Preached by Winton Boyd on Sunday, April 13, 2008
Last week in Java and Jesus we heard a wonderful quote from a Native American storyteller. I would like to use it as I begin this reflection on Noah. I don’t know if this story reall happened, but I know it to be true. It is a foundational story of our faith. This is the second of three weeks in which Ree Hale and I are preaching on issues related to the earth and our relationship with it, I want to take a gander back into this old and often misunderstood story.
Norman Wirzba, author of the Paradise of God, and a speaker at last year’s Earth Day celebration, makes a strong and careful case that the writer of Genesis presents Noah as the human through whom the curse God had placed on the ground is reversed.
He points out that the divine curse on humanity – placed because of rampant unrightetousness and sin – is borne out not only by humans but also by the ground itself (3:17- Cursed is the ground because of you). However, the hope of humanity rests on Noah, whose name means the one who will bring “relief…from the toil of our hands.â€
“When Noah emerges from the ark, God promised never again to curse the ground, promising instead to establish regular seasons that will make farming possible. The writers basic assumption is human identity cannot be adequately understood apart from its relationship to the soil. ” (p.29) Written from the perspective of the Yahwist agarian point of view, this view stresses human kinship with rather than separation from the rest of creation; human dependence, rather than human domination.
“The ark experience was really a training ground, a laboratory of sorts, in which righteousness could be learned and displayed. Noah emerged from the ark a “sustainer of life,’ as one who now knows what it means to take care of God’s creation.
He showed his care by making himself the servant of creation, by submitting his desires to the well being of others placed in his charge. Having seen the faithfulness of Noah, his willingness to be an earthbound creature rather than a mini God, God establishes a new covenant with him and with all creation, a covenant that will insure the continued order of creation.”
What we need, Wirzba continues, is to recover “the art of being creatures.”
The means first, that we submit ourselves to all creation and look to it as a source of God’s grace.
Wirzba continues, “The work of God’s hand, the whole panorama of creation–flowers, bees, photosynthesis, earthworms, rain, humus, chickens, sheep, babies, families, and friendships–testifies to God who cares intimately and deeply about the world and desires that it be beautiful and at peace.â€
“Many Old Testament writers believed that those who do not see this beauty and feel inwardly the marks of divine care are simply fools. They are guilty of … an inability to see the world for what it really is: the concrete manifestation of God’s cov¬enantal and creative love for the whole world. …They are likely to become wicked by destroying or spoiling the good gifts of God that are the nurturing root of our being and the inexhaustible source of our joy. …
Not only is creation a source of joy, our relationship with it shapes all of our relationship.
“If we are honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge a serious lack of readiness and desire to cherish the many gifts of creation that sustain and inspire us. Most of us do not devote ourselves enough to the caretaking and celebration of all God’s bewil¬dering array of blessing. The result, more often than not, is self-pain and pain to those around us . Collectively, our anxious obsessions prevent us from adequately considering and enjoying the welcoming life God so much wants for us.â€
Mastering the art of “being a creature†means, whether we live in the woods or in an urban high rise, that care taking of the earth leads directly to the formation of moral and religious virtues that are necessary for human development.
It is less about location and more about attitude and moral values. It is right and proper that we in the church, even if belatedly, make the strong connection between how we serve creation and how grow morally and spiritually. The time is long overdue for the church to insist that creation care, earth care, is not primarily about our personal survival, but about the ethics that shape our way in the world – even if there comes a day when the environmental threat lessens. It is about living with the humility that we are just one of God’s many and beautiful creations.
In addition to humility, learning the art of being creature also means developing the practical skills and sensibilities involved in caring for the planet. One writer, Bill Bryson, speaks in graphic ways about his relationship to and with the natural world.
An Iowa born writer who lived for 20 years in England, Bryson tells the story of moving his family “across the pond†to the USA, to Hanover, New Hampshire whereupon he discovered a path at the edge of town that meandered into the woods. Realizing that it was part of the Applachian Trail, a 2000-mile trail from Georgia to Northern Maine, he decided it would be “cool†to walk the whole trail. In his mind was the urge, as John Muir once put it, “to throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence.†As he tried to unpack the voice in his head that said, “let’s do it!†he realized he formed a number of rationalizations for this trek
“It would get me fit after years of waddlesome sloth. It would be an interesting and reflective way to reacquaint myslef with the scale and beauty of my native land after near 20 years of living abroad. It would be useful (I wasn’t quite sure in what way, but I was sure nonetheless) to learn to fend for msyelf in the wilderness. When the guys in camoflauge pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Acres Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake. I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through the eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, “Yeah, I have (taken a crap) in the woods.!†(A Walk in the Woods)
What Bryson’s trip and ensuing book, A Walk in the Woods, reveal is how out of shape, out of touch and even more tragically, how commonly American he is. In both humorous and heartbreaking ways, he writes a powerful memoir about what it actually takes to truly appreciate and live within nature.
While his writing is funny, it is also eye opening and tragic. Stepping out of his life for a brief period to walk in the woods, he demonstrates how ignorant and disconnected most of us are from the natural world that shapes, forms and sustains us.
But more that this, his book an invitation to let nature heal us, hold us, shape us and inform us. His experience brings to mind the more poetic writer, Wendell Berry, and his famous poem, The Peace of Wild Things
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of the wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
In an article on Friday about this afternoon’s Faith, Food, and Earth Day celebration, the Capital Times reporter began with the words, “There is just one letter of difference between “care of souls” and “care of soils.”
In a era of imminent environmental threat; in a time of moral and spiritual crisis regarding earth care, this ethic, first learned and taught through the ancient figure of Noah, isn’t peripheral to the life of faith. It isn’t an ethic we can afford to hold to ourselves. It is an ethic that must shape us, guide us, inform our decisions and continually form and re-form us into the creatures God made us to be. It is an ethic that must lead us, ultimately, back into the loving grace of The Wind who Makes all Winds that Blow, our creating and re-creating God.
We give thanks to ancients who knew this truth, who embodied it in this story so that we might be able to return time and again to a faith that makes us whole. Amen
