Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
This particular message was written for our annual Blessing of the Animals service.
Rebooting Creation
Scripture: Genesis 6:11-22
Noah and the Ark is one of the best known stories of the bible: all the animals coming in, two by two, riding out the great flood, only to come out after 40 days and nights to re-populate the earth.
People forget certain details, like the fact that the “clean” animals and birds came in 14 by 14; seven pairs, a symbolic number, and actually the total time on the ark was almost a full year – the 40 days and nights was just how long it rained.
Then, 150 days for the waters to subside, then another 40 days for Noah to dare to open the windows, then more waiting until it was actually dry enough to get out. As we know from Ottawa spring floods a few years ago, it takes a lot longer for the high waters to subside than it takes for them to appear in the first place.
This story is a wonderful and important lesson for modern humanity because when you read the whole thing, you realize that in this story humanity has put all the Earth at risk because of heedless human behaviour. If we look beyond the language of sin and judgement, we see parallels to modern concerns about climate change: annual wildfires and smoke, increasing tornadoes and hurricanes and, much closer to Noah’s situation, rising sea levels; all those human things that threaten much more than human life.
Frankly, I can understand speaking in judgmental language about short-sighted and selfish decisions that threaten not only future generations but also the very life around us. But I particularly like the way that this story emphasizes the fact that despite the human core of the problem, this is not a story only about humans and about human needs.
Human needs are specially addressed, it is true. That’s the purpose of the “clean” animals that get group rates: there were no “clean” animals until the law was written, but the audience for this story knew the law, so this language is a storyteller’s short-hand. The clean animals were going to be lunch, the “unclean” animals were all the ones it was not safe or wise to eat, so they brought extra clean animals so they could eat some and breed others.
Notice, though: the overriding command from God, the creator was to bring everything, not just the clean stuff. Bugs: creeping, crawling, swarming creatures, they were included. This was a very early recognition of the inter-connectedness of all life – the web of life, where diversity is needed to have a successful eco-system.
The first version of this story came from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Noah figure – Utnapishtim – saves a bunch of baby animals and birds as well as the village craftspeople, a very limited picture of “everything” compared to the Noah story, and frankly focused on saving “civilization” rather than the world.
Whoever re-wrote this story had the Jewish understanding of God as Creator and also had a clear sense that you need more than farm animals for the world to work; that even bugs have a place, even when we don’t understand why.
Thousands of years ago it was clearly understood that God, as creator put everything here for a reason and loved it all. In the Noah story, God is basically re-booting creation, wiping out this humanity that had become like an incurable virus on the planet and restoring things to the original settings, like the garden of Eden all over again, with just a small number of animals to re-populate the world; eight humans and more “clean” animals to support farming but nothing else left out. Humans are not permitted to destroy any other creatures when this reboot happens.
This is an important principle for us to grasp because it doesn’t put humans at the centre of things which is what we do all the time: “Hey, these bugs keep eating the crops and I’ve found a chemical that is really good at killing them; let’s make a bunch and sell it; we’ll save lots of people from starving, make a bunch of money too, and we’ll call it DDT!”
And you thought I was going to say Neo-Nicotinoids, those chemicals killing all of our bees.
We’re really not very good at waiting long enough to discover the side effects of our wonderful new inventions. We’re not patient; we want results fast and we don’t count the cost to other creatures, other life, until there’s a crisis.
The problem is that we can’t re-boot creation. The Noah solution is a wonderful warning to us about how badly we might manage things and some of the potential consequences. We are reminded in this story that God loves every part of creation, even those bits we find inconvenient, or incomprehensible. Like Noah, we are tasked with preventing their destruction, with saving them from the consequences of human misbehaviour.
The costs of our mistakes have taken on a world-wide scale, so let’s take that love that we shower on our dogs and cats and the other animals that share our homes and extend a loving hand to the rest of creation: the cute creatures, and the slimy ones, the birds and the bugs, the safe ones and the dangerous ones.
They are all part of God’s complex creation, lovingly made and inter-related and all worth saving.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 