Today's Scripture Reading (June 27, 2021): Genesis 9
August 13, 1961, is known as Barbed Wire Sunday. The night before,
August 12, an order had been signed by East German officials to erect a wall
between East and West Germany in an effort to stop the migration of people out of the East into
the West. And the fulfillment of the order was swift. On August 13, 1961, construction crews were already
hard at work tearing up roads and erecting temporary and barbed-wire barriers that would later be replaced with a wall. Overnight,
the world changed; what had existed on August 12, 1961, was no longer the
dominant reality on August 13.
At the time of Barbed Wire Sunday, I was only a year
old. My reality is that by the time I was ready to be
educated on European geography, Germany had disappeared. The European nation had been replaced by East Germany, a nation that existed in the orbit of the Soviet Union and the Communist Bloc, and West Germany, a country allied with the Western European nations like France. The separation of Germany, which
had been a reality since the end of World War II, was now symbolized by a wall
that surrounded West Berlin. Rumors of German reunification circulated, but few
could see any way that that it would happen. East and West Germany were our reality,
and no one could seem to see Germany in any other way.
And then, on November 9, 1989,
almost as suddenly as the building of the wall, the wall fell. While August 13,
1961, is known as "Barbed Wire Sunday," November 9, 1989, is remembered
as "The Night the Wall Came Down." Just as the reality changed on
August 13, 1961, we woke up to a different world on November 10, 1989. And
suddenly, German reunification seemed like it might be a possibility. Less than
a year after "The Night that the Wall Came Down," East and West Germany
ceased to exist, replaced by a reunified Germany.
Noah stepped out of the Ark after
the flood and was confronted by a very different world from the one that had existed
before the flood. The civilization that the descendants of Adam had built had
been wiped out. There were no cities, no businesses or organizations, no
buildings, and all of the everyday things that Noah had likely depended on in
the first 600 years of his life, were now gone. Now, Noah had to learn to do
things differently, and he had to grapple with what it meant to be alone, with only
his family to depend on for help.
In the much-maligned 2014 movie,
Noah, the builder of the Ark, is depicted as a man with severe mental and
emotional issues, suffering from a self-directed angst that was a direct result
of being the only survivor of a worldwide disaster. It was a different take on
this religious icon but not an interpretation without merit. I'm not sure that
any of us would be on stable mental or emotional ground if we were the only
survivors of a worldwide disaster.
God meets Noah as he steps out of
the Ark, and his instructions are the same as he had given to Adam; "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill
the earth." Don't worry about the
rebuilding of society; we will leave that to your descendants. Your job is to
start to repopulate the earth, knowing that every child will have a critical
role to play in the rebuilding of the society into something that was,
hopefully, better than the one that was destroyed.
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Genesis 10
Personal Note: Happy 62nd Anniversary to
my Mom and Dad.
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