Genesis 9:18-27

The Rev. Megan Collins

Sunday, April 19, 2026

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For the past year and a half, Dave and I have lived in an apartment just down the street from the church.  It was our first home after selling our house when the kids went to college, and we have loved it, but a few months ago we began to think maybe it was time for a change.

So this week, we moved.

To another apartment  . . . just down the hall.

I realize this sounds ridiculous. 

But the new apartment has a great view that looks out over the park. We can see downtown Orlando and way off in the distance, the fireworks from Disney. 

As I reflect back over the past week of moving, I have learned a few things. The first is this: If you are thinking that since you are just moving in the same building that you don’t need to pack, and you can just put stuff in your little wagon one load at a time, you would be wrong. People who heard we were moving earlier in the week kept asking if we needed boxes, or how the packing was going. Packing? We are just going down the hall.

To be fair to our plan, it turns out it can be done without packing. But it will take 25,000 steps up and down the same hall with said wagon, and a whole lot longer than if we had put things in boxes. We also probably should have asked for help, which appears to be a recurring lesson in my life. 

The other thing I learned is that, even for people like Dave and I who mostly like change, change is hard. 

I’m still trying to remember where things are in the new place.  There are a lot of new noises to get used to, like the Amtrak train that comes through in the middle of the night. I used to be able to navigate around my old apartment in the dark but now I trip over things because they aren’t in the same place in the new one. Even little changes, even good changes, like moving apartments, takes time to get used to.

Our lives are full of change.

You move. You change jobs. Your health shifts. 

Your kids and grandkids grow up and are different every week.

Our world is changing constantly, in a lot of ways that are scary, like the war, and how things seem to be moving backward in so many ways.  And in others that are exciting, like airpods that can translate between languages. 

It’s constant change, and we can't control it.

But we do have a choice on what we do in the midst of it. 

We’ll be continuing in our project going through the Bible this morning. (You can see previous messages from this project here). Last week, we left off with the story of Noah. As the story goes, God tells Noah to build a huge boat, which he does, and then he gets on it with his family and a bunch of animals. The world floods, at least as they know it, the water recedes, and Noah and his family return to dry ground to begin a new civilization. 

That’s where the story of Noah in our Sunday School classes ends. That’s all there is, nothing more to see here. But Genesis 9 keeps going. 

Gen 9: 18 The sons of Noah who went out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. 19 These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was peopled. 20 Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard.  21 He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and he lay uncovered in his tent.  22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. 23 Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father; their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness.  24 When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, 25 he said,

“Cursed be Canaan; lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.” 26 He also said,

“Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem, and let Canaan be his slave. 27 May God make space for Japheth, and let him live in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his slave.”

So Noah plants a vineyard, and apparently it goes pretty well, because he has enough grapes to make wine, drink too much of it, and he passes out in his tent. Then we are introduced to his three sons - Ham, Shem and Japheth. The story says Ham comes into the tent, sees “the nakedness of his father” and tells his brothers. Shem and Japheth then come in and cover him up. Then Noah wakes up, realizes what has happened, and blesses Shem, then tells Shem to provide space for Japheth in his future blessing. Then he curses Ham’s son Canaan. 

We have questions.

First, what????

Then, why is Noah so angry, just because Ham saw him naked? A generational curse seems a bit out of proportion to a little embarrassment? 

But when the Bible talks about uncovering nakedness, it doesn’t always just mean nakedness. It usually means, and I’ll keep this as PG as possible, the thing that sometimes happens when there is nakedness. In Leviticus 18, there is a very long section that talks about all the people who you shouldn’t “uncover the nakedness of.”  Specifically, members of your family, like your sister, your grandchildren, your aunt, your and then about your father it says this: “you shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother.”  Yikes. So something incestous may have happened here in the story with Noah.  So it makes sense that Noah would be furious, and want to curse anyone responsible. But why curse Canaan, Ham’s son, who wasn’t even there? Why not just curse Ham? And, at a broader level, why include this story in the Bible at all? Why would someone who was writing things down think, “This is one we’ll want to remember forever.”

There’s actually some answers to these questions on why Canaan, and those answers help us see perhaps why this story is included. We’ll talk about those in just a second, but first, we need to talk about how this text has been horribly misused. Instead of letting the Bible lead them to what it means, some people have come up with their own answer, and it has been catastrophic.

When Noah says “Canaan will be his slave”, nothing is said about race or skin color. But over the centuries, some Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interpreters decided to make a  link between Ham’s descendants and the African people. By the time of the transatlantic slave trade, enslavers used this horrific, distorted interpretation, to claim that black people were destined to be slaves. That it was somehow God’s will. They even renamed slavery the “Curse of Ham.” Now, not only is this morally reprehensible, it is also not in the text, at all. I can’t say this clearly enough. There is nothing in this text to justify the evil of slavery in America. There’s a lot of very strange interpretation that happened to get them there (read more here: https://davidwacks.uoregon.edu/2020/12/30/ham/)

But, for today, we know that a horrific justification of black slavery in America is in no way what this text is about.  So, back to what it does mean. Why this story at all? And why Canaan and not Ham for the curse? And by now you may be wondering, what does all of this have to do with how we respond to change? 

We’re getting there. Just a little later in Genesis, we’ll have another genealogy, and we’ll see that Noah’s son Shem, the one who he blessed, his line of descendants will lead to Abram, who will become Abraham, the one who goes on to enter into a covenant with God, a future patriarch of Israel.  And Abraham will go to a place named . . .  Canaan. The relationship that unfolds between the people of Israel and the people of Canaan is a very complicated one. As we get deeper into the Old Testament, we will need to deal with how biblical texts are being misused in modern day politics, for sure. But even within the Bible itself, this tension between Canaan and Israel is significant. In the same passage from Leviticus 18 that we talked about earlier, the one that talks all about nakedness, it begins by saying:

³ You shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not follow their statutes. ⁴ My ordinances you shall observe, and my statutes you shall keep, following them: I am the Lord your God.”

There is this contrast Leviticus draws between the ways of the people of Canaan and the ways of the people of Israel.  This story then, about Shem and Ham and Noah and Canaan and Japheth is really about a lot so much more than family dynamics. It’s about Shem’s descendant Abraham and the people of Israel, versus Ham’s son Canaan, and the Canaanites. It’s some Biblical foreshadowing to the tension between these two groups of people. The rest of the Old Testament will come back, over and over, to this division between the way of God’s people and the ways of their neighbors, like the Canaanites. If you’ve read the rest of the Old Testament, you’ll know the people of God actually continually mess up in the way they live. So these divisions are more aspirational than actual. But for the people of Israel, this outsiders versus Israel story becomes all they know. 

And then, everything changes. 

We meet a Canaanite again, much later in the Bible, this time in the gospels. It comes up in a conversation between a woman, and Jesus. In the gospel of Mark, he says she is a Syrophencian. But Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience, and he knows just how far back their beef with the Canaanites goes. So in Matthew 15, the woman Jesus meets is a Canaanite. Jesus meets her when she asks that he heal her daughter. And his response is that he was sent to the “lost sheep of Israel.”  But by the end of the story Jesus praises her faith and does what she asks. 

To the Jewish audience Matthew is writing to, something huge has changed.  

With Jesus, suddenly Canaanites, Gentiles, outsiders are included in what God is doing. 

There is this shift in their foundation, a change in everything they are used to. 

So what will they do with this change? The Bible tells us that too.

This is where we get back to what we can do with change too.

After Jesus has died and risen, and the early church has begun, we meet Paul. In Acts 13, this man Paul gets up to give a speech to a group of Israelites, and he starts by saying:

“Fellow Israelites  (because keep in mind, Paul is also Jewish) and others who fear God, listen. 17 The God of this people Israel chose our ancestors . . . 19 After he had destroyed seven peoples in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land as an inheritance . . .

This would be familiar to them. Things haven’t changed. It’s the same story they have known for generations. But then he goes on:

God has brought to Israel a Savior, Jesus, as he promised;  . . . 26 “Brothers and sisters,[f] you descendants of Abraham’s family and others who fear God, to us the message of this salvation has been sent.  . . .47 For so the Lord has commanded us, saying,

‘I have set you to be a light for the gentiles, so that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.’ ”

But now  . . . . it’s changed. 

God is for all people, including the gentiles, the outsiders.

And, in a surprise to no one, not everyone listening to Paul is excited about this change. Not everyone sees it as progress. 

For as long as they could remember, Israel and Canaan stood on opposite sides of the story. But through Jesus, everything is different, and the people of God now includes everyone. 

The Israelites have to decide what to do with this shift.

Will they run from it, push against it, argue for the ways things were, try to burn it all down? Yes, many of them did. 

They acted just like people have always acted when things change, especially when that change is progress that expands who is included. Everytime there is progress for the inclusion of women, or people of other races, or people in the LGTBQ community, there are people who push back, resist, argue for the way things were, who see the change as a threat.

But there is another option for how we can respond to change. 

This is something we can do when we respond to change in the world, and the changes that are in our personal lives.

Look again at Paul, in his speech in the book of Acts. Paul, who was Jewish, who had everything to gain from things just staying the same, from keeping out the Gentiles, 

but he doesn’t resist what’s changing. He doesn’t fight against it. He doesn’t reminisce for the good old days of Israel.  No. Instead, he looks for what God is doing in the change, and faithfully participates in it. That is something we can do too.

In the world right now, with how things are, maybe for many of us, that starts with having the faith to believe that God is here at all. That the horrible things, the war, the violence, the injustice, that those things are not all there is. That God sees what we see. And that the first step to living in this changing and often overwhelming times is to keep looking really hard for God. 

And in our personal lives?

We look for God there too. 

When things change, in your life, when everything you thought was stable starts to move, when the job changes, or the kids grow up, you can run from it. You can push against it. You can reminisce back to the way things were before. Or, you can be like Paul. 

You can look for what God is doing in the midst of the change, and participate in it. 

Not all change comes from God just to teach us something, of course. But no matter what it is, God can do something in you, in the midst of it.  You can ask “where is God in this? And how can I lean in to what God might be doing? Or at least learn something in the process?"

Whether you are experiencing a difficult change in your life, or something positive, or just something simple, like moving to a new apartment down the hall.

The other night as we laid awake in our new apartment listening to the train go by, again, at 2 in the morning, there was an hour or two where I laid awake wondering what to do with this my new changed nighttime reality. (I really do love to sleep). But what if even this small change is making me more flexible, teaching me again to adjust and to adapt, or at least making me a harder sleeper? 

And if this can happen with a small change, like moving apartments, how much more can I grow when bigger changes come? What could God do in me, in my life, if I was open to it, through the bigger shifts? 

God doesn’t send the train at 2am just to teach me things. But maybe God can teach me things in the midst of it. 

So . . . in the small things, and in the big ones, we can ask ourselves these questions:

Where is God in the changes in your life?

Where is God, in the changes in the world? 

And how can you lean in to what God is doing there?