Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from March 5, 2006

“Untitled”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Genesis 9:8-17

1 Peter 3:13-22

Something about this text doesn’t seem to ring quite true.  It begs the question, “What about the Gulf Coast?  What about the tsunami?”  The promise of the text seems at odds with our recent history and with countless other floods and natural disasters that peppered the history of our fragile planet.  The faithful reconciliation of this text with our lived experience is a challenge.  The images of houses shifted from their foundations, streets clogged with the debris of countless houses destroyed by Katrina and Rita are just too fresh to dismiss.

If you were here on Tuesday evening for our Fat Tuesday celebration, you can recall the images shown by Jane and Newell Curtis from their recent trip to New Orleans.  If you weren’t able to be there, you missed a great time.  Our parish hall was transformed into a mardi gras atmosphere, there was wonderful food, and a very moving presentation from Jane and Newell who are our Connecticut disaster relief coordinators.  So with all of that so fresh in our minds, it is a little difficult to know just what to make of these verses tacked on to the epic of the flood narrative.  The promise of not having any flood destroy the earth just doesn’t ring true.

Yet, we hold on to the story.  It’s one of the most familiar in all of scripture.  Most of us knew it before we could read.  I may be dating myself but I grew up in the age of flannelgraph—those lovely little sticky boards where you could put cut-outs of stuff.  One of my earliest memories of Sunday School was taking all the little critters and sticking them on the ark.  We sang countless verses of the “ants go marching two by two” until we got all the animals that we could think of.  As I got older, there were those folk songs that reminded us about why there weren’t any unicorns.  Remember that one?  As a teenager, I first heard Bill Cosby go, “Voompah!  Voompah!  Voompah!  Noah!”  Remember?  “What’s a cubit?” 

Now, from a strictly practical point of view, I have a little trouble with this story.  I had tended sheep, cows, pigs, goats and horses—there is nothing about having these critters on a boat for forty days that seems remotely like a good idea.  But it all helps to cement this somewhat romantic notion of the flood as a quaint little story that just might be true if that hunk of stuff they found on the top of Mt. Ararat really is the ark.  But the Journal of Biblical Archaeology regularly reminds us readers that the whole proposition is probably a lot of hogwash.

But that’s not to say that there aren’t some factual components to the flood narrative as it appears in Genesis.  History does suggest that there was some big problem with water in the ancient Near East.  There are similar stories that appear in the literature of parallel cultures, most notably the Gilgamesh epic of the Babylonians.  It suggests that when a lot of people tell a similar story, there’s probably some truth to it.

But to focus only on the presence or absence of historical facts, robs the story of precisely what we need in order to reconcile it to our time.  When it’s Israel’s turn to tell the flood story, it is significantly different from the way her neighbors tell it.  See, for Israel and for all the people of faith who claim this book, this is not primarily a story about a flood.  It is the story about a change that is wrought in God that makes possible a new beginning for creation.  As Walter Brueggeman notes in his stunning commentary on Genesis, “The flood narrative faces a basic incongruity of human life.  On the one hand, God has called the world into being to be a faithful covenant partner he has willed unity and harmony and goodness.  On the other hand, it hasn’t happened that way.  God willed a creation ordered by Sabbath rest but it is a recalcitrant creation resistant to the purposes of the very one who created it.”

That incongruity between creation and God is also true of Israel and God.  That fracture is the backdrop for the story.  The flood comes because God is displeased with the evil of his good creation.  Things are not working out as God planned.  So, “Creation, take two!”  When it’s all over and the dry land reappears and Noah and his sons and all the critters exit the boat, the story comes to a conclusion with what we read this morning—it’s God’s covenant.  It’s here that the concept of covenant is introduced for the entire canon of Scripture.

As covenants go, this one is unique in all of Scripture because this is the only one that’s one-sided.  This covenant is all God’s doing.  God asks nothing of Noah; he asks nothing of his sons; he asks nothing of creation.  God says, “This is what I am going to do.”  God makes an irreversible commitment that the post-flood, post-chaos situation is different.  Five times in this text, God says, “Never again.”  What is changed is God.  God has made a decision about the grief and trouble of his own heart.  We know that what has not changed is humanity.  There’s still evil, floods still happen, the world is no less troubled now than it was before the flood.  What has changed is God’s heart.  This relationship between the Creator and the creature is no longer based on retribution.  There’s been a revolution in God’s heart.  That relationship is now based on unwavering grace.

In the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, there were those who said that the devastation wrought on New Orleans were a sign of God’s judgment on the sinfulness of the city.  The truth of this text stands in stark contrast to that interpretation.  The text makes it clear that this covenant is not just with Noah but it was with his sons and with all of creation for all time.  The truth is, if it were up to Noah, the story would never have been told.  You may remember that when Noah’s feet hit dry land, the first thing he did was go out and plant a vineyard and proceed to get completely schnockered.  If you think I’m making this up (as some people at the 8 o’clock service did when they grabbed for their bible), I’ll save you the trouble and tell you that it is in Chapter 9, Verse 20. 

As a pithy apologist, Frederick Buechner noted Noah tried hard to forget but God tied a rainbow around his finger so he would remember, so the rest of us would, too.  This covenant was not just with Noah and, symbolically, with Israel, but with all creation, with all the animals, with all the people of all times in all places, including us.  It’s that same covenant that underlies Jesus’ baptism.  When Jesus was driven out into the wilderness after his baptism to do battle with the powers and principalities that would threaten him throughout his ministry, he had the promise of the covenant that was sealed in his baptism.

That same covenant goes before us, as well.  When it’s our turn to head out into the deep water, the covenant is before as a promise of God’s love and care, God’s grace and goodness.  The promise of this text is that God will not again be provoked no matter how provocative creation becomes.  It is a sustaining image for the beginning of Lent.  In place of the usual images of desert and wilderness and barrenness and devastation, we are offered covenant and rainbow and promise.  Instead of an angry God perpetually building a head of steam just waiting to blow, we have a tender God promising to stand with all creation for time eternal.

So when it’s our turn to head out into the desert to do battle with our own demons and the demons of the world, the promise is ours.  It goes out ahead of us when life is unfair, when life is unraveling.  That promise is ahead of us when death comes out of turn, when illness robs our days and haunts our nights.  That promise is ahead of us when we are tempted to judge others on the basis of what we see or what we fear.  Never again are we left to do battle on our own.  Never again are we abandoned.

Walter Brueggeman wrote, “We are fearful folks and we dwell in the midst of a fearful people; fearful of our world falling apart in terror and moral decay; fearful of too many dangers, toils and snares; fearful of not doing well, of being found out, of being left out, of being abandoned, of our own shadow.  Then we hear, astonishingly, in the midst of our fearfulness, your tender voice saying, ‘Do not fear.  I am with you in wealth and in poverty, in success and failure, for better or for worse.’  So we rally around that newness because it is both our hope and our work, a fearless newness into which we are immersed is beyond our expectation and, yet, it is offered in this covenant as a free and joyful gift.”  Amen.