Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
Why are ye so fearful?
It is a question for us. Ours is the culture of Humbaba. Humbaba? Who or what is Humbaba? He is a figure from the great Sumerian epic poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Humbaba is said to be the guardian of the forest which might make him the prototype of Smokey the Bear, protecting the forest from fire, or an appropriate mascot for environmentalists opposed to the ravaging of the forest by clear-cutting. But he is also said to be “the evil in the land,”a terrifying force of nature, we might say, and, intriguingly “a battering ram.” He is in many ways indescribable. A seemingly odd collection of images, to be sure, but ones which are largely summed up in the idea of Humbaba as belonging to “the fearful uncertainty in things.”
For the Sumerian world, the world of Mesopotamia, some 5,000 or more years ago, is perhaps more like our world than what we would care to imagine. For despite our naive over-confidence in technology, a fearful uncertainty lies at the heart of our culture. Apart from the technophiles who persist in thinking that technology is the future and will solve all our problems, we are really no longer quite so “assured of certain certainties,” as T.S. Eliot puts it, no longer quite so “impatient to assume the world.” We are, as he suggests in the Journey of the Magi, “no longer at ease.” That is, I think, a good thing.
The image of Humbaba as “a battering ram” is most suggestive. Humbaba is one of the images of chaos for the Sumerian culture, a culture which like ours produced an amazing array of practical and technological accomplishments, unrivaled in scope until the modern world of industrial and digital progress, with all of its attendant problems. They were the first, historically speaking, though they had their counterparts in the cultures of ancient China, India, and Egypt – all river cultures – to invent things like irrigation, therefore not being defined by the givenness of the land but figuring out how to bring water from the river to arid ground making it fertile; the first to invent sailing, no longer limited to the directional flow of rivers; the first to develop agriculture and the tools associated with it which allowed for settling on the land; the first to build cities with walls and buildings out of bricks, requiring the use of fire to harden clay, and so on and so on. But, perhaps, most importantly and as belonging to these marvels of human ingenuity; they were the first to invent writing.
