Genesis 5-8: Come out of the Ark

(Technically, this post also covers the end of Genesis 4, which was left out in the last post.)

Genesis 4:16-26 is the first of what becomes a trend in the Bible to list off detailed genealogies (though usually only sons, thanks to patriarchy). Just wait until we get to Chronicles! Actually, in order to give Noah the proper attention he deserves, I will. As tedious as the genealogies dispersed throughout the Bible may be, I still appreciate them, and I'll explain why when we get to Chronicles.

Genesis 5 starts by reiterating the Genesis 1 concept that Adam, the first human, was created "in the likeness of God," and then extends the idea to human reproduction, as Seth, Adam's new son, is born "in his [Adam's] own likeness, after his image." (5:3) While this could easily lead to thoughts like "descended from the gods," divine right, or many other potentially arrogant ideas, that's not how I read the Bible, nor does the Bible even say that. The Bible, as usual, just isn't an installation manual for your new Christianity software, sorry. Try aisle 9.

What strikes me about this particular verse is the context: this is after the so-called "fall" of humanity, and yet Adam is still described as being made in the likeness of God and, what's more, his son Seth is in Adam's likeness. The divinity is still there; God didn't take it away. For some reason, we can still say, "God dwells in you." In light of Cain's murder of his brother Abel, thanks to this "fall" and the presence of "sin," humanity is still "good," still God's creation.

After more genealogies, tracing from Adam to Noah over many generations (and full of rather long life spans! but more on that when we reach Chronicles), Genesis 6 opens with the heading "The Flood" in my Bible, which, of course, I crossed out and replaced with, "Australia!" in light of the massive floods there earlier this year. I don't know or care if the whole earth was flooded, or even if it rained it all, actually, because the Bible is not a history textbook either. Those are in aisle 3.

The story of The Flood goes a little something like this: people were living lives, the earth was getting populated, and, apparently, humanity had turned to evil. God was pretty upset. Except there was this guy, Noah, who was a pretty all right dude, and God decided that, while God definitely was going to wipe out all the horrible, violent people on the earth with a great flood, Noah ought to build an ark to save himself, his family, and biodiversity. (Dear self-professed "Bible thumpers," please reread Genesis 6: God is very keen on saving all of the animals from extinction. Maybe you should be too.)

The story details the very specific instructions God apparently gave Noah for building this ark, interspersed with things like, "Noah did everything just as God commanded him." (6:22) Genesis 7 is the flood itself, describing with narrative detail the tragic destruction of the Earth. What a scary time to be alive; sometimes, I wonder if I, like Noah, am about to witness the destruction of all that I know. Words like "global warming" and "climate crisis" and "deforestation" are scary; what will become of our earthen home?

Yet Noah follows God. The waters recede, and dry land appears again. (Genesis 8) "Come out of the ark," God says. (7:16, NIV) "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease." (7:22)

Come out, God says. There is evil, yet there is also good. Even when all of humanity, it seemed, had turned to evil and violence, one good man, Noah, made a difference and saved not only his family, but all of the creatures of the earth from great calamity and natural disaster. And after the rains, after the storms and the floods, the waters recede, and dry land does appear once again.

Noah lived in a frightening time, no doubt. Noah probably looked at "Congress" and thought it looked like a bunch of toddlers throwing tantrums and starting senseless wars, but Noah persevered. Noah had faith and hope and trusted God, trusted the sort of thing that seems crazy to trust, and Noah survived. It doesn't take a literal destruction of the entire earth for this story to have meaning to those of us who fear the flood, who fear the destruction of our world, because it is a story of faith leading one man to do something great, something heroic, and it is the promise that earth, that life itself, will endure no matter what.

Come out, God says. Out of fear, out of despair, out of darkness. Hope! God says. Have faith! Believe that not all is lost, that the storms will end and rainbows will appear. Whatever the storm, no matter how flooded the world around you, the waters will recede, and dry land will appear once again. That is God's promise.

(Amen!)

Genesis 4: Every Man for Himself?

Toto, I don't think we're in Eden anymore!

Genesis 4, as you may or may not know, is the story of Cain and Abel, another familiar story. Brothers Cain and Abel bring their offerings to God—Cain, the older of the brothers, brings "an offering of the fruit of the ground" (4:3) and Abel brings "of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions"—and God, much to Cain's unhappiness, likes Abel's offering but not Cain's. So Cain kills Abel.

There is much that can be debated in this chapter, ranging from God's favourite foods to the importance of family to God's justice to sin and foolishness to—well, you get the point. It is a story with which we are (almost) all at least somewhat familiar, and about which we all seem to have opinions. In these verses is the first real conflict of the good and evil within human nature, the first time we see the results of our new awareness of both good and evil, of our free will.

"If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it," says God. (4:7) We have a choice, God tells us; we always have a choice. The freedom to choose well, to do what is good, is always ours, and yet that freedom, that knowledge of good, lies in tension with sin always crouching at our doors. Knowing goodness means knowing evil. We must be masters of ourselves.

Cain falls prey to sin; he kills his own brother. "Am I my brother's keeper?" he famously says. (4:9) Much less famously, yet just as profoundly, God says, "The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground." (4:10) Cain, in defense of his jealous hate, says it's "every man for himself"; he is not responsible for his brother. Yet he is wrong.

"The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground." The very ground, the dirt, the soil itself, cries for justice, cries out against Cain's heartless action. Abel is dead, and yet the world itself speaks, gives voice to his spilled blood. The story of Cain and Abel is, to me, not a warning against a fickle God with particular dietary tastes, but a reminder of how deeply connected we all are to each other and to the earth.

And the justice administered in this story is not "an eye for an eye": Cain cries out, "I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will slay me," (4:14) yet God says no. "'Not so! If any one slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.' And the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who came upon him should kill him." (4:15) Rather than add to the bloodshed, God leaves Cain to suffer the guilt, to experience, as Dumbledore might say, "a fate worse than death": he is alone, disconnected, outcast.

Poor Cain. The story of Cain and Abel serves as an example of what we are really choosing when we choose hate, jealousy, and evil. Cain, led by the deceit of sin, chooses to suffer a fate much worse than death. The story says much more about us and sin than it does about whether God likes her steaks rare or well-done; it tells us that sin latches onto our weaknesses, our insecurities, and leads us to harm and to hate. God tells us we must choose, but we really can choose. It is both our freedom and our burden. Genesis 4 asks us to choose love, not hate, to be our brother's keeper, not murderer.

Saved

In my Evangelical Christian K-8 school, people said things like "born again" a lot. We were supposed to be born again. Once we accepted Jesus, accepted the Bible as a flawless history textbook that needed no interpreting, we would be "born again" and "saved." The idea was tied closely with baptism: when we were baptised, we were supposed to be "born again." Until then though, we were sinners going to hell. If you didn't "have Jesus," you were going to hell, and the only way to "have Jesus" was to be born again.

I was never baptised as a kid. My parents couldn't agree on anything, let alone where and when to get me baptised. If anyone was going to hell because I wasn't baptised, I figured it should be them, not me. I wanted to get baptised, but they just couldn't stop fighting long enough to let me. I liked Jesus, and I was all for having some Jesus in my life, but I wasn't "born again." I never felt like I died and was miraculously resurrected. As the years wore on, I just felt dead.

Little more than a year ago, I went to my first church service in years. It was a strange thing to do. Christianity had choked and strangled me; to walk into a church, any church, felt akin to committing psychological suicide. I don't really know why I went. I said I wanted to get baptised, but it felt more like an inescapable need to reconcile and get over my strong anti-Christian prejudices. I wanted to stop feeling like clawing my eyes out any time someone mentioned anything close to Christianity or even religion in general.

I went to church with tough skin and strong defenses. Months wore on. The next time I actually even went to a Sunday morning service was November. I felt every instinct telling me to run away, to go anywhere but church, every time I dared go to anything related to church, worse yet an actual service. It was a scary place to go because church had a way of reaching in past all of those defenses and ripping out my heart. I hated it for months.

In February, I finally fell apart. My façade of endless strength crumbled away, and I found myself completely defenseless. I felt, more than ever before, like I was dying, like my lungs had turned to fire, like my very soul was being ripped apart. Everything I had run from in my life, everything I had buried deep beneath what I thought were impenetrable defenses, was at once freed to suffocate me, to maim and torture me, to kill me.

I don't think the people who told me I needed to "accept Jesus" would consider this being "saved" or "born again," but that's exactly what it feels like. I died long before I walked into church last summer. I died when the teachings of my school first taught me that I was hopeless with God and then taught me that God didn't want anything to do with me. I was unbaptised, too stupid, too lazy, un-Christian, sinful, not girly enough, not man enough, gay, not a Bush supporter, different. I died hopeless. Jesus wouldn't save me.

Jesus didn't save me. Church didn't save me. Being strong didn't save me. Life was not found in any magic solution or fairy tale. Life was found in the face of death, in the face of my own fears and insecurities which sought to destroy me. Life was found when my new community gave me the courage to foolishly face death armed only with hope. Life was found in my own resurrection, my own liberation from fear and death. Jesus didn't save me: he never swooped down out of the sky, never gave me a shield to defend myself, a sword to fight back, nor even the hope that help really would come. It was what Jesus represents that saved me: faith, hope, courage, compassion, freedom, justice, and love. It was the Jesus within the people who surrounded me as I crumbled, the grace and mercy they showed me even at my ugliest, that saved me.

So thank you.

Dreams

My favourite dreams are not the ones I remember, nor are they the ones I forget. The dreams I remember are detailed and complex, full of information and mystery; the dreams I forget are lost to me.

I like remembering my dreams. I try to keep paper and writing utensil near me whenever I sleep, so that when I wake up, I can capture the dream on paper before it disappears and fades from reach. If I do not hurriedly pour out the dream onto paper, it vanishes, leaving only the lingering taste of it on my memory, though none of it remains.

These dreams have meaning, have mystery. I desperately cling to the details, even as they fall though my fingertips like sand, because something can be learned from them. This is my subconscious speaking, desperately trying to reach through to consciousness with its knowledge and wisdom. Sometimes, all is lost, but sometimes, I gleam one grain of understanding, one tiny new insight into who I am and how I relate to the world.

The dreams I forget are dreams I never even knew existed, but for the knowledge that I, like all humans, dream. I awake from these unaware that my mind has been in never-ending motion whilst my body savoured its much needed rest. The dreams I forget are a kindness: though my subconscious has spent the night wrestling with my fears and anxieties, my hopes and dreams, my conscious remains untroubled, unconcerned by this exhaustive work. The dreams I forget are the gift of ignorance, for some things I simply do not need to know.

My favourite dreams, however, are neither remembered nor forgotten. My favourite dreams have no plot, no story, no details to be recalled, and yet they are not lost or forgotten. They cannot disappear for they do not appear. My favourite dreams are a feeling, a powerful wave of something indescribable which consumes me and fills me up as I slumber, dreams which, when I awake, remain just as present. They become my day dreams.

I awoke to find myself lost in the embrace of my favourite kind of dream this morning. I awoke in peace, without the worry of trying to capture mist in my hands or the lonely silence of already forgotten dreams. I awoke unafraid, untroubled, and yet not ignorant. I understood the dream: I dreamt of nothing but of peaceful rest, of safety, of liberty. My subconscious gave no warnings nor shielding from its labour: with full honesty, my subconscious spoke only of peace.

A Story about Stories

Have you ever struggled to explain how something feels? Like when there are just too many different things going on that you just can't find the right words to explain it? And then, finally, it hits you: this is exactly like that one scene in that movie, that book, that song, that TV show, that poem, that story! You feel just like that one character must have felt! . . . But the person you're trying to explain it to never saw that movie, read that book, played that game, heard that song, learned that story. If only they understood that character! Then you wouldn't have to struggle to explain how it feels.

I think this happens much more today than must have happened in "the olden days," when stories were all shared by oral tradition and carefully passed down to the next generation. Communities were smaller and all had the same stories, so you could expect that whoever you talked to would understand a reference to any of your shared, cultural stories. It gave you a shared language beyond just words, a way of communicating without needing to be perfectly articulate.

In our global society, it seems increasingly impossible to find anyone who knows all of the same stories you do. And I don't mean facts or historical events, but the spirit of stories, the soul of them. We all know the Holocaust was a horrible point in our history. We pass the story down through our education system which teaches kids things like which country fought on which side, but the story of Anne Frank gives us something much deeper than just facts, figures, and death tolls. It is only through the story of individuals whose lives were deeply affected by WWII that we understand the horror of the Holocaust. Anne Frank gives us a way for our hearts, our guts, our very cores, to comprehend the tragedy in ways that history books never will.

As a young child, I had a book full of Bible stories told in ways that were accessible to a young child. It wasn't literal, but it made me fall in love with the Bible. Not because it explained theology perfectly or articulated the dogma and doctrine of the church flawlessly, but because it gave me stories and culture. It gave me a shared language beyond just words, a way of communicating without needing to be perfectly articulate.

I think the point was to make me believe the stories to be perfectly factual, a sort of history lesson, but that's not what I got at all. It didn't matter whether any of the people I read about really lived; what mattered was that, suddenly, I could relate to people, I could connect. If Anne Frank wasn't "real," would mean that no one had ever lived through something like what she lived through? Of course not.

I am well aware that Harry Potter is not a factual story, but it is not the facts that inspire me or give me strength and courage, just as no historical fact in the Bible or The Diary of Anne Frank has ever inspired me or given me strength and courage. It is the stories and the human experience that they articulate that fills my soul, that helps me connect to, understand, and explain the complexities of our confusing world.

I found myself trying to explain how something felt very recently, and it occurred to me how much being a part of a very specific community has helped me feel a little less hopelessly desperate to explain the things I just cannot. My community happens to be a church (though we've been accused of being nothing of the sort over the years, most recently after reading from the Qur'an [in both English and Arabic] and having Dr. Maher Hathout preach from our pulpit on a Sunday morning for Faith Shared), but what we share is not so much beliefs but stories, both the stories of our shared Biblical text and of our community's shared history.

Whether it is Jesus overturning the tables in the temple or our previous rector overturning tables in the greater Christian community when he blessed the union of two people of the same sex for the first time in our church nearly 20 years ago, the Saturday after I was born, or Moses asking, "Who am I?" when called to the unfathomable purpose of leading the Israelites out of Egypt, I am surrounded in rich stories, not just facts, dogmas, or "souls saved" quotas.

It's so much easier to deal with struggle when you have such rich, shared stories with which to connect.

The Ladybug

Today, I watched a ladybug die. I simply watched, unable to do anything to help it. At last, it was very clearly dead and very clearly in the middle of a walkway. I realised that it would soon be stepped on and crushed. The moment this realisation struck me, I was overcome with an outgrown instinct from my childhood: I wanted to give it a proper burial.

Taking great care not to cause any damage to its body, I picked it up and stared down at the lifeless creature in my hands. What I saw was not a bug, but, strangely, a friend, a loved one. It was a strange feeling to look down at something smaller than the nail on my pinky finger and realise it was a part of me.

I buried it in the small area of earth, woodchips, and plants that fill the small garden area just outside of the main office of my church (where the ladybug died). I dug a small grave, laid the ladybug in it with its feet beneath it, and whispered a prayer that came from somewhere beyond me or somewhere deep within me, perhaps both.

It wasn't until after I had finished the burial and finished my hushed prayers for the ladybug and for the world that it occurred to me how strange what I had just done was. It was something I had done many times as a child, unknowingly acting as a priest at the funeral of nature's tiniest creatures, but had stopped doing when I grew "too old" to do something so childish.

Yet, somehow, in the act of whispering prayers over the grave of this tiny creature, my soul felt no longer young, but old. My prayers over the lifeless ladybug, I realised, were also prayers over the lifeless friend whose death I was grieving. It was not, as I had suspected, naïvety nor innocence which compelled me to pay respects to the life of a ladybug, but a very real understanding that life, whether that of a ladybug or a human being, is sacred. I understood this as a child when I performed burials for the creatures that died and when I carefully extracted spiders and all manner of bugs from my shower before turning on the water that I knew would drown them.

In growing older, I forgot how sacred life is. Age, it seems, stole my childhood wisdom. And yet, age, it also seems, allows me to still find childhood wisdom again, even when I seem to have lost it completely, and grants the opportunity to learn new wisdom too. Age is a funny thing, often deluding us into the idea that we are too old for some wisdom and yet too young for others.

Blesséd be you, dearest lady bug, creature of the earth and of God.
Let your spirit be freed now and let it bring nourishment to the Spirit of the world.
From earth sprang you, ladybug, to fly through the mysterious air and walk the unknown surfaces of leaves, and to earth now you return, to give wisdom and nourishment to that which gave you life.
May your body peacefully return whence it came and let it bring nutrients to this earth in which it now rests.
May you have peace, now and forever more, that those who still breathe too may one day return to the earth and to God in peace.
Amen.








(Definitely not the verbatim prayer I gave earlier today; I could only remember the spirit of my child-like whispers, not the actual words.)