Sermon: Somewhere Over the Rainbow

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Somewhere Over the Rainbow

By Charles Rush

August 16, 2009 ^[i]

ese just in from Texas, more questions that children have posed to God. This from Donna, a future patent lawyer. “Dear God, in school we learned that Thomas Edison invented light. But in Sunday School, we learned that you did it. Did he steal your idea?” And this from Nan, a future therapist. “Dear God, I bet it is hard for you to love all the people in the world. There are only four people in our family and I can never do it.” This from Joyce, a future high-maintenance woman, “Dear God, Thank you for my baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.” High maintenance is not gender specific, Bruce writes “Dear God, please send me a pony. I never asked for anything before. You can look it up.” Bruce will buy himself a Lexus in 30 years. This from pensive Jane, “Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don't you just keep the ones you have now?”… like me. Finally from Larry, the pragmatic moralist, “Dear God, Maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they had their own rooms. It works with my brother. Larry.”

To these inquisitive queries, we must add one other, “God why did you ever think about destroying the world? And for that matter why did you later decide to save it?

Scripture itself is ambivalent on the first question. Actually two answers are given. The first one is general. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humanity was very great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of their hearts was continually evil and only evil. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth and was grieved in his heart (Gen. 6:5-6). Jack Miles, in his wonderful little book, God A Biography, points out that there is a striking naivete to these passages in Genesis. From the face of it, it appears that the actual level of human depravity comes as a surprise to the Almighty despite the fact that God is the creator of the world. It is almost as though, God is first discovering just how bad this can really be. As one commentator noted laconically, this era represents the adolescent phase of human development. God is like Bill Cosby's father when he was a teenager. “I brought you into the world and I can take you out.”

The second tradition gives God more of a moral basis for the decision to be rid of humanity altogether. That one says, “Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence” (Gen. 6:11,12). It should give us pause, particularly those of us who think we have transcended the Biblical sagas as sophisticates in a world come of age. I have a primordial image in my mind of the world at the time of Noah that looks pretty much like barter town in the Mad Max movies. It is a rough and tumble collection of thieves and rapists, outfitted in macho leather and lascivious animal skins, who are only interested in greed and rapacious violence. Anarchy is about to break out at all times and the strongest imposes their will on everyone else.

But fast forward to the deserts of New Mexico. The year 1944. A group of scientists from all over the world working at Los Alamos are waiting to detonate the first atom bomb. There is considerable nervousness about the test blast because a minor group of physicists have wondered aloud at the possibility that a nuclear reaction might have a chain effect exponentially. In which case, the whole world might be destroyed. The majority opinion does not think so, but no one is for sure. What does the Almighty think of our hubris and violence now? “The world was filled with violence”, says our scripture of a time long, long ago. I'm not so sure we have transcended that yet.

However necessary that bomb was to stop the Japenese, however inevitable it was that we would eventually deploy it, Robert Oppenheimer was right. His first words after watching the fireball rise above the desert floor, were a quote from the Bhagavadgita. It is a line from Shiva, the god of death and destruction. He said, “I have become death, destroyer of worlds.” The disturbing moral question that we would pose to God in this text, “why would you ever think about destroying the world?”, we can no longer pose that question to God until we ask it also of ourselves. Why would you destroy the world?

Scholars have pointed out that the story of Noah is universal as far as we can tell. Every culture in the world has some variation of the story of the world very nearly destroyed by flood with only a remnant family to start over again. The biblical story is unique because it is the only monotheistic faith in which a tale like this is told. Therefore, the one and only God is both creator and destroyer, judge and redeemer. Jack Miles says there is a primordial power to the Almighty in the story. God becomes distant, somewhat arbitrary and a power to be feared as well as revered. At this point, God is like the powerful Alpha-Male in a confined space, potentially a comfort, potentially a threat. No one quite sure what he will do.

In the Noah-type story that was told in ancient Babylon in saga entitled The Enuma Elish, the contradictory divine power is spread between two gods. That saga depicts a great battle between two mythic gods, Marduk and Tiamat. Tiamat is the goddess of the sea. She represents the forces of violence and anarchy in nature. Marduk is the god of heroism and battle that seeks to establish order and justice. After an epic battle, Tiamat is destroyed. As she dies, Marduk boards a boat of pitch and bitumen, just like Noah's. The waters of chaos recede, leaving dry ground and Marduk instinctively offers a sacrifice, the odor of which pleases the wider pantheon of Babylonian gods.

It does not surprise me that our primordial expression of divine wrath comes in the form of overwhelming water- hurricanes, floods, and the power of the ocean itself. You only have to have that happen once to change your attitude forever.

My brother-in-laws a few years ago, just off Cape Hatteras in a small boat. The National Weather Service looked good but the local weather patterns in that area are simply unpredictable and too local to screen. They were only a mile off shore when the swells started rising dramatically. It was unfamiliar sea and they were caught in a tide that was moving with terrific power in a direction we didn't want to go. The boat was laboring. A squall of rain came up and the temperature dropped 15 degrees in a minute, not a good sign. The swells were really pitching the boat and they were quickly scanning the sea for an island to put in for safe harbor and ride out the storm. Despite being on full throttle, it appeared that we were hardly moving in the boat. All conversation ceased, except with reference to getting to land and negotiating the waves. About that time they looked over the starboard side of the boat to see a wall of white water churning several feet high. It was a place in the sea where tides moving in different directions ran into each other. Their boat was being slowly pulled toward that wall of water and if it hit it, they would surely capsize a mile from the nearest shore in very rough water.

They looked at each other with a momentary glance of utmost serious concentration. A quick image of all their children back at the beach house. A flash of utter stupidity that they let this situation happen. The crashing sound of water and the fear that they could die right here. One of them says, ‘we are getting out of here now.' The only speech was to report conditions or give orders. Half an hour later, they were free from impending doom but no one really stopped working together until they made the dock. Even still, very little was said. It was a little too close, too vulnerable, too overwhelming. The sea is like that, primordial and powerful, beautiful, beguiling and it can crush you in a minute.

No anybody who has been on a rough open sea can understand how the power of nature can overwhelm you. Earthquakes, volcano's, tornado's, avalanche's, hurricane's, famines, plagues. They are overwhelming. Overwhelming is built into the fabric of the natural order and if we get in the way, it rolls over us too. If God is the force that is ultimately responsible for the structure of nature, it is understandable that we should hold God responsible for these things. It is not surprising that God was first conceived as a gargantuan force that simply has to be reckoned with, appeased, aligned with as best as possible.

We know about this. I went to visit a woman in the hospital once. She was checking her father in. Her father's health had been failing and he was near death. She had difficult decisions to make about his health care. Her brother and sister lived across the country. They were in a long distance argument about what was best for Dad, more than ready to offer their criticism of what had been taking place, unable to help directly themselves.

The nurses were getting her father squared away. I said to her, ‘so how are you doing.' She said ‘Good'. There was a long pause. “I mean my brother and sister aren't talking to each other as of today. My daughter at college has a fairly serious eating disorder and I am dumbfounded about it and I can't stop worrying about her. My son never calls home. I have no idea what is up with him. And my husband is on the wrong end of a merger and, the poor man, he is a bear to live with right now. But I'm good.”

I said, “well it's good your good.”

She said, “yeah, that's good.”

We know about the overwhelming part of life. At a deep spiritual level, we know that we are not likely to avoid this part of living. At the deepest spiritual level, we know that in a way that is not morbid, this is actually an important portal to a profound mode of living. Not that you want to hurry it on.

We can say that, only because of the novel thing that our scripture lesson teaches us today. “I will never again destroy the earth. I will establish my covenant with you. This is the sign of the covenant which I will make with you and every living creature. I will set my bow in the clouds and I will remember.” God is for us. God is with us. Love unlocks the key to the universe. At the heart of things is a fundamental goodness, even if we are presently being pretty much overwhelmed. Hold on to that goodness in the midst of suffering and pain.

When they first made the movie The Wizard of Oz, there was one scene in particular that the director decided to leave on the editing floor, that in some ways I wish they had included. In that scene, Dorothy has been captured by the wicked witch of the West. She is locked up in a prison hold, high in the castle of the witch. It looks as if she is truly done for and there is no way out. She is forlorn and she tries to revive her spirits by singing her song. I heard the scene on NPR a couple months ago. Judy Garland starts to sing the song, she falters, she tries to sing it again and dissolves into tears of despair [ listen here or here ]. I was listening to it on rte. 78. You could see cars pulling over to the side of the road. It brought down grown men. The director made the decision that it was just too powerful for it's time. He didn't think Americans could take it. In a way, that judgment is rather quaint. And on another level, in for the generation that lived through the depression through the Second World War to the Atom Bomb and the Iron Curtain, it is probably true that we didn't need any more illustrations about the frustration of being overwhelmed and lonely and deprived. That generation got that message front and center.

But it strikes me as a more profound expression of hope in the midst of deprivation and trial. We hold on to the song, sometimes we can barely get it out. We search for words but we cannot even articulate them because in the moment of despair, on a spiritual and emotional level, we cannot really believe the goodness of God. We simply cannot, so we have to borrow the songs that we grew up with, the hymns. We may not be able to speak but we can barely sing, haltingly, but we can barely sing. It seems to me, that is a more spiritually realistic picture of the face of hope in all of its difficulty.

The difficulties don't go away but God is with us and for us and there are spiritual resources available in those hours to get us on through and that is the point. Love unlocks the key at the heart of the universe. We have to come back to that.

My colleague Tom Reiber, an associate minister at Christ Church, told me that he went to visit Isabelle Deveney near the end of her life. Isabelle was old able to do little else at that point besides lay in bed. She slept a lot and got confused easily so conversations with her were brief.

He brought her communion. It was his first communion since he has been ordained. That is a very appropriate way to start, to bring the presence of Christ to those who are infirm and isolated from the community.

He is saying the prayers over the elements, consecrating the bread and the wine. Isabelle couldn't have a sustained conversation about much of anything but she connects with the very familiar words of the prayer. There is a prism in her bedroom window. As he is saying the prayers, the room is suddenly filled with the rainbow. That is right. We may not be exempted out of difficulty and suffering. But God will remember us and the covenant with us. As Jesus said, ‘lo I will be with you always, even unto the close of the age.' Amen.

^[i] A version of this sermon was preached by Rev. Rush on January 28, 2001