As we saw last time I wrote, I have a hard time staying inside the Noah story. I cannot imagine a God drowning children – not even when God’s heart was broken. But that doesn’t mean that I can simply reject this story or edit out the parts I don’t like. Why is this here? How do I make sense of it? How do I read this scripture in light of the entire Scripture? There are many places in the bible that give me pause. You’ll see – many places. I have to allow myself and my understanding of God and the world to be challenged by them, and I have to read them in relationship to all I have read and lived.
When I read this story in Genesis, I think mostly of the passion and commitment God has for humankind.
I know it’s skipping ahead, but read Hosea. Even in the first chapter, poor God is so torn. How can the LORD lay claim to the people who do such things, to children who have sworn covenant love and then turned their backs, to priests who neglect the poor, and to teachers who know so very little of what it is to love. You can hear God screaming “You are not my people” and still in God’s heart of hearts longing to call them “Children of the living God.”
How do we express the passion of God? This is not some clockmaker deity who sets things running and then moves on to tinker with the next project. This is the God who created and called it good. This is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. This is the God who promises and wrestles and speaks even in utter silence. This is the One who gets One’s hands dirty in our clay.
Hosea offers these images. Think of this God as the husband who keeps loving through a wife’s utter unfaithfulness. Think of this God as father to a child that is not his, a loving father who teaches his child to walk. Think of this God as an attacking lion who has nothing left to do but ravage. Think of this God as the mother bear after you’ve stolen her cubs. Imagine if God really did simply go away until we had our act together. This God wants steadfast love more than anything, but our love is like a morning cloud, like dew that evaporates with the rising of the sun. This God rages with love and hope and desire that can find no satisfaction in humankind – yet can only, somehow and incredibly, find satisfaction in human kind. What is God to do?
God, O thankfully, God remembers God’s self : “For I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” (Hosea 11:9) “I am like an evergreen cypress; your faithfulness comes from me.” (Hosea 14:8)
And here, in this space of wonder and of passion, come the cross and the resurrection. Jesus loves. God incarnate loves. No matter what we do to him, the incarnate God loves. Sin and death will not reign, for the kingdom of God is at hand. God will live no matter we do. And this God will pull us into life, into resurrected possibility. It is almost too much for the heart to conceive.
First, as it is in the story, we recognize the evil that we do, that we allow, that we neglect to fight, this evil is so vast and so horrendous that our hearts and minds cannot take it in. We might sometimes join God in wishing all this ugliness away. There’s that flood. The flood cannot be the end of the story though. For we remember the good. We remember the two being as one. We remember walking in the garden with God. We remember caring for creation as God’s partner. We remember that we are created in the image of the Holy One. We remember what we might be, and we look to the rainbows, those fleeting rainbows with all the hope and faith we can muster. We need those glimmers of God in our lives to remember all that the kingdom of God might be.
Next week: we babel.