Noah and the Ark is one of the most beloved of all the Bible stories.  A giant boat filled with all the animals of the earth, with Noah and his family at the helm, all sailing safe and sound while the flood waters rise around them. Then a dove sent to find dry land, bringing back an olive branch to the Ark.  Land ho! And a rainbow to close-out the story, as they do a summer thunderstorm.  Noah's Ark is a wonderful children's story that teaches how God expects humankind to act, and how God promises to exercise restraint in the future.  "Never again will I do this," God swears.  It's a story laden with ethical messages: God expects far more of humanity than violence and greed. But instead of wiping the slate clean as in the Flood story,    God now expects us to be partners in the renewing of human society.  The story of the Ark full of every creature on the Earth with humans at the helm providing for their safety in a time of mass destruction, is a story with a vision for humanity's greatest role:  that of Steward of Creation.  It asks us, "How are we doing so far in the 21st century?"  Not very well, I'm sad to say. So far, in 2018, our country has experienced 30 acts of mass murder due to gun violence.  To me, this is an indictment of our lack of stewardship of the common good.  Last year, we saw more polar ice melt due to human pollution than ever before. In the Bible story, God swears to never again be the cause of a great flood. Clearly we humans will now be the cause, if we do not change our ways.

       Stewardship of the common good is humankind's divine calling: the common good of not only our species, but of every other on the planet.  To me, this is the message of the beloved children's story. The Living Word of this story is a call from God.  That Word always challenges us to accept, to believe in, our calling.  Those who would take the story literally, whether they are modern atheist critics or religious fundamentalists, miss the point. Truth is taught through allegory, metaphor, moral example, and symbolism; some of the greatest tools of wisdom God has given the human species. I like the quote from John Dominic Crossan, who says: "My point is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally." How did we get so dumb? It all happened with The Enlightenment in the 17th century.  The enormous evolutionary gains in human intelligence and grasp of the natural world through the emergence of the scientific method began to replace the notion of symbolic Truth with the notion of empirical Truth. Or more accurately I think, to confuse the two.  Ancient stories of "Why is this so?"  and "How did this come to be?" that taught wisdom applicable to the common good and to humankind's role in living for the common good were replaced with empirical evidence-based reporting of natural phenomena devoid of subjective ethical imperatives.    Humankind fell in love with objective analysis and began exclusively calling that Truth. This set up a completely unnecessary dichotomy, I believe, regarding the notion of Truth. For example, in modern ELCA interpretation of the Bible we use the  "both/and" approach. We empirically analyze the context of the ancient story for what that can tell us about what does not apply today, and we ask "What is the symbolic truth within it?"  What is the story trying to tell us about who God is, and what God expects of us?  This is called the post-modern approach to Biblical study and it's how I do it. But we post-moderns get bogged down in asking "is this Real?" Did it "really" happen?  That's the wrong question to ask of a symbol. Post-modern humans say if it isn't "Real" in a factual scientific sense, then it must not be a believable Truth. But the question of belief is not whether it's objectively real or not. The question of believable truth is about whether or not it promotes the common good.  In essence, whether or not it "rings true" for us; whether or not it promotes the highest calling of humanity to be steward, protector, and promoter of the well-being of every single species on the Earth.

        The story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is a calling to humanity, to us, to again fulfill our highest purpose as stewards of the common good.  It is the story of what God's compassion looks like:  the story of divine compassion rooted in the human story, calling the human species to look at how we are living and to aspire to be more. Mark's story of Jesus baptized and sent into the wilderness and then into the city, brings the calling of humanity front and center: our Lord enters the living water of the planet to know and bless its life-giving power. The Spirit of God then pushes him deeply into the natural world, the place devoid of human civilization called "the wilderness" where our Lord takes his place among the beasts of the wild, showing us our kinship with all of life. Then and only then, after deep encounter with the shadow side of human nature symbolized by Satan, only then does our Lord enter human society again as the Savior:  the one with good news of how all creation would prosper through the compassion he teaches us;  the vision of the common good.

     Is that real?  Is it evidence based?  Those aren't the kind of questions we bring to qualitative visions of shared goodness.  Because this vision of the common good is a calling to us. It's the living Word of God encountering us and asking us "is this something we would invest our heart, soul, body, and mind in seeing happen?" "Do we believe in the Truth of it?" "Would we commit our lives to it?"

      This is how we as Lutherans at Mount Tabor in the Rocky Mountain Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America say the living God addresses us through the ancient texts of the Old and New Testament. And how we live our response to God's calling will be the answer to what we believe in.  

                                                  Pr. David