Readings below: Genesis 9: 18 -10:32,Acts 17:24-28, “On The Pulse Of Morning” by Maya Angelou.

I am not a shopper. I am sooo not a shopper. Strolling through racks laden with clothes is generally not my idea of a good time, under just about any circumstances. I believe that the love of shopping is something you have to be born with, and I definitely did not get that set of genes. Just walking into a mall is enough to give me palpitations. The only way I can survive is by knowing precisely what I have to get and knowing exactly where it is I’m going. And to such a genetically deprived person like me, shopping in a mall can be next to impossible.

Which is why I love those big maps at the entrances to places like Lloyd Center. You know, the lighted mall schematics with the big red dot on it that says “You are here”. Because once I find out where I am, I can locate my destination, navigate the route, make my purchase and get out as quickly as possible. It’s just all about knowing where you are and what’s around you.

Today’s reading from Genesis, while sounding like a selection from an Amorite telephone book, is essentially a mall map from the time of King Solomon. 3,000 ago, someone created what biblical scholars and archeologists now refer to as the Table of Nations. It’s a fascinating catalog of geo-political entities of the world back then: Countries, cities, tribes and even a few individuals are listed. Robert Alter calls this section of Genesis “a serious attempt, unprecedented in the ancient Near East, to sketch a panorama of all known human cultures.” 1 With a map like this, the Israelites could find the red “You are here” dot and locate themselves both geographically and politically. And they could categorize everyone else, “according to their clans and tongues, in their lands and their nations”. It was a handy device to be sure, but as we will see in a minute, the story of Noah’s progeny functioned as much more than a mall map of the ancient Near East.

For the past month or so we have been working our way through the pre-history stories of Genesis, tales of creation drawn from the oral tradition of the ancient Israelites and written down first by a writer from sometime during the reign of King David or his son Solomon, about a thousand years before the birth of Christ. Those texts were combined with another version penned by priestly scholars who were held in exile by the Babylonian conquerors of Israel about 600 BCE. As we’ve seen, those writings were significantly influenced by the creation stories of Babylon and were crafted to give a theological explanation for their political situation. The people needed to know why things were the way they were, and how God was working in and through — and despite — the political reality of exile. And that’s the lens I have chosen to use in this summer’s exploration of these scriptures: Why was each story written and how does that ‘why’ affect us today?

So why was this story written? Well, most obviously, this reading from Genesis serves to wrap up the story of Noah. Last week we experienced the Flood that wiped out practically the whole world and we saw the rainbow that God placed in the sky as a promise of an everlasting covenant with us, even though God knew that humankind would always be a source of divine disappointment and frustration.

So today we learn that Noah became a tiller of the soil, like his ancestor Adam was supposed to have been, and he grew the first biblical vineyard, the fruit of which led to the drama in the scripture today. In a matter-of-fact way, without any moralizing, we are told that Noah got drunk & passed out in his tent. His son Ham saw him there and reported the news to his brothers.

Honestly, we have no idea what this story is really about. Scholars surmise that it’s one of those tales that was really well-known to the people of Solomon's time. They knew what it was about, so the author got to skip the details and save some parchment. There are a lot of theories about this story, but we really don’t know! I’m taking the position that Ham simply walked in to his father’s tent that day & found Noah lying there in his birthday suit. And rather than just doing the right thing by covering his father up and never mentioning the incident to anyone, he leaves his father as he found him and goes off to laugh about it with his brothers. His older brothers were more mature, and not so amused by the situation. They did the right thing and protected their father’s dignity. When Noah woke up and put two & two together, he was more than a little upset with his son Ham.

Now that could have been the end to the whole account, but here is where we find another reason for the story and its inclusion in the Bible: The curse that Noah places on his son – well actually on his grandson – is not just an indictment of Ham’s poor judgment, this text is the first overt introduction of politics into the scriptures! And it has echoed throughout the world for 3,000 years. Did you catch it? Has anyone ever heard it used? Noah says,

“Cursed be Canaan, the lowliest slave shall he be to his brothers. Blessed be Our God, the God of Shem; unto them shall Canaan be slave.

May God expand Japheth's territories; may God dwell in the tents of Shem, unto them shall Canaan be slave.”

And suddenly, this whole story begins to make sense, especially when connected with the lineage piece that follows.

This Genesis story, while almost sounding like a real family with all the usual dysfunctional-family dynamics, is revealed to be as archetypal as Adam & Eve or Cain & Abel. Noah’s three sons, Shem, Japheth and Ham, are here to represent the three major political groups of the ancient biblical world. You can see how it works by looking at their offspring, once you decipher the Hebrew names.

I’m not going to go into all of it, but in a nutshell, big brother Japheth embodies all the people to the west and north of Israel. The place called Javan, for example, refers to Greece and Tubal to Turkey.

Shem is the father of the Shemites, the Semitic peoples, the folks who inhabited the land to the east: modern day Iraq, Iran & eastern Saudi Arabia. Down his list you can see the word “Eber” – that’s the root of the word ‘Hebrew’, and eventually (as we will see in a couple of weeks when we finish with Chapter 11) the family tree leads right to Abraham & Sarah.

But that troublemaker Ham? Well, most of Ham’s descendants inhabited the south: the area we know as Africa. Egypt is a word we recognize, but the list goes on to include several strange names. Cush is the area south of Egypt including Ethiopia; and Put is now known as Libya, the region east of Egypt. And here we find the real surprise of the list: Canaan, which is definitely not in Africa. So why is Canaan there? Because Canaan are the people that occupied the land that the tribe of Israel invaded and settled. And all the names listed as grandsons of Ham are the tribes that the Hebrews had wars and conflicts with.

Isn’t that something? This whole genealogy-of-Noah thing boils down to a theological justification for taking the promised land and destroying the Canaanite culture. Wowza.

Now that would be fascinating enough if it stopped there, but it didn’t. Noah’s curse of Ham was so perfect in justifying the brutalization of Canaan that it was picked up again and again to rationalize the cursing of others. It’s been used by been used by every faith who holds this story dear, Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. The curse of Noah has been used by the rich to brutalize the poor, by Christians to brutalize Jews, by the Europeans to brutalize the Turks and by all three religion’s believers to justify the enslavement of human beings, especially black Africans.

The earliest examples of this come from 6^th century Islamic records that invoke Noah’s curse as a rationalization for taking Ethiopian slaves. By the late 1600’s the curse of Ham was well-established as a divine sanction for slavery in many countries around the world. And of course, Southern slaveholders in the United States leaned heavily on the curse to justify themselves and their economic system that was based – and dependant – on slavery.2

After the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves, this misinterpretation of Noah’s curse did not die. It continued to provide a perverse reasoning for discrimination, brutalization, and even the murder of African-Americans. It blew my mind to find out that during the filibuster on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia had the audacity to read the text of the Noah story into the Congressional Record, noting that “Noah saw fit to discriminate against Ham’s descendants.” And to this day, racists preach “The curse of Ham” on ghastly hate-filled websites.

Of course, there is nothing in this story that says anything about racial superiority, nor for that matter, does any text in the Bible, but when you want to twist the scriptures to suit your purposes, the scriptures themselves can be easily ignored.

But the political motives behind Noah’s curse of Ham and Canaan should not overshadow the really great thing about the rest of today’s text: The Table of Nations shows us that while humankind dwells all over the globe, practicing different customs and speaking different languages and worshipping God in different ways, we are not just connected as a species, we are related as a family.

In his address to the Athenians the apostle Paul notes that, “From one ancestor God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live” with the hope that wherever we were, whatever language we spoke, we “would seek, reach out for and perhaps find the one who is not really far from each of us – the One in whom we live and move and have our being, ‘for we are all God’s children.’”

A lot of time has passed since Paul traveled the world of big brother Japheth, spreading the gospel of Christ, and even more since the days of King Solomon whose kingdom flourished in the world of Shem. Many’s the time that brother has turned against brother. A lot of borders have been drawn, a lot of wars have been fought. And on this 4^th of July weekend, we Americans find ourselves enmeshed in yet another, one that some politicians want to wrap in a cloak of religiosity, a garment that Ham would recognize.

I’m always torn a bit by national holidays. On the one hand, I do love my country – this is a vast and beautiful land and our democratic principles are wonderful, if somewhat imperfect, and unevenly in effect. On the other hand, this day brings out the jingo in many of us, especially in our politicians – as national holidays are wont to do in countries everywhere. Yet I really love the 4^th of July, with all the barbeques, and parades and fireworks and parties. It’s a conundrum I’m sure that many of you experience, too.

So today I’m happy I got to share the poem that I like to read this time of year. While it was written for Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in 1993, I think that Maya Angelou has penned the perfect Independence Day poem: the consummate poem to and about America. And I find it to be a work deeply steeped in the Gospel, the good news of God’s love for us and for humankind around the world.

Dr. Angelou tells us that, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again. Lift up your eyes upon the day breaking for you.

“Give birth again to the dream… Here on the pulse of this new day you may have the grace to look up and out and into your sister's eyes, into your brother's face, your country And say simply Very simply With hope Good morning.”

The texts today are about recognizing ourselves as one people – God’s people. And they’re also about how we stumble and fall, and about how we subjugate and destroy one another

and about God’s deep, abiding hope for us, hope that we may seek peace instead of war, community instead of isolation, and God instead of self.

It’s not easy to make those choices, as we know by all the scars that violence has left on the history of the world, but it is the choice God wants us to make, it’s the choice God has wanted us to make since the beginning of time.

And just because we don’t do it very well, doesn’t mean we don’t have to try to learn how to live with love and compassion in this world.

Which I think is why God gave us the gift of Christ. Most of us need mall maps to find where we are and how to plan our next steps. And most of us need visual aids to really learn stuff. The life that Jesus led and the love that Jesus shared is just the visual aid I need in bringing the idea of God’s love and hope us into real life. Christ taught us that, “Each new hour holds new chances for new beginnings.” He prayed that we would “not be wedded forever to fear, yoked eternally to brutishness.”

On this day, Independence Day Sunday, God is waiting for us to put down our weapons, be they guns or Bible verses, and simply say to our brothers and sisters here and around the world, “You are here: __ , and so am I, and all of us together we are God’s children. Good Morning.”

— — — — — — — — — — — —

[1] Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses; New York: WW Norton & Co., 2004; p. 54

[1] Sources: The Curse of Ham, by David M. Goldenberg, Princeton University Press, 2003
Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery,by Stephan R. Haynes, Oxford University Press, 2002. 
 

Genesis 9: 18 -10:32

And the sons of Noah who came out of the ark were named Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Ham was the father of Canaan. These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth spread out.

Noah – the first tiller of the soil – planted a vineyard. And he drank of the wine and become drunk, and exposed himself within his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father's nakedness and went out and told his brothers. So Shem and Japheth took a garment, put it on their shoul­ders, and walking backwards, covered their father's naked body. Each kept his face averted so that they could not see their father's nakedness.

And Noah awoke from his wine and he knew what his youngest son had done to him. And he said,

"Cursed be Canaan,
the lowliest slave shall he be
to his brothers."
And he said,
"Blessed be Our God,
the God of Shem;
unto them shall Canaan be slave.
May God expand Japheth's territories;
may God dwell in the tents of Shem,
unto them shall Canaan be slave."

After the flood Noah lived 350 years. And all the days of Noah were 950 years. Then he died.

And this is the lineage of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth-whose children were born after the Flood.

The sons of Japheth: Gomer and Magog and Madai and Javan and Tubal and Meshech and Tiras. And the sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz and Riphath and Togar­mah. And the sons of Javan: Elishah and Tarshish, the Kittites and Dodanites. From these the Sea Peoples branched out into their own lands, each with their own language, according to their clans in their nations.

And the sons of Ham: Cush and Egypt and Put and Canaan. The sons of Cush: Seba and Havilah and Sabtah and Raamah, and Sabteca. The descendants of Raamah: Sheba and Dedan.

And Cush begot Nimrod, the first mighty man on earth. Nimrod was a mighty hunter before Our God. Therefore it is said: "Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before Our God." The start of his kingdom was Babylon and Erech and Accad, all of them in the land of Shinar. Asshur came from this land, and he built Nineveh and Rehoboth-Ir and Calah, and Resen, between Nineveh and Calah, which is the great city.

And Egypt begot the Ludites and the Anamites and the Lehabites and the Naph­tuhites and the Pathrusites and the Casluhites and the Caphtorites, from whom the Philistines emerged.

And Canaan begot Sidon, his firstborn, and Heth and the Jebusite and the Amorite and the Girgashite and the Hivite and the Arkite and the Sinite and the Arvadite and the Zemarite and the Hamathite. Eventually the clans of the Canaanite scattered, and their territory extended from Sidon toward Gerar, all the way to Gaza, then toward Sodom and Gomorrah and Admah and Zeboiim, as far as Lasha. These are the sons of Ham, according to their clans and their tongues, in their lands and their nations.

Shem, father of all the sons of Eber and the older brother of Japheth, also had descendants. The sons of Shem: Elam and Asshur and Arpachshad and Lud and Aram. And the sons of Aram: Uz and Hul and Gether and Mash. Arpachs­had begot Shelah, and Shelah begot Eber. And to Eber two sons were born. The name of one was Peleg for in his days the earth was split apart; and his brothers name was Joktan. And Joktan begot Almodad and Sheleph and Hazarmaveth and Jerah and Hado­ram and Uzal and Diklah and Obal and Abimael and Sheba and Ophir and Havilah and Jobab. All these were the sons of Joktan. And their settlements were from Mesha all the way to Sephar in the eastern highlands. These are the sons of Shem, according to their clans and tongues, in their lands and their nations.

These are the clans of the sons of Noah according to their lineage in their nations. And from these the nations branched out on the earth after the Flood.

Acts 17:24-28

The God who made the world and everything in it, the ruler of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, and is not served by human hands, as if in need of anything. No! God is the One who gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.

From one ancestor God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would seek, reach out for and perhaps find the one who is not really far from each one of us – the One in whom we live and move and have our being. As one of your own poets have said, 'For we too are God’s children.'

On The Pulse Of Morning
by Maya Angelou

A Rock, A River, A Tree
hosts to species long since departed,
mark the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
of their sojourn here
on our planet floor,
any broad alarm of their of their hastening doom
is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
back and face your distant destiny,
but seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
the angels, have crouched too long in
the bruising darkness,
have lain too long
face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spelling words
armed for slaughter.
The rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
but do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
a river sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.
each of you a bordered country,
delicate and strangely made proud,
yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
have left collars of waste upon
my shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
if you will study war no more.
Come, clad in peace and I will sing the songs
the Creator gave to me when I
and the tree and stone were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow
and when you yet knew you still knew nothing.
The river sings and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
the singing river and the wise rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,
the African and Native American, the Sioux,
the Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
the Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
the Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
the privileged, the homeless, the teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the tree.
Today, the first and last of every tree
speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the river.
Plant yourself beside me, here beside the river.
Each of you, descendant of some passed on
traveler, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name,
you Pawnee, Apache and Seneca,
you Cherokee Nation, who rested with me,
then forced on bloody feet,
left me to the employment of other seekers —
desperate for gain, starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot...
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru,
bought, sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am the tree planted by the river,
which will not be moved.
I, the rock, I the river, I the tree
I am yours — your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
for this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage,
need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
the day breaking for you.
Give birth again
to the dream.
Women, children, men,
take it into the palms of your hands.
Mold it into the shape of your most
private need. Sculpt it into
the image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts.
Each new hour holds new chances
for new beginnings.
Do not be wedded forever
to fear, yoked eternally
to brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
you may have the courage
to look up and out upon me,
the rock, the river, the tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here on the pulse of this new day
you may have the grace to look up and out
and into your sister's eyes,
into your brother's face, your country
and say simply
very simply
with hope
Good morning.

Delivered January 19, 1993
at the Inauguration of President Clinton