“All in the Family”–Part II: Noah and the Story of Salvation (11/19/06 Sermon)

     One of the most beloved Bible stories—one that everyone knows even if they’ve never opened a Bible is that of Noah and the Ark. Among the first toys that my children received was a toy Ark with a smiling Fisher Price Noah herding smiling animals into it’s crowded hull. We went around the church this week and uncovered several Noah’s Ark play sets, all with the same smiling, cute, cuddly animals inside—alligators resting comfortably next to antelopes and gorillas cavorting with giraffes. As a child I also learned songs about Noah – particularly that one about Noah building the “Arky-Arky” because there was going to be a “floody-floody.”

     It’s a story that, in fact, seems to predate the Bible itself. Other ancient Mesopotamian cultures had flood stories like this—stories like the Gilgamesh epic or the Atrahasis epic which are very similar to the biblical story, where a hero is saved from a major deluge by building a ship at the command of the gods. It’s not surprising that Israel has a similar story, but the story as we find it in the Bible is quite different from the others and, indeed, very different from the cute and cuddly portrayals of it we give to our children.

     Last week we looked at how Adam and Eve, the first humans (or, the first children according to Irenaeus) tried to grow up too fast and rejected God’s offer of growth and maturity. They decided they didn’t need God to govern them, and thus voluntarily chose to do what God had commanded them not to. It was that act of rebellion that caused immature humanity to experience the pain of trying to sustain life on their own terms—the pain of hard work, child-bearing, and comparing themselves to one another. They had, as the apostle Paul would say later, “exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped the creature (themselves) rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25)—the lie being that they were in control.

     As the story of Noah opens in Genesis 6 we see that humanity had not learned from their Fall and the curse it brought upon them. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” Genesis 6:5). The human creatures had refused to acknowledge God as their Creator—refused to honor God as God. The rebellious children of Adam had betrayed God and his intent for creation, selfishly consuming creation rather than being stewards of it.

     What is God’s response? Look at Genesis 6:6 –“the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” The writer paints a picture of God’s heart in these verses. God is not an angry and distant tyrant deity who is throwing a fit because no one will listen to him. God is a parent who is deeply troubled by the alienation of his children’s affection. It is a seemingly hopeless situation that must be dealt with seriously.

     So God, seeing no other options, decides to “blot out” humanity by reversing the creative process. You may recall in Genesis one that one of the first tasks of creation was God’s holding back of the watery chaos—separating land from water, making human habitation possible. Now God sought to unleash the water from its boundaries as a way of sweeping the slate clean and starting over. The great creation experiment had gone terribly awry. The evil “heart” of humankind in verse 5 troubles the “heart” of God in verse 6. God feels pain in his heart for humanity—interestingly, the word “grieve” here in the Hebrew is the same word used in Genesis 3:16 to describe the “pain” of childbirth that Eve would experience—God identifies with the human creation rather than being fully and divinely detached.

     Here’s where the traditional view of God seems to deviate from what the text tells us. Traditionally, most of us have been taught that God is unchanging and fixed in his character and approach to humanity. “God is the same yesterday, today, and forever” we chant. The witness of the Old Testament, however, is that God is anything but a stubborn, stony-faced deity who arbitrarily smites people for minor offenses. The God of Israel is a person and personality—one who celebrates, feels pain, responds to human actions, questions, and pleas for help. Read the Old Testament and you’ll see scenes like Abraham bargaining with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, and God wrestling with Moses about his call—just two of many examples where God is interactive, changeable, influential. God is not captive by a certain set of behavioral rules imposed by popular theology. As Walter Brueggeman puts it, “[God] can change his mind, so that he can abandon what he has made; and he can rescue that which he has condemned.”

     So, it is in deep anguish that God decides to erase creation and start over. Even then, however, God is still open to exceptions. Enter Noah, who was the exception to humanity’s total depravity. Genesis 6:9 tells us that Noah was a “righteous man, blameless in his generation” and one who “walked with God.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that Noah was the epitome of perfection – the phrase “in his generation” may mean simply that Noah wasn’t as bad as everyone else! At any rate, the text seems to indicate that Noah represented a possible alternative to human sinfulness—that Noah might be a kind of “second Adam” through whom God might re-boot the creative process.

God enters into a relationship with Noah, offering him a chance for he and his family to escape the impending flood of judgment. He is instructed to build an ark—a ship five times the size of the Mayflower, a ship with no rudder—essentially a life raft. He is to bring aboard his whole family and two of every kind of animal, male and female. It is a monumental task—essentially the rescue of a remnant of the entirety of creation.

     In contrast to the happy faces on those toy arks, Noah doesn’t really have much to smile about. He knows in advance his neighbors are going to die. We’re never told how he feels about that (in fact, Noah doesn’t say much of anything in the whole story). There’s no indication of what the neighbor’s thought of his building a monstrous boat in the middle of dry ground—no procedural manual on how he gathered all those animals and kept them from devouring each other (or his family). We don’t know what Noah thought as the rains came down, or what he felt when seeing the bodies of his neighbors float past the boat in the midst of the deluge. The story doesn’t tell us…but I’m thinking that smiles were few and far between. We know, in fact, that one of the first things that Noah does when he eventually exits the Ark with his family is to plant a vineyard, make wine and get drunk (Genesis 9:20-21)—a fact that commentator suggests is evidence that Noah was trying to medicate his survivor’s guilt over the whole affair. It is a grim period of pain and suffering for both God and the remnants of his creation.

     Much of the focus that Christians have brought to the story of Noah is directed at trying to verify the historical veracity of the story. Archaeologists have searched for evidence of a world-wide flood (there is no such evidence) or have tried to locate artifacts from the Ark on top of Mt. Ararat. Mesopotamia was subject to widespread flooding, which is the reason that variations on the Noah story appear in ancient writings and mythologies. A flood covering a few dozen square miles would look to ancient peoples as though the “whole world” had been covered in water.

     But the point of the story doesn’t depend on its historical factuality. It is the paradigm for a great journey—a journey from one God-ordained creation that went bad to another God-directed creation that was full of possibility and hope. In fact, if you think about it, the Noah story connects very much with Thanksgiving-like pilgrims who set out on a ship from the Old World to cross the sea to a new one, so Noah’s journey takes humanity from the old creation marked by evil and corruption into a renewed world. The slate had been wiped clean and a new Adam (Noah) had been planted in a new world—a new garden and was instructed to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 8:17).

     But things were not the same in this new creation. Something had changed, but it wasn’t humanity. Despite the horrors of the flood and the pain of judgment, God now understood that the heartsick condition of his human children was a permanent disease. Look at Genesis 8:20-21. Noah built an altar to God after exiting the Ark, but when God smelled the “pleasing odor” of Noah’s sacrifice, “God said in his heart—note the language…here is God again speaking from the heart in the same way he had struggled back in chapter 6– ‘Never again will I curse the ground because of humankind, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood.’ God’s heart still embraces and grieves for his children, but he now recognizes that on their own they are completely hopeless. They are incapable of redeeming themselves because of their rebellious nature, which is easily passed from generation to generation.

     But here’s where God shifts—rather than consign evil humanity to the dustbin, God makes a covenant—a promise. God promises that no matter how evil, corrupt, wicked, and rebellious humanity becomes, God will relent from destroying them. Look at the second part of 8:21—“Never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.” Go to 9:11—“I establish my covenant with you,” God says to Noah and his sons. “Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood.”

In other words, God now promises that he will stay with, put up with, endure, and sustain the whole creation despite the diseased state of the human family. Like a steadfast parent, God decides to love humanity in spite of itself. Instead of pouring out the destructive waters of a flood, God will instead unleash rivers of mercy and springs of living water. God’s heart, hurt as it is by human sinfulness, is even more filled with compassion for his wayward children.

     The “bow” in the sky was to seal this covenant promise of God. Whenever it appeared, God told Noah, God would remember the covenant. The “bow” here, of course, refers to a rainbow, but the word has an even broader implication. It is also representative of a bow that is used to shoot arrows. This bow, however, was relaxed—not poised to unleash God’s weapons, but a sign of God’s promise to keep from shooting arrows of wrath toward his children.

     It is hard to imagine what this promise cost God to make. The rest of the Bible is a testament to God’s infinite patience, discipline, and steadfastness. God’s heart would be grieved many times by human sin and infidelity—things that still grieve God today. Yet, God was willing to take the initiative to pay the price in pain and suffering to stay with us…even to the point of entering into humanity itself.

     The coming of Jesus was the ultimate expression of God’s covenant promise toward humanity. Jesus came as God in the flesh, John tells us at the beginning of his Gospel, to show us how to become children of God—“children born not of natural descent, nor of a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:13). In Christ, God would fully identify with his human children, dwell with them, suffer with them, heal them, teach them…even be victimized by them and killed by them on a cross. Jesus was proof of how far God was willing to go to stick with us and redeem us.

     The Noah story lays the foundation for our understanding of Jesus and of God’s love for us. Even now, we use water at baptism to signify the cleansing of body and spirit that wipes away the old nature of sin in us and makes possible new life in Christ. Jesus would use the sign of water to talk about his mission—most famously in John 4 where he tells the Samaritan woman about the “living water” that he represents—a refreshing, revitalizing, renewing way of life. He talked about God’s Kingdom as a new reality—a new world where justice, mercy, and peace would prevail over the corruption of human sin and worldly power. That Kingdom would be complete at his return.

     In short, he represented in his person the new creation that God had promised from the beginning. As the apostle Paul would put it in 2 Corinthians 5:17 – “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ…”

     See, there is hope for the human family…but that hope does not lie in our own efforts. Hope comes at God’s initiative, through God’s compassion, through God’s sacrifice in Jesus Christ. When we embrace that hope through faith, we can be transformed ourselves and transported to a new world that is full of life.

     On this Thanksgiving Sunday, perhaps what we should be most thankful for is the fact that God has promised to stick with us. Because of that promise, that covenant, it makes sense for us to think hard about our own covenant with God. The Noah story tells us that we are never too far gone to return to a relationship with God. We can reclaim our baptism, let the living water of Christ wash over us again, and find ourselves refreshed by the promises of God. We can be forgiven, we can start over, we can be reborn.

     If you find yourself today feeling like you are about to drown in the depths of despair and sin…know that God has offered you the promise of new creation. All you have to do is reach out a hand and allow him to rescue you. The new creation awaits…and it can happen today.

Click Here for a study guide with daily Scripture readings that go along with this sermon.

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