Sermon: Not God’s Darlings??
Text: Genesis 9:8-17
Date: March 1, 2009
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
First things first: a reminder that we need not read the story of Noah and the flood as history. While there are so many flood stories in various world culture’s mythologies as to hint at a mustard seed of history, this story is best understood as foundational mythology. Like the story of the Garden of Eden. Someone once asked theologian Karl Barth whether he believed the snake in Eden actually spoke. His response: “The important point is not whether the snake spoke, but what he said.”
Same deal for this story. It’s not nearly as important to ask whether there was a flood as it is to attend to the reason for the flood and the nature of the covenant promise following it.
The rationale for the flood is given in Genesis 6: “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 to 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…’” [Genesis 6:11-14a] God was apparently fed up with the corruption and violence of humanity, which had only been created ten generations ago. The human race spoiled as fast as an Easter egg in the sun. In this story God reacts to violence with violence. God’s words here remind me of the way Bill Cosby used to talk about the way his father dealt with him when he was angry. He’d say, “You know, I brought you into this world, and I can take you out. And it don’t make any difference to me, I’ll make another one that looks just like you.”
So God almost-not-quite wipes the slate clean. This is not really a total destruction of all flesh, it’s a redemption. Representatives of the human creatures and all the other creatures are preserved through God’s agent, Noah, who at God’s explicit direction builds an ark that will survive the flood. Noah is put in charge of keeping enough of each species alive to replenish the earth after the waters recede.
When we arrive at the Genesis text for today, God is turning over a new leaf. The Lord solemnly promises never again to destroy all flesh in a flood. The Process and Faith commentator this week suggests that God is “in effect promising to deal with the problem of sin and evil by more creative means than simply wiping it out. It is in this moment that God is depicted as choosing to be a Redeemer, above and beyond being Creator and Destroyer.”[1]
That’s interesting. But even more interesting is the scope of this first covenant chronicled in the Hebrew scriptures. With whom exactly is God making this first covenant? With Noah and his sons? Yes, but there are several key ANDs in this story. “I am establishing my covenant with you AND your descendants after you AND with every living creature that is with you.” A few verses down the page, God says this covenant is “between me and the earth.” So it’s not just a covenant with Noah. Not even with Noah’s descendants, which would theoretically or at least theologically include you and me. The covenant is also with all the living creatures, indeed, with the Earth itself. Daniel Clendenin calls this “the original eco-covenant.”[2]
I can think of no scripture as true and relevant for humanity today than this reminder that God has a covenantal relationship with the whole created order. We are not the only creatures that matter to God. We are only one part of the interrelated, interdependent creation.
Good Golly, that’s hard for us to remember. I want to turn now to some wise words on this topic written by theologian Sallie McFague in her book A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming. [First, an aside. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen film footage of a traditional Eskimo mother feeding her toddler. She chews up the meat and spits it into the youngster’s mouth. That is in essence what I am about to do for you. These ideas are not in any way original to me—I’ve just been chewing on McFague’s chapter on ecological anthropology and want to share it with you a bit short of just sitting down and reading it to you.]
McFague begins by pointing out that in terms of how we act, probably nothing is more important than who we think we are. In Western societies, we think of ourselves primarily as individuals. We do not, first of all, think of ourselves as members of a community, not a human community or a natural or planetary community. We think of ourselves as individual beings that must look after ourselves. This notion of individuality as our defining feature is part of the anthropology (anthropology being the science of humankind) of at least three big American institutions: religion, the economy, and the government.
Christian theology’s focus narrowed through the Enlightenment until it was primarily concerned with the inner life of individuals and their relationship to God. Human beings were understood to be individuals in relation to God, either properly or improperly related.
In economics, the human being of market capitalism is the insatiable individual whose desire for endless consumer goods fuels the system—such an understanding of the individual as consumer is necessary for this economic model to function.
Likewise, in government the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” of individuals is the signature statement of American anthropology.
McFague writes, “When the three major societal institutions of religion, economics and government all agree on a basic anthropology—one that focuses on, supports, and celebrates the needs and wants of individuals—a powerful statement is being made.”[3] It’s almost impossible for alternative anthropologies to emerge. The energetic witch hunts against Communists in America (a communitarian perspective) illustrate the power of the anthropology of individualism.
Contemporary science paints a different picture of who we are in the scheme of things. The story that begins with the Big Bang and continues through millennia of evolution is “a story that begins with radical unity evolving into unimaginable diversity, but diversity that is intrinsically and internally interconnected. It is a story in which we human beings are, at present, the most complex developed creatures on earth, yet we are imbedded in, the products of, the earth and its evolution.”[4] We are special… as is everything else. Our “specialty” is self-consciousness: we know that we know. All sentient beings know many things—how to find food, ward off predators, raise offspring—but human beings appear to be the only ones who can think about what we know. That is our distinction. But all creatures are distinctive. McFague asks, would a dolphin think we could swim? Would a deer think we can run? Would an eagle think we could fly?
It is finally dawning on us that we are not separate, static individuals who choose to be in relation to other life-forms when we feel like it. Rather, “we now know that we belong, from the cells of our bodies to the finest creations of our minds, to the intricate, changing cosmos that gave us birth and sustains us.” As Wallace Stevens puts it, “We are not our own. Nothing in itself is taken alone. Things are because of interrelations and interconnections.” Sometimes we speak of the environment as if it were a stage on which we individuals play out our life stories. But we are a part of our environment, not apart from it. It’s time we begin to see ourselves differently, “not as post-Enlightenment individuals who have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but as part of a vast network of interrelationships, and specifically as that ‘part’ responsible for the rest, for other human beings and other life-forms.”[5] This new viewpoint is what McFague calls ecological anthropology.
McFague urges people of faith to re-engage with a fundamental study of ecology, which is not a hobby or just an activity for Sierra Club enthusiasts. Ecology is information about how our house works—our “house rules.” The most important and simplest house rule is also the most complex and difficult to internalize: everything is related to everything else. It is one of those platitudes that says it all but takes a lifetime to understand, rather like the statement “God is love.” Everything is related to everything else. Can we possibly internalize this, and learn to live as though it were true? It is an uphill battle for us North American individualists whose sensibility has been formed in just the opposite fashion. We still feel surprised to find out that the cutting of rain forests in the Amazon has an effect on the way algae grows in a lake in Minnesota. But perhaps we’re starting to get it.
If we were to accept ecological unity as the working interpretation for our dealings with each other and our world, McFague says, we would have two responses: appreciation and care. We would see ourselves as part of the web of life, an incredibly vast, complex, subtle, beautiful web that would both amaze us and call forth our concern. McFague, who is famously into metaphors, says it’s the difference between imagining the world as a hotel and and imagining it as a home. “In a hotel, the utilitarian perspective dominates: one uses hot water copiously, orders from the room service menu whatever one wishes, dumps the thick, dirty towels on the floor, and heads down the road to the next night’s hotel. The world as a hotel is a resource, solely for human use, including excessive use, if one so desires. This attitude toward the world could [also] be called the Kleenex perspective: use and discard… If, however, the earth were to be seen as our home, our one and only home, our response is likely to be very different. The home metaphor immediately brings to mind the necessity for house rules, the kind one sticks to the refrigerator for all for all the occupants to see and obey. They are usually something like the following: (1) Take only your share. (2) Clean up after yourself. (3) Keep the house in good repair for others.”[6]
Not too difficult a set of rules to understand, but demanding to live out as we think about the Earth as our house--particularly when we have been indoctrinated to treat the world more like our hotel than our home. We humans haven’t been working very intentionally at fitting our little human economy inside the planet’s big economy. We’re definitely bumping up against the limits of our behavior as we humans, numerous and powerful, are sending great numbers of species into extinction and are now affecting the very climate with our egocentric consumption.
Re-making our anthropology to be an ecological anthropology and re-thinking our theology to see ourselves as just one part of the creation that God loves is essential to our survival on this planet. We have been living a lie by thinking of ourselves as being the center of our planet rather than one of its neediest creatures. It’s a dangerous lie. Although God promised not destroy all living beings, we may be in a position to do that very thing if we do not reign ourselves in, and soon.
I have some bad news, and I have some good news. The bad news is this: We humans are not God’s darlings. We are more like God’s rogue elephants at the moment, trampling everything underfoot in our greed and disregard for the rest of the creatures. It is past time we de-center ourselves as God’s darlings in our thinking about ourselves.
The good news: we are, or can be, re-centered as God’s partners, the ones who can help work for a just and sustainable planet. We are not the only ones that matter, but we are in a unique position to become the caretakers of everything else. Rewinding a little, remember that internalizing an understanding that everything is related to everything else will call forth two responses: appreciation and care. I want to share one of Mary Oliver’s poems that captures both appreciation and care and suggests a vocation. The title is “Messenger”:
my work is loving the world.
here the sunflowers, there the humming bird-
equal seekers of sweetness.
here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
are my boots old? is my coat torn?
am i no longer young and still not half perfect?
let me keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work.
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
the phoebe, the delphinium.
the sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here.
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body- clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy
dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.[7]
[1] [1] Nancarrow, Paul http://www.processandfaith.org/lectionary/YearB/2008-2009/2009-03-01-09-Lent1.shtml
[2] Clendenin, Daniel http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20060227JJ.shtml
[3] McFague, Sallie A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008, p. 46
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid. p. 48
[6] Ibid., p. 53
[7] Oliver, Mary “Messenger” Thirst
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