Sermon from Sunday, July 10, 2016

Reading:  Genesis 6-9

Theme:  Poor Mrs Noah (or, Her Life Matters)

Poor Mrs Noah!

First her husband goes off for months on end to build a big boat because his God tells him to without – as far as we know, ever once talking it over with her. 

Then when the Great Flood he talked about actually comes she has to leave behind her home and her kitchen and garden and all her dear friends, to be den mother to the messiest, loudest, most disorderly floating zoo you can ever imagine.

And finally when they come down to ground again, she finds she is now de facto mother of all post-Flood humanity – again, without anyone ever consulting her and caring to hear her thoughts on the matter.

I wonder how she felt?  What her life was like?  What she thought of Noah?  Or of God?

Was she grateful to be married to someone so good and committed to what needed to be done?  Pleased to have made such a good match?  Was she happily obedient to whatever Noah and his God had for her to do?

Or was she maybe just a little bit angry?  Suspicious about this big boat and about Noah’s equilibrium and his faith?  And maybe his God?  Did she resent at least some of what was asked of her, maybe all of what was taken away from her, and what was left?

It would be nice to speculate, and spin some wonderful imaginative story about her, as many storytellers have in delightful ways.  I’d love to bring her to life here this morning in some fanciful incarnation, but the thing is it would be just that – just imagination.  Because the story as it’s been passed down to us just doesn’t say anything about her – and I wonder if that’s an important thing for us to listen to and think about.

She has no name, no face, and almost no place because with only once exception in the whole 4-chapter, 96-verse story, she is just background to the people who really count.  Twenty-two times in the story it’s just Noah who is mentioned.  Nine times it’s Noah and his sons – a few of those times, Noah’s wife and the son’s wives are added on at the end.  Only once is it Noah and his wife together.  Never is it her by herself.

She’s just not important in the official story of the Flood.  The storyteller doesn’t think we need to know anything about her.  She just doesn’t count.

It reminds me of funerals and memorial services I did for different University staff while I served as campus chaplain.  When the services were for professors – active or retired, they were held in the grandeur of University Hall with hundreds in attendance, important people offered tribute, and a wonderful reception followed.  I also did services for lower staff, maintenance workers, secretaries.  One in particular was for a server in one of the student cafeterias who committed suicide and left behind a young family; it was sparsely attended with no real involvement by the upper levels of the University itself.  I talked that over with the Chaplaincy Council (most of whom were professors) and I get the point they made about the different kinds of impact and influence different people have on the world, but I still wonder.

Is the world meant to be divided between Noahs who for whatever reason are up top and whose version of things becomes the official story, and Mrs Noahs who spend their lives silently and invisibly in steerage, absolutely necessary to things turning out the way they do, but whose experience of the story doesn’t get told on quite the same stage?

Whatever happened to that song we sing, that “all God’s critters got a place in the choir” where one of the verses says, “all God’s critters’ got a place on the planet, and if one doesn’t show, then the whole choir’s had it”?  Can we really measure importance and unimportance, and whose experience is worth listening to, or not?

I heard once of a professor of medicine who sometimes on a final exam would ask his students – for 10% of the mark, to name the cleaning woman they passed every morning on their way in to the school.

So I think it’s interesting that the only place in the story where Noah and his wife are seen and treated equally and like partners is when God is leading Noah out of the ark – after the Flood has come and gone, after Earth has been washed of corruption and all life is about to start over again according to God’s good will, and God says to Noah,

Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your son’s wives with you.  Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh … so they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.  (Gen. 8:15-17)

Every other time it’s been either just Noah, Noah and his sons, or Noah and his sons with Noah’s wife and the sons’ wives added on at the end.  But when God is starting it all over again, God clearly elevates Mrs Noah to full partnership with Noah, and their sons’ wives to full partnership with them.  It seems hierarchy -- particularly patriarchy, was part of the corruption Earth needed to be cleansed of, that what makes Earth good and what God wills is mutuality between men and women, equality among all people, and right relation of humanity with all of creation.

And I wonder what Mrs Noah felt at that moment – to hear God affirming her place as full partner with her husband?

Poor Mrs Noah, though, because no sooner does God issue this command, Noah ignores, or forgets, or just doesn’t get it.  Because as Noah leaves the ark (one verse later – in Gen. 8:18), instead of leaving as God commands, “Noah went out with his sons, and his wife and his son’s wives (somewhere behind them),” and by the very next chapter – the last chapter of the story, Mrs Noah and the wives of their sons have disappeared entirely from the story, old Noah is out drinking with his sons, and in his drunkenness he disgraces himself in front of them. 

It makes you wonder if anything was learned.  If Earth really was cleansed and re-made?

If Mrs Noah had been given more of a place, had been allowed to tell her side of what happened, had been invited to help shape the new world, I wonder what she would have said.  How things might have gone.  And how different – maybe better, the world might be.

There are many still in the world today – in our lives, in our country, in the world who like Mrs Noah are essential to the world, but who are voiceless, nameless, treated as unimportant, whose experience of how the world works never gets included in the official version.

Out of respect for Mrs Noah and all she gave up in the Flood for the sake of a new and better world, I wonder if the ones on top can learn to listen to their voices, and see them as partners in shaping the world in the way God wants, in the way it really works best?