Friday after Ash Wednesday: Old Wood and Fences
There was a lot of old wood around the farm.
There was old wood that fixed fences. There was old wood that we used to make gates and chutes and ramps to guide the hogs from their pen up to the truck that would take them to market to be sold. We would hit them and holler at them from the dusty field near the pond around a maze of ramshackle wood to raise them five feet off of the ground into the back of a truck that would haul them to slaughter.
Having grown up during the Great Depression, my father learned that you used what materials you had. We even tried to reuse old rusty nails, if you could pull them out without bending the nail too much, you could use it again. On the farm, you did not buy anything new unless you absolutely had to.
So the fencing that held the pigs was often broken and repaired, over and over again. Barns were patched and re-patched. Machinery was broken and repaired. Gates that led in and out of different pens were often wired together to fix a broken hinge. The gates never did close the same way again.
As we move through those early stories contained in Genesis, we see a world beginning in goodness becoming broken and in need of repair. This breaking always seems to be our doing, because of our pride, somehow our fault. And in a stunning admission, God even goes so far as to say that God regretted ever making humans in the first place. It is as if God had made some decision, saw how the decision played out, then wanted to rewind, to restart, and to perhaps create again. “I can do this better next time,” God might say.
And despite saying out loud that God wanted to start again from the beginning, a clean slate, this God says, in the present here and now, that we will try again. In spite of our regrets and our sorrow at what creation had become, we try again, not from the beginning, but from where we are.
God starts again with one human, Noah, his family, the animals, and a large boat made of wood.
Having worked with the wood that was around me as I grew up, I have to assume that the wood that Noah used was stronger than what we had around the farm. Much of our boards were rotting and breaking, held up by rusty, slightly-bent nails.
The story of Noah during this season of Lent is about sin and redemption. It is about God’s provision for us, that even when everything seems lost, we try again. That ark made of wood provides the way through, much as a cross made of wood is the image of Christian salvation. And even as Noah’s ark traveled through the waters of the flood to reach salvation, the waters of baptism usher the new Christian into a new world, a new reality.
And in the ark, they were all together, all of creation, humans and all animals, packed in one boat. It is an intimate sort of journey, lion and lamb journeying together to their new life.
I admit I was never sure what my father and I were journeying toward. We did not talk much as we ambled around the farm, as we traveled in his pickup truck to the feed store to buy more “supplement” for the hogs, to buy large bags of seed to plant, to buy fertilizer. He wanted me with him, but he did not talk to me. He did not tell me his stories, although I suspected that the stories were there. Strangely enough, he told my friend one of these stories as my friend was leaving for boot camp in the United States Army. I was not even present to hear it. My friend told me the story later.
My father told my friend about how he came quite close to deploying to Normandy during World War II. This was a treacherous time and would have been a difficult passage. He did not say why, but instead, my father wandered around New York, caught pneumonia, and missed the journey. My father’s story of World War II was not a story about a battle, but about wandering.
There are other stories that he never told me directly, tales of his alcoholic father, about him coming home from the Army to be with his father as his father died in the house next to the one in which I grew up. He never told me directly about how he administered the morphine to his father as he lay dying.
These are all stories that I did not hear; I would hear them later, through others.
It did not feel like I had a relationship with my father; it felt more like a journey that we were both on, packed in the same boat, perhaps eyeing each other cautiously, knowing that we were going somewhere, but not sure if it was going to be 40 days or 40 years.
And we were busy fixing broken fence along the way.
