Lent 1, Year B
February 26, 2012
Genesis 8:8-17
Depending on what sort of person you are, you might create two different headlines from the story of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood from Genesis. If you are a glass half-empty sort of person it would be something like “God Destroys World” and if you are a glass half-full sort of person it might be something like “God Gives World Another Chance.” But neither headline would be complete.
Read one way, this story of the flood is a horrendous one about evil and punishment. With only one family excepted, the entire population of the earth is evil and no good. A horde of animals along with this one family are holed up in a dark, smelly, crowded boat on what must have been a scary ride on a raging sea. Every other person and creature is drowned in the waters sent by an angry and punishing God. And then it finally ends and they are sent out to start all over again. To create houses, forage for food, forever reminded of this horrible catastrophe as they plod through the mud and muck and rubble of the flood.
But that tends not to be the way we read the story. All that disturbing stuff makes us uncomfortable and we’d generally prefer not to grapple with it. And so we gloss over it and make the story about doves and rainbows and paint it on our children’s nursery walls. That’s pretty much where the people that picked the verses for our lectionary this morning put us. They’ve left out the entire context of the story and bring us in just as everyone has safely disembarked from the ark to begin their new lives. Just as that rainbow makes its appearance.
Now please don’t get me wrong. I am not meaning to denigrate rainbows. The last time I saw a rainbow I was so startled and entranced that I practically ran my car off the road so I could take a picture of it on my cell phone. I love rainbows and everything ROY G. BIV just as much as my 8 year old daughter, and that’s saying a lot. But I think that a big part of what gives rainbows their beauty and magnificence is the dreary rain and gloomy sky and intimidating thunder and lightning that precedes them.
Sometimes you just can’t have the second half without the first half. The glass can only be half full if it is also half empty. Just like scientifically we can’t have rainbows appear in the sky without first having rain, with our story this morning the only way to get to the real meaning and truth of the rainbow is to first suffer through the flood.
To truly understand our reading for this morning we have to know the context, and it is not pretty. The world has taken a dastardly turn since its creation. Only 5 chapters before God begins plans for the flood, God created the earth and every living creature on it and declared it “very good.” But here we are, on measly page 6 of my Bible and already the Lord is “sorry that he had made humankind on the earth” and is “grieved to his heart.” Humanity has so completely devolved that God is ready to blot out all of creation.
Now just so you don’t think God was being spiteful and vengeful and poor humankind was just minding its own business and totally undeserving of God’s wrath, it might make you feel better to hear that we are told early on in this story that “the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth” and “every inclination of the thoughts of people’s hearts was only evil continually.” It’s probably worth noting that God’s two rules for Noah’s family after the flood were that they should not murder and they should not eat animals while still alive. If those two instructions were pretty much God’s first thoughts for this surviving human remnant, I’d agree that the world was not up to very good things.
And so God is sorry that he made humankind, bitterly grieved by the utter betrayal of the creatures he made. Only Noah has somehow remained uncorrupted and peaceful. And so God decides to destroy in order to recreate. To wipe the slate clean and begin pretty much anew.
But somewhere in the tempest of the waters and the booming of the thunder and the fearful cries of the survivors and the devastating results of this first holocaust, God changes. God makes a new promise, a new covenant with the creatures of the earth.
And it’s that moment that turns this story from being about evil and punishment to being about something else completely. That is the moment when our vision turns from half-empty to half-full.
God knows well that there is no hope for this post-flood world. God knows we can’t change, not for long anyway. Human beings are the same at the end of this story as they were at the beginning. One page later the people are already building the tower of Babel so they can reach the heavens and become like God. A few more pages and we get Jacob tricking Esau. Then there’s Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery in Egypt. Then the community of people freed from slavery in Egypt worshipping the golden calf. David lusting after Bathsheba and plotting her husband’s death.
It goes on and on. We disappoint God, we break God’s heart – over and over and over again. God knew it would be this way, and yet God entered this new covenant with creation -- God made a promise to never again seek to restore the creation through destruction. People haven’t changed, but God has. God chooses relationship over retribution. From now on, God’s restoration, God’s re-creation, happens through God’s love.
Now sometimes I find myself waiting for the “if.” God will be faithful if…. God will love me if…. God will invite me to come close if…. But there is no “if” in this story. There’s no “if” in our stories. God promises to be a faithful partner. Period.
This is the promise that echoes throughout the Bible. God promises no more flood to destroy the world to Noah, a family to Abraham and Sarah, a homeland to Jacob, the law to Moses, a son to Mary, the Holy Spirit to the disciples. But all of these boil down to the same thing. God will be our God and we will be God’s people. God will be in relationship with us. No matter what. The end of our story with God does not depend on us.
Sometimes when the Noah story comes up the follow-up questions involve a lot of wariness. If God promised not to ever again send a destructive flood, then what’s up with [insert your disaster here]? But that rainbow was never a promise of no more clouds, or no more rain, or even no more floods. I think most of us here this morning have had some experience of riding on that ark, tossing and turning in those violent waters. That rainbow didn’t mean that bad things wouldn’t happen to us. It meant that the bad things are not rooted in God’s ill will toward us. There will be darkness, but the darkness is not from God. The light and color that prevail over the darkness are what comes from God.
All in all, I think this ends up being a good story for the first Sunday of Lent. We hear a lot about sin during this season. For 6 weeks we’ll be surrounded by Church at its most penitential. You are dust, a worm and no man, says the Ash Wednesday liturgy. And the Great Litany this morning is chock full of all that. But Lent isn’t about us overcoming our sinfulness so that we can be close to God. We just can’t keep that up, as God realized after the Flood. But Lent can be a time to come closer to God by realizing how close God is to us. A time to acknowledge ourselves as belonging the God, a time to reach out and take hold of that beautiful promise of God. Because Lent leads to Easter, the cross leads to the resurrection, just as surely as the flood leads to the rainbow.
I’ll end with a fitting Native American proverb that God very kindly placed in my path yesterday at the Museum of the American Indian: “The soul would have no rainbow if the eye had no tears.” Amen.
February 26, 2012
Genesis 8:8-17
Depending on what sort of person you are, you might create two different headlines from the story of Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood from Genesis. If you are a glass half-empty sort of person it would be something like “God Destroys World” and if you are a glass half-full sort of person it might be something like “God Gives World Another Chance.” But neither headline would be complete.
Read one way, this story of the flood is a horrendous one about evil and punishment. With only one family excepted, the entire population of the earth is evil and no good. A horde of animals along with this one family are holed up in a dark, smelly, crowded boat on what must have been a scary ride on a raging sea. Every other person and creature is drowned in the waters sent by an angry and punishing God. And then it finally ends and they are sent out to start all over again. To create houses, forage for food, forever reminded of this horrible catastrophe as they plod through the mud and muck and rubble of the flood.
But that tends not to be the way we read the story. All that disturbing stuff makes us uncomfortable and we’d generally prefer not to grapple with it. And so we gloss over it and make the story about doves and rainbows and paint it on our children’s nursery walls. That’s pretty much where the people that picked the verses for our lectionary this morning put us. They’ve left out the entire context of the story and bring us in just as everyone has safely disembarked from the ark to begin their new lives. Just as that rainbow makes its appearance.
Now please don’t get me wrong. I am not meaning to denigrate rainbows. The last time I saw a rainbow I was so startled and entranced that I practically ran my car off the road so I could take a picture of it on my cell phone. I love rainbows and everything ROY G. BIV just as much as my 8 year old daughter, and that’s saying a lot. But I think that a big part of what gives rainbows their beauty and magnificence is the dreary rain and gloomy sky and intimidating thunder and lightning that precedes them.
Sometimes you just can’t have the second half without the first half. The glass can only be half full if it is also half empty. Just like scientifically we can’t have rainbows appear in the sky without first having rain, with our story this morning the only way to get to the real meaning and truth of the rainbow is to first suffer through the flood.
To truly understand our reading for this morning we have to know the context, and it is not pretty. The world has taken a dastardly turn since its creation. Only 5 chapters before God begins plans for the flood, God created the earth and every living creature on it and declared it “very good.” But here we are, on measly page 6 of my Bible and already the Lord is “sorry that he had made humankind on the earth” and is “grieved to his heart.” Humanity has so completely devolved that God is ready to blot out all of creation.
Now just so you don’t think God was being spiteful and vengeful and poor humankind was just minding its own business and totally undeserving of God’s wrath, it might make you feel better to hear that we are told early on in this story that “the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth” and “every inclination of the thoughts of people’s hearts was only evil continually.” It’s probably worth noting that God’s two rules for Noah’s family after the flood were that they should not murder and they should not eat animals while still alive. If those two instructions were pretty much God’s first thoughts for this surviving human remnant, I’d agree that the world was not up to very good things.
And so God is sorry that he made humankind, bitterly grieved by the utter betrayal of the creatures he made. Only Noah has somehow remained uncorrupted and peaceful. And so God decides to destroy in order to recreate. To wipe the slate clean and begin pretty much anew.
But somewhere in the tempest of the waters and the booming of the thunder and the fearful cries of the survivors and the devastating results of this first holocaust, God changes. God makes a new promise, a new covenant with the creatures of the earth.
And it’s that moment that turns this story from being about evil and punishment to being about something else completely. That is the moment when our vision turns from half-empty to half-full.
God knows well that there is no hope for this post-flood world. God knows we can’t change, not for long anyway. Human beings are the same at the end of this story as they were at the beginning. One page later the people are already building the tower of Babel so they can reach the heavens and become like God. A few more pages and we get Jacob tricking Esau. Then there’s Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery in Egypt. Then the community of people freed from slavery in Egypt worshipping the golden calf. David lusting after Bathsheba and plotting her husband’s death.
It goes on and on. We disappoint God, we break God’s heart – over and over and over again. God knew it would be this way, and yet God entered this new covenant with creation -- God made a promise to never again seek to restore the creation through destruction. People haven’t changed, but God has. God chooses relationship over retribution. From now on, God’s restoration, God’s re-creation, happens through God’s love.
Now sometimes I find myself waiting for the “if.” God will be faithful if…. God will love me if…. God will invite me to come close if…. But there is no “if” in this story. There’s no “if” in our stories. God promises to be a faithful partner. Period.
This is the promise that echoes throughout the Bible. God promises no more flood to destroy the world to Noah, a family to Abraham and Sarah, a homeland to Jacob, the law to Moses, a son to Mary, the Holy Spirit to the disciples. But all of these boil down to the same thing. God will be our God and we will be God’s people. God will be in relationship with us. No matter what. The end of our story with God does not depend on us.
Sometimes when the Noah story comes up the follow-up questions involve a lot of wariness. If God promised not to ever again send a destructive flood, then what’s up with [insert your disaster here]? But that rainbow was never a promise of no more clouds, or no more rain, or even no more floods. I think most of us here this morning have had some experience of riding on that ark, tossing and turning in those violent waters. That rainbow didn’t mean that bad things wouldn’t happen to us. It meant that the bad things are not rooted in God’s ill will toward us. There will be darkness, but the darkness is not from God. The light and color that prevail over the darkness are what comes from God.
All in all, I think this ends up being a good story for the first Sunday of Lent. We hear a lot about sin during this season. For 6 weeks we’ll be surrounded by Church at its most penitential. You are dust, a worm and no man, says the Ash Wednesday liturgy. And the Great Litany this morning is chock full of all that. But Lent isn’t about us overcoming our sinfulness so that we can be close to God. We just can’t keep that up, as God realized after the Flood. But Lent can be a time to come closer to God by realizing how close God is to us. A time to acknowledge ourselves as belonging the God, a time to reach out and take hold of that beautiful promise of God. Because Lent leads to Easter, the cross leads to the resurrection, just as surely as the flood leads to the rainbow.
I’ll end with a fitting Native American proverb that God very kindly placed in my path yesterday at the Museum of the American Indian: “The soul would have no rainbow if the eye had no tears.” Amen.
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