The Peak of Rebellion

The Peak of Rebellion
Genesis 6: 1-4

We had a friend in England who had been sexually abused on an ongoing basis by her uncle, who was a minister. The abuse had happened when she was a little girl (she was then in her forties), but all her life she had been trying to come to terms with the effects of that experience. She had indeed done much coming to terms, but the awfulness of the experience, the pain of it, and the effects of it still lived with her. The coming to terms continued. The grim thing is that her story is not an unusual one (except perhaps in the way the abuse had born strange fruit in her capacity to empathize with other people in their suffering). The other day one of my colleagues declared casually that a third of the people in the average congregation had been abused in some way. It seemed an unlikely statistic, but then I remembered the two occasions when men made advances on me when I was a young teenager. I was older than our friend, and these were not members of my family or ministers (though one was my math teacher), so maybe that made it easier to resist. My colleague was protesting that people who write about the Bible don’t mention this fact about abuse, which will have affected so many of their readers. So here I am mentioning it, because the Bible mentions it. Typically, the Bible talks about how life is...