Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City
June 1, 2008, The Third Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
The Reverend William A. Greenlaw, Ph.D., Rector
Genesis 6:9-22; 7:24; 8:14-19
Psalm 46
Romans 1:16-17; 3:22b-31
Matthew 7:21-29

     From our lesson in the book of Genesis: “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence…  And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth.’”

     And so Noah is instructed to build an ark—so that at least Noah and his family, considered righteous by God, might be saved, along with at least two of every kind living on the earth.  And the floods came for forty days and forty nights, and the ark rose high above the earth.

     After the rains had ended, Noah sends out a dove.  The dove finds no place to set its foot.  After another seven days Noah tries again.  And the dove returns to the ark with a freshly plucked olive leaf.  These symbols of peace are then fulfilled in the covenant that God makes with Noah, that never again will God seek to destroy the earth.  And God has set his bow in the clouds, to be the sign of the covenant between God and the earth.

     The story of Noah is the first in a whole series of lessons we will be hearing from Genesis in the coming weeks, thanks to the Revised Common Lectionary we are now using.

     We had a lively discussion last Tuesday evening on our lessons for today.  One of the things mentioned was that God acts in this story of the flood not so much out of vengeance, but rather sadness and dismay over how violence has so taken over the earth.

     Our discussion turned on how the flood did not exactly “fix” that situation—for clearly it did not.  Human beings are still free to mess things up gloriously.  But that God’s covenant gave the promise that the earth would never again be destroyed by a flood.  And Noah becomes a model of faith—and through grace a new relationship is formed between God and humankind.

     The only problem in this story is that one can hardly suggest that violence has subsided after what some have called “the avenging flood.”  And humankind may not be under a threat of destruction from a flood caused by God, but rather through possibilities of violence completely unimaginable to earlier generations—or from an earth so undermined by humankind that life becomes less and less sustainable.

     I have had reason to reflect a good bit over the last months on how the world has changed from when I first “came to consciousness,” as it were, in the early and mid-1960s to where we are today.  I am old enough to remember something of and sometimes to still be caught up in the hope and dreams and idealism that was present early on, of the “New Frontier,” of the “War on Poverty,” of the excitement and idealism of the Civil Rights Movement, of participating in the march from Selma to Montgomery, of meeting Dr. King and hearing him preach on several occasions, of being a part of the “Movement,” as everyone called it.

     But I also have seared in my consciousness the assassinations of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and then the twin horrors in 1968 in the shooting deaths of  Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, of the anguish and despair they caused.

     But perhaps even more, the sense of an evil war that knew no end which gradually sapped any idealism that might have remained, where dissimulation and outright lies became more and more the rule of the day, first under President Johnson and then Richard Nixon.  On traveling to Southeast Asia in 1967 as a part of the University Christian Movement working with students across Asia to protest the war in Vietnam.

     Of visiting Cambodia on that trip and having a sense of deep foreboding that that tranquil and peaceful country was about to be engulfed in war.  And of course having no idea of how far that country would sink—where our actions set the stage for so much of the evil that was to consume Cambodia a few years later.

     It is sobering to reflect on where we have come, of the progress—or rather lack thereof—that we have made, from those days to this.  Of beginning a career fighting an evil war, and now coming at least to that major transition in my life that retirement represents, and, guess what?….  An evil war with ever more revelations of duplicity and lies, and the killing goes on, endlessly.

     Progress?  Hope?  Possibility?  Idealism?  As some of us search for glimmers of hope and possibility in our current situation, my thoughts and hopes are tempered by the later analyses and revelations of “the best and the brightest” of that “New Frontier”—which became anything but as we sank deeper and deeper into Vietnam.

     At the very least, I think we can say human history is a very bumpy road, fraught with ambiguities and peril at ever turn—and that is how it is going to remain until the kingdom comes.

     Well, in considering what to do with this, I would note that our lectionary compilers are not only giving us a lot of Genesis, we are also starting today on a 15-week sojourn through Paul’s Letter to the Romans that won’t end until the middle of September!  Now, as you might guess, there will be some problematic Paul, for sure.  And some of it will be pretty dense.  But there is also the Paul that gives us a handle, a way of understanding an intractable world, of an intractable humanity, of our own intractable selves—which I believe helps us enormously.  And I mean it when I say that it is this Pauline insight which has enabled me to keep going as a priest for 37 years now.

     Richard Norris is a name that at least some of you will know as a theologian and historian who taught at General for a time and later for many years at Union Theological Seminary.  He was most influential in helping our church understand, accept, and celebrate the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate.  He was a key thinker in helping the church move toward inclusivity in terms of sexual orientation.  He was a wonderful senior colleague as I began my career as a very junior-level professor way back in 1971.

     One of the aphorisms Dick Norris used to delight in proclaiming with his cat-like grin, was to suggest that all good preaching is, at bottom, a theme and variations on “justification”—which of course comes straight out of Paul.  In short, we don’t have, however you cut it, the ability to complete ourselves, to fulfill ourselves, to deliver the world, much less ourselves.  It is through the grace of God and grace alone that allows us to stand, to claim our inheritance as God’s beloved children, to be truly free, to be unshackled from all that would bind and limit us in living out our destiny with God.

     Our heads are so thick and dense, my head is so thick and dense, that I fight this notion every day of my life—because in spite of every evidence to the contrary, I persist in somehow thinking I can pull it off, I can hold it together.

     Thank God for those occasional moments of insight, of grace, of illumination, where I know unmistakably the divine paradox.  To know that when I offer it up, I am in fact set free.  And in that God-given freedom I am given more possibilities than I ever imagined possible.  Until, of course, I claim them for my own.  And then we start the cycle all over again.

     How I wish, how I long for finally arriving.   A world that lives sustainably, a world that has given up war and violence, a world that knows no hunger.  Or, how about at least my finally getting it together?  As I say, short of the kingdom, it would seem none of these things are going to come to pass.

     So how do we hold things together, how are we to understand?  As happens so often, I turn to the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen.  Far from solving hunger, we are serving record numbers—1626 meals on Memorial Day, well over 1400 meals on Thursday.  With wrenching cutbacks in funding continuing.

     And yet, every day here is a miracle.  Where it does come together.  Where we have a sense of the human values we are called to incarnate.  Where transformation takes place.  Where God is unmistakably present.  That is what we are given each day.  And that is enough.

     It is not unlike our Parish Eucharist.  We come in all our sorts and conditions, our incompleteness, our brokenness.  And yet, in offering up all that we are, something happens—and we are made whole.  We are given our life back.  And we are sent forth to live out who and what we have become, to be who we are.  Even as we are.

     As so often happens, it is in our gospel lesson where all this is pulled together remarkably.  “Everyone … who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.  The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock.  And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand.  The rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!”

     In both a corporate and individual sense, we know that life is full of heavy rains, floods, tempestuous winds—and so much that beats against us.  And they happen and will happen even in spite of that rainbow in the clouds reminding us of that first covenant.

     Every time I forget my grounding, of the foundation on which I stand, of the rock on which it is based, I may stand for awhile, but I am standing on very shifting sands that cannot sustain me for long.  When I put my trust in God and in the grace which is my hope and justification—and I need to acknowledge that I sense myself to be in that place only every so often—I will still face winds and rain and floods, but I am grounded.  And in that, I find an amazing source of strength regardless of what comes at me from without or from within.  There is no other way to explain how I survived serving 25 years in this place.

     On a quite different plane, I want to make one concluding observation.  It is no accident, I think, that in the marriage service in our prayer book, one of the suggested gospel lessons is just this story of the house on sand or rock.  I rejoice that an unmistakable process is underway to legalizing and recognizing marriage between any two consenting adults.  Any marriage, like all of life, will have its good times.  And a sand castle can be great fun!  But any marriage, like all of life, can and will have its storms, its wind and rain and floods.  And a sand castle simply won’t last under such circumstances.  But a marriage that is built on a firm foundation of realism and love and forgiveness and trust—freely given, that marriage is built on a rock that is firm indeed.

     In my experience, many, maybe most of the couples I have worked with have chosen this gospel lesson for their wedding.  More than 31 years ago, this was the gospel lesson Jane and I chose for our wedding.  And one of my most treasured possessions was given to me by Jane the night before our wedding at our rehearsal dinner.  It was a rock—beautifully polished on one side; the rest of it was very rough and formidable looking.  And the accompanying card had these words, “May our marriage be like a house built on rock.”

     My prayer for each one of you on this day, and my prayer for this wonderful Church of the Holy Apostles is that your faith, that the faith embodied in this place might be like a house build on rock.

     Amen.
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