Sermons – First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn

Biblical Migrations: Noah            

Ana Levy-Lyons

November 10, 2019

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

 

Approximation of Scripture Reading (Genesis 3-6)

It’s a few years into the humanity experiment and God is looking around, bummed out. “This is not at all what I had in mind when I made the adam – the human. First I give them everything they need – the most beautiful garden, flowing with sparkling clean water, bursting with plants of all kinds with delicious fruits – and what do they do? They have to go and eat from the one tree I said they can’t eat from. I give them one modest limit on their use of my natural gifts and they blow past it immediately. And they won’t even take responsibility for it – Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent. They had enough; they had everything, and they didn’t realize it. So I kick them out of the garden. I have to. They can’t handle it.

 

Then, as if that’s not bad enough, you know the two brothers, Cain and Abel? Well Cain kills Abel. Murders him, just like that! My Abel. The one I made and loved. Dead. And I only know about it because his blood cried out to me from the ground itself. Because Cain is not taking responsibility either. He keeps saying, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ over and over. As if he’s not. I’ve had it. I’ve had it! I’m starting over.”

 

Sermon Part 1

When God decides to shake up the Etch-a-Sketch and start over with this world, the vehicle for preserving life is not a boat, it’s a box. I know it’s always portrayed as a boat in the picture books, usually a very lovely wooden boat with a bow and a stern, a port and a starboard, lots of windows, maybe with oars and maybe with sails, with all the happy-looking people and animals hanging out on the deck. But in the actual text, the life support system that God instructs Noah to build is just a big, multi-story box. There are careful instructions for the shape and dimensions of the box, so many cubits high and wide, the edges sealed with pitch. And it is to have only one window.

 

This window has been a mystery over the years because the Hebrew word tsohar that’s usually translated as “window” in this story doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Bible. So you can’t really know what it means. Some rabbis have said that Noah is told to put in a skylight; others say it’s a radiant gem that glows with its own inner light. Maybe even Noah doesn’t know what a tsohar is. But in order to save himself, his family, and all of life on earth, Noah (who is 600 years old, by the way), is told to build a box with one mysterious light source, get everyone to climb in, with no ability to guide it, and surrender to whatever happens. And he does it. They all do it. And once everyone’s inside the ark, the text says, “God closed it for him.”

 

It’s a really scary image. Especially as the flood waters start pouring in. To be a human in that ark, in that box, would have been to be drowned in helplessness. And maybe that was the point. Maybe that was the spiritual education that humanity had to undergo. Because when you think about God’s profound disappointment in humanity – it was because of our abuse of the gift of human agency.

 

From an initial state of harmony with the natural world where we were given everything we needed, the first humans took more. Our sense of entitlement to take and take with no limits alienated us from the land. We were exiled from the garden and then it says that the land became hostile and “sprouted thorns and thistles” at us. And in the story things just got worse from there. With the new pressures of scarcity, jealousy and greed cropped up. Brothers fought. Cain murdered Abel and then refused to take responsibility for it. The earth itself protested and cried from the ground.

 

We now have a picture of humans at war with the earth and one another. We are obsessed with controlling our environment – taking beyond our limits – the grabbing and the claiming of the fruits of every tree as ours for the taking.

Biblical Migrations: Noah            

Ana Levy-Lyons

November 10, 2019

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

 

Approximation of Scripture Reading (Genesis 3-6)

It’s a few years into the humanity experiment and God is looking around, bummed out. “This is not at all what I had in mind when I made the adam – the human. First I give them everything they need – the most beautiful garden, flowing with sparkling clean water, bursting with plants of all kinds with delicious fruits – and what do they do? They have to go and eat from the one tree I said they can’t eat from. I give them one modest limit on their use of my natural gifts and they blow past it immediately. And they won’t even take responsibility for it – Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent. They had enough; they had everything, and they didn’t realize it. So I kick them out of the garden. I have to. They can’t handle it.

 

Then, as if that’s not bad enough, you know the two brothers, Cain and Abel? Well Cain kills Abel. Murders him, just like that! My Abel. The one I made and loved. Dead. And I only know about it because his blood cried out to me from the ground itself. Because Cain is not taking responsibility either. He keeps saying, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ over and over. As if he’s not. I’ve had it. I’ve had it! I’m starting over.”

 

Sermon Part 1

When God decides to shake up the Etch-a-Sketch and start over with this world, the vehicle for preserving life is not a boat, it’s a box. I know it’s always portrayed as a boat in the picture books, usually a very lovely wooden boat with a bow and a stern, a port and a starboard, lots of windows, maybe with oars and maybe with sails, with all the happy-looking people and animals hanging out on the deck. But in the actual text, the life support system that God instructs Noah to build is just a big, multi-story box. There are careful instructions for the shape and dimensions of the box, so many cubits high and wide, the edges sealed with pitch. And it is to have only one window.

 

This window has been a mystery over the years because the Hebrew word tsohar that’s usually translated as “window” in this story doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Bible. So you can’t really know what it means. Some rabbis have said that Noah is told to put in a skylight; others say it’s a radiant gem that glows with its own inner light. Maybe even Noah doesn’t know what a tsohar is. But in order to save himself, his family, and all of life on earth, Noah (who is 600 years old, by the way), is told to build a box with one mysterious light source, get everyone to climb in, with no ability to guide it, and surrender to whatever happens. And he does it. They all do it. And once everyone’s inside the ark, the text says, “God closed it for him.”

 

It’s a really scary image. Especially as the flood waters start pouring in. To be a human in that ark, in that box, would have been to be drowned in helplessness. And maybe that was the point. Maybe that was the spiritual education that humanity had to undergo. Because when you think about God’s profound disappointment in humanity – it was because of our abuse of the gift of human agency.

 

From an initial state of harmony with the natural world where we were given everything we needed, the first humans took more. Our sense of entitlement to take and take with no limits alienated us from the land. We were exiled from the garden and then it says that the land became hostile and “sprouted thorns and thistles” at us. And in the story things just got worse from there. With the new pressures of scarcity, jealousy and greed cropped up. Brothers fought. Cain murdered Abel and then refused to take responsibility for it. The earth itself protested and cried from the ground.

 

We now have a picture of humans at war with the earth and one another. We are obsessed with controlling our environment – taking beyond our limits – the grabbing and the claiming of the fruits of every tree as ours for the taking.

A Culture of Forgiveness

Ana Levy-Lyons

October 6, 2019

First Unitarian, Brooklyn

 

Today is right smack in the middle of the Jewish High Holidays – between Rosh Hashanah, the celebration of the creation of the world, and Yom Kippur, the celebration of our capacity to mend and heal and turn and return to ourselves. This returning is called in Hebrew “teshuvah.” So Rosh Hashanah comes first on the calendar, but there’s a weird and fascinating teaching in Jewish tradition that teshuvah was created before the world was created. It’s a kind of trippy concept if you think about it. Before there was a world at all, before there were marriages that fell apart, before there was over-parenting or under-parenting, before there was racism, before there was a climate to change, there was the ability to repair what is broken. Before there was anywhere to return to, there was the capacity to return.

 

I told this concept to someone the other day and they said, “Ok, that’s going to make my head explode.” So here’s how one rabbi explained it: “God thought of creating a world but every time she thought a world into creation God would destroy that world until she created teshuvah. It was teshuvah—the possibility that not being perfect does not inexorably lead to not being—that allowed the world to exist. Teshuvah is the guarantor that being human, being fallible, is not fatal.” Of course some mistakes are fatal, but most are not and so when we make a mistake, do something wrong, repeat a destructive pattern, the urgent questions become – Can we change? Can we deal with our issues, reset, and do better next time? And can we be forgiven?

 

When you go searching the internet for stories of forgiveness, as one does when one is preparing to preach a sermon like this one, all you can find is the extreme games of forgiveness. The dramatic stories like the families of the people killed in the Charleston church shooting forgiving Dylan Roof; Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor forgiving the Nazis who imprisoned her; Brandt Jean forgiving former police officer Amber Guyger for accidentally shooting his brother in his own home. These kinds of stories are awe-inspiring and sometimes troubling and hard to fathom. But most of the dramas of our daily lives, thank God, are not this horrific. The acts of wrongdoing and sometimes apology and forgiveness happen in small ways throughout the day, throughout the year, just a drip, drip, drip of moments that together form the fabric of our communities – our families, our schools, our workplaces, our congregation.

 

We ordinary humans who are not murderers make mistakes all the time. These are the kinds of mistakes we listed in that forgiveness prayer earlier -- condemning in our children the faults we tolerate in ourselves; condemning in our parents the faults we tolerate in ourselves; deceiving ourselves and others with half-truths; pretending to emotions we do not feel. And it’s bigger things too – pursuing fleeting pleasure at the cost of lasting hurt; using violence to maintain our power, withholding love and support. Wrongdoing is inevitable. But teshuvah and forgiveness are not inevitable. They are choices we make. Sometimes we apologize and sometimes we don’t; sometimes we forgive and sometimes we don’t. But when we do forgive, it makes a difference, not just to ourselves, and not just to the person we’ve forgiven, but to the feeling in the room; the tone of the city where we live. It affects the air that we all breathe. They say forgiveness does not change the past, but it does change the future.

 

There is nothing more paralyzing than the fear that making a mistake will be fatal. That somehow if we choose wrong, act wrong, say something stupid, or fail to do what we said we would do, we will be unable to recover. We will be permanently diminished. People will forever think less of us. Or opportunities will slip through our fingers. Or someone we love will have a worse life forever.