living thing on board. Make the ark square with a roof like the dome of the heavens.”[ii]
There it was, line for line sometimes: the flood and the ark, the animals, the dove and the raven being sent out to search for land, the gods’ remorse and the repopulation of the earth.
And something about the fact that non-biblical people had told a wildly similar story to the story of Noah’s Ark softened my heart somehow. The biblical baggage I’d been carrying faded, and the story became just that, a story, told by ancient people who were desperately trying to figure out how their world worked and why things are the way they were, trying to somehow make sense of good and evil and sin and survival, and this story was the best they could do.
And here is the truth that lies within this story:
Human beings are horrible in so many ways. Now, I know we are Unitarian Universalists, and we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all people, and that stands. And, can we also agree that human beings are capable of some pretty nasty stuff? We are horrible! To each other, to our planet, to other living things. We, all of us, even you and me, we are capable of just horrific things.
And so, if we were a people who believed in a creator (perhaps some of us still are), but if we were a people who believed in a creator and we did not have a Big Bang Theory or a Theory of Evolution, and how else could we have gotten here? If we were a people who believed in a creator, we might imagine that creator having, shall we say, creator’s remorse, taking a look at what he or she had created and saying: Ugh, that was a mistake. What am I going to do now?
What about starting over?
What about starting over?
And so, in the story, God does just that. Hold’s God’s nose and wipes them out. Saves a remnant, a man and his family, two of each animal – because they were pretty good creations, after all –
and sets out to begin again.
And after it’s all over, after the flood waters have receded, after the dove has brought back a sign of dry land, after Noah and his family and the animals have disembarked, God says, I promise, I will never do that again. And God sets in the sky a sign of this promise, this covenant, God makes with Noah. A rainbow to say, be reminded of this covenant each time you see a rainbow in the sky, it is a sign of peace between parties, a sign of love, a sign of promise.
This is the first covenant explicitly described in the Bible; it encompasses all of humanity and “every living creature…that is on the earth.”
Covenant was a common practice in the ancient world, an agreement between two parties. It was a formal agreement, a bond. The agreement would have been sealed during a special ceremony which often involved burning something. In the case of the story of Noah, God sets God’s bow
(we don’t often think of a rainbow as a weapon, but in this case, think of it as God’s weapon, God’s bow) facing away from the earth, away from humanity. “I will remember the covenant,” God says. “This is the sign…”
And so, I’m interested in the people who told this story – all of them, Israelite and Mesopotamian. What does it mean to have the ultimate power in one’s universe be able to get so angry as to wipe out all the beings on the earth? And what does it mean to have the ultimate power in one’s universe be so contrite as to say, never again, I will never do that again and…
by the way, we are henceforth bonded, forever?
What does it mean for human beings to be so deplorable as to warrant ultimate destruction
and so loveable as to warrant a bond with the almighty?
But that’s it. That is who we are. Deplorable and loveable. Each of us and all of us. We may not like it. But it is just true.
~
On May 19, 1975, during a robbery at a small grocery story in Cleveland, a shopkeeper named Harold Franks was murdered. Eddie Vernon was twelve years old at the time. He became the main eye witness in the prosecution’s case against Rickey Jackson and two other teenagers. There was only one problem: Eddie hadn’t actually seen anything. Eddie testified against Rickey and the other young men, he says, because police threatened his family and pressured him to do so. Rickey was convicted and served 39 years in prison, maintaining his innocence the entire time.
This all weighed heavily on Eddie, and finally, at the age of 52, he came forward with the truth. Rickey and the two other men were released. The murder remains unsolved.
Rickey and Eddie met soon after Rickey’s release, and three years later they sat down in a StoryCorps booth to record their story.[iii]
“I used to think about you a lot,” Rickey tells Eddie. “Hatred, loathing. I even used to fantasize about ways that I was going to kill you.”
But then he describes seeing Eddie in court 40 years after the original trial. And then Rickey says to Eddie: “It was very courageous thing that you’ve done. And in order for me to move forward, I wanted to put everything to rest, so I talked to my lawyer and asked if there was any chance that you and I could hook up and when I saw you, all those things I used to think about you, the animosity, I could hardly remember. And, might have been my imagination,” he says,
“but when we embraced, it felt like you just got lighter in my arms.”
“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Took a whole lot off of my shoulders – the weight I’ve been carrying for all these years.”
“People still find it hard to understand that I forgive you,” Rickey says, “and I think people confuse that with forgetting. I’m not going to ever forget, but if forgiveness is my way out, I’ll gladly take it.”
“And I thank God for that,” says Eddie.
“After all we’ve been through,” Rickey says, “to finally be sitting here face to face talking about what happened. I’m saying one man to another, I wish you nothing but the best, always.”
“I wish you nothing but the best, always.”
Life is not kittens and rainbows.
But sometimes it is rainbows and olive branches.
~
Our theme for this month is intention. And that’s how I got to Noah’s Ark in the first place.
My reflection on the theme led me back to this story, to asking questions like: What was God’s intention when it came to humanity, to all of creation? Was it to destroy or to save?
And what are we to do with the end of the story, the olive branch, the rainbow? What does it mean to create a covenant? What kind of intention is required?
We often say, somewhat flippantly sometimes, that we are a covenantal, not a creedal, faith.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I often say that. We do not share a set of beliefs that one must ascribe to in order to be a Unitarian Universalist. There is no test of faith. We do not recite a creed on Sunday morning – or any other time of the week, for that matter.
Many of you have shared with me that this is the main reason you are here. That it became hard to recite something that you no longer believed. Others of you have told me that you miss it, the creed, or at least some tenets of it.
So, if we do not share a creed, and if we are truly what we profess to be: a radically theologically diverse community, then what do we share? What are we all doing here? What is our intention toward each other?
My colleague, the Rev. Sue Phillips writes that:
“our congregations are voluntary associations in that members and friends participate according to their conscience – no one is compelled by creedal requirement, eschatological fear, or priestly mandate to join a Unitarian Universalist congregation. But we are nonetheless called to engage in religious community. Whether by individual conscience, justice-seeking community, or by God, Unitarian Universalism teaches that we are called to create beloved community in community. Our theologies may differ about what or who is calling us, but we are united in a belief that we are part of an interdependent web of existence. This call, wherever it comes from and however it manifests in our individual lives, is that which compels us to come together. There is no such thing as a Unitarian Universalist by themselves,” she says. “Our faith is practiced in covenanted community.”[iv]
Our faith is practiced in covenanted community.
As a covenanted community, as a member congregation in the community of covenanted congregations that is the Unitarian Universalist Association, we agree as individuals and as a congregation to affirm and promote the seven principles of Unitarian Universalism. You’ll find this covenant on the back of our order of service and displayed just outside the Sanctuary. It is also listed in the second section of the by-laws of our Unitarian Universalist Association:
We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association,
covenant to affirm and promote
- The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
- Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
- Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
- A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
- The right of conscience and the use of the democratic;
- The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all;
- Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
The covenant also lists the sources of our shared faith:
- Direct experience of … transcending mystery and wonder
- Words and deeds of prophetic people
- Wisdom from the world’s religions
- Jewish and Christian teachings
- Humanist teachings
- Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions
But the piece I’m especially interest in today is at the very end of the text: “As free congregations, we enter into this covenant, promising to one another our mutual trust and support.”[v]
Promising to one another our mutual trust and support.
Sue Phillips, in her work on covenant, remarks that most congregations are familiar with behavioral covenants. We make promises to each other about how we will engage with conflict,
how we will behave together, how we will handle it when someone does not behave within the boundaries of the covenant we have established and agreed upon. This is all well and good. We have done important work here in the past few years on our own covenant[vi] with the Permanent Committee on Right Relations. Our congregational covenant provides a foundation for how we want to be together. This is crucial to creating a covenantal community.
“Anyone who has ever tried to live in religious community knows how important it is to have clear expectations about how we will try to be with one another,” Sue Phillips says.
But the practice of covenanting goes beyond agreeing to behave cordially toward one another or to deal with conflict openly and fairly. As Unitarian Universalists, we trace our congregational roots back to the New England congregations who, in 1648, authored together a covenant known as the Cambridge Platform. “For [these spiritual] ancestors,” Sue reminds us, “the motivation for governing individual behavior wasn’t just copacetic community life but deep awareness that people who practice loving each other are best able to love God.”[vii]
The deeper practice of covenanting has its roots in the first covenant signified by the rainbow and in the idea that we, human beings, might be able to be bonded together the way humanity is boded to the holy, with a pledge of mutual trust and ongoing support.
Now, we are a congregation that believes many different things about who or what or how God is – including that God is not. But consider that many “congregations and communities use covenant as a way to express their deepest aspirations and values.”
In this sense, I look to the beginning of our congregational covenant: We covenant together to create and nurture a culture of respect and kindness, and to engage in the spiritual and everyday practice of loving more generously.
To engage in the spiritual and everyday practice of loving more generously.
This is our aspiration. This is what we sign on to when we become members of this community. But in the same way that a wedding is not a marriage, being a member of USNH is not signing the book or standing before the congregation and saying nice words.
Being a part of this enterprise takes intention and work and commitment and mutual trust – that I will engage and you will engage and together we will take risks, open up, question, seek, search, try to understand, struggle and make mistakes. Together, we will pay attention, ask questions, listen, live our answers. Together, we will learn to love our neighbors, and we will learn to love ourselves.[viii]
Together, though, like Eddie Vernon, we have the power to do otherwise, we will apologize with humility. Together, though, like Rickey Jackson, we could choose a different path, we will forgive with humility.
And through the grace that we offer each other, we will be forgiven.
Through these practices, we create, together, a beloved community.
Through these practices, we discover dry land and set our own rainbow in the sky.
May we live into the practice of covenant.
May each of us engage in the spiritual and everyday practice
of loving more generously.
May we discover together the joy of creating and living in a community
built on mutual trust.
May it be so.
Amen.
[i] Victor Harold Matthews, Old Testament Parallels: Laws and Stories from the Ancient Near East, Paulist Press, 2006.
[ii] Matthews.
[iii] https://storycorps.org/listen/rickey-jackson-and-eddie-vernon-180105/
[iv] Sue Phillips, On Covenant. https://www.uua.org/sites/live-new.uua.org/files/sue_phillips_on_covenant.pdf
[v] https://www.uua.org/sites/live-new.uua.org/files/uua_bylaws_2017.pdf
[vi] https://www.usnh.org/about-us/our-covenant/
[vii] Phillips.
[viii] “One Love” by Rev. Hope Johnson in Voices From the Margins, Skinner House, 2012.