Henrietta United Church of Christ

Does God get mad? Does god sometimes unleash a holy righteous wrath to punish evildoers? Our first scripture reading is part of a familiar Bible story from Genesis 7.

Then the Lord said to Noah, "Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation. 2Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and its mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and its mate; 3and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth. 4For in seven days I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights; and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground."

5And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him. (Genesis 7:1-5)

How many of you colored pictures of this story when you were young, or saw illustrations of all the different animals walking in pairs onto the ark? My Bible story book showed the earth covered with water flood, but it didn’t show millions of horses, rabbits, or chipmunks being helplessly washed away. It didn’t show millions of men, women and children holding onto pieces of wood until they died of exposure or starvation. It showed the rainbow in the sky, but it didn’t show the dead trees, rotting carcasses, and utter devastation as far as you could see on the earth.

Would God unleash such destruction on His own entire creation because one species among millions, a young species that was trying to learn how to tame its natural instincts, wasn’t righteous enough for him?

Two weeks ago we dramatized the story of God instructing the prophet Samuel to anoint David, to prepare him to replace Saul as king. God had rejected Saul because he had disobeyed God.

So what had Saul done to make God fire him as king? Earlier in the story, the prophet Samuel had told King Saul, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, `I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey'" (1 Samuel 15.1-3). So Saul had obediently gathered the Israelite army and defeated the Amalekites, killed all their men, women and children as God had said, but spared their king and the best sheep and cattle.

God was angry at Saul because Saul’s genocide against the Amalekites, whose sin had been defending their land against the foreign Israelites generations before, hadn’t been quite total enough. He had spared one man and some of the animals.

If I could edit the Bible, I’d cut that story right out. But there it is, in the Holy Bible, chapter and verse.

So do we believe stories like that, and cower in fear of a petty, tyrannical God whose righteous will is to destroy us or condemn us for our mistakes? Or do we regard the parts of the Bible that we like as Holy, and ignore the rest? Many people have come to reject the whole Bible because parts of it are so distasteful to modern minds. I wrestle with these questions myself. So today I want to share my perspective on stories like these.

We think of the Bible as a book because it’s published that way. But at first it was more like a library–a wide variety of stories, laws, poems, and wisdom that were written by different people in different situations over a long period of time, and that had been told and recited for generations before they were ever written down. Reading the Bible is a little like digging in an archaeological excavation site, and finding deeper and deeper layers of human culture, going way, way back to the early stages of human civilization. But spiritually speaking, this excavation site happens to be underneath our own church. These are our own spiritual grandfathers and grandmothers whose lives and thoughts and faith we unearth in this collection of writings.

To know how to interpret and apply the words of the Bible we have to try to get inside these people’s minds. So let’s try to put ourselves in the sandals of people who lived thousands of years ago, before there was a Bible, the Ten Commandments, or much of any kind of writing at all. You never knew when a devastating flood, earthquake, plague, or marauding band might come out of nowhere and threaten to destroy you, your family, or everything and everyone you knew. Your mind needs to have some sense of control over this dangerous world you live in. You sense there is a power operating in this world way beyond your own. This power seems dangerous and capricious. Maybe if you appease this higher power with sacrifices, diligently bow before it, and obsequiously obey its commands, it will favor you with blessings and withhold its destructive anger. This was the level of most people’s religion when the story of Noah began to be told.

About ten years ago a book came out titled Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History. It presented convincing scientific, archeological and anthropological evidence that a great flood covered a large populated area around the Black Sea about 7600 years ago. The earth was coming out of a major ice age, and the warming atmosphere created conditions for huge amounts of rain to fall on the earth. But what precipitated this flood was a huge lake that was created by melting glaciers. A big natural dam of earth and rocks kept this lake from emptying into the Black Sea 500 below. It’s quite likely that a long, heavy rain combined with the melting glaciers finally caused a sudden break in the dam, releasing a violent torrent of water 200 times the flow of Niagara Falls that raged down the valley into the Black Sea. All the farmland and settlements around the Black Sea were covered by the deluge. (Source: www.essortment.com/all/noahfloodepic_rmtq.htm.)

Unusual rains were falling and glaciers were melting all over the world, and there are stories of a great flood in many different ancient cultures. But that global warming wasn’t caused by human sin. Those people were helpless victims of it.

Have you ever been hit with an unexpected calamity and found yourself asking, “God, what did I do to deserve this?” The story of Noah’s Ark was told and retold to help people make sense of their lives. It told them that human wickedness made God angry, but that God promised He would never destroy the whole world like that again. That story must have been very reassuring to them. There is a right and a wrong, with consequences for both. But God isn’t going to unleash furious, destructive wrath that just destroys everything. So we still tell this story to our children today, to help motivate good behavior without making them paralyzed by fear of a God whose anger knows no bounds.

Now the story about God getting angry because Saul didn’t quite wipe out every living thing in the Amalekites’ territory takes us back to a time when the Middle East was full of groups of people competing with each other for land and resources. Hmmmm. Why does that sound so familiar?

To these people, this was a zero-sum game. The more another tribe had, the less you had, and vice versa. If you think this way, in order to survive, you have to be strong, aggressive, and united. Worshiping and obeying a powerful God who has chosen you and favored you over all the other groups, who wants to give you their land, who views their religions and beliefs as wicked, and who is offended that they have tried to stand up against you, helps unify and motivate you for victory. And wiping out all them and everything that belongs to them will cleanse the land of their presence and eliminate any temptation of being contaminated by their foreign culture and religion.

This story about Saul and the Amalekites was told and retold to reinforce unity, identity and obedience so that this vulnerable people could survive. We see this kind of thinking among the extremists of both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. And we saw some degree of it in our own country after 9/11, when politics, militarism and religion were fused together into a potent surge of nationalistic power. So maybe our own experience can help us understand why violent stories like this were told and retold.

Fortunately, as we continue our archeological exploration and read other parts of the Bible, we see people’s understanding of God developing into higher and higher levels of spiritual maturity. A recurrent theme throughout the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) is God’s mercy and steadfast love, which “endures forever.” And the Psalmist proclaims, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein (Psalm 24:1). There’s no “us vs. them”,”clean vs. unclean” here.

And then we read of the son of a Jewish carpenter saying these words in our second scripture reading, from Matthew 5:

"You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' 44But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:43-48)

These are some of the most remarkable words ever written. Jesus knew God as a God of perfection. But Jesus describes this perfection, not in terms of impossibly high standards of purity or flawlessness, but in terms of perfect, complete love. It’s a love that doesn’t play favorites–God’s sun and rain are given to the righteous and the unrighteous. And this love is extended to those we count as our friends and those we count as our enemies. And then Jesus challenges us to grow toward perfection by embodying that all-embracing love ourselves. Be a perfect, unconditional lover like God, he tells us. This teaching reveals the highest level of understanding who God is and who we can be that I know. And if we all followed this teaching, wouldn’t the problems that tear apart our would just dissolve?

It’s words like these in the Bible that help me look at the stories like the flood or the slaughter of the Amalekites and learn something from them. I see in those ancient stories something of my own human self trying to survive in a dangerous world. I am like our spiritual ancestors. When I look at God through eyes of my fear and pain, I tend to see a dangerous God who has to be pleased and appeased. If I look at God through eyes of guilt, I see a punishing God. If I look at God through the eyes of intolerance of my neighbor, I see a God who hates the people I hate. I see every aspect of my human nature depicted in the stories of the Bible.

But I also see in the Bible the ongoing story of very human people learning to trust God more and more–to humbly bring to God their fear, their pain, their guilt, their hatred. Whenever Bible characters like Abraham and Sarah, Moses, David, Solomon, and Paul, stopped trying to create God in their own human image, and yielded themselves to God’s guidance, mercy, and truth, then God began re-creating them in God’s own image. In their own human ways they become bearers of love, hope, truth, and creative power.

When the floods of life come–and come they will–our human nature will ask what we’ve done to deserve God’s punishment. But we can take our pain and fear to God, knowing that sun and rain, love and loss, birth and death, are all a part of our life experience. We can ask God to help us release what we need to let go of, help us gain what we need to learn, and help us deepen our trust in what is unshakable and eternal.

When we feel threatened or hurt by our enemies–as we inevitably will–our human nature will rise up in self righteousness and want God to smite them in some way or other. But we can take our anger and hatred to God, knowing that God’s love includes both them and us, and knowing that we are as human as they are. We can ask God to heal our wounds, calm us with the peace of God’s presence, help us see our contribution to the conflict, and help us see what part we can play in its resolution.

When I look at the Bible from this perspective, I guess I don’t have to cut any parts out or avoid the stories I don’t like. I just have to have the courage to look at my own human nature honestly. And I have to have the trust that God’s love is deep enough and wide enough to include me along with everyone that God has made. And I have to have the humility to yield to God’s truth and wisdom that are waiting to guide me.

So does God get angry, vengeful, and intolerant ? No, but we do. May our humility before God help us to remember that God is not us, and we are not God. And may God’s love for us help that gap between us to grow smaller and smaller as we grow in faith and trust through every challenge life brings us.