Noah: a Review 

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

     Welcome back. Let's think about Noah.

     I know the movie received a few ho-hum reviews. I know that few people actually loved the movie. I know there were some who thought the movie was so good that they want to see it again with loved ones who have not seen it.

     I number among the latter. Noah will certainly disappoint all comers who expect an obedient, Sunday School version of the man called by God to save his family, himself, and pairs (or sevens) of all the animals in the world on a boat after Yahweh sends a huge flood to punish humanity for its violence.

     I expected to see scenes of a sexually immoral society of men and women; much like what we saw in The Ten Commandments where recently liberated Hebrew babes and hunks orgiastically danced around a golden bull they had formed while Moses was talking to the divine party pooper.

     That did not happen in Noah. Humanity’s wickedness was clearly of the violent kind. The only scene of sexual immorality in the movie clearly suggested forcible rape.

     I also expected scenes with God saying a few words. The voice of Benedict Cumberbatch, James Earl Jones, Morgan Freedom, or that British actor who played Dumbledore in the last six Harry Potter movies would have given God’s word considerable gravitas.

     God was more silent during this movie than I was.

     I also expected Genesis to be present in the movie. Aronofsky did not disappoint. The infusion of Biblical legend with modern storytelling proved intriguing.

     For instance, we find Noah and his family hiding from the descendants of Cain. They have overrun all territories East of Eden. They have invented gun powder, iron weapons, and an early inclination to destroy the planet with technology.

     I know some people were put off by this. Indeed, I had to think about it before I understood what the movie was trying to do. We see people wearing trousers. We see maces attached to wooden handles with bolts, welding helmets, hatchets, and bear traps.

     Why not?  This is consistent with the Biblical legend of humanity being created fully intelligent. History reveals our intelligence evolved over time. Legend reveals our forebears fully functional in malevolent rationality.

     Cain’s descendants seek to snuff out all descendants of Seth. In doing that, they are annihilating the only decent people who manifest love, not violence, on the planet and to the planet.

     What I liked most about the movie was how events and information (shall I say it?) “evolved” towards the movie's denouement.

     In the Bible, an epic appears in a poem. There are only four chapters written about Noah in Genesis. Contrast that to Moses' forty chapters in Exodus.  Even with more material to work with, De Mille's The Ten Commandments resorted to storytelling.

     In that movie, there was a long story about a jealous brother with a birthright and an adopted brother. Both loved the same woman, but she loved the adopted brother, Moses. Indeed, Seti, the father, preferred Moses over his true son, Ramses.

     In this movie, there is a long story where you know how it ends, but you wonder how in the world Noah will get there. 

     So, what do you do with four chapters from Genesis if you're Darren Aronofsky?  I'll tell you what you do; you do what De Mille did.You tell a story where there is none.

     That is exactly what Aronofsky does. And what a tale he tells!

     God never appears to Noah. Dreams appear to Noah. He must interpret them. 

     At first, Noah believes God is about to destroy all life with a flood. He has no idea he might escape that fate. Even his grandfather, Methuselah, cannot help him figure out what to do. Noah decides that everyone is about to die. It takes a second dream for Noah to interpret an escape.

     Other interesting touches besides nine hundred year old relatives drive the story. There is a seed from the Garden of Eden that does interesting things when planted.

     There are Watchers, or fallen angels, who attempted to win back the Creator's love by helping humanity, but the descendants of Cain betrayed them. They have no love for the descendants of Cain or Seth.

     Another interesting touch?  No one refers to God by name. The Creator is God’s name. The Creator is the mysterious presence in the story.

     One last touch? Noah finally closes the door for the last time on the ark, but there is a serious shortage of females.

     To make matters worse, Noah reveals himself to be like a lot of us. When it comes to God, he gets some things right, but the things he gets wrong, he gets murderously wrong. 

     His inability to interpret the Creator as a loving God drives the outcome that decides whether humans become extinct or whether they live again.

     His choice is Adam's choice:  love or obedience. Without spoiling the movie, I can say he chooses well. We're all here, aren't we?

     Go see the movie with an open mind. Go looking for a story, not a Sunday School lesson. If you can do that, there will plenty to talk about in church.

     Next time, I’ll write about what the fundamentalist who lives inside my head found offensive.

     Blessings...

GOD SOUNDS...LIKE RAIN

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Let's think about rain.

If the still, small voice of God spoke to us in the pitch and tone of rain then we must surely have ears to hear it.  Few sounds are lovelier than steady rainfall gracing our senses.  Imagine God's Word having the quality of a cradlesong.  

There are rains where there are no lightning bolts and no thundering peals shaking the world.  Often, these liquid lullabies may soothe our weary hearts and calm our shattered hopes if we lose ourselves in their brief, steady song.  

I love to listen to tender rains until I fall asleep.

I heard that a child peacefully reposes when a parent sings softly to it.  The parent also settles into a state nearing restful slumber in response to the child. 

What a lovely symbol to ponder for two loving hearts of creation and Creator that so move one another. 

Blessings...

HEARD AT CHURCH

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let's think about death.

As Palm Sunday draws near, we must think about death.

I believe death is the source of our worst fears. If death is like anything else that happens to us in life, then it cannot be all that bad.

How often fear plays out to be more dreadful than its object.

In his story "Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy" Tim O'Brien writes about the terrible fear that American soldiers carried with them in Vietnam.

It was the fear of death that killed Billy Boy.

The protagonist of the story, Paul Berlin, imagined the following telegram would be sent to Billy Boy's parents:


“SORRY TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON BILLY BOY WAS YESTERDAY SCARED TO DEATH IN ACTION IN THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM, VALIANTLY SUCCUMBING TO A HEART ATTACK SUFFERED WHILE UNDER ENORMOUS STRESS, AND IT IS WITH GREATEST SYMPATHY THAT…”

This same fear torments Paul Berlin and the other soldiers to the end of the story…and beyond.

Fear is the mind killer as another writer has told us.

What a tragedy to perish by ravaging ourselves with the misery of knowing that we are all going to die. Rather we can choose to accept that fate and love all the days we are alive.

Loving all the days we are alive suggests purpose to our lives. Life must lovable, so that we yearn to love it. Let us unite in a grand purpose of eradicating those ills that make it impossible for many among us to share in a blessed existence. 

Reality preaches that we inhabit the same ark floating to the same end. We must never allow the burden of our mortality to diminish our vitality.

   

Yes, personal extinction is our lot; our species will pass away; everything dies; even our immortal ones have died.

The sky gods have passed away.  They have been replaced with a grander view of God that transcends vast and infinite universes.

Indeed, the god, Jesus, will have died over two thousand years ago this Friday, but death is not the end of the story. Extinction is not the final storm.

There was a valley of dry bones once upon a time that was seen by a prophet in a vision during the Babylonian Exile.

In the vision, he heard a question from God:

"Yahweh said to me, 'Son of man, can these bones live?'

I said, 'Only you know, Lord Yahweh.'"

All the star stuff that originally made the bodies that had decayed into bones knit together again.

The wind of God, the same one that was the breath of life in the beginning for Humanity, blew anew as the prophet beheld the bones living into people.

Ezekiel writes that it was an exceedingly great army. Later, he tells us that the vision was about the resurrection of the nation of Israel. The Babylonian Exile had not destroyed it.

For Christians, the story has meant something different. It points to our faith that death may be our fate, but it is not our end.

Death ends us without upending us. Shall we live again?

The proper answer is ever Ezekiel's answer, "Only God knows."  

The proper hope is that a breath from God may yet blow anew within us. We proclaim that hope on Easter Day.

How do we know?  On the one hand, we know nothing. We are all just interesting star stuff.

On the other hand, we know something. We know that our living again is not in our hands, which did nothing to give us our lives, but in God's hands in whom all life dwells.

It is not our will, but the will of our God who is love. God's love is eternal. It is our hope that love will remember us and make us new.

If there is only a vision, and not life eternal, then that will be okay too. For God has given us to all that has been created even if for just one lifetime.

There's just not a whole lot to fear either way.

Blessings...

A SHABBAT PRAYER

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Let's think about Shabbat or what Christians call the Sabbath.

The word means, simply, "rest."

At sundown every Friday night Jesus, who was Jewish, would have rested and reposed in God.  

So, here is my Sabbath wish for the world:

May the Lord bless you. May the Lord preserve you from harm.  May your life be a light in all of creation.  

May your heart be filled with love.  May you know peace. 

May you make the pain of daily living an oblation to the Lord so that you are cleansed of it and healed.

May you rest.

Blessings... 

SHAVING WITH OCCAM’S RAZOR

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Let’s think about Occam’s Razor.

I remember watching Jupiter once during a high school football game.  It shone brightly in the sky before kickoff.  By the 4^th quarter, it appeared to be moving backwards. 

When I was a kid, I used to race my younger brother.  We’d draw up a finish line.  I’d give him a head start.  I would pass him a few yards before the end.  While I was passing him, he appeared to be going backwards. 

To ancients who believed the earth was the fixed, immovable center of the universe, the appearance of a planet moving backwards must have contributed to the belief that planets were heavenly beings watching them.

Jupiter appears to be moving backwards because our planet rotates, but Jupiter also recedes from the sky.  It can vanish for weeks.  

An ancient Greek named Ptolemy attempted to explain such celestial oddities with epi-cycles.  He proposed that planets moved in circles as they moved across the sky.

This earth centered theory, what we call the geocentric theory, was the prevailing theory of ancient people for millennia.  It underlies all Biblical thinking about the cosmos.

This earth centered cosmology, or world view, would eventually be replaced by a sun centered theory.  Now, we do not believe there is a center to the universe, just our solar system.

This heliocentric theory, first proposed by Nicholas Copernicus, in the 16h Century, changed everything:  philosophy, politics, religion, and Poland.  It put Poland on the intellectual map.

Too bad the earth centered theory was the explanation of the universe when the Bible was written.  That fact has caused a ton of grief and centuries of bad Bible reading.  

Think the Bible is inerrant?  This earth centered universe is one whopping huge error in the Bible.  In many places in scripture, ancient writers wrote that the earth did not move.  Upon pain of death, it did not move by God.

Copernicus was no dummy.  He knew he would be burned at the stake for suggesting the earth moved when the Bible clearly said it did not.  Thus, he arranged for his book Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs to be published after he died.  His theory set the sun in the middle of the universe and proposed that all planets, including Earth, orbited the sun. 

His theory satisfied the requirement of Occam’s Razor.  It did not need a bunch of epicycles to explain planetary motion in the universe.  Once the sun was in the center of a solar system, the motions of all the planets became the simplest explanation.  Just because it was the simplest did not mean it was believed. 

Look up Galileo’s trial if you want to see how humanity, upon pain of death, resisted the idea of an earth centered universe.

By the way, when I say universe, I mean a tiny cosmos.  Ancient people thought the skies and earth were all there was and there would ever be.  They could not conceive of a solar system let alone billions of suns, billions of galaxies, and infinity.

Yahweh was immortal, but not infinite when compared to our God of love we worship today, who is the ground of Being-itself.  Next to our God in whom everything that is moves and has its being, all other gods are just sky gods.  

Truly, science in general, and Occam’s Razor in particular, are faith's best friends.

Indeed, when it comes to religion, I apply Occam’s Razor.  It cuts off whiskery superstition and idolatry.  The Bible thereby inspires faith that is strong and sensible rather than idolatrous and silly. 

If what we know to be true conflicts with our faith, then we need to take a long hard look at what we believe about how to believe.  St. Augustine said something just like that centuries before I wrote these words.

In the case of the Bible, the problem is not God or the Bible.  The problem is how we are interpreting the Bible.

As John Crossan has asked the question, and I paraphrase here, were ancient people so dumb that they wrote the Bible literally and we are so smart today to read it as symbolic and metaphorical; or were they so smart that they knew they were writing poetry and we are so dumb we take it literally?

I have on my car a Jesus fish and a Darwin fish.  Mine was the first and second car in Chattanooga to have them joined on one automobile bumper.  I put them on my Corolla in 1995. 

I hoped to start a trend.  A decade passed, and my indomitable Corolla died underneath an overpass on Interstate 75.  A few days later I bought a new Fusion. 

I stuck a new Darwin fish and a new Jesus fish on that car too and thus became the second person in Chattanooga to post them on his car.  I suppose it takes two to begin a trend.

One day, I was walking out of Best Buy in Chattanooga, when I saw three teenagers standing behind my car.  One of them pointed to my car and asked me to explain my fish.

I said, “They belong together don’t you think?”

One boy replied, “I don’t see how.”

I asked, “Have you ever read Origin of Species?”

“Nope.”

“How about the Bible?”

“Some of it. ”

“Well—I,”

These young men sensed a long explanation coming…and they were probably right…so they dashed off before I could get started. 

I relished the opportunity to explain to them how I read The Origin of Species.  Why I knew Darwin was right, and how, like Copernicus’ book, it changed everything.  

Nonetheless, I was never leaving God.

Blessings…

HOLY HOMOPHOBIA, BATMAN!  

JAMES BALDWIN WAS RIGHT!

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Let's think about homophobia in heaven.

The Washington Post has recently reported some comments made by Bishop Desmond Tutu.  I shall include the entire quote below:

“I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this.  I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place. I am as passionate about this campaign as I ever was about apartheid.  For me, it is at the same level.”

According to the Post, Bishop Tutu, "likened equal rights for gays to the fight for equal rights for blacks."

The problem here is the same problem James Baldwin writes about in his book The Fire Next Time.  It is arrogance.  

When black Americans were fighting for civil rights, the perception was that freedom was something that white people gave to them.  White people wrongly believed that they had an intrinsic perfection that black people needed.  

Liberty was included in that package deal of perfection.

And all the people said, “Bull shit!”

The same crap is going on today.  Straights believe that gay people are getting their liberty because they are giving it to them.  Many straights believe that being hetero-sexual carries an intrinsic perfection that gay people would be so blessed to possess for themselves if only they would but accept it.  

Since they do not, then they are cursed.  

I cannot express more strongly how repulsive I find that kind of thinking to be.  It is not the gospel.  It is not in accordance with reality.  It is of the same stuff that stunk up the brain matter bleeding inside the skull of a Father Coughlin, a Bull Connor, or any person who believes in the lie of the so-called "real American."  

The only thing that exists in reality that matches this kind of thinking is...

Bull shit.  And I'm just being mean to bulls for thinking it.

Arrogance would make heaven into a hell.  Let us recall that in Christian lore, hell is where arrogance prefers to rule rather than submit in heaven. 

So, I shall tag along with the good Bishop here if homophobia is holy.

Blessings…

Oh, Jesus!

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

I love staring at the Atlantic. The best time is in the morning as the earth slowly turns Tybee Island toward the sun. This morning, the first day of April, I wended along the rim of sand and sea: alone, alert, seeking likenesses as Walt Whitman sought over a hundred years ago on a northern shore. A gusty wind blew coldly beneath a sky billowing with swollen, dark clouds. I stepped among pea sized seashells and over seaweeds sandy tentacles. Terns skittered about the beach on twiggy trident feet. Dawn slowly dissolved into memory.

I sought healing. My soul felt trampled as if every army that ever existed in the world had battled there.  My mind had been torn-tossed between having the courage to quit my job or having the guts to remain. I teach English in the lowest circle of educational hell known as corporate alternative school.  Future leaders of the criminal underworld, scores of unruly teens, and a few good students bully and berate each other constantly when they are not menacing the staff.  Some select students, whom I dubbed the Feral Five, are so bad I often wish they would stay home.

Such were the antagonistic feelings and thoughts roiling within me as I sought peace in one of the loveliest places in Georgia.

            I lifted up my eyes to the horizon. An object approached from a great distance over the sea. At first I thought it was a barge lugging lazily toward Savannah’s harbors. They come from Europe stacked high with orange, green, and brown cargo crates as big as hotel rooms. To my amazement, I realized after a few minutes that I was looking at a man, an enormous man, as huge as the Tybee Island Light House. Indeed, that would make him the same size as those super crosses that churches erect in towns across America. Glowing seagulls encircled his head. His long brown hair and dark beard trembled in the wind. His eyes were fixed upon me.    

            I was afraid, but not enough to flee. Who could he be?  Jesus?  Maybe, but a magical being such as I beheld could just as well be Poseidon. If he were the Lord, then the prayers of my youth, the ones I had surrendered to scientific and theological sophistication, were coming true!   I began to doubt, to look around for a camera crew just in case I was seeing an apparition projected by a new special effects technology.

His feet sloshed the waves aside as he stepped onto the shore. I could have parked my wife’s minivan inside one of his footprints. His white robe flapped in the breeze. He wore brown sandals with soles that came up to my ankles.

            He said in perfect Elizabethan English, "Be thou still and hearken unto me." 

The words nearly knocked me to the sand, not because of some unseen power, but because he was loud, with a volume that drowned out the ocean’s surge—that and I stood just below him. I stepped back about ten yards. What should I say?  I had read enough scripture to know the customary response was to admit unworthiness.  I decided to shout the first thing that popped into my head.

            I yelled, “Oh!  Wow!  Jesus!  Is that you?”

            He waved his hand, as if to silence me. He said, “Thou art a sinner.”

            That was disappointing, but at least I knew he was not Poseidon.  He would have spoken with an earthquake.  Then Jesus said something I did not expect.

            He said, “Thou art ignorant, too.”

            That seemed harsh, but I could handle it. I had lost an argument with my wife about that very thing the night before. Besides, I studied philosophy in college.  Nothing reveals how ignorant a man is more than philosophy, or a wife.

            He smiled in an odd way, and his eyes lit up.  They scrutinized me with eyes as blue as chrysocolla, and as clear the sky above a boundless, smog free plain.  His white skin manifested such purity that the foamy wave tops turned beige.  Jesus looked more European than I did.   

            “Are you Jesus?” I shouted.  I did not want to be impolite.  It made me uncomfortable to think that Jesus would expect me to recognize him.

“Take thou my hand,” he said. He knelt, stretched forth is right hand, palm down, and waited.

The moment was awkward. His finger was as thick as an oak, so I could not “take it” in a conventional sense.  I did take it in with a good long look for as much time as I dared without actually staring.  His nails arched evenly over his fingertips. There were no calluses, no warts, and no tattoos on his wrist. His fingerprints were normal. I squeezed his index finger between my hands.

I do not know why I did it, but I sensed Jesus wanted to stand up.  I clamped myself onto his finger with my arm and legs as if it were a branch. He did stand, his hand going up a few feet with him, and I hanging on as if to eternity.

“Let thou go,” he said, shaking his finger.  I obeyed and fell onto my back into the sand.  

“Ouch!” I said.

“Thou art not hurt,” he said.

“I art,” I replied. “My spine hath a withered disk.”  I threw in the Bible word, hoping he would offer to heal me.

            He stood up and dusted the sand off of his robe. I watched with curious fascination. I said, “Lord, may I ask you a question?”

            “Ye do not have to ask. My answer is this: the hour of my return has not come to pass.” 

            Ignoring the slight flutter in omniscience, I said, “Actually, uh—I was wondering if…”  I could not believe I was about to ask God’s son this question. “Uh--could I have a sample of your blood?”  I waited. He watched me silently. I continued, “One drop, Lord, to put under a microscope, for—uh—comparison—uh --immortal with mortal blood cells.”  He frowned slightly as I hastily said, “Do you have cells?” 

After a long pause, he said, “Hast thou a needle and a vial?”

“Verily not,” I replied.

“If you did, would you have me give more of my blood to thee?” 

“Uh--for science?” I said, “Maybe.  I mean, a fingernail would do the trick too.”  He stared at me for such a long time, and I felt so foolish, that I said, “Never mind.”

“Then hear me speak the good news.” 

It is easier for a rich man to go to heaven than it is for a needle to pass through the hide of a camel.” 

“Uh…Okay…Really?” 

“A fool lives only by the sword. The sage buys a gun.” 

“What?  No way!”

“I am the Way!  Thou shalt not ‘no way’ me.”

All this time, Jesus shrank as he spoke. He diminished imperceptively at first, like the movement of an hour hand on a face clock, but when he said, “If you smite the cheek of your enemy, turn his other cheek so that you can smite it more mightily than the first,” he dropped in height by several feet. 

“God is love of money.”   Down he came.

He was as tall as President Obama when he began to explain his parables in ways I never heard before. The Samaritan was lynched, the Prodigal Son perished on the streets, and the grape farmer sent his son with mercenaries to put down a worker rebellion. He and I were eye to eye when he said, “Cursed are the weak for they shall be trampled underfoot.”

I said, and I could not hide the emotion in my voice,“None of that makes sense!”

As quickly as if he were reciting the Sermon on the Mount he proclaimed new beatitudes touching on the issues of the day.  I listened in horror as I heard that everything Jesus said proved that I had deceived myself in thinking I ever knew him.

He loved war.  “The war the merrier!” he said.

He despised women who believed they possessed such a thing as choice in all things except coupons.  He said every time he saw gay people he wanted to blow up a planet.  America is a Christian nation.  Muslims are his mortal enemies.  Liberalism, evolution, and the germ theory are lies straight out of the pit of hell.  He also had some vitriolic things to say about the primacy of Mark and Q in synoptic gospel scholarship. 

Jesus kept shrinking as he shattered everything I hoped and lived was truth.  Miraculously, as he shrank, the volume of his voice did not decline one decibel. 

I felt myself becoming smaller too.

Finally, he stopped dwindling after he said, “Go ye and believe likewise.”  He was about the size of G.I. Joe.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said.  I would have fallen to my knees, not in shame or remorse, but in disappointment that I had sought to emulate a Christ less grand than a broken toy piano. 

Then, something wondrous happened. He started to grow again.   He grew from G.I. Joe to  Danny Devito’s size in a few seconds. Now, I am not a very tall man, a little less than average height, so imagine my surprise when he stopped growing just below my chin.

I held my breath waiting for some final word. He said nothing.  Instead, he grinned strangely as his hair shortened, his beard vanished, and his face changed one by one into the faces of the Feral Five, and then the faces of every student I ever taught, of students I never taught, of those whom I loved or hurt, of those whom I loved and hurt, of my friends, my relatives, my children, and my wife.

“Who are you?”  I said.

Slowly, he transformed into a man I had never seen. His eyes turned brown like a camel’s eyes. His hair shortened, becoming black and coarse. His olive brown skin looked hard and dry. His jaw appeared bruised and swollen. He hardly had a beard at all. He smelled of fish and sweat.

            "Are you the devil?" I asked.

            “Verily not,” he replied, “I’d be a lot less fun if I were.”    He winked, tousled my hair, and then ascended up into the sky.

            Jesus left his footprints in the sand, some as big as a mini-van, others as small as G.I. Joe’s, as I watched him vanish into the clouds. Suddenly, I heard laughter and seagulls. I looked and beheld men, women, and children walking on the beach.

            I ran as fast as I could to my car.  I ran so hard that I tripped more than once and fell into the sand.  Once I got into my car, I tried to phone my wife, but my cell phone crackled, and then died. After a few miles toward home, I began wondering what had happened.

All of a sudden, my radio blasted on by itself. Peals of distant hysterical laughter poured out.  I pressed all my preset buttons.  I pressed my tuner and watched the numbers change.  There was only one channel, the mirth channel, and only one song of laughter.

            “This is crazy,” I said. I changed the radio to my CD player. There were no songs, only laughter on each track.

            “What in the world…?” I shouted.

The laughter stopped. Moments of muffled snickering passed.

A voice said, “The turn the cheek bit was a tad over the top, don’t you think?”

A second voice, sounding all the world like George Burns, replied, “So it’s April Fool’s Day. Next time, hire a writer.”

“Hello!” I said. “Is someone there?” 

The George Burns voice said, “April Fool, Billy Boy!” and it started raining inside my car.

Blessings...