I wrote this sermon for Calvary UMC based on one I wrote back in 2014 for Presbury. It is a story that has captivated me and I've been trying to move out of the way enough for the Holy Spirit to share it.
Scripture:
Hebrew Bible: Genesis 9:8-17
(NRSV)
Then
God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am
establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and
with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic
animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out
of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall
all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall
there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
God
said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and
you and every living creature that is with you, for all future
generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign
of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over
the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my
covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all
flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all
flesh. 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.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign
of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that
is on the earth.”
Gospel:
Mark 1:9-15 (NRSV)
In
those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by
John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he
saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on
him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved;
with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him
out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted
by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on
him.
Now
after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good
news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of
God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
Sermon:
Let us pray:
Patient Teacher,
we give you thanks for this
scripture even when the stories within it are hard.
Open our minds today. Open our
hearts.
Write your covenant within us,
so that these stories we read become more than just children's
bedtime stories. May they become our story. Amen.
How many of you have heard the
story of Noah's Ark before? It is somewhat familiar, I know. Most of
us if we have any religious background at all growing up hear about
it as children. Look
at the animals in the ark! we
say, mimicking the lion's roar. When I was a kid, we used to read
these silly stories written from the points of view of the animals on
the ark. We used to laugh and laugh at Noah trying to keep the
elephant away from the mice they were so terrified of. But when you
take a moment to read the Genesis account, you realize that this is
not a nice happy story. Lots of people die. Earlier in chapter six of
Genesis, the scripture actually says that God was sorry
God had made humankind. It is a heartbreaking, confusing, terrifying
tale. But from the terror emerges this beautiful promise, a covenant,
one of many that God makes with us throughout our history as people
of faith.
You may have heard a tale of
terror this week if you turned on the news. Or maybe you didn't. Can
something really be a tale of terror if it replays over and over
again to no effect? But surely what happened in Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School in Florida on Wednesday was the kind of evil that
would make God regret creating us.
When I think of the story of Noah
and the ark now it is the idea of God who is angry and frustrated and
done with the world that sticks with me. It sticks with me because it
is an image that makes me uncomfortable. And because it is a feeling
I understand. I scrolled through images of the victims, read stories
about them, heard the nonsense from Washington about thoughts and
prayers but no action. And I thought, you know what we need, God.
Another flood. How can we possibly come back from this? How can we
rebuild in a world where so much has gone so wrong?
But God does not work like we do,
thank goodness. Well, in the story of Noah, God does take on some
decidedly human tendencies, which makes me wonder that we decided the
destructive flood came from God because humans have a capacity for
violence we would like God to have as well. I'm not so sure God does
share those qualities. But there is something in this story that God
does share with us. And that is grace.
God is able to redeem even the
worst of situations. A flood was coming, everyone would die, but
maybe God could still save us. And God did. Noah built the ark.
Teachers and coaches gave up their lives for their students. First
responders saved who they could. And now survivors are claiming their
voices and standing up to politicians who refuse to enact common
sense gun laws to try and save more children from the horror they
lived through.
We may think in these stories of
terror that God should pack up shop and move on. But if God does
that, then we don't have to change either. We get to wash our hands
of the world, stop trying to figure out how God is calling us to
change it. We don't have to sit there and be grieved over loss as we
move toward new life anyway.
But God has made a covenant with
us. Set a rainbow in the clouds to remind God’s self, supposedly,
but also to remind us: new life is possible.
I see the story of Noah as a
resurrection story. Sure, it is a much more depressing resurrection
story than the one we will read in forty days, but it is about new
life that comes out of the horror of death. Not because
of the horror of
death--- God doesn’t need destruction to bring about new life. But
new life is always possible for humanity. The thing that makes Noah’s
story a Lentan one is that it covenants with us, requiring us to
rebuild. To try again. To take forty days to dig deeper into
spiritual disciplines, to fast and pray, and turn our lives back to
God.
So already I have suggested in
this sermon that maybe it wasn't exactly God who caused the Flood
like the text says. Now I am reading a responsibility for us into the
covenant we read this morning. If you look carefully at the covenant
we read, God covenants with us that humanity will never again be
destroyed by a flood. There is no response for humans. It isn't a “if
you do this, then I will do that” kind of covenant.
Maybe the Gospel story explains
this part better. In the scripture we read from Mark, Jesus has been
baptized. He emerges from the water, the heavens open, God names him
beloved, and then he is immediately driven into the wilderness. We
can presume he is still wet, that’s how quickly he moves. He
doesn't have time to celebrate his belovedness; he gets right to work
in the wilderness, relying totally on God in the midst of difficulty
to discover what his identity as Beloved means for his work here on
earth. God never says, “This is my Son, the Beloved if he does all
the things I want him to do.” But Jesus knows that his identity as
Beloved of God means that he has a responsibility to help live into
the kindom
of God.
And so do we. God's covenant with
Noah says there is no such thing as too far gone. We might not
believe God, but that is what the rainbow tells us anyway. There is
no violence, no grief, nothing that is too far gone that God can't
eke some good out of it. And we, as beloved children of God, baptized
as Jesus was, also have a responsibility to work with God to eke out
this good. We are agreeing to work with Jesus to renew the world from
the inside out.
I was talking to Pastor Beth this
week about this passage from Noah. When I read it now, I picture less
the art we find in children's Sunday school rooms, and instead I
picture an experience I had the last time I was in Bosnia.
Bosnia, to those of us who
remember the news in the 1990s, is one of those places that seemed to
once mirror the wickedness of the world that must have so
disappointed God. During the war, neighbor killed neighbor,
concentration camps were established, mass rape was used as a
calculated tool of war. Today, the violence is not rampant though
tensions still course along ethnic lines, but corruption still
defines the country. There is apathy, disgust, hopelessness. A dark
rain flooded the country with a hate so powerful that it is a wonder
anything is left, but even today stagnant water left over from the
war seems to cover so much. Bosnians know the wickedness of
humankind. They have wondered if God can ever pull them out of the
violence they have endured--- if they are too far gone. Bosnians know
what Noah felt, looking over the wickedness of his fellow humans as
those first fat drops of rain fell on his nose.
That wickedness is always very
apparent in graveyards in Bosnia, especially if you can look across
and see just how many graves are marked 1993 or 1994. And one day, I
found myself in one of these graveyards. I had gone with my friend
Đana to visit her family because it was Bajram (or Eid), a family,
food, and faith-oriented holiday. First, though, we stopped at the
community graveyard; during Bajram, one also says prayers for the
dead. The cemetery sits almost precariously up on the mountain, rows
of skinny white graves sticking out into the sky. We stopped the car
and got out to see Đana's cousin Dijana and her family were already
there. Dijana and Đana covered their heads with these huge scarves
and went over to the graves. I stood around awkwardly trying to keep
Dijana's three-year-old and Đana's two-year-old from falling down
the mountain. But at one point I paused and looked up at the two
cousins praying, their veils flapping in the mountain breeze, at this
little line of graves all with the last name Domazet--- most of whom
I knew. Đana's father was killed during the war in 1994, her mother
from a heart attack when she was in her early forties, her
grandmother from Alzheimer’s, and her aunt from cancer. Đana was
crying, and reached over to touch her mother's grave. So much loss in
such a young life. So much pain. The floodwaters in life had taken so
much from her. And yet, yet here we were. The sun was shining, the
grass was so green, and two toddlers were running around hand-in-hand
laughing.
Đana rebuilt her life. She
decided that the destruction of war, the pain of grief, the constant
fear of loss would not keep her from living. Noah rebuilt his life,
built a home and planted vineyards. And many in the community of
Parkland, Florida, are rebuilding already as well, refusing to let
violence have the last word in their community.
Perhaps there is a part of your
life that needs rebuilding. Perhaps there is a part of you destroyed
by fear or apathy, shriveled by bitterness and loss. Invite God into
those places this Lent. Look for rainbows, seek goodness together.
Perhaps that means taking up a practice like gratitude journaling---
forcing yourself to look for the good in your life and nurture it.
Perhaps that means becoming an advocate as many students are,
standing up to death-dealing things in our world and working to stop
them. Perhaps that means spending time in service, helping someone
else to rebuild.
The rainbow covenant reminds us
that God will work beside us to bring life from dead situations
anywhere and anytime. Won't we choose to work with God?