Rev. Betsy Aldrich Garland
March 1, 2009
Genesis 9:8-17

God’s Offer We Cannot Refuse

At the RI Conference UCC board meeting on Thursday, we signed on to a resolution about global warming that came from the Connecticut Conference.  Their theological underpinnings, statements of fact, and calls for action had a sense of urgency to them:  The polar ice caps are melting; sea levels are rising!  We read daily about too much water in some parts of the world, resulting in more frequent tsunamis and hurricanes, and too little water in other parts of the world, resulting in drought and death of crops and livestock. 

All in all, this sounds like an appropriate time for us to consider the quintessential mythic water catastrophe of Noah and The Flood.  The story has been watered down to a Fisher Price play station with a bearded Noah, a not-so-seaworthy, bursting-at-the-seams ark, and cute little animals – two of each kind – that can be marched up and down a plastic gangway. 

But, if you go back to your Bible and read the Genesis account of Noah and The Flood, you realize that this is the G-rated version of an R-rated story with graphic images of violence that evolves over four chapters.  Beginning in Genesis, chapter 6, we read that God is

“...sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and [the corruption and violence] grieved him to his heart.”  So God says, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created – people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 

Only Noah and his family found favor in God’s eyes.  So God instructs Noah how to build an ark – 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide by 30 cubits high – and gives him a list of whom to bring aboard.  The rains come, not unlike the rain we had Friday night when I was working on this sermon, and float the ark, and submerge the mountains 15 cubits deep.

The Great Flood covers the earth for months.  In the R-rated version of this story, we can imagine the death and devastation.  Some of you will remember the old Bill Cosby monologue when God says to a skeptical Noah who is getting grief from his neighbors about the ark in his driveway, “How long can you tread water?”  Obviously not long enough.  Death by drowning is feared second only to death by fire.  It would not have been a pretty sight.  And all because of God’s anger in the face of our ancestors’ wickedness. 

We debate endlessly in the media about the morality of waterboarding.  Yet we don’t discuss how to love a God who drowns everyone and everything!  We have this theological problem – how to reconcile a loving God with The Flood.

We could suppose that the story emerged out of ancient memories of ice ages and global melting cycles, passed down through the centuries as oral history.  I imagine ancient Yarwists trying to make sense of an unpredictable world – women chatting in the Red Tent or while stirring stew pots over an open fire; men sharing opinions of world events at the village gate.  And I picture Priestly writers bent over their manuscripts trying to make theological sense out of chaos.

We read in Genesis that we are made in God’s image.  But, in practice, we make God in our image.  So, we can understand God’s anger.  We, too, have been dismayed by our Frankensteins and anxious to wipe them out and start over.  We, too, look for the easy out when things get difficult.  We, too, run out on our church families when there is conflict.  But Isaiah reminds us that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and our ways are not God’s ways (Isa. 55:8).

In chapter eight, the ark finally touches bottom, and Noah and his family – and his animal menagerie – come ashore to solid ground and make burnt offerings to God – of course, one might ask where they found the dry wood and which of the limited supply of creatures they would have been willing to sacrifice – God has a change of heart and God says,

“I will never again curse the ground because of humankind,
for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth;
nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done” (Gen. 8:21b). 

Creation is not perfect – but God will work with us on our behavior problems.  And to show that he means it, in the lesson for today, God establishes a covenant with Noah and Noah’s descendents and all living creatures.

“When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth” (Gen. 8:16). 

Although we can take some comfort in the rainbow, in this divine speech, God makes clear that God has placed the rainbow in the sky, not to remind us, but to remind God of the covenant, and not just for us, mind you, but for all life and for all generations .

Covenants, sworn, formalized agreements between two parties, often between unequal parties, such as God and the Israelites, were common in the ancient world – but they generally were conditional.  Rulers would establish an agreement with their people that they would provide A, B, and C as long as the people would keep the X, Y, and Z stipulations of the covenant. 

Here, what is significant about the covenant with Noah, the first of several covenants in the Hebrew Bible, is that God’s covenant is unconditional.  In spite of our violence, God will keep up God’s end of the agreement – an offer we cannot refuse.  In fact, God doesn’t even ask our opinion or require anything of us. 

Now, clearly God didn’t have Katrina and New Orleans in mind and wasn’t promising to eliminate natural disasters in this covenant.  These are part of the natural life cycle on earth, not as punishment by an angry God.

So what was God promising?  God was promising that even though God could wipe out every living thing, God was not going to do that – ever again.  In spite of our poisoning the earth, warring with each other, and neglecting our responsibility to care for one another, God will show us mercy.  The magazine Homiletics [1] puts it this way, “God’s grace bridles God’s justice.”  In other words, God’s loving kindness holds God’s temper in check.  The rainbow is God’s reminder of that truth:  God is for us, not against us, and will be for all eternity.

The Apostle Paul makes that point eloquently in his letter to the Romans when he writes about the persecutions he and others are experiencing:

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers,
nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth,
nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us
from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom.8:38-39).

So, this Noah story is important to our understanding of what human beings are like – sinful, greedy, self-serving at our worst – and what God is like – patient, merciful, loving in spite of our wickedness.  Chaos is overcome by covenant, once and for all.  If we choose to be made in God’s image, then, according to the Genesis account, we also can choose to extend grace to each other.

Yes, we live in an unjust world:  Evil people fly planes made bombs into twin towers.  Greedy people write bad mortgages and raid our retirement savings.  Oblivious people make policies that separate immigrant families.  Sick people abuse our children.  We are wounded physically and emotionally, even onto death.  We are quick to anger and resentment and judgment.  Who would not want to get even?  We want God’s justice to make it right.  But God has sworn off violence:  “Never again will I destroy....”

Now, we are the ones who want the flood, but God gives us the blood – the blood of Christ.  We want retribution, but God gives us a rainbow.  We want a tsunami, but God gives us an ark.  We want a sword, but God gives us the cross. [2]  These are our tools to mediate justice on behalf of others, even those who have sinned against us.

In the film Evan Almighty (2007), God says,

“Let me ask you something. 
If someone prays for patience, you think God gives him patience? 
Or does he give him the opportunity to be patient? 
If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage,
or does he give him opportunities to be courageous? 
If someone prayed for the family to be closer,
do you think that God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings,
or does he give them opportunities to love each other?”

We have a choice.  We can choose the flood, or we can choose the rainbow.  We can choose destruction, or we can choose grace.

Last Sunday, Transfiguration Sunday, we learned about light.  This Sunday let us remember that it is light shining through water-laden skies that creates a rainbow.  On this, our first Sunday in Lent, we are wont to hurry to the happy ending of resurrection.  But Lent takes us to the cross first.

Let us remember that God is for us and accompanies us in all our times of trial – even

as we seek to mediate God’s grace in a chaotic world.

Amen.

[1] Theological Performance Art, March – April 2009, Vol. 21, pp.9
[2] Paraphrased from Homeletics, op sit.