Noah...the movie

It had seemed that the days of the great Biblical epic movies – films such as The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Story Ever Told - were long over.  But there I was in the movie theater, waiting for the show to begin, when Noah’s Ark appeared on screen, surrounded by Oscar winners Russell Crowe, Anthony Hopkins, and Jennifer Connolly, plus Emma Watson (remember Hermione from the Harry Potter films?). Noah will be released later this month, but it is already provoking discussion and controversy. Personally, I think it is crazy to review a movie without first seeing it. But with the Noah story coming to theaters and on people’s minds, this is a good time for some preparation.

First – let’s be clear that this movie is, and I quote, “inspired by the Biblical story.” So it isn’t necessarily trying to be faithful to the text of Genesis or to any particular Jewish or Christian theology. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, a challenging and dark director who last made Black Swan, this movie is likely to take artistic liberties with the story and have its own message. In fact, the New Yorker quotes Aronofsky’s description of Noah as “the most unbiblical Biblical epic.” And I’m fine with that.

I value the Bible. It is central to the faith that I live and share. It is sacred. But I do not believe that it requires rigid defense. It’s strong enough to take care of itself, and people will still be reading it long after any movie is forgotten. I would much rather err on the side of having too much creative play with Biblical stories than being so rigid that we can barely re-tell them except in the most stilted, cautious way.

As long as we understand that the movie is not the same as the Bible, I think that the movie actually gives us an opportunity to hear a familiar story with fresh ears, even if we decide that we don’t like the movie or that it distorts the message of scripture. It’s a chance to remember what the story of Noah and the flood in Genesis is telling us.

The story of Noah and the flood is one of those Biblical stories that surprises us for exactly the opposite reason that it surprised the people who first heard it. We are used to thinking about God as caring and protective, and so it surprises us to think that God would cause a flood to deal with the presence of evil and violence among humankind. That doesn’t sound like the God we know. But in ancient Israel, the story of God causing a flood was absolutely normal and unsurprising. There are old Sumerian and Akkadian texts which tell of the Gods who cause the world to flood, and one person who builds an ark to save the animals and start anew. In the Akkadian version, the Gods are upset by all the noise and clamor that humans make, and there’s no telling when they’ll do it again. When people first heard the story of Noah, the idea of a God who causes a flood to destroy nearly all people is not surprising.

What would have been surprising at the time is the promise by God never to flood the world again. When the ark comes to rest on land, when Noah and his family and the animals step out onto the world again, God puts a rainbow in the sky like a hunter hanging up a bow. The rainbow is a reminder of the promise God makes. One may even think of the Noah story as a theological contradiction of those other stories. It is a way of saying that the God worshipped by the Hebrews, the One God, is not like Gods you have heard about before. The story of Noah is one of the reasons that we now take for granted the picture of God as one who loves and protects us.

Ash Wednesday and 'I'm Done With Snails'

A girl in the third grade begins a poem:

When my third snail died, I said,
'I'm through with snails.'

She was writing poetry because her class had been visited by the poet Kathleen Norris, who had moved to her grandparents home in South Dakota to write, to rediscover the Christian faith in small Protestant churches and a Benedictine monastery, and to help school children in those small Dakota towns to discover the arts.

Norris reflects on the way that death surrounds this girl who is writing the poem in class:

"She sits up to let me pass down the aisle, the visiting poet working with the third grade: in this dying school, this dying town, we are writing about our lives."  (Dakota, page 189)

This week, Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent. Ash Wednesday we invite each other to look ahead to where Lent always leads. The cross. We make the sign of the cross on our foreheads, of all places, and we hear the words "from dust you were made, and to dust you will return." It is a reminder that we share in death that Jesus faced, or that Jesus shares in the death we all face.

Ash Wednesday is a powerful experience in our 2014 American culture, in which our tendency is to do everything we can to keep from thinking about death until the very last possible moment. And why not? Isn't it painful to be reminded of our mortality? Is it any wonder that the Ash Wednesday worship service draws so few of our regular worshipers in the Protestant tradition?

And yet, I find the reminder of our mortality, within the ritual safety and assurance of worship, to be just the opposite of grim. It doesn't make me morbid; it makes me more alive. It is a powerful reminder of the incredible gift that life is, and inspires me to re-focus, to re-connect with God, to repent of anything that keeps me apart from the deep life of following the way of Christ. Worship on Ash Wednesday is solemn, but it is not weighted by death.

Kathleen Norris writes "the little girl calls me, holding up her paper for me to read:
When my third snail died, I said,
'I'm through with snails.'
But I didn't mean it.