Kahu's Manao
Keawala‘i Congregational Church
United Church of Christ (USA)
Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sunday, June 1, 2008
The Rev. Kealahou C. Alika
“Waters of New Life”
Genesis
6:9-22; 7:24; 8:14-19
Someone recently returned from a trip to Rio de Janeiro and talked about going up to Sugarloaf Mountain. The mountain is situated at the mouth of Guanabara Bay on a peninsula that sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean. Its name is said to refer to the resemblance to the traditional shape of a concentrated refined loaf of sugar.
Others say it is believed by some that the name actually derives from the Tupi-Guarani language as spoken by the indigenous Tamoios to mean "high hill." The mountain is indeed high. It is a monolithic peak of granite and quartz that rises 1,299 feet straight up from the water's edge of the city.
A glass-paneled cable car transports visitors to the top of the mountain. The original cable car line was built in 1912. It has been said that the mere sight of the peak even at a distance in a film is sufficient to establish the setting as Rio.
However, what makes the peak even more conspicuous is the statute of Jesus Christ, with outstretched arms, towering over the city. It is a striking image.
The city itself is a mix of urban wealth and rural poverty. The city is surrounded by many favela or shanty towns built out of metal, discarded lumber, cardboard and plastic clinging to the hillsides where the poor live.
I shared with you several years ago the story of a young girl named Margarita who grew up in one of the favela. She is featured in a book called The Spiritual Life of Children written by Robert Cole, a Harvard professor of psychiatry and medical humanities. (Robert Coles, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1990, pages 90-91)
Cole interviewed children from around the world living in many different countries and raised in many different religious traditions. He visited Margarita with a doctor friend who is a pediatric surgeon and a devout Catholic. It would be difficult for us to imagine her sufferings and humiliations but that is the reality of her world.
Though uneducated, she is outspoken. Though unable to read or write she is eloquent in her observations of life in the favela. “When I look at Jesus up there – arms extended - I wonder what he is thinking. He can see all of us, and he must have an opinion about us. I try to talk with him. When I am most upset, he is all that I have.”
“My mother is sick. She still works in Copacabana as a maid in a hotel, even though she coughs, and she bleeds. She is all we have – and him.”
Margarita points to the statue. “A lot of time I ask him why he does things like this.” She moves her right hand across an arc, encompassing the favela where her family lives. “He must see what we see, Copacabana and Ipanema (wealthy parts of the city) and then this place.”
“Mother used to tell us we’ll go to heaven, because we’re poor. I used to believe her. I don’t think she really believes herself. She just says that – it’s a way of shutting us all up when we’re hungry! Now, when I hear her say it, I look up at him, and I ask him: What do you say, Jesus?”
As Margarita talks more and more the author’s friend becomes increasingly concerned about her vehemence and rage. But for the author Margarita has every reason to be frightened and sad: her mother may soon die; her father is long gone; the family is at great risk, and so her anger is not only understandable but much better expressed than pushed aside.
Throughout his interview with her, Margarita’s anger persisted until the sky began to darken and rain began to fall. It was then that she noticed the lightning first and then the thunder.
One would be hard pressed to determine if she was distracted by the thunder and lightning or if she actually became more focused. But this much we know. When the thunder and lightning subsided, she fixed her eyes upon the sky and looking up at the statue of Jesus said, “I’d rather have him send a flood of rain down the slopes of our favela” as if to say that such a flood would help rid her life of all that was troubling her; that whatever ills may have befallen her, she would be able to start her life over again.
In the Biblical story of creation we are told the following: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in that day that you eat of it you shall die.’” (Genesis 2:15-17).
In time the man, Adam, and later the woman, Eve, ate the fruit and as a consequence of their disobedience, each succeeding generation became aware that good and evil exists in our lives and in our world and that each of us will die one day. The choices we make to share or to hoard the resources available to us have consequences for good or evil.
Our reading from The Book of Genesis tells us of how the earth – once good – is now corrupt. The story is a source of comfort to me but it is also a source of great consternation. Yes, it is true that God offers humankind a fresh start through Noah and his descendants. We find great comfort in knowing that God seeks to redeem and transform the future of humankind.
But the redemption and transformation comes at a tragic cost – the destruction of almost all of humankind for its evil ways. God is imagined as having already seen the results of people's wickedness (Genesis 6:11-12; Seasons of the Spirit, Congregational Life Pentecost 1, 2008, page 36). So God decides that humankind must be destroyed.
I have always been troubled by a God who thinks nothing of waging violence against human beings. Yet we know that in an ancient worldview, where gods were considered responsible for the future, destruction provided a way to clear away the past and allow a new beginning. That was the understanding of God that was shared by Noah and those of his generation as well.
As we look around the world and see the evil we have wrought upon one another it would seem that "wiping out humankind and beginning again" would be an option some of us would welcome from time to time. But thankfully, as a consequence of Noah's obedience and faithfulness to God, the option of a flood of epic proportions to cleanse and bring about rebirth at the expense of other people's lives is no longer available to us.
God said to Noah and to every succeeding generation after the great flood: "I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations, I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth." (Genesis 9:12-13)
If water is to become a source of power to cleanse and make new it will not come from another great flood or the flood of rain down the hillside of a favela in Rio. Instead, it will come through the waters of our baptism. Such waters become the means through which we experience God’s cleansing and rebirth within each of our own lives.
But what of the knowledge and presence of good and evil in our lives and in our world you may ask? That will depend on the choices we make. We have the capacity as human beings to literally destroy ourselves and all of creation. That will not be God's doing but our own.
As we share the bread and the cup this day may we remind one another once more of how "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." (John 3:16, NRSV) Amen.