Sons Shameless and Shameful

The years are slipping by; the ark fades into the past. Day by day, they began to give their clean new world a more definite character, shaping and settling it. To this growing human family, Noah was ancestor and elder. In any society, “the continuity of the group was dependent on a constant stream of tradition passing through generations.”¹ But, as one philosopher ably puts it, “tradition requires fathers who are able to hand down and sons who are willing to receive.”² This parent-child bond, a link of transference of tradition between an older and a younger generation, is the basic building block of culture. Noah learned the ways of Enoch who walked before him; he heard the tales of righteous Abel; he knew the old, old stories and the deep, deep wisdom. If any legacy is to be left, it depends on an uninterrupted stream, of which Noah is a living symbol and carrier.

If society is to function in the present, its basic traditions have to be received as something with authority. And that means Noah, as the community elder passing along this tradition, has to be a patriarch – a father who rules. Before giving the terms of his covenant, God laid the groundwork for human government, a necessity if crime is to be punished and justice is to be done (Genesis 9:5-6). Noah automatically assumes that role. As Luther put it, “Noah alone ruled the church, the state, and his household.”³ That's a lot of authority concentrated in Noah's hands. Fatherhood, like all government, is a heavy weight; sons and daughters grapple with the consequences.⁴

And consequences there are. Having planted and tended a vineyard, Father Noah “drank of the wine, and he became drunk” (Genesis 9:21). As we've said before, ancient Jewish readers took this as some kind of festival of thanksgiving to God, and they usually assume that Noah merely took things furthest.⁵ With him also are sons Japheth, Shem, and “Ham the father of Canaan” (Genesis 9:18). What's interesting is that one of the few Canaanite stories we've found includes a scene where we overhear the Canaanite gods explain what makes for a good son. And two lines concern how a good Canaanite son cares for his drunk father on the way home from a sacred feast.⁶ A good son is there “to grasp [his father's] arm when he's drunk, to support him when sated with wine.”⁷ So we expect the father of Canaan to at least live up to Canaanite standards... right?

There's no indication Ham helps Noah home, although Noah does make it home. The next line in Genesis, we just know that Noah “uncovered himself in his tent” (Genesis 9:21). At least he's inside his tent, in private space, shrouded by a “social skin” that shields his state from public view.⁸ But now, and only now, does his son Ham step into the story – and step over the line. You don't waltz into the presidential bedroom on a White House tour, and neither should Ham be waltzing into Noah's tent uninvited. “Ham's first misdeed,” it's been suggested, “was his disrespectful invading of his father's private space.”⁹ He's in Noah's tent as an intruder.

I doubt it was by accident or with virtuous intent that Ham is in this tent, to find himself suddenly “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”¹⁰ It's hardly a good omen that Ham's name is all but the last letter of the Hebrew word ḥamas, 'violence,' as in what filled the world Noah was rescued from – and now it's in his tent.¹¹ What happens in there, the Bible may not spell out. One early rabbi suggested that Ham abused or even sexually assaulted Noah.¹² And a few modern scholars defend that interpretation.¹³ Others, inspired by the Law's identification of “your father's nakedness” with “the nakedness of your father's wife” (Leviticus 18:8), argue that, while Noah was unconscious, Ham took advantage of his own mother, who became pregnant with Canaan.¹⁴ A larger group of rabbis suggested that Ham went so far as to castrate Noah, hence why Noah did no more multiplying after the flood and also why he'd curse Ham's fourth son for stopping Noah from ever having a fourth son.¹⁵ A few modern scholars see parallels between Genesis here and Greek myths where the brother of Iapetus castrates and overthrows their father,¹⁶ which makes sense in a world of contested inheritance.¹⁷ Noah might be relieved to hear many scholars discount these stories,¹⁸ even if these dark possibilities lurk in the background on purpose.¹⁹

All we know for sure is that “Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father” (Genesis 9:22). This is the same word for 'saw' as when Eve “saw that the tree was... a delight to the eyes” (Genesis 3:6).²⁰ It's not a casual or passive noticing, as if Ham stumbled on the sight and just didn't close his eyes fast enough. This is a voluntary gazing, a searching, a looking into.²¹ Ham is willfully seeing his father's nakedness. Since ancient times, his motive has been cited as “idle curiosity.”²² Today, we tend to use that word, 'curiosity,' as a positive thing, the virtue of healthy interest in the world. But 'curiosity' used to be a bad word, a malformation of the human thirst for truth to “reflect pride and power rather than love and wonder.”²³ Medieval theologians catalogued all sorts of ways the quest to know could go wrong.²⁴ You could learn just so you can show off, or to service of sin, like a terrorist studying bomb-making techniques. Curiosity might also mean getting distracted from greater study for the sake of lesser knowledge, like a guy who memorizes sports statistics but can't be bothered to open his Bible. Curiosity might mean hunting for knowledge in all the wrong places, like tarot cards and crystal balls. It might mean hunting knowledge severed from its meaning – studying the world, but never as creature of the Creator. And curiosity can mean hunting knowledge that just isn't for you – prying into people's private affairs, wasting time on what you can't get, demanding knowledge that isn't available. As one Jewish teacher put it, “What is committed to you, pay heed to; what is hidden is not your concern. In matters that are beyond you, do not meddle, when you've been shown more than you can understand” (Sirach 3:22-23).

Ham stands here as the role model for people who want to peer behind things like tradition and authority and custom, who believe they have the right to every truth, who deem nothing sacred when it stands in the way.²⁵ Ham aims to gaze on the naked truth, no matter the cost. He insists on seeing through the chains that would bind him to be a part of society rather than its very author. He will accept no limits on what he may see; his appetite for first-hand knowledge is ravenous, gluttonous, an uncontrolled passion. And so Ham, champion of curiosity, takes a clear-eyed look here at the spring whence his starting seed sprang.

Leering shamelessly at Noah's wrinkled body, sniffing a whiff of Noah's boozy breath, looming in awful judgment over Noah's bareness, Ham finds nothing to inspire his awe – nothing cosmic, nothing impressive, nothing beautiful or good or true. This is the mystery of generation? This is the seat of authority? Ham just can't believe it. His faith shatters on the shoals of the scandal. He finds it irrational, childish, silly. “Ham laughs when he sees his father stripped naked.”²⁶ In Ham's searching, scoffing, sneering study of his sotted sire's shame, “eliminated is the father as authority, as guide, as teacher of law, custom, and a way of life.”²⁷ Ham sees through it, behind it; all such things now lie disenchanted and demythologized at his feet. Ham is almost a prototype of “democratic man..., who seems also to be deaf to authority and who knows neither awe nor reverence.”²⁸ Ham, asserting his equality of rights, laughs at what he no longer believes in.

In fact, he can't believe he ever believed in Noah. Ham finds nothing worthy of respect or loyalty in this body he surveys, and Ham allows that snapshot of a scene to drown in him what the flood could not. As a result of this fractured faith, Ham's deconstruction leaves a sour taste on his tongue. His disbelief is served with sides of anger and betrayal. Feeling silly for having credited the incredible, Ham deflects onto Noah and conjures deep offense at Noah for having had the gall to appear righteous. In this, he's a lot like Michal, married to David but still a Saul's girl at heart. When King David seemed to beclown himself by “uncovering himself” in public like a “vulgar fellow” (2 Samuel 6:20), Michal “looked... and saw... and she despised him in her heart” (2 Samuel 6:16). Just so, here “Ham, like Michal, gazes at his father in the tent in a hostile manner,” despising Noah in his heart.²⁹ Luther goes so far as to say Ham develops “a satanic and bitter hatred against his father.”³⁰

Now, even here in the abyss of deconstruction, Ham could journey back upwards. He can't unseen what he thinks he's seen, can't unknow what he thinks he knows. But he can choose to be kind, can be charitable, can be humble. He can repent of callous, cruel curiosity. He can hope for love to overcome his hate. He can pray for his faith to grow again from seed, a mature faith reconstructed to cope with a parent whose ways aren't immediately apparent through the wrinkles and the mess. Out of basic human decency if nothing else, “he should have covered his father.”³¹ But he refuses. He leaves Noah naked and alone.

Ham ventures forth from the tent with a crusading zeal, determined to haul Noah's nakedness into the open, verbally and conceptually if not physically. His Canaanite descendants would tell us that a good son was called “to refute the calumnies of [his father's] detractors,”³² and “to drive his troublers away.”³³ Ham chooses instead to become the detractor and troubler of his father. He went out and “told his two brothers outside” what he had seen and learned (Genesis 9:22), maybe bringing their father's clothing in hand “as evidence of Noah's drunken state.”³⁴ Ham goes public. To his brothers, he “pointed out the nakedness of the father.”³⁵

No doubt Ham defends himself as a straight-shooter, just calling 'em like he sees 'em.³⁶ But Ham “proclaimed aloud what it was right to leave untold.”³⁷ Even on a charitable reading, this is just “malicious, disrespectful gossip,” an unnecessary truth filtered through prejudiced eyes and spewed out of place like so much dirt.³⁸ “The tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness... set on fire by hell..., a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (James 3:6-8). That fiery tongue here recounts Noah's condition, not impartially or innocently or out of concern, but out of a calculated desire to “blacken his good name,”³⁹ to degrade Noah from lord and loved one to laughingstock. Ham will have nothing to do with the Law's demand to “honor thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12), or with the New Law's demand to “obey your leaders and submit to them” (Hebrews 13:17). He takes immense comfort and glee in Noah's apparent downfall,⁴⁰ as though this ripped away forever Noah's right to sit in judgment, as though this were Ham's hour of liberation unto license.

Allowing resentment to nurse a delusion of vindication, Ham was overwhelmed with “a desire for mocking.”⁴¹ His public words are meant as knives with which he might neuter Noah, taking captive his father's reputation.⁴² Ham thus “arose impudently against his father,” aiming to humiliate Noah, “to undermine Noah,” effectively to overpower and overthrow Noah once and for all.⁴³ Ham becomes the new world's “first rebel against law and authority,”⁴⁴ aiming to let it fall away – or else fall into his hand, as he assumes (so he thinks) his father's place.

“Ham hastened to invite others to view the sight,” to share in Ham's freedom, to confirm his ascended status.⁴⁵ Like a serpent in the garden, he tempts his brethren to open their eyes to the naked truth, to taste and see that the father's authority is bad, that his tradition is foolish, decrepit, unsuited for the demands of a brave new world. Unlike Adam and Eve, Shem and Japheth discount the hissing. They were “above heeding such evil counsel.”⁴⁶ Where Ham sees Noah's plight as a comedy, they recognize a tragedy.⁴⁷ “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers” (Psalm 1:1).

In what comes next, Jewish lore suggested that “Shem commenced the good deed,”⁴⁸ “Shem took his garment, and he stood up.”⁴⁹ Genesis just says that “Shem and Japheth took the garment” (Genesis 9:23), perhaps Noah's cloak which Ham had stolen to support his scurrilous report. Whoever initiated the action, once they picked up the garment, “they laid it on both their shoulders” (Genesis 9:23), literally shouldering together the burden of making reparations for what he's stolen, to redress “the evil intent of their brother.”⁵⁰

How'd they do it? How did they find a solution that didn't break things worse? “They walked backwards, and they covered the nakedness of their father” (Genesis 9:23). As one early Christian put it, the brothers “neither approved nor betrayed the fault of the saintly man.”⁵¹ They don't go around trying to justify Noah as what he's not, trying to say it's so good he's drunk and naked; but neither do they betray him, as Ham did. Instead, they simply “made it their one concern to right the situation speedily,” and then yield Noah space to awaken.⁵² So what Ham discovered dis-covered, they covered up again, restoring to him a sign of his status.⁵³ In so clothing the man made naked by the fruit of his vineyard, Shem and Japheth become imitators of the LORD God who, when Adam and Eve stumbled naked from the garden, “clothed them” (Genesis 3:21).

In walking backwards, “their faces were backwards, and they did not see their father's nakedness” (Genesis 9:23). Shem and Japheth did not participate in Ham's sin. They refused to degrade Noah with judgmental or even inquisitive looks. They disciplined their eyes to not see their father in an undignified state, “lest their reverence for their father be diminished even by a single glance.”⁵⁴ Eyes fixed firmly on the flaps of the tent, they walked backwards until Noah was covered, and then shifted gears back into drive, their eyes unwavering until they were again outside the tent. Perhaps, as one ancient teacher thought, they did it “trembling all the while,” believing that Noah “was protected by angels both while awake and while asleep.”⁵⁵

In their solemn entry and respectful retreat, Shem and Japheth reaffirmed Noah's worth in exactly the way Ham didn't. In fact, the Hebrew word order closing their account – “the nakedness of their father not did they see” – is almost exactly flipped from when “saw Ham... the nakedness of his father,” highlighting how backwards they acted by Ham's standards.⁵⁶ But backwards by Ham's standards, backwards by the cruel world's standards, is the right way for one to walk. In all they do here, Shem and Japheth, no doubt to Ham's bitter annoyance, broadcast “their complete rejection of both his arguments and his values.”⁵⁷

So, where Ham was a champion of curiosity, Shem and Japheth have eyes studiously open to all things but one. In any system of thought, there's always a foundational axiom that can't be derived from anything more basic; and, just so, human community is built on fundamental principles which Shem and Japheth cannot dispense with as Ham has. They therefore accept the fact of authority, however fallible; they embrace law and order, however frail; they submit to tradition, however forgettable. They will still receive what Noah hands on, that they might not approach their own sons and daughters empty-handed. Shem and Japheth thus, with ample reason, walk in and out of Noah's tent “by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7), with what one writer dubs “a pious act of willful ignorance” for the sake of saving a family, a society, a world.⁵⁸ What's turned their gaze away from Ham's 'naked truth' is simply the power of love, by which they know more than Ham's loveless eyes.

Later Jews saw this kind of filial piety in cultic terms, saying that “kindness to a father will not be forgotten: it will serve as a sin-offering, it will take lasting root. In time of trouble, it will be recalled to your advantage; like warmth upon frost, it will melt away your sins” (Sirach 3:14-15). Their kindness was reenacted by Israel in the wilderness. Whenever the camp would move, in God's tent the priests had to “take down the veil of the screen and cover the ark of the testimony with it” (Numbers 4:5). As one Jewish scholar observes, the priests “use that curtain to effectively shield their eyes from the Holy Ark until they use that very curtain to cover it, protecting its dignity by ensuring that it never be exposed.”⁵⁹ The ark and other holy things needed to be dressed, as though they were the nakedness of God within his tent (Numbers 4:7-14). Even the closest Levite cousins to the priestly line “shall not go in to look on the holy things even for a moment,” as Ham did, “lest they die” (Numbers 4:20) – for later, people did die when “they looked upon the Ark of the LORD” naked (1 Samuel 6:17). One role of the priests, then, was to be a Shem-style son to God the Father, preventing the sins of Ham.

Christians of the early centuries found the piety of Shem and Japheth to be even a better model for theology than the curiosity of Ham. In Ham barging in to grapple with his father's 'naked truth,' they saw a forecast of heretics' theology sans humility. Heretics were often guilty of “meddlesome inquiries.”⁶⁰ “Where are those who say they have attained and possess the fullness of knowledge? The fact is that they have really fallen into the deepest ignorance.” That's Ham's 'naked truth' right there. “In heaven, they veil their eyes; on earth, the busybodies are obstinate and shamelessly try to hold their eyes fixed on his ineffable glory.”⁶¹ Such “an investigator, were he able, would strip off all the glory of the Son to observe.”⁶²

The truth is that “anything worth believing must be approached with pious humility.”⁶³ “When we seek to know in a virtuous manner, we fear and obey God, and we accept our finite limits in knowing.”⁶⁴ God will always be greater than we can fully know, but knowing God by grace is the highest aim of the human mind. That's why there's a real virtue at work both in good theology and in any other good thinking. “Studious Christians come to know both God and creatures more deeply,” precisely because they aim at deeper intimacy with Creator and creation on God's terms.⁶⁵ And God's terms are, at heart, the cross, which – as we marveled last Sunday – were foreshadowed by Noah's plight, drunk and naked and vulnerable.

Roman soldiers by the hundreds made sport of Jesus: “They mocked him... and they spit on him and struck him on the head” (Matthew 27:29-30). So too, “Herod and his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him” (Luke 23:11). At Calvary, soldiers stripped him of his garments, leaving Christ in the nakedness of Noah; and in that condition, they crucified him (Mark 15:23-24). In that dark hour when God Incarnate was pinned naked to a cross, this was in some way the greatest revelation in history of “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23).

But, St. Paul says, the revelation of God in “Christ crucified” is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). “Those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads” (Mark 15:29). “So also the chief priests, with the scribes, mocked him to one another” (Mark 15:31). It was Ham's finest hour, or so he thought, as man and woman, Jew and Gentile, gathered around the cross to jeer the dying Lord. But after the temple veil tore to reveal emptiness within (Mark 15:38), disciples took the naked corpse of the Lord and covered it in a shroud (Mark 15:46). The deeds of Shem and Japheth were a foreshadowing of “the piety of the people who believed” in Jesus,⁶⁶ who “do not look at their father's nakedness,” the dead Christ, but “honor it with a veil” by proclaiming not only his cross but his resurrection.⁶⁷ Going forth, we imitate Shem and Japheth in word and deed: “I was naked, and you clothed me,” says the Lord (Matthew 25:36).

And he returns the favor. “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27), and so have “put on the new self which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator” (Colossians 3:10). Each of us, at that baptism, may stand and shout with the prophet, “He has clothed me with the garments of salvation; he has covered me with the robe of righteousness!” (Isaiah 61:10).

Alas, at times we stumble, we sully or strip off our garments. People turn out to be messy, and it's easy to find fault if we're looking for it. But as a medieval theologian said, “to observe our neighbor's faults with the intention of looking down upon them, or of detracting them, or even with no further purpose than that of disturbing them, is sinful.”⁶⁸ We must not be each other's Hams. Hence one old bishop pleaded, “Let us not draw attention to our neighbors' faults. Should we learn about them from others, far from being anxious to see their nakedness, let us rather, like the right-minded sons, conceal them, cover them up, strive to raise the fallen person by exhortation and advice, instructing him in the magnitude of God's love, the extraordinary degree of his goodness, his boundless compassion.”⁶⁹ That doesn't apply, of course, to abuse or crime or genuine public interest: “It is not backbiting to reveal a man's hidden sin... for the good of public justice.”⁷⁰ But in all our worst sins, Christ offers us, if we'll buy them by repentance, “white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen” any more (Revelation 3:18).

When we at last succumb to the heady wine of death and are denuded of the body, we're “longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed, by putting it on, we may not be found naked” (2 Corinthians 5:3). Our true desire is resurrection, to “be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up in life” (2 Corinthians 5:4). These aren't garments we can put on ourselves, helpless as corpse and ghost. Only our True Shem can cover us and wake us to new life, a sobriety and strength heretofore unknown, “raised in glory..., raised in honor” (1 Corithians 15:43). Clothe us eternally, Lord Jesus, and unveil to us the fullness of your glory! Amen.

The Sotted Sire

“Bondage and death the cup contains; dash to the earth the poisoned bowl! Softer than silk are iron chains, compared with those that chafe the soul.”¹ Those are lyrics we used to sing here. On a Friday in late March 1839, the General Conference of our denomination, as it existed then, “resolved that strong drink, as it is usually used, is an evil and should not be practiced in our church.”² They wanted “all our members to become total abstainers from all intoxicating drinks.”³ Eventually, the rule was phrased that “none of our members shall be permitted to use as a beverage any intoxicating drinks,” and if somebody did so, “such member shall, upon conviction, be excluded from the church.”⁴ Though we rephrased the message about church discipline in 2008, we didn't drop our historic claim about total abstinence from alcohol being “the only truly responsible position for members of our churches” from our Discipline until 2016.⁵ So if you were a member here a decade ago, and you drank a beer one day after work, or enjoyed a margarita at a nice restaurant... phew, you got away with it!

One of the historic hallmarks of our denomination is a longstanding commitment to the temperance movement. A number of groups in the early nineteenth century were swept up into an uncompromising condemnation of alcohol as utterly evil. The science of their day, as they read it in keeping with a common-sense philosophy then prevalent, told them alcohol was an artificial and unnatural substance, “poisonous, dangerous to race survival, and lacking in nutritional value.”⁶ Even the smallest sip of alcohol interfered with the senses and excited the imagination, thereby already impairing “the balance between mind, emotion, and will.”⁷ We therefore, they said, “have no right” to drink a drop of it “unless prescribed by a doctor.”⁸ And so, privileging their hygiene-focused middle-class values as a measure of holiness, they concluded that every Bible reader before them had simply been too blinded by alcohol to see the true abstinence Bible for what it was.⁹ As an old song of that era had it, “When Noah bade the ark farewell, he did not make his wine to sell, and if the danger he had known, he would have left the grapes alone!”¹⁰

Now, however, we know that, far from being unnatural and artificial, “alcohol routinely turns up in natural environments.”¹¹ Fruits and other high-concentration sugar sources, when colonized by yeasts, ferment without our help. And we've seen animals who know it, like little tree-shrews in Malaysia that binge on a nectar as alcoholic as beer, elephants walking away unsteady from the fermented fruit of an African tree, and howler monkeys going wild for the alcohol-rich orange fruit of a Central American palm tree.¹² Alcohol is a lightweight molecule that travels a long distance, and so animals that eat a lot of fruit, including primates, can use it to find the best sugary fruits.¹³ For animals like that, an attraction to alcohol is a very helpful adaptation. And since – however and whyever he did it – God made our bodily animal nature in the same mold, it's not surprising that we have a similar impulse. Even Adam and Eve quite possibly would've been “routinely exposed to a low alcohol concentration in their diet” of fruits in Eden.¹⁴

Noah's pioneering work was in taking control of that natural phenomenon and making beverage alcohol, a wine. We heard last Sunday that this was part of God's plan: he gives growth to grapevines for the sake of “wine to gladden the heart of man” (Psalm 104:15). Sufficiency in wine is part and parcel of the prophets' picture of the life of God's favor (Amos 9:14), so God gave his people “a land of grain and wine” (Deuteronomy 33:28). One wine expert calls it “an analgesic, disinfectant, and general remedy all rolled into one.”¹⁵ Up until recently, wine was the best antiseptic we had, which is why the Good Samaritan pours it on the wounds of the man beaten on the road to Jericho (Luke 10:34). And since water could often have bacteria or parasites in it, wine was often safer, hence why Paul advises Timothy to “no longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments” (1 Timothy 5:23) – because, in a pre-modern world, “those who drank fermented beverages... lived longer.”¹⁶ Not only that, but wine was “a perfect medium for dissolving and dispensing drugs,” making “fermented beverages... the universal medicines of humankind.”¹⁷

So, given that science shows us that alcohol is a natural phenomenon in creation, and that the Bible tells us that God intended us to ferment wine from grapes, and that scripture and history alike attest to multiple good purposes that wine and other such things could serve, I'm very glad that our denomination's law threatening church discipline against any and every sip of it is no longer off the books. Our forebears seem to be in jeopardy there of falling afoul of the Apostle Paul's warning against false teachers who “require abstinence from foods,” and drinks, “that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth; for everything created by God is good, and nothing,” including things containing alcohol, “is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer” (1 Timothy 4:3-5).

So far, so good. But there's a principle of toxicology called hormesis, where for some substances, a little bit is a help but a big bit is a hurt.¹⁸ While the health benefits of low-level alcohol consumption are still hotly debated by scientists,¹⁹ it's possible alcohol is hormetic. (So is oxygen, also toxic to us in unnaturally big doses!) So, as one early Jewish writer put the matter, “this is the perception a wine-drinker requires: so long as he is decent, he may drink, but if he exceeds the limit, the spirit of error invades his mind.”²⁰

Hence, “the use and enjoyment of wine needs great care.”²¹ Our animal attraction to alcohol was designed for low doses in chewed fruit, for which there's a built-in limit of how much alcohol we could get before we're full; but beverages like Noah's wine bypass that safeguard, and, with concentrated alcohol now so cheap, that poses a serious danger.²² That's why Israel's wise men advise us to “not look at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup, when it goes down smoothly; in the end, it bites like a serpent and stings like an adder” (Proverbs 23:31-32). It's no wonder some Jews wondered if the wine-grape was the fruit that damned Adam and Eve.²³ For “wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler, and whoever is led astray by it is not wise” (Proverbs 20:1).

Well, Noah's wisdom lapses. His wine leads him astray, and the serpent in it bites him. “He drank of the wine and became drunk” (Genesis 9:21). Some early Christians excused Noah here, figuring Noah “did not know the nature of wine,” that it could get him drunk,²⁴ so “he didn't know how much he should take..., and so, through ignorance, he was surprised into drunkenness,”²⁵ “the result of inexperience, not intemperance.”²⁶ Then others said that, even if Noah drank before the flood, it had taken so long to get his vineyard grown that, due to “the long absence of wine,” he'd lost the tolerance he expected to have.²⁷ But others more frankly confessed that Noah had been “led into committing a grave error through the wine.”²⁸

The tragic truth is that “even the greatest saints sometimes fall.”²⁹ As Noah drinks cup after cup, his gut lining absorbs more and more alcohol molecules, transferring them to his bloodstream. His liver puts out enzymes to process ethanol into acetaldehyde, and then other enzymes to turn acetaldehyde into an acetate salt; but Noah's building up blood alcohol faster than his enzymes can metabolize it. Not only does it get into various other organs, but it slips easily across Noah's blood-brain barrier, getting access to all sorts of chemical pathways in his noggin.³⁰ The result of that, the Bible depicts, is that “your eyes will see strange things, and your heart utter perverse things; you will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea” (Proverbs 23:33-34), to “reel with wine and stagger with strong drink” (Isaiah 28:7).

Whatever Noah's excuse, one early bishop remarked that “voluntary intoxication... clouds the intellect more severely than any demon..., robbing its victim of any sense of values.”³¹ By drinking to drunkenness, such a person “willingly and knowingly deprives himself of the use of reason,” which is the faculty that lets us clearly see and follow God's will.³² Drinking to excess is “an irrational action that leads to further irrational actions.”³³ Hence even a “small excess is more harmful in drink than in other things.”³⁴ It's not great for you; it's not great for society. Consuming alcohol is one of the top medical risk factors for all sorts of things, and alcohol-related disorders cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars each year, to say nothing of the rest of the world.³⁵

But matters get worse. Isaiah scoffs at “heroes at drinking wine” who chase it at all hours, from early morning to late into the night (Isaiah 5:11, 22), thinking, “When shall I awake? I must have another drink” (Proverbs 23:35). Even in ancient times, you could see people who made alcohol a lifestyle, “yet, despite yesterday's spree, still gulping down one drink after the other.”³⁶ Hosea warns that wine has power to “enslave the heart” (Hosea 4:11), to the point where a person is “swallowed by wine” (Isaiah 28:7). For reasons scientists are still trying to understand, regular drinking for some can create a dependency, an addiction, that so stacks the brain against the will that a person may drink compulsively even while taking no pleasure in any of it.³⁷

Our denomination has long felt the addictive perils of alcohol. Our founding bishop had a brother who might well qualify as an alcoholic, confessing that “I could not resist it, and... if I was started, then all resistance was gone,” try as he might.³⁸ As the brother traveled for work, he often had to live hotels where the owners sold alcohol. The results were predictable; the brother's health deteriorated, and the bishop lost his brother in 1905, less than three months after the bishop excoriated his brother for “the way in which you threw your life away.”³⁹ Their letters are tragic and painful to read, with little sympathy in evidence. The devastation of alcohol addiction is a too-common story now and then, and it used to be far worse. In the first seven decades of our nation, alcohol abuse skyrocketed until the average American drank over five gallons of absolute alcohol each year, much more than today.⁴⁰ It's no wonder there developed an organized prohibition movement, the point of which wasn't to go after drinkers but to go after dealers (like some of those tavern-keepers and hotel owners of the day) who used the addictive qualities of alcohol as a profitable weapon for “the exploitation of the weak, impoverished, and defenseless.”⁴¹ Our denomination was, no surprise, a big supporter of Prohibition, deeming the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment “a glorious triumph in the warfare for the uplift of humanity.”⁴² Despite the fourteen-year experiment, however, our sad finding was: “the national thirst is still unabated.”⁴³

Noah's thirst could've developed into a drinking habit that risked addiction. But he didn't: his excess in drinking “was reserved to that one instance alone.”⁴⁴ Still, even on that one occasion, it laid Noah low. “He became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent” (Genesis 9:21): Noah “reclined with his thighs naked and uncovered,”⁴⁵ then “passed out in the tent unclothed.”⁴⁶ Not a pretty sight, least of all from a fellow in his seventh century.

Taking a step back, the new world has a new garden, where Noah, a second Adam, has reached out and picked the fruit, making wine with it; and as a result of what he does with the fruit, he's found naked “in the midst of his tent” (Genesis 9:21). It's obvious what the Bible's getting at here, right – garden, fruit, nakedness? This is “a replication of Adam's sin,” happening all over again in the clean new world.⁴⁷ And Noah's tent will provide little more protection than Adam and Eve's fig leaves did. This is “a bad start to a second human race.”⁴⁸

The Israelites under Moses had to be careful in their camp, since the LORD dwelled with them, “so that he may not see any thing of nakedness among you” (Deuteronomy 23:14). Yet here Noah adopts “an indecent state of nudity,” albeit in the privacy of his tent and not in public.⁴⁹ Not only was that a cultic offense, but it was deeply embarrassing. For a person's naked body to be exposed was a disgrace (Isaiah 47:3). It's no wonder Nahum warns Nineveh that God will “make nations look at your nakedness and kingdoms at your shame” (Nahum 3:5). When prisoners of war were taken captive, they were often led away “naked and barefoot, with buttocks uncovered” (Isaiah 20:4), as “a form of humiliation for defeated enemies.”⁵⁰ “By disrobing, Noah invests himself with a lowered status, one befitting powerless captives and servants.”⁵¹ He's ripped away his dignity.⁵²

We know that, in many cases, drunkenness can be a gateway to committing further sins. When the Apostle Paul warns us, “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery” (Ephesians 5:18), he's paraphrasing an earlier Jewish book that said, “Do not be drunk with wine, because wine perverts the mind from the truth, arouses the impulses of desire, and leads the eyes into the path of error.”⁵³ Early Christians worried that a drunk person is thereby rendered “more capable of evil,”⁵⁴ and can be a real danger to others, even unintentionally, as we see often on the road, with a third of traffic fatalities related to alcohol.⁵⁵ “Thus he commits sin and is unashamed. Such is the drunkard, my children: he who is drunken has respect for no one,”⁵⁶ and may “sin by uttering lewd words, by fighting, by slander, by transgressing God's commands.”⁵⁷

But in addition, excessive alcohol also “lessens strength and multiplies wounds” (Sirach 31:30). We're told how several Israelite royals were assassinated while “drinking himself drunk” (1 Kings 16:9) or while “merry with wine” (2 Samuel 13:28). Inebriation often plays a tragic role in impairing victims of sexual assault, heightening their risk and vulnerability.⁵⁸ Just so, Noah, in his tent, is “brought low like a motionless corpse.”⁵⁹ – naked, unconscious, and too addled by alcohol to regain consciousness any time soon, clearing the way for whatever it is his son Ham does to victimize him in the very next verse (Genesis 9:22).

But early Christians wondered if perhaps God allowed this sin at the level of the letter for the sake of an even greater beauty at the level of the spirit. For “all this was said in type of the Savior,”⁶⁰ in that “the drunkenness and nakedness of Noah... contain the mystery of Christ's suffering and death.”⁶¹ Jesus, during his conversations with his dearest disciples, often foretold his coming passion in terms of “drinking the cup that the Father has given me” (John 18:11), “the wine of God's wrath poured full strength into the cup of his anger” against the sin of the world (Revelation 14:10). Jesus prayed not to drink it, if there were any other way (Mark 14:36).

But there wasn't. “He drank and was inebriated” by suffering as he was beaten and crowned.⁶² “When they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them” (Matthew 27:35). “His mortal flesh was stripped naked,”⁶³ “and his thighs were laid bare – the dishonor of the cross.”⁶⁴ Like the naked Noah victimized by some act of Ham's, the naked Christ “endured abuses and derision and submitted to the ultimate torment of the cross.”⁶⁵ And in this story, all of us play the role of Ham, for when we fall away to sin, it's “crucifying once again the Son of God to our own harm and holding him up to contempt” (Hebrews 6:6). The voices of mockery toward the Lord, the contempt for his inebriating suffering, are our voices. Noah's sin reveals Christ's salvation.

But also in a moral sense was the tale of Noah set down for us, “so that we may guard against drunkenness as much as possible, with the picture of such a fall clearly described before our eyes in Scripture.”⁶⁶ Jesus himself tells us to “watch yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with... drunkenness..., and that day [of his coming] come upon you suddenly like a trap” (Luke 21:34). Why would it then be a trap? Because drunkenness can so dull “the reason of the human mind... that it does not even have concern for itself, much less for God.”⁶⁷ One early Christian suggested that “men drinking insatiably the wine... made a transgression worse than Adam and... commit themselves to the eternal fire.”⁶⁸ A bishop later followed these lines with the declaration that truly voluntary drunkenness (as opposed to compulsive, as sometimes in addiction) is “a mortal sin... classed with homicide and adultery and fornication.”⁶⁹ And they got this from their Bible, because St. Paul lists “drunkenness” among the “works of the flesh” and “drunkards” among those who “will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:19-21; 1 Corinthians 6:10).

No wonder some ancient readers, stepping beyond Scripture, advised that “if you wish to live prudently, abstain completely from drinking,”⁷⁰ and that a person “will do well if she avoids the use of wine entirely.”⁷¹ That's especially the case for someone with addictive tendencies or who otherwise is “easily the worse for taking wine” – according to theologians in the Middle Ages, for somebody like that, the consumption of even small amounts of alcohol would become “unlawful.”⁷² To toy with that serpent waiting at the bottom of the cup, to play games with its fangs and risk its venom while aware of the consequences, would ignore the goodness of God. “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise” (Ephesians 5:15).

For the rest of us who are lawfully free to do so, if we then choose to imbibe, the standard must be “careful moderation in the use of alcohol,”⁷³ to “not drink wine to the point of losing self-control.”⁷⁴ “Since we belong to the day, let us be sober” (1 Thessalonians 5:8), even as we enjoy a moderate dose of alcohol with thanks as God's provision. Yet in it all, “be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers” (1 Peter 4:7). But whether we take the cup or not, as St. Augustine says, “let us be temperate, and, in whatever we do, let us know why we are doing it.”⁷⁵ Understand your freedom in Christ, but be mindful, as were the campaigners for justice in the age of Prohibition, of how your choices relate to commercial interests of exploitation even today.

Remember also that “it is good not to... drink wine... that causes your brother to stumble” because of your influence (Romans 14:21). Be judicious in time, place, and company. In the presence of those who may suffer deep offense or else be misled to drink intemperately if they see you drink even temperately (“nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean” [Romans 14:14]), join them in abstaining. But, in the presence of those who may be misled to drink intemperately if your abstention leads them to think the rule for Christians is heavier than they can bear, model temperate partaking before their eyes. “So then, whether you... drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31).

Instead of intoxication with alcohol, the Apostle bids us instead “be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). As one pre-Christian philosopher put it, “when grace fills the soul, that soul thereby rejoices... so that, to many of the unenlightened, it may seem to be drunken, crazy, and beside itself.”⁷⁶ Just so, at Pentecost when the apostles and other disciples were “all filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:4), skeptical onlookers accused them of being “filled with new wine” (Acts 2:13) despite it being just nine o'clock in the morning (Acts 2:15). Those skeptical onlookers misperceived the beautiful intoxication of the grace of the Holy Spirit, proving themselves unenlightened in not being able to see the signs of great grace in the apostles' souls – the same grace, the same Spirit, that should be operative in the Church's gathered worship as we sing, thank, and revere Christ our Lord with all love (Ephesians 5:19-21).⁷⁷

So “wake up from your drunken stupor,” the Spirit cries, “and do not go on sinning” (1 Corinthians 15:34). In light of our blessed hope, why should we “fall away or weigh down our hearts with drugs and drunkenness?”⁷⁸ There's a gospel of hope for the world for us to spread! There's a channel of blessing we're meant to become! The Holy Spirit is at hand! And “the fruit of the Spirit is... self-control,” or sobriety (Galatians 5:22-23). Thus the sober saints “are drunk in a sense, for all good things are united in the strong wine on which they feast, and they receive the loving cup from perfect virtue.”⁷⁹ May we, clothed in the Christ who became inebriated and naked for us, drink this virtue forever, being swept up in “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17)! Hallelujah! Amen, and amen.

New Life, New Joy

The flood is over; the world's reborn, and life has God's blessing to go on. Over the past several weeks, we've heard the story of a second creation, as God restores a new world, albeit one accommodated to the crookedness of the human heart. In pagan tellings of the story, after the hero of the tale appeases the gods by his sacrifice, he gets whisked away “toward the east, over the mountains,”¹ “far away, where the rivers rise.”² Since he was thus “removed from the world of men,”³ he couldn't well headline a sequel. But in Genesis, Noah very much returns to the world; and, with a plot wide open, we have the luxury to skip ahead an untold amount of time.⁴ This next episode could begin right after the flood, but the action would still take “at least six years” to get underway, said some ancient readers.⁵ Others allowed time for a whole new generation to be born first (Genesis 9:19), maybe thirty-two grandchildren running around or grown before the story even starts.⁶

Whatever the jump forward, when the next verse begins, we read that “Noah began to be a man of the ground” (Genesis 9:20). Now, in the beginning, Adam was made “to serve the ground” (Genesis 2:5), and when he lost the garden, that's what he did: he was exiled “to serve the ground” from which he'd been made (Genesis 3:23). Cain was “a server of the ground” (Genesis 4:2), and God described his labor to him by saying, “You serve the ground” (Genesis 4:12). They worked at the ground, pushed their labor into the ground, wooed the ground. But Noah is a man of the ground, or you could even translate it as 'a husband of the ground.' He's wooed and won. He's become “the master of sowing and cultivating,”⁷ a “master of the new earth,”⁸ engaging the ground in a way kinglier and lovelier than Cain or even Adam had. No doubt that includes farming wheat that he and his family can grind for flour and bake for bread.⁹ But as the first 'husband of the ground,' he's a pioneer in a new kind of agriculture, just like his Cainite counterparts were great inventors of civilized arts and crafts (Genesis 4:20-22) or his ancestor Enosh was a pioneer in religion (Genesis 4:26).¹⁰

And so Noah “planted a vineyard” (Genesis 9:20) – he “tilled the soil with care and planted a vine with his own hand,” a biblical declaration that early Christians championed as refuting pagan myths that vineyards and their products were invented by this or that pagan god.¹¹ Noah's invention was a truly human achievement: under the hand of God, he “devised vinedressing from the instruction implanted in his nature.”¹² So far as the Bible tells it, Noah is “given credit for planting the first vineyard,”¹³ as “the initiator of orchard husbandry.”¹⁴ Archaeology seems to testify that the wild Eurasian grapevine was domesticated in the late Stone Age, and maybe not far from the mountains of Ararat – or, as one archaeologist put it, “the Noah Hypothesis has been confirmed.”¹⁵ In one Jewish legend, what happened was that Noah had found a vine-shoot that washed out of Eden in the flood, and, after prayer and fasting, God bade him “arise... and plant the vine,” since “for you it will be life.”¹⁶

Speaking of the Garden of Eden, if everything from the start of chapter 8 onward has been replaying the story of creation, then we'd be due for the planting of a garden right now, wouldn't we? And so it's no coincidence that here we find this vineyard in chapter 9, which – in some loose way – corresponds to the garden from chapter 2. In Genesis 2, though, “the LORD God planted a garden... in the east” (Genesis 2:8). Here, Noah “planted a vineyard” (Genesis 9:20), effectively playing God's role as planter.¹⁷ Noah aspired to “create his own version of the experience of life in the garden,”¹⁸ and so once it's grown, Noah “functioned as a new Adam,”¹⁹ indwelling “a new Garden of Eden presided over by Noah, the image of God.”²⁰

The Bible doesn't tell us much about God growing the Garden of Eden, how long he took for that, but Noah gets no luxury of miracles here. A vineyard could be so slow to build up and mature that it was often planted with an eye to the next generation reaping most of the fruit.²¹ Noah “took the time and trouble to cultivate a vineyard” through years of intermittent labor, investing in it patiently, with season after season of building and pruning, waiting patiently for the first full harvest of its grapes.²²

And all Noah's patient work was like a prophetic parable, to show in advance how “the Lord, having a care for the human race, established the synagogue among the Jewish people,” as one medieval monk put it.²³ Isaiah pretty famously pictured Israel as the LORD's Vineyard when he sang, “My Beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill: he dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a tower in the midst of it, and he hewed out a wine-vat in it” (Isaiah 5:1-2). And even Jesus echoed the same, describing God's work with Israel as that of “a master... who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower” (Matthew 21:33). Noah foreshadows God's patient care for his holy nation.

But notice that, for both Isaiah and Jesus, a core element of a vineyard is a winepress – a vineyard isn't just to grow grapes as a snack, but to make wine out of. Grapes naturally carry a strain of yeast, a single-called fungus that's suitable for fermenting the grapes' own sugar and producing ethanol.²⁴ With a little help, that natural process can be guided to function as “controlled spoilage” of the grapes, preserving them.²⁵ At its minimum, that involves stomping the grapes out into must,²⁶ letting it ferment, and then sealing it away from oxygen to stop bacteria from turning the ethanol into acetic acid and making vinegar.²⁷ Noah must do that, pressing and fermenting the grapes, in the gap between verses, by verse 21 he has wine.

Some early Christians, when they read this, figured Noah “was the first to crush the fruit of the vine,”²⁸ and so “made the first discovery of wine drinking.”²⁹ The Bible doesn't say that for sure, and scientists like to imagine prehistoric humans gathering grapes, storing them densely enough that the weight presses those on the bottom, and finding that the juice left behind was ever so slightly alcoholic.³⁰ Archaeologists have found wine residue from over seven thousand years ago in Georgia and northwest Iran,³¹ and wine is thought to have been “a central part of the life and religion of early humans in the Near East” all the way back to the late Stone Age.³²

But it's fascinating that, seventeen years ago, in a cave near the Armenian village of Areni, archaeologists found a plastered area littered with grape seeds, which drained into a sixty-liter vat embedded in the cave floor. It was a Stone Age winery, the oldest one we've found so far, over six thousand years old.³³ That ancient winery is less than fifty miles east of the mountain we today call Mount Ararat. It isn't close enough or simple enough to be Noah's own, but it attests to an ancient legacy of wine-making in the Ararat region; and from that general area is where the traditions of growing grapes and making wine spread throughout the biblical world.³⁴

Remember that when Noah was born, his father Lamech prayed he might bring relief from the agonizing toil of farm labor (Genesis 5:29). A number of scholars see Noah's introduction of wine as part of his answer to that prayer,³⁵ bringing “partial relief from the curse upon the earth that makes him sweat for his bread,”³⁶ “comfort for humanity in the fruit of the vine,”³⁷ making “a good way to 'come down' from the workday and block out a humdrum existence.”³⁸ This morning, we read in a psalm where one reason why God gives growth to “plants for man to cultivate” is so that humanity “may bring forth” from the grapevine “wine to gladden the heart of man” (Psalm 104:14-15). God provides the grapevine with wine as his intention, for us to relax and enjoy it!

Used appropriately, Israel saw wine as “a God-given blessing.”³⁹ It represents “more than mere sustenance.”⁴⁰ Israel's traditions of wisdom remembered that “wine gladdens life” (Ecclesiastes 10:19) and said that “wine, from the beginning, was created for joy” (Sirach 31:27), “an important joy of everyday life.”⁴¹ No wonder King David appointed one official to oversee his kingdom's vineyards and another official to oversee the royal wine-cellars (1 Chronicles 27:27). No wonder the Bible's pictures of abundant living include “vats bursting with wine” (Proverbs 3:10), and God's promise of restoration for his people was that “they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine” (Amos 9:14), “for the enjoyment of relaxation, cheerfulness, and good spirits.”⁴²

It's not for nothing that Israel's sacrifices to God were always accompanied by pouring out wine to him – nearly two bottles with every lamb, two and a half with every ram, almost four bottles with every bull (Numbers 15:5, 7, 10).⁴³ Nor was it for nothing that one of Israel's biggest holidays celebrated “the produce from... their winepress” (Deuteronomy 16:13), with encouragement for them to enjoy “wine or strong drink, whatever your soul desires..., and you shall rejoice, you and your household” (Deuteronomy 14:26). It was an accepted truth in Israel that they “turned to relaxation and enjoyment... to celebrate a festivity” when they'd “indulge in wine after sacrificing.”⁴⁴ And not just Israel, but anywhere in the ancient world, “celebrations of the wine harvest or the first tasting of the new wine often had overt religious expressions.”⁴⁵

So ancient Jewish writers depicted Noah letting his wine age five months before, on New Year's Day, “he made a feast with rejoicing,”⁴⁶ where they were “blessing the Lord of Heaven, the Most High God.”⁴⁷ Then, “the wine being ready, he held a sacrifice and gave himself up to festivity,”⁴⁸ so that Noah “rejoiced, and he drank some of the wine, he and his sons, with rejoicing.”⁴⁹ This is a picture of celebration, of enjoyment, of delight! Thus Noah heeded the call to “eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart” (Ecclesiastes 9:7), savoring his sabbath rest in his makeshift Garden of Eden.⁵⁰

With that garden, Noah played twin roles, that of the LORD God in planting it and that of Adam in enjoying it. And in that, who else could Noah be foreshadowing but Jesus Christ, in whom the nature of the LORD God and the nature of Adam are united unconfused in a single person? As God, he planted the whole world for us; then, as man, he dwells in this world as one of us. And in this great vineyard, Jesus presents himself to us as “the True Vine” tended by his Heavenly Father (John 15:1). For how do the prophets describe grace, if not as the gift of “wine... without price” (Isaiah 55:1)? One old-time preacher urged that, in “the good things involved in our salvation,” we should “consider especially where wine has proved useful, and tremble.”⁵¹ Christ offers his saving wine to intoxicate us, to cheer us, to delight us with the joy of heaven on earth. It's through “the grain and the wine and the oil” of the Church's holy gifts that we become “radiant over the goodness of the LORD” (Jeremiah 31:12). Christ's cup is a “saving potion... for the salvation of the soul,”⁵² “wine that cheers God and men” (Judges 9:13), which makes our hearts rejoice in the LORD (Zechariah 10:7)!

Noah's wine was but a promise of the true wine from the True Vine, the blood not of grapes but of the God-man. One old Christian reflection on Noah's vineyard declared that “its fruit will become the blood of God, and just as the race of men have been condemned through it, so through Jesus Christ Emmanuel in it they will receive a calling and entrance into Paradise.”⁵³ Paradise! Noah's vineyard imitated it, but Jesus leads us into a better Eden than before. And what is that, if not Holy Communion, where Christ shares with us the sweet bounties of his Paradise in bread and wine, body and blood? So come! “Wisdom has built her house..., she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table” (Proverbs 9:1-2). In this “house of wine,” our Savior's banner over us is love, all love and joy and delight (Song of Songs 2:4). Let us feast now at Wisdom's table, let us glean now from the vines of Eden, let us be cheered now by the richest wine of Christ our Savior! Hallelujah! Amen.