First Sunday in Lent, B; February 22, 2015; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of love, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

I always love praying The Great Litany with you each year on the first Sunday of Lent. Intended to be used during times of great duress or danger or devastation, The Great Litany seems particularly appropriate this year as we are in the midst of what feels like a slow motion, wide-spread, ongoing disaster of a winter in Boston with record-breaking snowfalls and low temperatures which are straining people and systems to the breaking point. I hesitate to call weather disasters “natural” disasters because the most disastrous parts have the fingerprints of humans all over them. (People are a part of nature, I guess, but that’s not usually what’s meant.) The suffering is born by most people, of course, but the disparate impact on those who have limited or insufficient resources is scandalous and painful. With coming cycles of melting and freezing, hoped for warmer temperatures are actually going to reveal and result in much more structural damage and flooding in buildings including our own parish house, where it’s been raining in the kitchen, music room, and basement for much the last week. I’ve been hearing similar stories from parishioners all week. If you are distressed by the disaster, I’m glad you’ve found your way here to this warm building and, more importantly, warm community. If you are not distressed by the disaster, please take a little time in the weeks to come to see what you can do to help people who are struggling.

The other day I stumbled on 16^th century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker’s defense of praying the Great Litany even when a community isn’t suffering. (I’m sure he was responding to complaints about its length.) He wrote: “if we for ourselves had a privilege of immunity, doth not true Christian charity require that whatsoever any part of the world, yea, any one … elsewhere doth either suffer or fear, the same we account as our own burden? What one petition is there found in the whole Litany, whereof we shall ever be able to say at any time that no [one] living needeth the grace or benefit therein craved at God’s hands?” [1] The answer, of course, is that there is not one. We are all in this together.

The reminder of the Great Flood in our lesson from Genesis seems prescient. It’s a story that has roots that are at least 7,000 years old, according to archeologists. Jack Miles, who wrote The Drowning of the World, says that, “historically, the Flood story entered the national literature of Israel from Babylon, where it was the story of a good god of dry land and order triumphing over an evil goddess of deluge and chaos. When monotheistic Israel borrowed this story from polytheistic Babylon, it faced a difficult choice. It could cast the flood goddess as a natural disaster which …[God] could not stop, admitting an embarrassing limitation upon [God’s] power. Or it could cast [God] in both roles as the bringer equally of weal and woe. Israel made the second choice; and though the motivation was probably theological rather than literary, the result was a stupendous literary character, one combining immense physical power with absolutely terrifying moral ambivalence.” [2]

The Flood story in the Hebrew Bible was told and written down by people in captivity who had their own counter-cultural version of how to make sense of their lives, and what I imagine was their own terrifying moral ambivalence (which they projected on to God). Should they fight the oppression of the Babylonian empire or assimilate — build houses, settle down and make the best of a bad situation? Should they drown in a flood of despair or build an ark as righteous survivors? This tension of moral ambivalence, which echoes throughout both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament, is our inheritance. It belongs to us.

What seems particularly poignant to me is this story of God as both sorry and forgetful. Three times our text indicates that God says something to Noah without Noah responding. According to Robert Alter in his translation of the first five books of the Bible, “this [writing pattern] generally indicates some sort of significant silence – a failure to comprehend, a resistance to the speaker’s words.” [3] In other words, Noah’s silence is significant. In this story, Noah is not speaking to God. Noah is giving God the silent treatment, uncomprehending or resisting the Word of God. And the solicitous God, in this accounting, is self-aware enough and concerned enough to know that frequent reminders will be necessary for God to be faithful to the covenant that God is offering. This is a picture of a God who needs to tie a string around a finger or write on a hand. Note to self: don’t destroy the world with the flood again. So I imagine the same qualities of ambivalence, remorse, and forgetfulness probably describe the people of Israel, captive in Babylon, because they’re all qualities that I recognize in myself and in my community, particularly in light of the beginning of Lent.

There’s one more quality that I find in this covenant story, made all the more remarkable by the timing of its telling in development of Hebrew Scripture. There’s wide agreement among Biblical scholars that the beginning parts of the book of Genesis were among the last parts to be developed and written down. In other words, the Flood stories are actually much newer than the stories that come after it. It’s like when a book gets written, and before publishing, the writer or editor determines that it needs a prologue or a prequel. The creation stories and the flood stories in the beginning of Genesis are all prequel, developed and written down after the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and as many as 500 years after the stories Moses and the Exodus.

Here’s what’s interesting to me about that. In the story of God’s covenant with Abraham, the promise is specific to Abraham and his children – his descendents – his seed. God’s covenant given to Moses, written in stone, and God’s covenant given to Jeremiah, written on the heart has been expanded to include all of the Israelites. But this covenant that God is offering to Noah is with and for all of creation. In the Biblical narrative, the covenant stories seem to grow more particular. But if we look at the development of covenant stories chronologically, there’s much more give and take, and this is an incredibly expansive, universal covenant with all living beings – all flesh. It’s radically inclusive in its aspirations. And it’s hopeful. This story reveals a deep hope for world-wide reconciliation with the Divine. In the Babylonian flood legend that formed the basis for this story, a necklace of jewels was flung into the sky as a sparkling reminder of a promise to never again destroy. Here, a bow – a weapon – an instrument of violence, an instrument of the people’s oppression has been hung up and turned into a thing of beauty, a sign of the pledge of the loving kindness of the Holy One.

That’s a story worth repeating, and it gets repeated in Christian testimony of the redeeming power of the instrument of violence and oppression, the cross, that gets hung up and turned, by God, into a thing of beauty. I know I’m jumping ahead in the story of Lent – but that’s where this narrative is going. We know it and the people Mark was writing for initially knew it too. We can’t see Jesus except through the lens of the cross. All of our Gospel stories are prequels to the crucifixion. Not one of our Gospel stories about Jesus can be understood apart from the experiences of Jesus’ followers of his passion and resurrection, even though we are often told that they didn’t know what it meant. We are only ever guessing ourselves, 2000 years later.

For now, we get a glimpse of the baptism of Jesus, during which he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, heard that he was beloved by God and that God was pleased with him, and then that very same spirit drove him into the wilderness to be tormented and tested. And yet, the angels ministered to him and he came through that long ordeal proclaiming the goodness of God and the nearness of God’s holy realm. His call to repent is a call to turn around, to change toward believing in the good news that the power of God’s Love trumps everything. For now, we get a chance to recall that we too are completely immersed in the Spirit of God; that we are beloved by God and that God is pleased with us; and that whatever torment and tests we endure, there are angels all around ministering to us. There are. You are some of them. For now, we are being offered a chance to come through a long ordeal proclaiming the goodness of God and the nearness of God’s holy realm. Let’s take that chance.

1. Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie. Book V, Ch. Xli, sec.4 cited in The Litany of the Church: Considered in its History, Its Plan, and the Manner in which it is intended to be Used by W. H. Karslake (London: B.M. Pickering, 1876), GoogleEBook edition.

2. Jack Miles, “The Drowning of the World,” in Talking about Genesis: A Resource Guide (New York: Doubleday, 1996) p. 67.

3. Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), p. 51.

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