Genesis 9:8-17 A Contract with the Earth
Sermon March 1, 2009: People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE: The Rev. Dan Griggs
The church around the world has now begun a forty day season of self-reflection, repentance and for many even life-changes, in preparation for the memorial of Jesus' sacrifice for us, and the celebration of his resurrection for our hope. This is the First Sunday in Lent. And how shall we Protestants, who have not gone to the same lengths as the Orthodox and the Catholics in fasting and confession—how shall we approach Lent? I want to suggest that for Protestants Lent invites us to become conscious of our deeds and how they affect other people and the world around us. This would be an appropriate Lent, I think.
Someone said that governing is "the art of the possible," not of the ideal. Ethics, then, is the art of doing what is good—or if that's not possible, at least the art of doing what is necessary. Sin, in contrast, is the will to do as I please no matter who gets hurt. Lent invites us to become conscious of our deeds and how they affect other people and how they affect the world around us.
This Lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures today is the story of what happened after the Great Flood. You will remember that God told Noah to build a boat and take aboard his wife, his three sons and their wives, and (depending on which verses you read) either one pair or seven pairs of every species of animal.[1] Everybody else and everything else was drowned. You can sense the legendary nature of the Flood narrative in Genesis. Our First Lesson begins after the waters have receded and everybody has come out of the boat. Noah offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving to God, and God makes a "covenant" with humankind, with all living things, and with the earth. In the history of theology this is called "the Noacic covenant," and it's universal, in contrast to the Abrahamic covenant which God made only with the descendants of Abraham. It's a theological statement near the very beginning of the Bible that tells us who we are, and what our relation is to the environment and to God. We are creatures of the earth like the other animals, but it is to us that God speaks. That makes us terribly responsible for all that cannot speak. We have a responsibility to be conscious of our deeds and how they affect other people and how they affect the world around us.
But what is a "covenant"? In the ancient Near East there was a legal concept that went something like this. A superior (a king, or the high priest, for example) could make a legally binding agreement with someone of lower social status (a farmer, or a day-laborer, or a fisherman, for example). The relationship was unequal. The lower person swore to serve the greater person, and the greater person swore to protect the lower person. Sometimes this kind of agreement was used when one country defeated another country in battle: it became a treaty of unequal partners. And within that agreement, everything the lower party did had some relation to their submission to the superior person—even their family life.
The agreement that God made with Abraham was a "covenant," and everything Abraham's descendants have done since then has had some relation to how they serve God and how God protects them. That's why the Nazi Holocaust is such an earth-shaking atrocity: many Jews have been led to question how the God of their "covenant" could withdraw and not protect them. I also need to add that Muslims also consider themselves covered by the Abrahamic "covenant": through Abraham's older son Ishmael, the legendary ancestor of the Arab peoples.
In today's First Lesson the Noacic "covenant" is established with humankind, and with all animal life and plant life, and with the earth itself: trees, birds, cattle, the soil. None of these speaks, and I think it's interesting that Noah doesn't speak either. Even though humankind speaks with God in behalf of the earth, in this moment of covenant-making Noah is silent: it is completely a gift from God. It's an act of grace that God invites us all to a new beginning, and that new world is simply given. We human beings are responsible to and for all life on earth and for the environment itself. It's essential, then, that we keep ourselves conscious of our deeds and how they affect other people and how they affect the world around us.
Maybe it says something about our pride about human intelligence, human speech, science, technology—maybe our pride isn't warranted. Maybe our approach to each other and to the world should be humility rather than pride. We as a species have done to the whole earth what our present generation has done to outer space: once we figured out how to go there, we began putting weapons there. For we are terribly responsible.
Maybe this is the core insight we can draw from the Flood Story in Genesis: that we humans are part of nature, and humility becomes us.
So what I'm suggesting today is that Lent invites us to become conscious of our deeds and how they affect other people and how they affect the world around us. Most poultry farmers here on the Eastern Shore have taken this very seriously—especially with avian influenza issues. They care for their flocks, they manage their layers and their fryers, and when they take their lives it's not done mindlessly: it's responsible animal husbandry. You who have flower gardens or flowering bushes know how this works: you want flowers, so you have to prune the plants; but you have to do it responsibly. In contrast there are great agricultural corporations which cultivate millions of acres of farmland, and don't show nearly as much care: for example, on potato farms the mechanical harvesters sort out the large potatoes from the little ones and dump the little ones back on the field to rot, when there are hungry people living nearby.
So Lent invites us to consciousness—to remember who we are under God, and to make our choices with that in mind.
Someone might think, "Pastor, what you're saying today is trivial!" Our economic priorities have certainly assigned animals and plants and the environment to a trivial place, but how trivial is a child's health—a human child or the offspring of an eagle, either one? Both are held precious in the covenant to which the legendary Noah is witness: precious to God. How trivial was the decision of General Motors back in the 1930's to buy up and close as many trolley systems in as many cities as they could, so that more people would buy cars? How trivial is forgiveness and reconciliation between life-long friends?
Lent invites us to become conscious of our deeds and how they affect other people and how they affect the world around us. In that osteoporosis commercial Sally Struthers says, "I have this one body and this one life." So do we all; and this one body, this one life is part of a great chain of being over which God stretches out his memorial rainbow; and we all live and love and work and have our existence beneath the "covenant" it symbolizes—we are one Creation. Humility becomes us. And during Lent, repentance too.
AMEN
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