Rev, Joseph Boyd

The last couple weeks have brought us flooding. We have witnessed a torrent of rain, flooding streets in various parts of Ohio. Cars were stuck and needed to be evacuated and abandoned, and later towed. Some people felt like they were taking their life in their hands trying to drive on their streets as the water flooded in.

We have also become intimate once again with a flood of violence directed toward our most loved and most vulnerable, the blameless, the innocent – our children. For the last couple weeks we have been trying to process once again another mass shooting, another shooting in a school. This one has felt very different for me. Though we have seen other mass shootings, even school shootings, this one feels different. I know when I heard about this last shooting in Parkland, Florida, the first powerful feeling I had was dread. It wasn’t shock, it wasn’t horror, it wasn’t surprise. It was dread. I dreaded to hear another tragic reminder that this kind of mass violence will not be leaving us anytime soon. I see this kind of violence, and see something happening to myself, to the people I talk with, even to our children – we are disturbed and still trying to acclimate.

We are shocked and traumatized, and we’re getting used to it. This last bit it the most distressing to me – that we might be getting used to it.

This kind of violence is forcefully becoming part of our new normal. I see this when I listen to children speak about it. I heard a story about teenagers who were opening their school play two days after the shooting in South Carolina. They were crying backstage moments before the curtain was about to rise. The drama teacher asked them – What was the matter? They replied in hushed tones that they were worried a gunman may be out in the audience, and see them as easy targets on stage. This was never a thought I had as I did school plays. It’s changing the way our children think, and they’re modifying their expectations in ways that feel heartbreaking. I see our blameless, innocent children wrestling with a culture that seems hell-bent on taking it away from them.

As I read the account of Noah’s flood now, I see something in the text that had never occured to me. There was already a flood that was happening before the predicted large flood. It says in the text that the land was full of violence. There was a flood of violence.

It was something that Noah and all the citizens must have been trying to make sense of and get used to – that there was never ending violence. There seemed to be no end or solution in sight. I always thought it was odd that Noah doesn’t argue at all when he’s told to build an ark and give up everything he’s known. I always thought it was strange that there doesn’t seem to be any grief or indecision. And perhaps now I see why – Noah and his family must have been sick and tired of the world as it was. They were probably overwhelmed and sickened by the violence they experienced on a non-stop basis, and they were tired of feeling constantly helpless. They were ready to see a new morning, one that wasn’t so filled with violence and tragedy.

It would be like promising that if you followed instructions today to build an ark, there would be no more gun violence tomorrow, no more violence of any kind. It would be a completely new world. No more mass shootings. Everything else would be gone too. There would be no more credit scores, no more debt. There wouldn’t be a president or a corrupt government.

The slate would be wiped clean, ready to start over again. I bet a good number of us would consider getting in that ark. It’s part of the human imagination to dream of a time when the slate is wiped clean, when we can leave behind what is hurting us, and protect what we care most about.

It’s a part of our American tradition – men who live in cabins near ponds, and contemplate the real meaning of live unadulterated by culture or society. It’s actually part of our faith tradition through men like Emerson and Thoreau – this sense that we can make a choice to leave behind the larger culture and cultivate our own values. We shelter them, protect them from a world that is too fast paced and violent for the soul to flourish. That’s one response.

Do you notice what God tells Noah is worth protecting? His family and all the non-human animals. I think this is a literary device that makes a powerful point. There is one thing that these animals and Noah have in common according to the story –  they’re blameless. They’re innocent. The ark is a shelter to protect innocence from a world that is seeking to destroy it. Innocence. This is what God thinks is worth protecting in this story.

Noah gathers all the innocents – all these animals – alligators, geese, chimpanzees, giraffes. But he misses one, as Shel Silverstein points out. He misses the unicorn who is always hiding and not easily seen. This points out the limitations of Noah’s story – he only protects the innocent lives he can see. He’s concerned with protecting flesh and blood from harm’s way, and this is noble, but he misses something important. He forgets to protect the less obvious, that which is precious, but not easily seen.

The unicorn represents imagination. Without imagination we may still technically be alive, but we’re not quite fully human. We’re missing out. We’re leaving too much of ourselves behind. This is my concern about the flooding of images and stories non-stop through our news media. It is not that we shouldn’t be informed, especially about painful and difficult things. But the non-stop flooding of information can rob us of our imagination, if we fail to take breaks from it.

This is why I think we come to church. We don’t come here to avoid the world or avoid the news.

We come here to be children again – to imagine, dream, hope, wrestle with things we’ll never fully understand or master. We come here to play and feel joy, and find ways to support one another. We come to feel alive, and know that there is something good, something worth protecting and appreciating. We come here for our own children. We come here to feel the part of our humanity that refuses to budge and concede to fear and hatred. We come here to know our true place in the world. We come to know and be known through love.

It’s easy to be blind to goodness when we’re flooded with non-stop violence and pain, and systems that perpetuate this. It’s tempting to think we need to be constantly disturbed.

There are two kinds of innocence. There is the kind of innocence that avoids tragedy and practices perpetual naivete. Then there is innocence that meets tragedy directly but refuses to be completely consumed by it, flooded with it every waking moment. We don’t need to commit ourselves to remain perpetually in a state of pain because the world is in pain. We don’t owe the world our complete lack of innocence.

It’s remarkably easy to give up our innocence. It’s easy to let the flood of news and commentary overwhelm our imagination and concede that we live in a violent and painful world that offers no real relief or hope. If you watch the news, a reasonable person would come to this conclusion. Then the only option left of us to help us get through our day is to practice denial, denial of the world. I don’t think that is what the story of Noah’s ark is about. I don’t think it’s about denying or turning your back on a violent world. I think it’s a story about innocence. It’s a story about our children. It’s a story that reminds us never to lose sight of the blameless, to protect and nurture what we hold dear as the flood approaches. The flood will come, but we don’t need to be completely consumed and lose ourselves as long as we stay connected to a worldview that predates our cynicism and world weariness. I see the flood as a kind of baptism for all of us – let it take the violence and greed and fear, and leave us with what really matters in the end. Remember who we love, remember the children.

Noah is obviously not a real person. Nobody can grow up and remain completely blameless, innocent.

We can’t help but get tarnished, warped, and hardened by our experiences. It’s part of growing up. Noah is the part of us that often we try to bury or deny or that we think is silly – the part that insists that another world is possible, and believes it 100%. Even at my relatively young age, I find that hard to swallow. I can feel the curse of realism informed by past disappointment clouding my vision.

But you know who believes that another world is possible, that we actually can do better, that we can stop violence from polluting the world? Our children. It is no surprise that the blameless, the innocents of our culture would be the voice in the midst of crisis. Our children are not just our future because they are younger than us. They are our future because they believe with more conviction than you and I that another world is possible. They are telling us a flood is coming, and they are showing us what we need to survive. They are telling us what to do. It begins with washing away violence, and protecting the blameless, the innocent. Our children are telling us loud and clear – protect the innocent from violence. I think it’s time we start listening to them, don’t you?