I would like to begin today with a prayer from the UN Environmental Sabbath program.
Please pray with me:
We have forgotten who we are.
We have alienated ourselves from the unfolding of the cosmos
We have become estranged from the movements of the earth
We have turned our backs on the cycles of life.
Now the forests are dying
And the creatures are disappearing
And the humans are despairing.
We have forgotten who we are.
We ask forgiveness
We ask for the gift of remembering
We ask for the strength to change. Amen.
In the beginning, in the primal darkness, on the day before the first day, there
were only three—Elohim, Earth, and the waters. And the breath of Elohim (which is the
Hebrew word for God) moved over the waters which covered Earth. “On the third day,
Earth [was] revealed, the hidden [was] made visible, the mysterious [was] uncovered. On
the third day, Earth [rose] from the waters, an epiphany from below—a geophany.” So
says Norman Habel, in his commentary on Genesis in what is called the ‘Earth Bible’
series. The geophany, according to Habel, is the heart of the first creation story, for all
life depends upon the revelation of this dry domain rising from the waters—the fertile,
habitable Earth. And God created life, and behold, it was very good.1
But times change.
In a time of great forgetting, the earth is filled with violence, the creatures are dying, and the waters are rising. The life systems of the planet are overcome by
destructive forces unleashed by recalcitrant human beings, and the earth faces the prospect of uncreation, the return to chaos. And the tears of God are flowing. It’s the
story of our time, and it’s also a very old story.
It’s time to take a fresh look at the story of Noah and the flood; and putting aside
all our associations with children’s stories and miniature arks with animal action figures
and pretty rainbows, it’s time to see this story for what it is—a story of horror, and grief,
commitment and promise. Because Noah has a message for us, as we confront our own
flood of human-induced ecological devastation, and search for hope amid the ruins.
The story begins in horror and grief. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of
humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their
hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind
on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” Wali Fejo, an indigenous Australian
commentator on this text, explains that “God…suffers because this evil violates the
sacred, the Earth where God is present. The ‘sorry’ of God is the deep hurt God feels
In this quote, I substituted the
English translation “Earth” for the Hebrew word erets, which Habel uses.
because of a deep hurt in the Earth.” Fejo adds, “The suffering of God in the flood
anticipates the suffering of God in the crucifixion.”2
The pain of the Earth suffering under human dominion is powerfully described by the Apostle Paul in our Romans text for today. This passage, which exudes both pathos and hope, has one central theme—that is, human beings and non-human creation share a common fate—our destiny is intertwined with the destiny of the entire creation. In fact, Paul strongly suggests that the destiny of the earth is dependent upon the moral responsibility of the human creatures which God made to care for the earth.3
Hear again Romans 8:19-21:
“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of
God; for the creation was subjected to futility not of its own will but by the will of
the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from the
bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of
God.”
The passage ends on a note of hope, but a question hangs over the text like a cloud—
creation is waiting for the revealing of the children of God—Earth is groaning in labor
pains awaiting the birth of a new humanity modeled after the likeness of the God who
became incarnate in Jesus Christ—but will this new, graced humanity, a humanity
capable of partnering with God to release the creation from its bondage to decay, really
materialize? Will creation’s hope be fulfilled?4
The story of the flood is the climactic moment in a downward spiral of events that
came after God’s creation of the “very good” Earth. The transgression of Adam and Eve
is followed by the first murder committed by Cain. Violence is introduced into God’s
world. By the sixth chapter of Genesis, God who once “saw” that everything was very
good now “sees” that the earth is corrupt, or “destroyed” to use a better translation.5 At
the beginning of the human story in the Bible, the entire project of God’s creation is
already in extreme jeopardy. The question looming over this text is, “will life continue?”
That question is our question; it is the question that brings us together in this time
and place. Will life as we know it on Earth continue? The grief God feels in the time of
Noah is our grief, as we see the earth being destroyed at human hands, as we see the sea
levels rising, and know the pain of countless life forms disappearing before our very eyes.
In addition, we grieve for the injustices that multiply across the globe as the climate
changes due to human emissions of greenhouse gases. It is both ironic and
extraordinarily unfair that the people on this planet who are the least responsible for
global warming will be the most impacted by it. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, in their Fourth Assessment Report released last year, noted that poor
communities will be especially vulnerable to climate change because they have more
limited abilities to adapt to the changes and are more dependent on climate-sensitive
resources like local water and food supplies.6 Africa and Asia will be particularly hard
hit.
To quote the report, “By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people [in Africa] are
projected to be exposed to an increase of water stress due to climate change…..[and]
Agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected
to be severely compromised by climate variability and change.”7 Throughout Asia, the
IPCC predicts that “Freshwater availability, particularly in large river basins, is projected
to decrease due to climate change, which….could adversely affect more than a billion
people by the 2050s.”8 And that’s not even to begin to speak of the devastating impact of
climate change on low-lying island nations, which will create millions of environmental
refugees fleeing islands which are being claimed by rising seas. This is not only a matter
of environmental stewardship; it’s also a matter of human justice—and that is what we
mean when we speak of our commitment to eco-justice—it is the recognition that the
well-being of the earth and the well-being of the most poor and vulnerable human beings
are deeply and inextricably connected.
The famous poet Wendell Berry has written, “It is the destruction of the world in
our own lives that drives us half insane, and more than half. To destroy that which we
were given in trust: how will we bear it?”9
In the flood story, God cannot bear the destruction that she sees, and so God
determines to make a clean break, to return the Earth to its original hidden state, in the
waters of creation’s womb, so that the old may be swept away to make room for the
new.10
The story of the flood begins in horror and grief, but even at the beginning, a
thread of hope is present. Noah is there—standing at the ready. Waiting to be called into
service. According to Walter Brueggemann in his commentary on Genesis, “Noah…is
the bearer of an alternative possibility.”11 Noah is the man of promise. You see, God has
a plan, or perhaps we might call it a dream or a hope. God desires to renew the face of
the earth, to heal it, and to preserve the rich biodiversity God has created on the earth.
But God needs Noah to participate in this effort; God cannot, or chooses not, to act alone.
And so, essentially, God makes an agreement with Noah. God will save Noah and his
family if Noah will cooperate with God in saving two of every species that shares the
breath of life with Noah.
The Bible tells us that “Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.” And
you know what happened next. It rained and it poured, and the waters rose until the
entire Earth was covered beneath them, and only Noah and all the life in the ark rode out
the storm. But the tension in the narrative is still building…will this little boat withstand
the fury of the storm? Will the waters ever subside and the earth reappear? Will there be
a second geophany? The ark is not safe until it can touch the Earth again. For one
hundred and fifty days, the ark floats alone in a watery universe, a tiny oasis of life.
And then comes the turning point. Chapter 8, verse 1: “But God remembered
Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the
ark.” Life resumes on Earth. And God makes a promise. God initiates a covenant
between God and all living flesh that never again will the earth be destroyed by a flood,
and God hangs a rainbow in the sky as a sign of the covenant. This story has a happy
ending. But what of our story? What does God’s covenant promise mean to our
generation that lives with the threat of rising seas due to climate change and faces the
prospect of ecocide without an ark? As the earth is corrupted once again by human
violence, where do we find the hope to struggle against the forces of chaos which we
have unleashed?
I think that we have to face a hard truth here. God’s covenant notwithstanding,
we have no guarantees that our biosphere will survive if present trends continue. Despite
what some biblical traditionalists have asserted, God’s covenant is not unilateral. There
are three parties to the rainbow covenant: God, human beings, and all living flesh.12 All
must cooperate for the promise to be fulfilled. The earth has enormous regenerative
powers, and God is the lure which beckons us into partnership with creation. But we
humans must choose to take up the mantle of Noah—to fulfill the promise of a different
way of being human. To do this, we must wake up from the sleep of forgetting and
remember who we are. If God’s remembering was the turning point of the story of the
flood, it is now we who must remember…it is we who must remember our place in the
community of life.13 Our hope lies in our capacity to remember.
Berry asks the question, “To destroy that which we were given in trust—how can
we bear it?” My prayer is that each one of us will decide right here and right now that we
cannot and will not bear it. My prayer is that we will take up Paul’s challenge to become
the children of God that the Earth is waiting for. We can choose to bear an alternative
possibility. We can choose to remember our covenant to be Earth-keepers, along with
God and all the forces of life on Earth which are striving to keep our ark of life afloat.
The waters are rising; we have work to do. Let’s get moving.
1 Norman C. Habel, “Geophany: The Earth Story in Genesis 1,” in The Earth Story in Genesis, ed. Norman C. Habel and Shirley Wurst (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2000), 41.
2 Wali Fejo, “The Voice of the Earth: An Indigenous Reading of Genesis 9,” in The Earth Story in
Genesis, 142.
3 Brendan Byrne, SJ, “Creation Groaning: An Earth Bible Reading of Romans 8:18-22,” in Readings From
The Perspective of Earth, ed. Norman Habel (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2000), 197.
4 Ibid.
5 Anne Gardner, “Ecojustice: A Study of Genesis 6:11-13,” in The Earth Story in Genesis, 118-119.
6 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and
Vulnerability, Working Group II Contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth
Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers, released in April 2007, available at
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-spm.pdf, 7.
7 Ibid., 8.
8 Ibid.
9 Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir (New York: Counterpoint, 1998), 98.
10 Fejo, 142.
11 Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 79.
12 Gardner, 121. See also Calvin de Witt, “Behemoth and Batrachians in the Eye of God,” in Christianity
and Ecology, ed. Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary Radford Ruether (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2000), 296 ff for an understanding of God’s relationship with human beings and other creatures as a threeparty
relationship.
13 Brueggemann, 85. Brueggemann makes the point that God’s remembering of Noah and the life in the
ark is the turning point of the flood story, the turn from God’s destructive purpose to God’s redemptive
purpose.