July 28, 2024 Genesis 9:8-17 Series B
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God, our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who loves you with his very life. Amen.
I have here a safety vest, one of these hi-vis jobber kinda things. I’ve always thought it was cool how bright they are, like, it doesn’t really make sense how that works. Anway, this one is worn by members of the Lutheran Church Early Response Teams or LERT. Lert is a program where congregations train and then send people to assist our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ when they experience a disaster. Assistance ranges from cleaning up brush and limbs following wind storms, to mucking out basements after floods, to helping reroof after a fire.
I went through the process and that’s how I got this cool thing here. In the training seminar, a huge emphasis is rightly on safety. How to not do dumb things after a natural disaster. For example, don’t put your hand in a hole, you don’t know what could be in it, something pokey, or a snake, or a live wire. They talk about how to avoid hazards so you don’t get hurt while trying to help someone else. That’s the reason for these thingies, stay safe.
This has been a year for rain, and praise God for that, but in some places in our great state, there has been too much rain, and some severe flooding. I pray that you never have to experience it, but cleaning up after a flood is a very challenging endeavor. First, the water itself as it recedes is dangerous. It can be filled with diseases and other contaminants, sewer for example, and you want to avoid that. Also, receding flood waters can move all kinds of things, causing more problems.
And then after that, comes the mold. Mold growing in basements, on furniture, on the very ground, producing spores that can make you sick. It’s not a pleasant experience. Which is why the LERT program is such a blessing, helping people work through some of the worst experiences.
I think that the way we talk about Noah and his journey on the Ark is not very helpful most of the time. Like, we use it as a kids story, looking at all the pretty animals lined up two by two in order to go on their fun little boat ride. You get the classic picture of the giraffe sticking it’s head up out the window cause the boat’s too small, that kind of thing.
But after the year on the Ark, when Noah, his family, and all the animals disembark, I think we run into bigger problems. The pictures that artists paint, that we imagine are animals walking off into a new paradise, into a new Garden of Eden. Like, green grass, flowers, beautiful trees, and there in the sky is the rainbow, a happy thing that just looks so pretty set between two of the mountains of Araarat.
What we don’t think about is the aftermath of a flood. The kind of thing that causes volunteers to put on one of these safety vests to help out. And I was thinking about this and I found a picture, I have included it in your service folder. It’s intense. It’s not the usual image of leaving the ark, it’s honestly hard to look at.
There is chaos, the animals are fighting, there are dead branches hanging everywhere, with moss and mold. There is complete destruction. And at the top of the picture you can see the Ark, resting there, haphazardly landing on jagged rocks. There is smoke coming from near it, the altar that Noah built to offer sacrifices.
And if you look even closer you can see it, faint off in the distance, the rainbow. It’s there, faint, covered by smoke and mist, almost fading. There is such a stark difference between these two images. There is so much to take in. In this picture, we see the destruction, we see the aftermath of the great judgment, the aftermath of death as new life is trying to scrape by.
This story matters to us too. Right now, it’s hard for us to imagine what the world was like back in the days of Noah, back in the days when only 8 people, 8 people on the whole planet, believed in God: Noah, his wife, their sons and daughters in law. But we don’t have to work hard to imagine the stark, destructive reality of sin. All of us struggle with it, struggle against our sins and our desire to serve God. And at time we find ourselves in open rebellion against God. We pretend like he doesn’t exist or we simply ignore him so we can satiate our desire to do what we want, what we think is right, as opposed to what God tells us to do.
In the events leading up to the flood, we learn of the violence and wickedness of the people on the earth, and we too are violent. The fifth commandment tells us that we should not hurt or harm our neighbor. Jesus in the new testament tells us that this includes his reputation and honor. But we do. We may not physically hurt someone, but we aren’t afraid to speak words in anger .We don’t use swords to cut, we use words, words that cut deep and leave lasting wounds. All of us bear the wounds of someone speaking against us, and there are those out there who bear wounds of us speaking against them.
And God chooses his words carefully. What words does he speak after the great cataclysm. If you were there, in the second picture, up by the altar what message would you expect from God? God could have very well spoken more words of judgment, words of warning. God could have said, “This is what happens when evil abounds.” or “Let this flood serve as a warning to never disrespect me again.” Or something like that. But he doesn’t. He does the exact opposite.
God speaks words of hope and promise. More than that, God puts that rainbow in the sky as a sign of his vow. In the midst of the rebuilding, the mucking out, the danger of what’s in that hole, the danger of landslides and mudslides, of raging rivers and chaotic weather, in the midst of all that, God makes a promise of hope. “ I will never do this again.” God says. “No matter the level of violence and sinfulness in the world, in humanity, I will not destroy by a flood again.” A solemn promise, a solemn oath.
And God hangs up his weapon of war, his weapon of destruction. His bow. Bows and arrows were the most deadly weapon for millennia, and they still are to this day. And God hangs his bow up. He’s done waging war against humanity. The rainbow is there and serves as a reminder, not for us, but for God. God says when he looks at it he will remember his vow and he will not send another flood like this, another flood to destroy the earth. He will not take up his bow and wage war against the earth.
And God looks at what we do, what we think, what we say, and then he sees the rainbow. He remembers his promise. He’s not going to destroy us with water, but instead he will save us. So he does something different this time. He sends Jesus. He sends Jesus to take the death, the destruction from us. St. Peter in his letter talks about the flood and the ark. He talks about Noah and his family being saved in the ark.
And he tells us that God does send a flood, this time as a baptism. A flood that washes away, cleanses you from your sin. A baptism that washes away all the muck, the filth, the disease, all of it. That all of our sins would daily drown and die. And that something new would emerge, not the second image, but the first. Because we are baptized into Jesus, not just into his death, but into his life, into his resurrection from the dead.
And that we are now in a new ark. Christian architects and designers have looked at this passage and built churches to remind us of being in the ark. The narrow and long building with the pointy roof, it looks like the inside of the ark. And there at the front we see the dove, reminding us of God’s provision. At the back we see the cross, the door that brings us into God’s kingdom. Here we are safe. Here you are cleansed and restored. In the midst of a world of violence and hate, of anger and sins, here you are made new, ready to go out and face a world. Ready to put on the vest and go start rebuilding, telling of what God has done.
That first image, where the animals are all happy and the grass is green, that image will come to pass too. Only from the second ark, only through the flood waters of baptism, only through the salvation that Jesus won on the cross. God is using this second arc to take you there, to the new creation, to his eternal rest. Amen.
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