Oh No…ah!

Lent 1 B 3/1/09

Genesis 9:8-17

Grace and peace to you from God the creator, and from God’s Son and our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Do you ever read the little italicized blurbs that are included in addition to the lessons and prayers in your Celebrate insert? I try not to—at least not before I’ve had a chance to look the readings over for myself, or in the pastors’ study group that meets each Tuesday morning in Manchester.

You see, I was trained in seminary to interpret the scripture in a particular way. First by letting each text “speak” to me through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and then specifically by the exegesis of the passage—a process that takes into consideration historical, societal, literary, and linguistic elements, as well as the text’s relationship to the chapter and book it lies within, and also to the whole bible. It includes in depth studies of particularly interesting Greek and Hebrew words, comparisons with other translations and the original (as close as we can get). I must tell you—reading what someone else wrote about a text is way, way down there on the line.

So I usually don’t read them (or have the lectors read them to you). After they’re done—after the sermon’s finished—during the offering—read them then. That rule established firmly within the realm, I’m going to break it today and read from the “Introductory Blurb” that starts the Celebrate off each Sunday.

Read

Five covenants of the old testament. Used as a lens. To examine the sacrament of Holy Baptism. Our participation in Christ’s death and God’s covenant with us for a resurrected life like Jesus’. I like it! Let’s do it.

But wait a second. Noah. It’s Noah today. And I’ve got a problem with the story of Noah. Part of it anyway. Not the part where Noah single-handedly builds this tremendous boat without even having a Home Depot nearby. Not the part where all those animals got along and didn’t fight with each other…or worse: (Now, I know I had two field mice when we sailed, but today there’s only one—MITTENS!). And it’s not even the part where in forty days and nights they only drifted as far as Mt. Ararat.

No, in fact, I have no problem at all with Noah and his ark full of flora and fauna. It sounds like a tall tale, folklore—but with God nothing is impossible, so, okay. But then there’s the fact that the Noah story has many similarities with other cultures’ stories of mighty floods—the Gilgamesh Epic, to name one—there’s many more. Yet, in my mind, the existence of such stories just seems to cement the validity of there having been a tremendous flood, historically speaking, or at least that every culture faced flood as a common experience. No, I got no trouble with Noah, or the boat, or the story itself.

What I got a big old problem with is a god who can willingly, deliberately, premeditatively wipe out every living thing on the face of the earth, and in the air above and the sea below. Oh, yeah, yeah—I know—God saved Noah, his family, and the wild kingdom in the ark. That’s great. Eight people, a zillion animals. Sorry, but for me, that only highlights the fact that—(clear throat, whisper)—that God killed everyone and everything else. All creatures great and small. Blub, blub, blub. Finito!

And I don’t mean to scare your children by mentioning all this. They’ve heard all about Noah and the ark before—many times, I’m sure. They know what happened to the people not on that boat. I think it doesn’t register for them—they don’t feel the emotional impact of the story’s body count. Maybe it’s the way we tell it.

Hey, you know, I don’t think it effects us adults fully, either. We acknowledge the carnage but we’re strangely disconnected from it. Maybe because we attribute it to the hyperbole of well-told tale—an exaggeration. That it really means a lot of living things died—too many to count, so it becomes “all.” We can live with that. Or maybe we rationalize the drownings by recalling how very wicked the people were back then (except for Noah’s family). After all God gave them every chance to straighten up. God didn’t just wipe out the earth on a whim—he planned it.

Somehow I don’t find that to be the least bit comforting. Especially when I consider our status as sinners before a God who demands justice. Maybe we’re not as bad as the people in Noah’s day, maybe we’re worse—I don’t know. But what I do know is that if I had had to earn my ticket on the SS Noah’s Ark, I wouldn’t have had any where near enough frequent sailing miles for the passage. I’d be left behind with the wicked ones—which we all are, truth be told. We all sin.

And God, it seems, only saved the last righteous man and his family. Works! Merit! This god isn’t very Lutheran, either. Our Lutheran understanding of God is that God forgives freely those who believe in Christ. Grace by faith alone.

Am I alone in feeling this way? Or do you feel like God went a little off the deep end with this flood thing? Then what are we to do with the wrathful God of the Old testament?

Well, we could be like a certain early church leader turned heretic, who noticed a disparity between the OT and NT portrayals of God, declared the OT god to be too vengeful, and so he tore the OT out of the bible. His name was (confirmation students—we just studied him…) Marcion.

That seemed a bit extreme to me—tearing out the OT—you’d lose a lot of good stuff doing that—all the Psalms, the creation story, the history of Israel, the servant songs of Isaiah, a large chunk of our theology. Not an option.

We could look at this story and say it is just that—a story, fiction—good fiction but made up just the same. Entertainment. A legend, a fable. Prehistoric version of Gilligan’s Island. But, no, this is the inspired word of God, so it must go deeper than just that.

The answer, I believe, lies at the end of the story—which Lisa read you this morning. It’s the covenant. Which is a fascinating and important piece of Old Testament theology. Yes, the Lord starts off in the story as a wrathful deity, or at the very least, a disappointed creator ready and willing to sweep the pieces off the earthly game board and start over. And yes, that God is scary and dangerous—exactly because he has the power to carry it out. Couple that with the motivation of persistently lawless and wicked people, and you have the recipe for some serious vengeance. So, yes, God destroys all life save that on the ark. He’s God, by God. He can do that if he wants to.

The amazing fantastic thing that we find out in this first week of Lent is that God limits himself by making a promise, a covenant, with Noah and the new genesis. Never again will God destroy all flesh with a flood. And here’s the kicker: the covenantal relationship that God inaugurates with this promise is unilateral, that is, it is not dependant on the people’s behavior, good or bad. God promises it, and therefore no matter what God will keep that promise. He is bound by his word. He sets aside his godly rights and accepts willingly the limitation to his power.

And that, brothers and sisters leads directly from us in the hands of an angry God, to the clear, cool waters of baptism, where God’s grace and mercy are given to us freely, and again, unilaterally. Which leads us into the arms of a loving Christ. All that from the story of a floating zoo.

Let me finish up by reading the other blurb you should never read before the offering—the introduction to that first reading….

Read

Amen