Day 3: Genesis 8-11

Day 3: Genesis 8-11

God of new beginnings, help us to hear Your words this day as we read. Guide us to feel your presence in this ancient words. AMEN

A new beginning, a new creation

Okay, God, we get it. You are really all about making a new creation, and we haven’t even passed the first part of Genesis.

While reading Genesis 8 I was struck by all of the numbers, 150 days here, 7 months there, 40 days here. But the more interesting number came with the image of Noah and the dove. When Noah sends out the dove the first time, after sending out another type of bird, the dove returns, finding nothing. Then in beautiful symmetry to the first telling of creation, Noah sends out the dove seven days later. The dove returns with an olive leaf. Then Noah, his family and all those animals have to wait ages before getting off the arc; in fact, they wait over six hundred years. That must have been some olive leaf to provide such hope.

After all of this; the building, the raining, the sea-sickness, the waiting, God makes a new covenant with Noah and the rest of the creation; the covenant that is remembered and seen to this day, a bow in the sky. During some past research I recall reading that the bow, which is also a symbol of war (i.e. bow and arrow), became a symbol of how God would take our fears and joys, much like the earth strapping them to an arrow and shooting them into the heavens. Although this seems like a fitting image of God turning the tides, no pun intended, I doubt that people at this time had a clue what a weapon version of a bow would even look like, but it makes for an interesting visual to “modern” people.

Somewhere over the rainbow

I have often wondered why lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people have clung to the image of a rainbow as a sign of pride. Working deeply in the LGBT community, and being gay myself, this reading took on a new meaning this morning. I am not sure why today, why this time. But today I felt a wave come over me as I read Genesis 9, the telling of God’s covenant in a rainbow.

Remembering my childhood and youth, the time in which I lived my life in a personal flood, a flood that covered who I really was, I remember the feeling of waited patiently for a sign of hope. Like Noah, I would send out birds to see if there was food and land, such as exploring websites of national LGBT organizations or meeting another “queer” kid that was sharing my experience.

Then, one day, I found my olive leaf. After going to college to major in music (yeah, my mother says she didn’t know I was gay, I don’t get it either), I met a group of people who had no fear of who they were and who they loved. Yet, like Noah, I waited to open the doors and set myself free. I didn’t wait six hundred years, but it felt like it. After all that time treading water, the colors and beauty of the rainbow was an amazing sight, and an amazing promise.

So I guess the rainbow makes perfect sense. A sign of hope, a new promise. Yet, as many LGBT people, and many other people in the world, have been hurt by people in the church we turn our back on this new promise given by God. We let people pour down rain on our lives. We let dogma flood our earth. Then a moment comes when we look up and see a reminder in the sky, a rainbow, that God is still there, loving us God’s promise remains.

All in the language

I often find myself arguing with people about the power of language. Whether talking about language barriers between people of different cultures or countries, or speaking about the many different meanings to so-called common words, language plays an important role in our lives. Genesis 11 has often been used as a means to teach that this language barrier is a curse from God.

If we take the story literally, we have a group of people, all the same. They speak the same language, and thus decide to spend their time focused staying as one and, to some degree, on finding THE God. God, seeing this, spreads the people throughout the world.

We’ve all been there. We find a group of people who we feel connected to, similar to. We forget about the rest of creation and focus on ourselves. Even in our churches we do the same. We build creeds and traditions, all the time in the best interest of finding THE God. But, when we focus on how things have always been or on only finding THE God, the God that apparently lives in the sky in this story, we forget that God is truly all around us, in each person we encounter. Babel reminds me to look around at all God has created, all the differences in the world, and to call them good, to call them God.