Messy Families (Part 2): Noah & Sons

There are a couple of professors at the University of Chicago at the Booth School of Business there that did a long-term research project, and they recently shared their findings.

And their research project was to predict people's race, people's economic well-being, and people's political views based on the products that they bied or that they bought, not bied, that they bought, and on the different things that they watched.

And here's what they found.

This is probably a government grant at its highest.

Here's what they found.

That if you're white, in other words, you're you're somebody who is ethnically white, that one of the predictors, or the predictors are that you watched Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, American Pickers, the Big Bang Theory, or the Kentucky Derby.

And if you're non-white, maybe you didn't watch any of those.

That if you're white, you bought or have eaten Thomas English muffins, sweet baby rays barbecue sauce, or stovetop stuffing, and that you own a pet or a flashlight.

Then their conclusion when it came to income was that in 1992, again, this is a long-term study, that one of the great predictors that you were a high-income individual is that you had grey coupon mustard in your refrigerator.

And in 2016, their predictor, now get this, this is research.

If you're a high-worth individual or high of high income, you own an Apple iPhone.

Like, thank you, thank you.

Now, here's what they had for conservative liberal.

Conservatives were more likely to eat at Arby's, Apple Bees eat gif peanut butter, while liberals were less likely to own fishing gear, were more likely to watch Will and Grace either in the 90s or the more recent version, or to drink alcohol.

Now, here's why I share that.

You may say, what does that have to do with anything?

Not a whole lot, other than I thought it was interesting, and this.

And that is, I don't need a government grant or research to make this next statement, and that is if you have a family, there's a chance that you have something messy in your backstory.

That there's an event, maybe a relationship, maybe some kind of story that's there that you wish did not exist, and you as a family rarely talk about, and when you do, you kind of obscure what took place.

And that may be things that are pretty big.

Maybe there was a divorce, maybe there was an addiction, maybe there was a relational breakdown, maybe there was something that somebody did to somebody in the family that they didn't participate in, but but it happened, and and now it's just we wish that didn't exist, and we try to keep that from being told.

And here's what all of those things have in common there's an event that took place, and then there's a response or a reaction to the event.

And what we're going to do today is we're going to look at Genesis 9.

What we're doing in this series, Messy Families, is we're looking at messy families in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible with the first family units and seeing the mess.

And we're going to see that in the story you heard read, Noah and his sons, that there's an event and then there's a response.

And you may have thought when you heard that read, like, where is this going?

I mean, this is a story about Noah getting drunk, getting naked, his son looking at him, and then them coming in backwards with this cloth covering it.

Like, what possible benefit does this have to me today?

Well, every story has an event and it has a response, and it may be big, it may be small.

On July 4th and the day before on the 3rd, I resurfaced my deck.

I built a new deck probably six, seven years ago, and I bought wood because I was cheap instead of the composite board, and partly just the budget didn't allow at the time.

And now every time I go to resurface, I think I should have bought composite board.

But I was resurfacing the deck, and it was really hot on July 3rd and 4th, if you were here in Pittsburgh, like like brutal hot.

And so I was working on the deck, uh kind of took off around noon, I think, or so on the third, went home, worked till dark, got up and thought I can get this done by 10, 11 o'clock in the morning, have the rest of July 4th to hang out with my family.

It gets to be two or three in the afternoon, and I'm still not done.

Like it was one of those.

And then my wife comes out, and she decides that it's a good time to give me some tips and pointers on how I could do the deck better.

Now, she was at an earlier service today, she came up to me afterward and said, make sure you tell everyone why I came out in the first place.

It was to bring you a drink.

So she wanted that to be known.

So we have an event.

I'm working, I'm dripping wet, and my wife comes out and gives me pointers.

Now, now I would love to tell you that my response was, thank you, wise spouse of mine, for the suggestions on how to improve the quality of our outdoor living space.

My response was something more along the lines of you can get a paintbrush anytime you want and come help with this.

Now that is small, I mean that's not the kind of events that I'm talking about, but but my point is this everything has an event and then it has a response.

And how we respond to the events that happen in our family matter.

Good responses yield something, bad responses yield something.

And so, what we're going to do is look at the story of Noah and his sons with the event and then the response.

So, first the event.

What happened?

Now, when you first read this, you would say, well, what happened was Noah got out of the ark, he planted a vineyard, he grew grapes, he made wine, he drank wine, he got drunk, he laid down uncovered, his sons saw him, bragged about it, and then the other sons went in backwards, and then Noah goes all ballistic and curses his descendants for all time.

Like, like that's what happened.

Now, you can read the story that way.

I think that's a that's a fair reading.

But there are a lot of scholars who read this story, and when they read it, they say there's something else going on here.

In fact, there's a very short summation of this in the Faith Life Study Bible notes, which I think there's a free version online.

And what they argue is that this event was really not the way that the original readers would have read it.

They would have read it and seen uncovering the nakedness or the uncoveredness as a euphemism for having sexual relations.

And so what they would have said was that what happened was Noah got drunk, and when it says that he was uncovered before Ham, his son, that Ham either went in and did something that you kind of think shouldn't be done with uh with his dad, or what they would say is that he may have done it with Noah's wife, his mom.

And here's kind of how they argue this, and you may say, okay, where is this going?

Do we need this?

And I'm just giving you a little background here, and ultimately I think you can interpret this either way, and where we'll get is it won't matter.

But the English Standard Version of Leviticus 18 7 says, You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother.

And again, this the study Bible makes a case that if you follow this train of thought through the Old Testament, you will see that this may have been why Noah had such a reaction.

And Ham going out and basically telling his brothers was saying, Look, I'm I'm usurping you guys, I'm I'm in charge now because of what I just did.

Either way, this is an ugly story.

And this is one of those stories that you look at and you say, What in the world?

Why is this in the Bible?

And let me just as an aside say this, and that is this kind of story that's in the Bible, this story, this is part of the reason why I believe the Bible is true.

Because if you and I were to write our family histories, we would airbrush this kind of thing a little bit.

We wouldn't just put it here like this.

We we would say, well, you know, there was something that happened back there with Uncle Noah.

He got a little tipsy one night, but but but we wouldn't go into this kind of detail.

And the Bible doesn't airbrush its heroes.

I mean, Noah is one of these people that you go, Noah, the Ark, the rainbow, Noah, and then what does it do?

After all of this, it says, and then he got drunk one night, and stuff happened.

In other words, the Bible records stuff.

That's pretty real.

But more than that, I think we see this in this event, and that is that a good beginning does not equal a good ending.

In other words, just because we start well doesn't mean that we end well.

What the Bible says about Noah in Genesis 6 is that he was righteous.

Now, we could say that God is declaring him righteous rather than his acts, but it appears that when the world was wicked and God decided to judge the world through the flood, that he basically said, Here's somebody who's righteous, somebody I'm going to save.

And what he did is then he let Noah go on the ark with his family, with two of every kind of animal.

In other words, he had a great beginning, and yet his ending was not so great.

Now, again, this just reminds us of something that being righteous early in life doesn't mean that we'll continue to be, but I think it's a warning against entitlement, a warning against ever getting to a point where we feel we're above certain standards, where we start to say, I've got it figured out, I know how I'm going to live.

What we need to understand is that simply having planted a garden does not mean that we've maintained it.

That somebody who loves music and performs well at a young age, if they don't keep up the discipline of their skills, may not continue to have the skill set later.

And so it's important for us as we look at this story, just simply to say there's this event, but starting well does not mean that we end well.

Now I'd be remiss here if I didn't at least mention the role that alcohol seems to have played in this.

Noah gets drunk.

And when you read through your Bible, if you read through your Bible, what you'll see is that the Bible does not condemn or name drinking as a sin, but it does name drunkenness as a sin, but even more than that, it names it as being foolish.

Here's what we read in Isaiah chapter 5, verse 22, it says, Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine and champions at mixing drinks.

Isaiah 5:22

In other words, woe to you, and Isaiah 5 gives a bunch of woes for different things.

It says, Woe to you if you make sport of drinking.

In other words, it's saying it's not wise.

And then Proverbs chapter 20 also gives us some wisdom around this.

Proverbs 20 · chapter mention

And what Proverbs 20, verse 1 says is wine is a mocker and beer a brawler.

Proverbs 20:1

Whoever is led astray by them is not wise.

See, what happens sometimes when we drink too much is that we can lose our capacity for good decision making.

And we can end up in a place we don't want to go.

Or maybe we don't lose our capacity for good decision making, but what happens is as we drink, we avoid other issues because drinking becomes an escape.

And what we see in this story is that the role alcohol played in somebody's negative events in their lives.

There was a correlation, and sometimes we can just rush right past that.

And what I just simply want to say to those of us who are gathered here today is don't rush past that.

Don't assume that you're always above it.

And here's how you know you might have an issue with drinking or a substance.

And that is if somebody close to you in your life has said you have a drinking problem.

Because people don't just all of a sudden say, I think I'm gonna give this person a hard time about drinking.

What happens is your dad, your mom, your brother, your sister, your husband, your wife, your children come to you and say, you know what?

I think you're relying too much on this, and it has become negative in your life.

That's a time not to say, I think I have this down and I'm okay, but to realize that alcohol can have a negative impact in your life.

It can lead you to bad decisions, it can lead you to not deal with the reality of where you are.

But there's something even more here in this event, and that is we need to see that sometimes seemingly small sins can have big consequences.

And I say this because drinking a little too much, sleeping, sleeping uncovered, whatever you want to say, doesn't seem like a lot.

And whether you see something more nefarious here or you say it's as simple and straightforward as what it appears to be, what we see when we read this is that is that something as simple as drinking a little too much led to family dysfunction.

And here's why I say this if you read through the curse that Abraham gives to Canaan, the son of Ham, what you see is that then these families split, and Noah does not die a happy, contented man, with all of his kids and grandkids around him on the Christmas card.

What happens instead is Noah appears to really be disconnected from his own kids.

In other words, a seemingly small act had significant consequences.

And here's what happens for many of us, and I'm included in this, is we start to think that sin isn't that big a deal.

In fact, I would guess if if some of you are saying, look, I don't do church, and one of the reasons I don't do a lot of church is I don't like talk of sin.

I don't like anybody telling me what I should or shouldn't do, and so I don't like this whole idea.

But but here's the issue.

What we do is we tend then to say, this God figure, this divine figure, has given us a bunch of random rules to follow.

Instead of seeing him as the creator, the good God of the universe, the good father who's given us some instructions for how our life will work best, and saying, here is some direction for you.

And because we don't have an immediate consequence, sometimes we start to think there isn't a consequence.

Let me put it like this: if you are driving late one night and you come to a stoplight, and it's like late at night, two, three in the morning, and you come up to that light and you sit there, and you sit there, and you sit there, and you look around, and there's nobody coming, and you think, this is ridiculous.

I nothing's going to happen, I'm going to go.

Now, I know there are different kinds of people here.

There are those who think that's horrible.

I would never do that.

There are those of you who have done that and would never tell anybody you've done that, and then there are those who would do that.

I'm not going to tell you which one I am, but let's just assume, for the sake of this, that you go through the light.

Now, now what happens?

Probably nothing.

You don't get hit, there's no police officer, you don't get pulled over, and you think, you know what, this is this is not a big deal.

So the next time you come up to a light, what do you do?

You think, especially in the middle of the night, maybe it's not a big deal again if I go through this.

Maybe you have an experience where you accidentally run a stop sign and nothing happens, and you start to think, you know what, there's no problem here.

But here's the problem, and here's why you ultimately obey lights, at least in the middle of the day, is you say, I know that these lights are actually here for my good, not just to be an inconvenience.

And therefore, if I if I run them, I'm actually putting myself at peril.

But when nothing happens immediately, sometimes we can get to thinking, it's not a big deal.

But what we see in this story is that seemingly small steps away from God can have big consequences.

So that's the event.

Now let's think about the response.

What you get is you get Noah coming out and saying, Cursed are you, Canaan, the son of Ham, who did this.

Now, some would say this is an argument for the more nefarious kind of reading of this text, because what he's doing is he's saying, You maybe the offspring of my wife and Ham, I'm going to make sure that you're cursed, or he's doing something something grander here.

I don't believe that there's anything to this curse.

And here's what I mean by this.

Some people will read this text and they'll say, This is where you get different people groups, and where you get a justification for one people group being superior to others.

That doesn't seem to me to be in play here.

In fact, if you read this text and then read through the rest of Genesis and the rest of the Old Testament, what you'll see is that Noah was just acting as a bitter man at this point.

He was not acting on God's behalf.

And so this curse, I don't believe, is from God.

I believe it's Noah simply expressing a curse and saying, This is how I see things.

And here's part of why I say this, and that is that there's a woman named Rahab who comes on the scene several generations later, who's a Canaanite.

In other words, a descendant of Canaan, the one who's cursed.

She's a prostitute, and she helps the spies when the children of Israel are trying to make their way into the promised land.

And she shows up in the lineage of Jesus Christ.

In other words, what God does is he takes even from something as messy and messed up as this seems to be, and he says, and I'm gonna bless somebody from the middle of this.

If this had been the curse of God, I don't think that he would have brought that beauty back into it.

And so here's what I think is important for you and me, and that is what do we do in a messy situation?

Well, the first thing I think we need to do is we need to go to Jesus, go to the cross.

That's where the story ultimately goes through Rahab.

And here's why this is important, because what what you and I can tend to do when we have a messy story, either one that we created or one that was created for us.

Either way, what we can tend to do is we can tend to say, okay, I have to live in the midst of this, but going to Jesus, going to the cross, what that does is one of two things, depending on where we're coming from.

If it was our mistake, our doing that brought it about, is it tells us that God, through Jesus Christ, forgives and loves, even where we've blown it.

And if it was somebody else's thing, what it does is it reminds us that we all exist by grace and we're not better than other people.

Now I realize if you have been through something horrific, that you may hear that and say, wait, are you saying that that person and I are just the same?

No, that's not what I'm saying.

But what I'm saying is, before God we all need grace.

And so even if you've been mistreated horribly at some point, going to the cross allows you to not have to live with persistent bitterness.

And once we've gone to the cross, then what we can do is we can deal with it directly.

What you saw with Noah here is what he does is instead of dealing with Ham, is he curses Canaan and he almost bypasses it.

And what happens so often to many of us when we go through something negative, when we have a story, is we either try to take revenge on somebody or we internalize instead of dealing with it directly.

But once we've gone to the cross, what happens is we're able then to come and deal with it directly.

And then what we need to do, I believe, is we need to be willing to acknowledge it publicly.

Now, listen to me for a moment.

If you have in your family backstory something that you wish hadn't happened and your family tries to keep private, secret.

What happens is secrets that are kept become family shame.

And what happens is then they become a part of your story where you say, if you really knew, if you really understood that piece of my backstory, if you knew how I contributed to the divorce, if you knew how I contributed to the bankruptcy, if you knew what was done to me, then you wouldn't like me.

And it becomes part of our shame.

And when I say we need to be willing to acknowledge it publicly, I don't mean that we wear a t-shirt that says, hey, here's what happened to me.

What I mean is that is that we come to a point where we say, when it's appropriate and with who it's appropriate, I'm willing to talk about it because there's something in talking about it that actually releases the shame.

And if we've gone to the cross, the reason we can talk about it publicly, and again, I mean with the appropriate people, the reason we can do that is we can say, it doesn't matter to me what you think about me, because I know what God has declared over me through Jesus Christ.

And this is why, as a Christian, as a person of faith, if you're a person of faith, you actually don't just have a promise of eternity, but what God does is He actually gives you the ability to walk into any situation from any place that you've had shame and say, you know what?

You can think what you want about me, but I know what God has declared.

And that's where you and I will find freedom and the ability to actually be vulnerable about what has not been right in our lives.

You see, the problem for many of us is what we do with our family stories, with our own morality, with our own sinful choices, is we treat them like we treat selfies.

Now, some of you may not take selfies, but probably most of you do.

And at some point you post them.

And what do you do when you take a selfie?

My wife and I went to the beach recently for a couple of days, and we saw a lot of people doing the selfies, and then we took a couple.

And what you do is you take a selfie, and then you go, let me see that.

And you look at it, you go, no, no, no, let's take.

Another one, and you keep taking them until you get just the right selfie, where you know the chin's tucked up just right, and the gut's sucked in enough, and and the background's nice and everything.

My wife and I had a picture taken recently, and there was a kid climbing like on a pole behind us, and it was a great picture of us, except for this kid, so we airbrushed him out.

Um now now here's why I say that sometimes we treat our own stuff like selfies.

What we do is we say, let me present, like I do on social media, the best possible version of myself.

Now that's fine on social media, although we all know that you look like the first six pictures you took.

But when we do that with our lives, it leads to an obscuring of reality and a non-celebration of the grace that God has given.

So, what do we do with this?

Well, very simply, let me just put it this way.

It's important that we don't make small compromises that may lead to future events that are negative.

See, for Noah, it was small compromises.

And when I say may lead to future events, we don't always know the exact correlation.

Sometimes we can compromise and there may not be a lot of negativity.

Sometimes we will not compromise, and something negative may come in, but what we do know is that when we compromise, we increase our chances of negative events.

And it's important that what we do in our lives is that we continue to say, I am going to understand that God is a loving Father who's given me a perception and a way to go that is for me, not against me.

I mentioned the stoplight thing where we can get to thinking that going through a light is no big deal.

See, what we do with sin sometimes is we think of it being like just eating another piece of pie on the 4th of July, where it's like, I probably shouldn't do that, but you know what, I'll wake up tomorrow and it won't be that big of a deal.

Instead of seeing sin like a shot of cocaine, that may lead us to a lifetime of addiction and difficulty.

And it's those little small compromises that set us on that track, and if we're not careful, we can end up there.

But but even beyond that, what we need to do is we need to be able to look at our lives and when we have negative situations, say, I'm going to respond with grace and vulnerability, grace, because I know that it was God who has, through Jesus Christ, made a way for me, and it is God's grace that means even when something's happened to me, that I am able to say, God's at work and I can be vulnerable about it.

One of my sadnesses in our day and age is that the church, I don't mean this church, I mean the broad church, is seen by most people who aren't part of church as being the last place they would ever want to go and be open or vulnerable.

Because the perception is if I go to church and I tell about what's real, I'll be judged.

I'll be told I need to be better.

And I don't believe that that's how the church was meant to function.

And sometimes church contributes to that because one of the easiest ways to build a big crowd in a church is to be distinct from other churches, to say, we're the church that has it figured out.

And the way the churches do that is they say, we're the spirit-filled church, and all the other churches aren't spirit-filled.

So if you're really spirit-filled, you'll be here and we're better than, or we're the intellectual church.

We have all our doctrine right.

Everybody else has their doctrine wrong, and we're the right ones, so think like us, then you'll be in the right group, or we're the church that cares about missions or social justice, or we're the church that cares about evangelism, or we're the church that fill in your blank, and all of a sudden you start to say, that's what makes me feel good, but here's what I think ultimately the church should be built upon.

And that is our brokenness and our neediness.

Now I realize that that won't always build as big a crowd.

You know, come here, join the sinners, the broken.

In some ways it feels better to say, oh no, I'm I'm the doctrinally pure, I'm the I'm the socially concerned, I'm this.

But when we really understand the message of the Bible, the messiness of it, what we'll do is we'll start to say, this is a place where we can come and vulnerably be real, where it's okay not to be okay, where being who I am is accepted because none of us has it all together.

And in that, we'll begin to celebrate and savor the God who loves to reverse the mess.

God reversed this in some ways with Rahab and into Jesus.

And I know if you've been through something where you say, My situation was really, really hard.

I'm not saying by any stretch of the imagination that you or I would choose to go through it, but one of the things we often see is that God takes what we consider to be the darkest, most difficult things, and he brings new beauty out of it.

Sometimes when we're going through a divorce, we say, How could this possibly turn out to be good?

And I'm not saying anyone would want to go through it, but sometimes it's the brokenness, it's the lessons of the first divorce, maybe even the second or third divorce, that lead us to the fourth marriage where we're actually able to love and be loved well.

Sometimes it's it's the decisions that we make in the context of our business that caused us to lose a ton of money that allowed us to find success in another time or to be generous and not make money our God.

Sometimes it's in our pain that we actually turn to God instead of living with an air of self-sufficiency.

And when we celebrate God's grace, even in the midst of our mess, what we do is we say, God, I wouldn't choose to go through this, I don't like this, but I believe that somehow you'll take this and you'll weave a tapestry that brings something good from what to me has been nothing but negative.

You know, I don't know what your story is.

What's in your backstory that you say, I wish this weren't true, or I don't want anybody to know about this.

But I'm guessing almost all of us have something.

Maybe you're here and you're saying, I don't have anything, and if everyone would just do what I did, then everyone's life would be okay.

But even that misses what this story points us to, and that is in our brokenness, God meets us.

And God brings good from the things that aren't good.

Whether we're the perpetrator or somebody else is.

Maybe you don't see yourself as somebody who's made a mistake, or maybe you know all too well about it.

But the clear and compelling teaching throughout the pages of the Bible is that through our mistakes, there's a savior, a substitute, one who makes it so that we can be right with God, not just for eternity, although it is that, but also to navigate this life without shame.

And you can experience that today by simply saying, God, I know that that I've made some messes, and that Jesus is the one who died on behalf of me.

And I want to trust him to be my substitute, my savior today.

Father, I thank you just for your word, and Lord, I know that as we're gathered here, that there are situations that I'm sure are spoken, unspoken among many of us.

And God, I pray that we would have the courage and the confidence because of your grace to bring our messy situations to the light and thus be freed from the shame and the secrecy of it.

But we could live in a community that says it's not it's okay to not be okay because we know the one who has made all things right.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks for being here.

Have a great weekend.