Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Lent 1
March 1, 2009
W. Gregory Pope
Series: Life Together in Covenant Community
GOD’S COVENANT
WITH ALL CREATION
Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-10; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15
The biblical story is a narrative of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. The whole world was created to be in relationship with God. Our sin, our rebellion from God’s ways that theologians often label “The Fall,” devastates this design of creation’s relationship with God. And yet, in the midst of our sin and rebellion, the biblical story of redemption unfolds as God continues to reach out in love for the entire world that God has made. This love is made clear through the various covenants - at least five of them - that God initiates with creation and its creatures.
In this morning’s story of Noah and the Flood, we hear about the first of those covenants. It is unfortunate, I think, that we have turned the story of Noah’s flood into a fairy tale for children. It’s not surprising that most people don’t understand what this story is about. It’s not a children’s story or a story concerned with history. The archaeologists who search for gopher wood on every mountain in the Middle East are missing the point.
The writers of Genesis would be surprised by the silliness of many of the questions: How did they fit that many animals in a space that isn’t big enough for that many animals? How did the dogs and cats get along? Why didn’t the lions eat the bunnies? And what about the dinosaurs?
It is a story many scholars believe was written while the Jews were in exile in the sixth century before Christ. They are wondering if God will abandon them forever. They are asking as all of us do in times of crisis: What is God really like? Will God ever get so angry at us because of our sins that God will destroy us?
The biblical story begins with God’s creation of the world in love and beauty, blessing it and calling it good. It was not long, however, before terrible things began to happen to God’s good creation. Adam and Eve created in God’s image disobey God and change their address. Cain murders Abel and the descent into darkness deepens. The inclination of the human heart was evil and violence was everywhere. In so many ways the world was falling apart.
How would God react to their sin? God’s response was not that of an angry tyrant but a grieving parent whose heart had been broken. As God watched us, God’s own children, do evil and suffer evil, we are told God was sorry that he had made us and it grieved him to his heart.
One cannot be a parent without knowing this kind of grief. The word for grieving used here to describe God is the same word used to describe the pain of motherhood in Genesis 3:16: in pain you shall bring forth children.
God is described here as a broken-hearted parent. And what God decided to do was unmake the world, to let it return to the watery chaos from which it came.
But one person changed God’s mind. Rather than destroy the world, God decided to begin the world all over again. Here’s how the story announces the change: But Noah found favor in the eyes of God.
How many people does God need to change the world? One. One faithful daughter or son in a partnership with God can change the world. The grieving God decided to save his lost world.
Bill Moyers once asked a news reporter if he were doing this story of Noah and the Flood, what would the headline be? The reporter replied: “God Destroys the World.” Samuel Proctor, a Baptist minister, said his headline would be: “God Gives Humans a Second Chance.”
The story tells us that Noah was righteous and blameless and walked with God. God came to Noah and told him to build an ark in order to escape a coming flood and to gather with him on the ark his family and every kind of animal two by two.
Noah got to work building the ark in his backyard. He became the laughingstock of the neighborhood. The homeowners association complained about this monstrosity of a boat that was dwarfing all the houses in the neighborhood. It would ruin the real estate values around him.
The neighbors didn’t believe Noah’s warning about the flood, even when the rains started. They kept on with business as usual.
Meanwhile Noah gathered his family and the animals in the ark. Soon the waters began to rise. The ark began to creak and groan until it found itself afloat. The flood had begun.
It rained for forty days and forty nights. The waters covered the earth. It couldn’t have been an easy voyage. Cooped up together that long, your loveable idiosyncracies become no longer loveable and your faults are lit up like a lightbulb. The old joke is probably true: If it were not for the storm outside, the stench inside would have been unbearable.
At the end of the forty days Noah opened a window and sent forth a raven hoping for the waters to subside. Then he sent forth a dove who could not find dry land and returned. Noah waited seven days and sent the dove out again. This time the dove returned with a sprig of olive branch in her mouth. Life had never looked more beautiful.
How they must have rejoiced at this sign of hope. The waters were receding! Soon they felt the bottom of the boat scraping the ground, settling its weight on the earth once again.
When Noah emerged from the ark, there was a sense of spaciousness and blessing. Life began again. As soon as they stepped out, Noah built an altar and there, knee deep in the mud, they knelt and gave thanks to God.
Then came a promise and a covenant from God. It was a covenant of peace and mercy. God said,
Never again will I cause the waters to cover the earth. Never again shall sowing and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night ever cease! I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the imagination of the human heart is evil from youth.
Note the paradox here. Nothing about humanity has changed. We are still sinful. God is not deceived. God knew our hearts were still inclined to evil. So out of God’s heart of unending mercy came this covenant with Noah and all creation.
The covenant has no conditions in it whatsoever. There’s not a word in it about what Noah will and will not do. It’s all about what God will and will not do. “I won’t hurt the earth like this again,” God promises Noah, “I won’t do it and I won’t forget, because I’m hanging up my bow in the sky where I can see it. It will not be a weapon anymore, but a reminder of the covenant between me and you and every living creature for all future generations.”
Something major has shifted in God’s mind since the beginning of this story. Humanity will not change. The God who knows everything knows that. In no time at all, Noah will be drunk and naked, Jacob will be stealing Esau’s birthright, Aaron will be leading the children of Israel in a dance around the golden calf, and David will be figuring out how to get Bathsheeba’s husband out of town.
The main point of this story is not the righteousness of Noah, or what happened on the ark, but rather what was going on in the heart of God.
So this is not a story about the flood or a change in humankind. This is a story about an irreversible change in God. God swears off retribution as a way of dealing with creation and chooses covenant relationship instead, making possible a new beginning for creation.
From now on, God will not let his sorrow lead him to kill. He will bind himself to his creation in peace, promising himself to creation, although he knows how it will wound him. So God will be wounded. If there is to be pain in the world, then God will share it. Never again will God protect himself by killing off those who have caused the pain. God’s covenant is life not death.
Of course, bad things continue to happen to us and to creation, but this biblical covenant is our assurance that none of them is rooted in God’s ill will toward us. The constancy of nature, though fallen, will be the sign of God’s steadfast love:
Summer and winter, springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.
God vows never again to give up on us. God’s heart will be filled with infinite patience and long-suffering love.
God sent a sign of this promise never again to flood the earth: “I will set a rainbow in the skies,” God said. The word bow is the same word for a warrior’s bow. As one writer put it, “God took a warrior’s bow and re-strung it with the colors of creation.” Whenever we see a rainbow we are reminded that God will never strike in anger, but will preserve life on earth with the constancy of his love. This is the kind of God who invites us into covenant throughout the biblical story.
This is a covenant with all creation. A unilateral covenant will all people and every living creature.
And yet, it is important to remember that on the first page of scripture God called us as creatures in God’s image to care for the earth. Any covenant we make with God as a congregation must in these days include a promise to care for God’s creation. God has promised not to destroy it. Shouldn’t we as God’s people do the same?
The way of God’s love is lived out on the shore of God’s covenant. We embody this covenant of God’s love by living faithfully together in community. A community of salvation called the church.
For twenty centuries the ship has been one of the primary symbols of the church. Early Christians decorated the walls of the catacombs with drawings of the ark symbolizing the church.
Frederick Buechner compares the church and Noah’s Ark this way. He says:
In one as in the other, just about everything imaginable is aboard, the clean and the unclean both. They are all piled in together helter-skelter, the predators and the prey, the wild and the tame . . . There are sly young foxes and impossible old cows. There are the catty and the piggish and the peacock-proud. There are hawks and there are doves. Some are wise as owls, some silly as geese; some meek as lambs and others fire-breathing dragons. There are times when they all cackle and grunt and roar and sing together, and there are times when you could hear a pin drop . . .
It’s not all enjoyable. There’s backbiting just like everywhere else. There’s a pecking order. There’s jostling at the trough . . . It’s a regular menagerie in there, and sometimes it smells to high Heaven like one.
But even at its worst, there’s at least one thing that makes it bearable within, and that is the storm without . . .
At it’s best there is, if never clear sailing, shelter from the blast, a sense of somehow heading in the right direction in spite of everything, a ship to keep afloat, and, like a beacon in the dark, the hope of finding safe harbor at last.
We all need a safe harbor, don’t we? This church has been a harbor for many.
Thomas Keneally brought the story of the Holocaust to contemporary remembrance in his novel Schindler’s List that later became a movie. Did you know that the original title was Schindler’s Ark? Oscar Schindler’s factory was indeed an ark, serving as a safe haven for hundreds of innocent potential Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. It was a place where many sought to ride out the storm in safety.
We can face whatever happens because we have each other in his ark called the church, and because God is with us and has promised to guide us safely to shore. And deep down, we know we desperately need God and each other.
If we forget God’s promise, just wait for the next rainbow to be reminded.
Do you ever see a rainbow and not think of this story of Noah and the Flood?
An eight-year-old boy in Macon, Georgia was inside his house listening to the radio when he heard the news that World War II was over. Running into the street, he found the entire neighborhood there, all of them cheering and crying and falling into each other’s arms. He does not remember who said it first, but someone yelled, “Look!” and pointed down the street where the oak trees parted to reveal the top of a bright rainbow. All at once the street got quiet as prayer. “It was God’s promise of peace,” he says now, “and we all knew it.”
This covenant of peace and hope was not lost to the memories of the Hebrew people. As exiles in Babylonian captivity concerned about their future, they remembered God’s covenant, this time spoken through the prophet Isaiah. They are some of my favorite words:
Fear not, for I have redeemed you
I have called you by name. You are mine.
When you pass through the waters I will be with you,
And through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.
When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned
And the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the Lord your God,
The Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
Right before Jesus entered the wilderness (where God had established the Sinai covenant with Israel) he passed through the baptismal waters of the Jordan (identifying with his people who had also passed through the Jordan).
Mark says when he came up out of the water the heavens were torn apart. And what descended? Not the destructive flood waters, but rising from the life-giving waters of baptism the life-giving sign of the dove descended upon him. A reminder of that first covenant God made with creation. And Jesus heard what we each need to hear at our baptism, which is a sign of our covenant with Christ: “You are my child, the Beloved.” And the call to covenant comes from Jesus himself. They are the first words he utters in Mark’s Gospel. He says, “The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has drawn near, repent, change your life and trust the good news.”
And so we pray with the psalmist: “Teach us your paths, O God, make us know your ways, lead us in your truth.”
And then when Jesus came to the table for his last supper with the disciples, a night we seek to relive on Holy Thursday, it was the only time recorded for us that Jesus used the word “covenant.” Each time we gather at this table we are called to remember the covenant we have with God. The basic elements of creation are here - bread and wine - made holy by the presence of Christ at the table. Taken into our bodies, these holy tokens of creation become divine. God welcomes all of creation to the table to a covenant relationship as God’s Beloved.
You don’t have to wait for a rainbow to be reminded of God’s covenant with us. We are reminded every time we gather around this table.
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CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425
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