After the Rainbow

After the Rainbow--September 23, 2016

"The sons of Noah who went out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. These were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled.  Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and the lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside...." [Genesis 9:18-20]

This changes everything about the way we hear the Flood story.

Seriously, this weird little episode--which surely was remembered in Israel's collective book for stories for the campfire just as much because it gave them a reason to justify conquering the land of the Canaanites (who, after all, were the distant relatives of the "bad son" Ham in this story)--this weird little story of Noah passing out drunk and naked in his tent makes a critical difference for how we understand the theology of the Flood Story, but most of the time we don't even think of this story (or have deliberately tried to forget it is there).

And I get it, too--culturally, for whatever reasons, we have allowed the Flood story of Genesis 6-9 to be heard primarily as a children's story, with pastel cartoon animals all smiling as they are gathered into a Winnebago-sized boat until you turn the page and they are all smiling on dry land under a rainbow.  And a children's story is not allowed to end with the hero getting drunk and getting caught naked on the ground.  Again, understandably so: we want our children's stories to have simple morals, and it is easier to make Noah's story become a fable about "keeping on believing (in yourself, we might add, because this is America...) even when other people doubt you" than to let it end as strangely as "Noah couldn't stand the haunting memories of all he had been through, and so he self-medicated with cheap wine to silence the nightmares once he got off the boat." But that indeed is the way the story goes in Genesis, and not the G-rated cartoon musical with singing animals we probably imagine it to be in our heads.

And that, as I say, makes all the difference.  And this is why:

Anybody who has heard the story of Noah probably has this built-in implicit assumption that Noah was qualitatively "better" than everybody else, and that he "won" the prize of surviving the Great Flood because he was "holier" than all the world's rotten sinners.  Our quick-and-dirty thinking usually goes something like this: If God was so upset at all the rottenness and sin in the world that God was going to wipe all humanity out with a flood, but then decided to save one person and his family, well, that one person must have been better--made of better stock, so to speak--than everybody else. He must have been more righteous, and that's why he made the cut and got to live, and all the other sinners were justly punished.

And if Noah had gotten off the ark and been a Boy Scout for the rest of his life, we might have had reason to think that way.  We might have assumed that the storytelling in Genesis is there to say, "Only the worthy survive--watch out and be good, or else the divine boogeyman in the sky is going to zap you somehow."  We might have assumed that Noah's survival is a lesson in God rewarding good behavior.  But... once you realize that the story keeps going after the rainbow, and that the guy who got off the boat was just as much a mess as everybody else, before or after, then this story is less about God punishing 'bad people' and rewarding 'good people,' and more about God's choice of grace edging out the option of giving up on all creation.

Now, I can hear the protests forming on lips already: "Doesn't the Bible say that Noah was special?  That he was more righteous or holy or whatever than everybody else? Isn't that the clinching proof that he was good and everybody else was bad?" Well... it's true that Genesis calls Noah "righteous," but actually the first thing said about Noah is simply that "he found favor in the sight of God."  That is to say, he was graced.  God loved him because God loved him--not that God loved him because he was better behaved.  Grace is thorny that way--it stubbornly refuses to be taken as a reward for good behavior and insists on seeking us out before any discussion of our resumes or background checks.

And then once you realize that post-flood Noah is drunken slob, it becomes crystal clear: the Bible itself is not trying to give us a morality tale, but a saga of grace.  God sees how rotten we are to one another and to our environment, and God came very, very close to saying, "That's it--I'm done with all of you" and giving up on all creation.  At that point in the storytelling, God could have started over with new humans--people who couldn't mess up, a Humanity 2.0 that wouldn't rebel, people who would never harm one another, be selfish, kill one another, or exploit the created world.  That could have been how the story went.

But it ain't.

The strands of Genesis tell a messier story, by choice. God does not get rid of all the "bad people" and make creation start over with only "good people" (supposedly like Noah). But rather, God takes one of the messes, with all of his jagged rough edges still there, and says, "I am going to continue with you, rather than giving up on humanity."  Yes, Genesis says, God got to the point of "being sorry" to have made us, because humans proved to be such short-sighted and selfish caretakers (we are still pretty short-sighted and selfish as caretakers of creation, for that matter). But the story says that when push came to shove, God chose to keep the broken people, the messy people, the "sinners" after the rainbow... God did not choose to start from scratch.

And that makes all the difference, really, between the real Good News of the gospel and the morality-tale versions of it that we are more used to.  The fact that Genesis does not whitewash out the messiness, the tragic desperation, and yes, the unfiltered reality of ongoing addiction, from the story of Noah forces us to see that when grace "starts over" with us, it doesn't mean that grace gets rid of "bad" people and only works with a clean slate of "good" people.  Rather, grace starts over with us in all of our messiness.  The story of Noah is the story of God's choice to allow brokenness to stay in the raw ingredients of the world.  It is the story of God choosing, in the end, to "hang up the bow" as it were and to rule out ever again operating by the old strategy of wiping out the sinners. It is God's choice to keep a world that will thus always be full of messes and messy people rather than starting over with new, non-messy people.

What that means is that God loves you, and this whole world, so fiercely that God chooses a world with you--and therefore, with messes--in it, rather than a world in which nobody can ever break a rule or a heart but which would be without you.  And it means that when grace  starts over with us, God doesn't not throw us out in favor of holier raw materials, but uses us as we are where we are.  Even after the rainbow, we live by grace.

God of all creation, you who choose to love us in our messiness, enable us to love each other and your world in all of our messiness, and to hear and receive your love for US in all that messiness, too.