Lent 1B, February 21, 2021, 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 on the first Sunday of Lent, and I’m sad not to have prayed it chanting in a solemn procession that surrounds and enfolds the congregation in this prayer written for, and intended to be used during, times of great duress, danger, or devastation. I’ve been thinking about and hearing from some of you about how right it feels to be back in our liturgical, spiritual season of Lent. Lent is a season that aligns with much of what we are experiencing: a season of self-sacrifice, a season of recognition of when, where, and how we’ve missed the mark of Love, which is the Biblical definition of sin.

Even when a community is not suffering as greatly as other communities, the 16th-century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker defended the practice of praying the Great Litany, probably against complaints that it was too long or too dreary. His reason seems particularly apt in the midst of this pandemic combined with weather-related catastrophes. He wrote: [1]

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?

The answer, of course, is that there is not one. For example, in the US in the past couple of months, someone has died from COVID every thirty seconds. We are nearing 500,000 deaths in the US and 2.5 million worldwide. Whether or not we are intimately involved with people who are dying from COVID, we are all in this together.

Today, I’d say, we are all in the same boat. Today, we have a tidy bundle of readings curated to recall the story of the Great Flood, a story of sin and righteousness, a second chance, a rebirth, linked for Christians to the baptism of Jesus and his time in the desert. Like any other good Christian Sunday School student, I learned about 40 days and 40 nights of rain that flooded the earth; I learned that Jesus was driven into the desert. I connected the watery wilderness of a flooded world with the Judean wilderness of a harsh rocky desert. I learned that 40 days is literally a quarantine. In Jesus’ time, forty days of wilderness time was a prescription for separating oneself from others to stop the spread of disease – physical and spiritual disease. There wasn’t much of a distinction in Jesus’ time, and I think we make too much of a distinction in our own time between physical and spiritual malady. During a quarantine in Jesus’ time, a deeper relationship with the divine, the ground of all being, was what was being sought. A more profound connection with the sacred for the purpose of healing and restoration was what was deeply desired. Our own need for quarantine hasn’t changed much.

It wasn’t until I was 61-years-old (in other words, last week) that I registered that the story is that Noah, his wife, his three sons, their wives, and a pair of every creature on earth were on the ark not for forty days, but for a year. Forty is the number of days that it rained after they all got on the ark and waited a week for the expected storm. It was one full rotation of the earth around the sun until Noah and his family could get off of that crowded and smelly seedpod of a vessel. I was re-reading my mentor Ellen Frankel’s The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah, written in the form of communal dialogue among women across time and space, when I finally heard the voice of Mrs. Noah, traditionally called Naamah by Jews. (She has a dozen other names in a dozen other traditions.) In Frankel’s book, Naamah says, “Imagine what it required of me to endure a full year in the ark, cooped up with a boatload of animals and family: so much patience, caring, good humor, fortitude, and resourcefulness.” [2] Oh, I thought, that’s just what this past year has called for: so much patience, caring, good humor, fortitude, and resourcefulness, at least in this particular upside-down ship at 15 Newbury Street! (If you’re in the sanctuary, look up. If you’re at home, maybe Brad can point a camera to the ceiling: it’s the bottom of a ship.) This sanctuary is its own kind of seedpod!

The Torah teaches that not very long after society was set in place, it went terribly wrong. [3] People became violent and lawless, so the Holy One decided that they wanted a do-over. The Bible doesn’t say what the sin was that caused the Divine to want to wash the slate and start again, but the midrash (the term for sacred stories between the lines of scripture) speculates that what caused the lawless, violent behavior was unbounded affluence, material prosperity along with wanton disregard for the well-being of creation. Sound familiar?

There are many ancient cultures with stories about a great flood, but what sets the Torah version apart is that it has a moral. It’s a surprising moral because it’s for the Holy One, in three parts. The moral is, that wiping out humans and starting again doesn’t work;  that the Holy One learns that humans need rules; that humans need the promise of grace in the midst of suffering. The Holy One learns these lessons. The Holy One gives humankind seven universal, ethical laws: six proscriptions against worshiping idols, cursing the Divine, murder, sexual infidelity, theft, and eating flesh of a living animal, and one prescription for establishing courts of justice. Those are rules that, when heeded, will ensure participation in Ha-Olam Ha-Ba, the World to Come. The promise of grace comes from the Holy One giving them a rainbow to remember the everlasting covenant with every living being on the earth. The rainbow is not to remind people, although it does. The rainbow is to remind the Holy One to protect all creatures of the earth from unmitigated and unending chaos, and to never wash the slate clean ever again.

The Flood story in the Hebrew Bible was told and written down by people in captivity in Babylon, as their own countercultural 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 First and Second Testaments, is our inheritance; it belongs to us.

This story of God as both sorry and forgetful is particularly poignant to me. Three times our text indicates that God says something to Noah without Noah responding. According to Robert Alter in his translation of the Torah, this writing pattern indicates significant silence due, either to Noah’s failure to comprehend, or his resistance to, God’s words. [4] It goes by so fast, we might not notice it, but in this story, Noah was not speaking to God.  In this accounting, the solicitous God was self-aware enough and concerned enough to know that frequent reminders would be necessary for God to be faithful to the covenant that God was 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; it doesn’t work. 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, that is made all the more remarkable by the timing of its telling in the 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, as foundational stories of the people of God, 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. 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, and Jacob, and as many as 500 years after the stories Moses and the Exodus, which are the oldest.

Here’s why I think that matters. In the story of God’s covenant with Abraham, the promise is specific to Abraham and his children, his descendants, his seed. God’s covenant given to Moses, written in stone, and God’s covenant given to Jeremiah, written on the heart, have been expanded to include all of the Israelites. This covenant that God is offering to Noah, however, is with and for all humans. In the biblical narrative, the covenant stories seem to grow more particular. If we look at the development of covenant stories chronologically, however, there’s much more give and take; 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 lovingkindness 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 we all know where our Lenten narratives are heading. 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 and experiences of resurrection.

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 for quarantine. Yet, God’s messengers ministered to him, and he came through that 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 is stronger than anything else. 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 place in this seedpod! 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, like Naamah, with patience, caring, good humor, fortitude, and resourcefulness.