Full Frontal Nudity and Ethnic Cleansing

Back in the days when I was a camp counselor at a church related summer camp, we used to sing an impressively annoying song about Noah and the ark. The song had many more verses than seemed reasonable. After proceding for much too long, it came crashing to an end with God sending out the sun to dry up the landy landy and everything being fine and dandy dandy.

I would never have wished for more verses, but I have come to believe that by ending the story at the first sign of a rainbow, we miss the whole point.

I was an adult before I learned what happened after the flood waters receded and the rainbow faded from the sky: Noah, weary of all the death and destruction, weary of living with his family at close quarters, weary of cleaning up after pairs of every animal imaginable, made a plan. He couldn't just wander down to the corner liquor store. It took him months, yea verily even years, but he had a plan.

He planted a vineyard...nurtured the grapevines...tended them....pruned them....harvested the grapes....fermented them....and after long anticipation, he tied one on. Saint Noah, the most righteous man on the planet, the only one worth saving, got stinking drunk.

Then, soused on his homemade wine, he took off his clothes and lay naked in his tent.

Biblical scholars don't make too terribly much of this. They focus on the reactions of Noah's sons and his subsequent blessings and curses. Commentaries blather on about the beginnings of conflicts between nations. Americans spent an embarrassing few decades using this story to defend the institution of slavery, since there is a handy piece about slavery in the curse on Noah's son who snickered when he found dad naked.

I think they've all missed (or at least underplayed) the point...and it is a really humongous point....the most important lesson we can glean from the flood story.

Think about it. God, in the story, finds people too evil and violent to keep around, so God washes all the bad people away and keeps the good ones. When the flood waters recede and the ark lands, God sets the rainbow in the sky...WHY? As a reminder to God to NOT try this again. WHY? BECAUSE IT DIDN'T WORK.

When Noah and his family, the righteous ones, get off the ark, God makes this observation on the new and improved human race: "the inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood." God promises never again to wash away the bad people from the planet BECAUSE WE ARE ALL BAD PEOPLE.

Don't get me wrong...I know lots of swell folks. I'm pretty cool, myself.

But if you take the very best of us, wash away the rest, you still end up right back where you started.

In the story of Adam and Eve, the point where they realize their brokenness is described in the following way: "Their eyes were opened, and they realized that they were naked."

Noah, the chosen one, is right back at the exit ramp from the garden of Eden. Naked.

What would it mean for us to really understand the Noah story? To once and for all realize that you can't sort the good people from the bad, that you can't solve the problems of the world by getting rid of "THOSE PEOPLE."

Instead, the battles between US and THEM continue all over the globe. Good guys and bad guys. Insiders and outsiders. If only we could just wash those other people away, all would be well with the world.

And we would wake up the next morning and find ourselves NAKED.