If you use e-mail, you know how easy it can be to misaddress an e-mail note, and have it go to the wrong person, or come back to you undelivered.   You have to get the address exactly right.  Consider the case of the Illinois man who in the dead of winter left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida.  His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him in Florida the next day.   When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick e-mail.  Since he couldn't find the scrap of paper where he had written her e-mail address, he decided to type it from memory.  Unfortunately, he missed one letter and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher's wife whose husband had died just the day before.  When the grieving widow checked her e-mail, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream and fell to the floor in a dead faint.  At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:

Dearest wife, just got checked in.  Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow.
P.S.  Sure is hot down here.

 It can be easy to get the wrong message, can't it?  And not just with e-mail.  It even happens with the Bible.  It can be easy to misunderstand what God is trying to communicate to us through this book.    No wonder, when some of the stories are as wild as the one about Noah and his sons.  Here's Noah, our hero, settling down to be a farmer after the flood, and he promptly starts over imbibing on the fruit of the vine.  One day he passes out on the floor of his tent buck naked.  His youngest son happens by, and he apparently gets a big kick out of his father's predicament so he goes back to tell his brothers, leaving nothing to the imagination, and enjoying every moment of the telling.  The other brothers try to preserve what little dignity their father may have left, but still Noah finds out what happened and what his son had said.  So he curses his youngest son, and praises the other two.
 
 Many of our misunderstandings about the Bible come from assumptions that we bring with us into the Bible reading.  We may think, for instance, that we already know what it says.  So we just read on the surface and don't try to understand deeper meanings.  We may also bring to the reading our own prejudices and stereotypes and sort of write them in as we read.   And that's exactly what has happened with this story.
 
This story about Noah and his sons is descriptive, not prescriptive.  It's a story, not a command.  But for hundreds of years, people have been using the second half of this passage as a prescription for life.  Here's how it works:   It's traditionally believed that Ham, the father of Canaan, was dark skinned, and was the father of all dark-skinned people in the world.   So, when power-hungry light-skinned people read this story, they come to the part where Noah curses his dark-skinned son, and have taken that as the word of God for them.   For hundreds of years, people have used that faulty interpretation to justify their hateful and violent behavior.   To justify oppression of entire races and cultures, and to justify slavery.    God has decreed, they say, that some races are superior and others are inferior.   “See, it's in the Bible!”

 But God didn't send that e-mail.  This is the enraged, embarrassed, hung-over Noah speaking, not the Lord.   The story is descriptive, not prescriptive.   No one has the right to use the Bible to beat someone else into submission.   Not with this passage of Scripture or any other passage for that matter.  But as Shakespeare once said,  even “The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”

 If you read the Bible and it seems to elevate you above someone else or if it reinforces what you already believe but it doesn't challenge your thinking, you may want to take another look at how you are interpreting what the Bible says.  Be careful not to read into Scripture your own version of the truth.  Let the Bible teach you God's truth.
 
 A second way of bringing false assumptions into the Bible by looking at the characters of the Bible as being larger than life.  When we read the Bible with that assumption, the characters seem worlds apart from us, not only in time and culture, but also in quality.  They are the super heroes of antiquity.   They are head and shoulders above us common folks, after all their stories made it into the Bible.  They are people of great faith and strength.  Unlike us, they have the uncanny ability to hear God's voice and the faith to follow God's leading.    They have the persistence and fortitude to bring to reality some unbelievable schemes.  They are saints.
 
 Then, without warning, the Bible throws us a curve, and shows us Noah, the man who walked with God passed out drunk in his tent.  The man who was so sure of God's call that he didn't care who made fun of him.   The man who saved humanity from extinction.   Suddenly we see that Noah, our hero, the man who walked with God, walked on feet of clay just like we do.

 So, what happened to knock our hero off his pedestal?

Well, Noah was a man of firsts.  He was the first to build a giant floating zoo.  He was the first to plant a vineyard, the first to taste wine.  And I believe he was the first to discover how to numb the pain that comes from living life.  Think what Noah has been through.  The adrenaline rush of hearing God's call.  The ridicule of his neighbors.  The arduous task of building the ark.   The stress of managing all those animals.  The trauma of all the devastation as the flood waters rose.    The noise and stench of the animals, along with the complaining of the crew.  The fear of the storm, and the fear of God's anger.    He and his family are the only people left in the world.  Now that he has hit dry land, and the world stretches out before him, what does he do for an encore?  No doubt he has a desire to escape not only the memories of the past but also numb his thoughts about the loneliness and boredom of the days to come.  Noah has a case of post-traumatic stress syndrome of biblical proportions.   In the midst of the crisis itself, he was the world's biggest hero.  Now that the crisis is past, he has to live with himself again.  Live with his feelings and struggles.  His wife and kids and granddads.   And nobody else.
 
 I suspect many in this room can relate to Noah and his desire to dull the pain of the past, or forget the responsibility of the present and future.  For instance, a father of four boys was told by his wife that they were about to have their fifth.  The husband informed his wife that at that moment he felt like he could use one.  (parables, etc. 19.4.5)

 In a similar vein I'm intrigued by what Leith Anderson says about Baby Boomers and depression:  “depression has increased tenfold in the last two decades as people struggle to cope with the disappointments of unmet expectations.  Not the least of these disappointments is the boomers’ failure to meet their own expectations.  They have found themselves in a highly competitive world with 77,000,000 others vying for the same jobs, houses, and money.  Many peaked early in their careers and have nowhere else to go.”  (Anderson, Dying for Change, 84)

 That's one way to describe Noah.  He peaked early—he was only 600 years old when the flood came—and then had nowhere to go.  What do you do for an encore?

 In this less-than-complimentary scene, we see a man who seems very different from the man who built the ark, yet this is Noah too, and I think in the long run we can find even more inspiration from this side of Noah, than we could if we only had the other Noah to observe.  The other Noah just feeds our misperception that the biblical characters are different from us.  But, this second Noah has a lot of company among earthlings.  For there are many who have peaked in their career and then have fallen on their faces in the mud in one way or another. The stories of Dwight Gooden, Daryl Strawberry, Jim Bakker, and Bill Clinton come to mind.  But I suspect this hits closer to home than that for most of us. Most of us have habits or histories that we'd prefer to keep behind the tent flap.   And as long as no one peeks into the tent, we are able to keep up the illusion of being the wonderful sinless people we wish we were.

 Here's where the good news comes in:  If Noah, our hero, was also just as weak and vulnerable and human as you and I are, then what does that say of us when God calls us like God called Noah?    Can we, too, rise to the challenge of building our own ark in this stormy world when God calls?  Can we, too, trust God to be faithful when God calls?  Can we, like Noah, take great risks for the sake of God's kingdom and expect to experience great things as a result?  Will we, too, be remembered for walking with God, rather than for our failures and weaknesses?