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March 1, 2009 Sermon

Lent I: A Sign - The Age of Noah
(Genesis 9: 8-17; Mark 1: 9-15)

Reverend Sally Harris and Luke Mayba

In the beauty of the earth may we RECOGNIZE your holiness. Amen

Carl Jung, the renowned psychologist once wrote that we are a sick society because we have lost a valid myth to live by. Drawing this conclusion from his own spiritual journey and from those he counseled Jung claimed that the Church had ceased to perform the theological task of translating the truths of the tradition into the thought forms of our day. We are a sick society because we have lost a valid myth to live by. Even in using the word myth I know I am running headlong into semantic problems, because myth, to many people, is a lie. Despite the fact that during the last few decades myth has been rediscovered as a vehicle of truth, most of us still tend to think of a myth as something that is false. Yet myth is the closest approximation to truth available to the finite human being. Time or place does not limit the truth of myth. A myth tells of that which was true, is true and will be true. If we allow it, myth will integrate intellect and intuition. A study of the myths of various religions and cultures shows us not how different we human beings are, but how alike we are in our longing for a God, who gives meaning and dignity to our lives. I am not sure how much of the great stories of our Biblical traditions are literally true, how much is history, how much is the overlapping of different cultural stories. Was there truly a flood that destroyed the whole known world? Did Noah see God place a rainbow, and declare it to be the sign of the promise, the covenant that never again would God destroy the whole world? Was there really a figure named Satan, who tempted Jesus in the wilderness? Does it really matter? Does it really matter when the mythic truths we receive from these stories enlarge our perception of our humanity, and our encounter with God? The mythic truths come from a community of people who struggled to know and understand the meaning of God in their lives and to have their lives shaped by that understanding. So we return to the myths that have shaped a people for thousands of years. We turn to probe their meaning for our lives. We journey through the Lenten landscape to recognize our Lenten footprint.

We come first to the landscape of floodwaters. Our reading from Genesis is like turning to the back page of an action-packed novel, skipping the intrigue and mystery and reading only the conclusion: after the flood nothing would ever be the same again. From now on it is no longer the curse but the blessing that rules the world. God has become vulnerable to creation. God promises to relate to all of the created order in a different way. This covenant, made in a younger world, has been part of the tradition of the human race for three millennia. Does seeing a rainbow stretch across the sky not move us? Yes this part of the myth has been looked to as a sign of hope, security and more recently diversity. Yet we are the first generation for whom a vital fact has changed. The conclusion of Noah and the flood assumed that only God could wipe out the created order. Yet today, for the first time in the history of humanity we humans have the potential to destroy the face of the earth. We have created nuclear weapons and pollution that have every possibility of destroying creation through mismanagement. We, in this generation, have acquired a new and awesome responsibility and vocation. We have returned to the age of Noah – we must again be ark-builders not because of a threatening God but because humanity threatens to overwhelm the earth.

[LUKE RESPONSE]
Every week, at my school, a student shouts out on the morning announcements over the P.A., “Give a hoot! Don’t pollute! Put your garbage in the garbage can and your recycling in the recycling bin!” It’s that student’s signature sign-off. And while I admire her willingness to keep repeating this message week after week, I’m also embarrassed by the extent to which her words seem to be ignored. Walking down the hallway at the end of a typical lunch hour, the passage is littered with pop cans, cafeteria wrapping, and other waste. Not that the teachers are necessarily that much better. A sign in our staffroom, requesting that the sink area be kept clean so that custodial staff can wash it in the evenings, sits above a frequently unwashed dish-filled sink. And in the run-up to this week’s district professional day, I must have heard 5 times the message that teachers were to bring their own coffee mugs to help the environment. Nevertheless, in the end, paper cups were provided for the approximately one half of staff, in my estimation, who just couldn’t bring themselves to comply with this simple idea. Such episodes frequently make me doubt the “educational approach”. Think about the “educational approach” to cigarettes, or drugs or junk food. I really do sometimes doubt the amount of faith we put in students to actually “learn” from the education we give them. Or maybe it’s just my “classroom message” that has no effect; no effect compared to the high tech advertisements and endlessly repeated slogans on TV commercials.

It is especially tempting to doubt the power of the “educational message” when I think of the environment. Granted, for many years, we could blame our inaction and our complacency on ignorance. Up until a few years ago, a good part of the population could still convince themselves that climate change wasn’t really happening or, if it was, it wasn’t something for which human beings were responsible. Today we can no longer plead ignorance. We know our planet is in peril and that only radical changes can steer us away from a course leading to imminent ecological catastrophe. We know this! Yet all it took this year was an economic downturn and our politicians now scarcely bother to mention greenhouse gas emissions. I wonder, along with local theologian Sally McFague: are we the first generation in the history of humankind that will refuse to act in favour of the best interests of our children’s future? But other considerations make me think maybe “the message” does matter after all. I remain puzzled by the definition assigned to the term “democracy” by my favorite author, John Ralston Saul. He calls it a “system in which words are more important than actions.” [The Doubter’s Companion] Isn’t that a lot of faith to be putting in citizens’ ability to respond to each others’ publicly expressed arguments? What about us? Are we simply immune to scientists’ message about the reality of our plight? Or rather is our fear making us avoid hearing this message too often or in too much depth? How much of this message do we discuss in our daily lives with family, friends, and colleagues? I for one still hear it seldom enough that I am shocked by predictions such as those of Gwyn Dyer who, in his series The Climate Wars, paints a scenario where, before the year 2050, India and Pakistan wage nuclear war over the remaining water flowing from the disappearing Himalayan glaciers: water without which either country could not grow enough crops to feed their people. Now and then I reread George Monbiot’s calculations in his book, Heat, that greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes are more than twice as harmful to the biosphere, per passenger mile, as those from cars. And he reminds us that it is possible to fly more “miles” in a day than many people drive in their cars in a year. (Don’t ask Marilou and me where we’re planning to travel on our honeymoon this summer.) Yet what is our greater fear? To be seen as hypocrites? Or to allow this message, this new “mythic truth”, to penetrate our consciousness?

When I began preparing this reflection, I logged into the “Religion and Faith” section of wondercafe.ca, a United Church online discussion forum, and I asked the question: “How do we reconcile God’s promise to Noah, to never again flood the Earth, with the imminence of rising sea levels caused by global warming?” I wanted to know how to interpret the rainbow, that sign, that promise God supposedly gave us. Could we still have faith in this sign? I was hoping other users would write deep, in-depth, innovative analyses in response. The best I got in the next couple days, before my question was abandoned altogether, was “Can’t blame God for what humans are doing to Earth.” So how can we have faith in the sign? Maybe the rainbow speaks to us as a sign precisely because it’s a beautiful phenomenon of the natural world. God allowed the natural world to relay God’s message. What is the natural world telling us today? Our Lenten season begins with the theme of “recognition”, and part of our journey is to recognize the true effects of the human footprint on our ecology. In “The Age of Noah”, Thomas Friedman [Hot, Flat and Crowded] observes: “In the same twenty minutes that will see some unique species vanish forever, […] 1,200 acres of forests will be burned and cleared for development. The CO2 emissions from deforestation are greater than the emissions from the world’s entire transportation sector—all the cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships combined.” Do I really need to know this? Will this recognition be enough to change my lifestyle and make it sustainable? Probably not. But if I have faith, it’s a faith that the message can impact behaviour. And even if there aren’t many places we can bring ourselves to discuss the scientists’ and nature’s message, I’d like to think that Church can be one of those places. If there’s a sign of hope or a promise in this year’s Lenten wilderness, I perceive it in the call of those who warn us about a dire future, and in those among us willing to hear and acknowledge this call.

[SALLY’S CONCLUSION]
It is in the wilderness that such revelations are made; here we encounter what is beyond our ¬selves. The wilderness landscape is always a place of testing, of letting go of what was before so what is to come can enter. It is a time of naming, that which hinders us from being faithful to our covenant with the Holy One and with the earth. It is a time of privilege, of intimacy with God. It is a time of acknowledging the vulnerabilities of our lives and our planet and the possibility of the divine who empowers us to recognize and make new. The terrain can be treacherous but the Holy One has gone before us. We have a rainbow as a sign of presence and promise and we are given angelic spirits and wild beasts for company. After the flood nothing would ever be the same again. After the wilderness, may we never be the same again. Is this not a valid myth by which to live?

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