Ham It Up

I put a video together for my wife with clips of the family and in one clip our grandson Matthew hams it up for the camera, ignoring his brother and friends.

Telling him what a ham he is drew a blank, since he had never heard the expression.

And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. - Genesis 9:27

In today's reading, Ham enters his father's tent to see him naked and he tells his brothers.   I can picture him laughing and if he had access to modern technology,  Noah's butt would have been tweeted and texted to the world.

Of course, there wasn't much to the world back then, so telling the brothers was not much different from telling everyone.

Somehow Noah was conscious enough in his stupor to know what Ham did, so he cursed his son Canaan. 

While this explains the enmity between the Isrealites and Canaanites, it seems like an extreme measure for the crime of peeping in in dad.  But perhaps we are a bit too immunized by media, surrounded as we are by all sorts of public displays of what used to be private. 

Shame is dead and so any disgust experienced by those among us who "are not that modern" as my mom used to say, is considered a sign of old age.

There is a common ground here that I feel we need to respect.  Not all peoples have the same values, customs and beliefs, so shouldn't we respect them as we seek respect ourselves?

Ham's sin was to violate his father's privacy and share what he discovered with others.  I get that.  I would br angry too.

I'm afraid most won't get it. 

More to come...