Well there were a couple of high profile goofs this past week by celebrities who don’t always say or do the smartest things.  The silver screen makes theses stars bigger than life to us, but they are indeed mere mortals and often very ordinary.  I found a website article called the 60 dumbest celebrity quotes and some of them were pretty funny.  Brooke Shields, who if memory serves me right graduated from Princeton, said while interviewing to become a spokesperson for a federal antismoking campaign, “Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.”  Very well said Brooke, I feel the same way.   “Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.” Those words were uttered by Ivana Trump, on finishing her first novel.  Kind of makes you wonder if she had a ghost writer, doesn’t it? And who can forget Britney Spears, who said, “I get to go to lots of overseas places, like Canada.”  I have been oversees too Britney—to Canada, Mexico and Texas. 

I can’t even begin to list the quotables by our President, there is a whole category of these known on the internet as “Bushisms.”  But he once said, “I think war is a dangerous place.”  I hope you do think about that, sir.  Golfer Greg Norman is grateful if not bright when he said, “I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father.”  And let’s not forget the Governor of California who may be a great politician when he said “think gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman.” 

And let’s not forget our sports heroes- Joe Theisman, quarterback and sports analyst said, “The word ‘genius’ isn’t applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.” – True, though tragically Norman was the forgotten Einstein.  “Half this game is ninety percent mental.” Danny Ozark, Philadelphia Phillies manager reminds us, and maybe Danny is only using whatever percentage is left.  Or how about fellow Arkie and sportscaster Pat Summerall who ponders during a Superbowl broadcast, “If only faces could talk.” Pat has had so much Botox that his face doesn’t seem to move, but it still manages to talk.

And singer Christine Auguilera recently said, “Where is the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?” Well Christine ask Sharon Stone she knows where it was held, and had a quotable herself as she opened her mouth in a most inopportune way that might have major repercussions on her career this past week.  In case you missed it the story she said this at the Cannes Film Festival: “I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?” Of course the reaction by the Chinese was immediate, and the public news agency there called her “the public enemy of all mankind.”   She basically apologized and offered to help herself in the relief efforts in the area, but basically it was too little too late.  She is now feeling the full wrath of an economic global superpower, and it will no doubt hit her where it hurts the worst, in her pocketbook.

          And while it may seem that in the big scheme of things the Chinese are overreacting, we can understand their sensitivity.  The problem is this is an earthquake that has killed 68,000 so far, with many more still missing and has left over 1,000,000 homeless; it is a disaster on an epic scale, so no doubt those closest to it are a little touchy.  The Chinese people have suffered more than we can imagine and will for years to come, so her remarks were particularly uncalled for and insensitive.  And rightly or wrongly, when you are a public figure and make money off of the people, your intuition and your basic instincts just have to be better than Stone’s. 

          To be sure earthquakes are among the world’s most devastating disasters. And yet as many as have lost their lives, earthquakes are no match for the numbers of lives lost to flooding. In part because of the flooding that occurs in the aftermath of other kinds of disasters.  Tsunamis are massive walls of water that result when an earthquake rocks the ocean’s floor.  We remember all too well that as bad a storm as Hurricane Katrina was, it was the breaking of the levee on Pontchartrain and the subsequent flooding that was so cataclysmic.  The recent cyclone that hit Myanmar was so devastating because of the flood waters from the storm surge.  78,000 are now known to be dead, and 56,000 are still missing.  And a staggering 2.4 million are homeless.  That is about the population of Arkansas.  The latest problem for Myanmar is now getting the rice crop planted in the month of June before the Monsoons hit, or there will surely be widespread famine later this year there.

          But flooding also hits close to home.  Each year, regional floods are not much more than a blip on the evening news, but claim many lives and do countless billions in damage.  Lost in the outbreak of five sets of killer tornadoes here in Arkansas this spring is that fact that the state has suffered great economic losses from floods as well.  Five Arkansans have also lost their lives to flooding this spring.

          Floods are serious and devastating business. So in light of these current and recent reminders, I have chosen the Old Testament (please, someone order me a psych consult) Lectionary text this morning from Genesis chapter six, the story of Noah and the great flood.  Now you know the story if you ever went to Sunday School as a kid, and probably even if you didn’t.  Noah was a guy that we really don’t know anything about, but God confesses that he was greatly sorry, he was grieved and pained that he ever created the human race and planet earth, and that he decided to simply wash it all down the cosmic drain.  I guess he wasn’t an animal lover either.  The story gets weirder as there is something in the story about God repenting in the King James that is confusing.  God took  deep breath and decided to show a little mercy and he would save a sample of each species and give the whole shebang one more chance.  It is written that Noah walked with God, whatever that means, and God decided to spare him.  Noah is a man of few words, so we really don’t know how he was righteous or why he was different in the eyes of the Lord, we only know that he was.  So Noah built a big old boat out of Gopher wood which may be something like cypress, 450 feet long (about the length of a football field and a half, 75 feet wide and 45 feet tall.  The modern cruse ship is typically 850 to over 1,000 feet in length, by comparison, but this ark was a cruise ship size monstrosity.  It had three decks, the sun deck, the lido deck—well, OK it had three decks.  Noah rounds up all the animals, bugs, birds, and even reptiles he could find which the story indicates is every single kind of them, he then loads up the next of kin and waits out 40 days and 40 nights of rain.  Then the flood waters which covered everything on earth even the highest mountains by more than 20 feet remained for 150 days.  The waters are said to have killed every single living thing on the planet, save what was inside the Ark.  It was the near annihilation of creation, a cataclysm of apocalyptic proportions.   Then God whipped up a wind to dry up the waters.  Noah sent out a couple of birds, and finally a dove which found a fast growing tree and brought him back an olive branch.  And God told them to get out of the boat and get busy repopulating the earth.  Noah built an altar and offered a sacrifice to God, and the smell of the roasted meat was so pleasing that God promises to never take such an action again of wiping out the human race.  He hung a rainbow in the sky to remind us of that promise, the text says.  So God changes his mind several times in our text and maybe even repented of a thing or two.

          So what are we to think about Noah?  This cute children’s story is anything but cute and is problematic on many levels.  For the conservative who requires this to be an actual historical event, the problems are many fold.  It is a modern engineering marvel to build giant boats, taking massive shipyards and dry dock facilities and hundreds of laborers many months, even years to build a vessel this size. Wood is a lousy shipbuilding product; and Gopher wood is very flimsy. Technology even today could not build this ship solely of wood at this size.  The old but way smaller Cutty sailing ships were wood that was reinforced with massive amounts of iron, which was not available to Noah, and by the way, there were no nails or fasteners available then either.  A boat this big out of flimsy wood? Well, you get the point. 

There is also the problem of  the animals, with as many as 15,754 animals, insects and so forth on board according to Woodmorappe’s “Noah’s Ark Feasibility Study.” Others have said that he would have had to collect more than 1.5 million animals and insects to cover everything, from all corners of the world.  Can’t leave out the Komodo Dragon or those turtles from Galapagos. Not to mention that he would have to get them to the Ark pronto to save them, which sounds like a tough task. I saw John Wayne in Hatari, and catching animals is tough business even for the formidable Duke.  I won’t even guess how you catch all those birds in the Amazon.  And people have done massive calculations about how much these animals would weigh and how much food (many tons) was required to feed them all for this type of voyage. And with just seven people, the animal husbandry alone was an insurmountable task.  I think you get the point that these numbers are astronomical.

I should point out that there is also no scientific evidence for a universal flood anytime in the earth history.  Neither archaeology nor geology shows any evidence of such a flood having ever occurred.  I remember my very conservative Old Testament professor at Southwestern was even concerned about the concept of a universal flood, he thought it reasonable that it was a small local tribal flood, despite the text indicating otherwise.  There is no evidence in sedimentation layers that civilizations were wipe out by a great flood at any time.  There may have been a great local flood, archaeologist hypothesize about something called the Black Sea Flood (now in modern day Turkey) some 8,000 years ago, which some suggest was the flood of Noah.  And of course 8,000 years is not many generations to go from a handful of people to 6 billion.  Certainly there is no evidence of universal flooding or the wholesale destruction of life on earth at the same time.

          There is also the problem of the flood narratives of other cultures that are older and remarkably similar or even parallel to the Genesis account.  Mark Issac has identified 86 such flood stories from literally every continent.  Flood narratives are a universal favorite of folklore worldwide and cross culturally. The most famous of these is the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, which has many points in common with the Genesis account, and is an older story, which some have therefore suggested that the Hebrews borrowed the myth and incorporated into their own faith story.  The Genesis story describes how mankind had become obnoxious to God; they were hopelessly sinful and wicked. In the Babylonian story, they were simply too numerous and noisy, kind of like going to Chucky Cheese on a Saturday night.  Other points in common: The Gods (or God) decided to send a worldwide flood. This would drown men, women, children, babies and infants, as well as eliminate all of the land animals and birds.   The Gods (or God) knew of one righteous man, Ut-Napishtim or Noah.  The Gods (or God) ordered the hero to build a multi-story wooden Ark (called a chest or box in the original Hebrew).  The Ark would be sealed with pitch in both stories.   The Ark would have with many internal compartments.  It would have a single door and it would have at least one window.  The Ark was built and loaded with the hero, a few other humans, and samples from all species of other land animals.   In both stories, a great rain covered the land with water.  The mountains were initially covered with water.   The Ark landed on a mountain in the Middle East.   The hero sent out birds at regular intervals to find if any dry land was in the vicinity.   The first two birds returned to the Ark in both stories, and the third bird apparently found dry land because it did not return in both accounts.  The hero and his family left the Ark, ritually killed an animal, and offered it as a sacrifice.  God (or the Gods in the Epic of Gilgamesh) smelled the roasted meat of the sacrifice and the hero was blessed.   The Babylonian gods seemed genuinely sorry for the genocide that they had created. The God of Noah appears to have regretted his actions as well, because he promised never to do it again.

          Well, we could go on, you get my point.  You want to believe in a historical Ark, OK by me.  I know, I know, it was a miracle, and God can do whatever thing he wishes, no matter how impossible or illogical, even through the likes of us. But I have no trouble believing that this is an epic tale meant to teach us a spiritual lesson about ourselves, about God, and about our relationships to the divine and maybe even to each other. But wait a minute– that approach is problematic as well, because there is a problem with the lessons of this story.

           I mean think about this story as simply story.  It is not the sanitized little kid’s story that is depicted in all those Noah’s Ark collectables and toys with all those darling animals and a cute grandfatherly looking Noah grinning ear to ear.  Those not familiar with the story might wonder why God would destroy nearly all the descendants of all of the creatures he had created and just four chapters earlier called it good. The story is that God was displeased with all of his human creations except for Noah and his family. Annihilating those one is displeased with has become a familiar tactic of the followers of this and many other gods. In any case, we’re talking about God here and He doesn’t have to make sense to us or explain himself to his creatures. If he wants to annihilate us, he can I guess. It’s his right.  Despite the bad example God set for Noah’s descendants–imagine a human parent drowning his or her children because they were “not righteous”–the story remains a favorite among children.

          Philosophers speak of the problem of evil and they speak of two kinds of evil, moral and natural.  Moral evil is the easiest to deal with, as it is evil that results from human choice and actions.  If the dam breaks and kills a bunch of people, then that is because of human or technological failure and limitation, and is not God’s fault.  That is bad things happening to bad people, if you will.  But Natural Evil is more problematic.  What did those people in China or Myanmar do to deserve such a fate?  In reality the answer is that other than choosing to live in the wrong place they are not anymore guilty of evil than the rest of us, unless you choose as Mrs. Stone did, to victimize the victim at the expense of seeking vindication for your own self righteousness.  If Katrina was God’s punishment on the sins of New Orleans, then what did good old southern evangelical Biloxi do wrong?

          I mean people, think about it.  We are told that humanity is evil, and that God like a fickle child was sorry that he ever made any of them and decides to drown the world.  Wow. That is tough.  I never learned to swim until I was an adult, and nothing scares me like drowning.  As hard as it is to say, it is almost as scholar Karen Armstrong suggests that God is indeed capable of evil in his heart, that he did own that evil and repent of it, and we will never understand the evil in our own hearts until we understand this fact.  It does seem as the revelation progresses in the book of Genesis we see God “grow up.”  God is sorry and pained about his flawed product, wipes it all out, and regrets doing so on some level and promises to be better next time and not ever do it again.  Now OK, I understand the part somewhat about bad things happening to bad people here, about God hating evil and loving those who do what they are told, but let’s face it, our boy Noah was far from the perfection that we are told that God desires. Noah’s (the most righteous human on earth) story ends with the bizarre tale in Genesis 9 about him getting drunk, passing out naked and exposing himself to others and cursing his youngest son for looking at his nakedness and condemning his son (and his descendants the Canaanites) into eternal slavery as though Noah’s indiscretions were his youngest son’s fault.  Holy smokes!  If he was the best in the lot no wonder God was sorry about the whole mess.  No wonder I never preach on the Old Testament!

          So what do we do with Noah? Hebrew, Rabbi Arthur Waskow helps me with the lesson of Noah when he writes:

The story recounts that violence, corruption, ruin were rampant on the earth. God, seeing that the human imagination was drawn toward evil, determined to destroy all life, except for one human family led by Noah, and one pair of every species. God rained death on every being except those who took refuge with Noah on the Ark. One year later, the waters subsided so that these refugees could emerge. And then God, though explicitly asserting once again that the human imagination is drawn toward evil, took an almost opposite tack: God promised that the cycles of life would never be destroyed again, insisted that new rules of behavior must govern human action in the future, and gave the Rainbow as a sign of this covenant. As we wrestled with the story, what first leaped out at us was that human acts had propelled God into action. “God” here plays the role of karma: “Whatever you sow, that’s what you reap.” Old images of a vengeful, punitive God gave way to the concern that we were bringing disaster on our own heads. If all life is, in fact, connected, then walling ourselves off from the weave of life-breath was bound to cut us off from our own breathing. (Rabbi Arthur Waskow, The Rainbow Sign, The Shalom Center)

          You see, we learn the lesson of Noah that evil cannot win.  The story of Noah is about not getting what we deserve, it is not about God hating evil, it is about getting the grace of God that we do not deserve from that point on.  And the practical truth is that we live in an age where we face annihilation at our own hands either through our propensity to war and the ever increasing possibility of nuclear holocaust as even rogue and terror sponsoring nations dabble in nuclear power, or ruin through global economic crisis, or slow death through ecological crisis.  We live in a world where evil reigns and gets the upper hand much of the time, that is a fact.  It is predicted that perhaps hundreds of thousands more will die in Myanmar because of the military government’s policies that are counterproductive to the aid and welfare of its citizens.  And daggummit, while China owns the shirts on all of our backs they do indeed Mrs. Stone have a culture of oppression of human liberties and rights, rights that we take for granted.  There is not freedom of speech there, nor freedom of conscience.  Their collective conscience is efficiently mass manufactured and made in China.

          We have to learn that while God has promised to no longer destroy the human race that there is no guarantee that we will not destroy the human race.  Rabbi Waskow points out that in the last few decades his people the Jews have lived with this reality as they have experienced the Nazi Holocaust and many neighbors whose sole goal in life is to see them all dead. And if we haven’t learned the lessons of the human heart, just remember the modern genocides of Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur.  In Darfur alone, 400,000 dead and 2.5 million displaced in their civil war.  And it seems to me that we who are concerned with modern day rightness need to not let that happen and to not let evil go unchecked. 

Noah and the Ark teaches us is that the human heart is capable of great moral evil, which in the end for me is more disparaging that natural evil, because it has intentionality behind it.  And while God gets the credit for Natural evil, it is truly random.  But human evil has the lust for power, or money, or sex behind it.  It is fueled by pride, by greed, by lust, by wrath, by envy, by sloth, and even by gluttony in consuming all we can of the world’s products that we believe we are entitled to.  These are things that seemingly are old as the Ark itself and just never change.

          So what does change?  In our story, I believe God changed.  I know, same yesterday, today and forever immutable.  But remember the story and the resultant spiritual lesson of the story is the point.  And this lesson is one of the most profoundly significant things in the entire Bible. At the very least God changed his approach; maybe a planet full of floating carcasses was too much for the God who is love.  Or maybe the lesson is that the all powerful one does not have to resort to violence or coercion; there is a better way, for the story of Noah is that violence is not the answer. That evil will not win the day, nor will it be defeated by others doing evil.

People, we need to learn on this planet that evil doesn’t stop evil. That is the lesson here– good stops evil.  God teaches us that through example. For good to win, we must not repay evil with evil. 

          We all too often solve the violence problem with violence.  The person with the biggest stick always wins right or not. We attempt to solve our family and personal disputes, our nation’s domestic and foreign disputes with violence.  Though we may win the battle, we often lose the war.

          Non violent change is indeed powerful.  Ghandi changed an entire and mighty country with his principles of non-violence.  Martin Luther King, Jr. changed society and revolutionized culture through non violence.  Jesus Christ rewrote history through nonviolence.  The Sermon on the Mount is a treatise on Kingdom living, and Jesus Christ who is the fullness of the grown up God shows us a way to be counterculture people and not buy into the evil systems but instead practice the radical law of love.  Jesus said to love our enemies, do good to those who despise you and pray for those who persecute you, because anyone can love a friend who loves you.  Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers for the Kingdom of God belongs to them.  Jesus said when someone violently slaps you on the cheek, turn the other cheek.    Jesus said that we are to love one another because he first loved us. And though he was almighty God in human flesh, who had the same power of the God of Noah to fight back, he tells us in John 18:36,  “mine is not a kingdom of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, my men would have fought to prevent my being surrendered to the Jews. But my kingdom is not of this kind.”    

          Friends we have to learn and live the law of love.  We have to start repaying evil with good.  We must operate as citizens to the Kingdom of Heaven, not as citizens of these kingdoms of principalities and powers.  Because if we fail to do so, we will find that our civilization can indeed be wiped from the face of the earth by our own devices and at our own hands.  For you see, when we resort to power and fight evil with evil, we are in danger of missing the boat.  To learn to forgive, to love, to empower the vulnerable, to liberate the oppressed, to enable good to win over evil is critical for our very survival.  It is also something else, it is the Good News. Thanks be to God.