The First Sunday in Lent (B) — Genesis 9:8–17
Bethany and Faith Lutheran Churches, Reading, PA
The fifteenth century “Imitation of Christ” is one of the great classics of Christian spirituality, but I’ve never read it. It seems ridiculous to me. Become more like Jesus. We fail before we begin. It’s one thing to follow his teachings, to live like Jesus wants. That’s hard, but maybe possible; if not, he wouldn’t have said it. But to live like Christ himself? Jesus is God, made flesh. I am very much not God. I cannot even begin to approximate him.
Even so, I’ve decided its time to explore this spiritual discipline. This Lent, you can expect my sermons to look at what God is like, and how we might be more like him. Maybe a good way to prepare ourselves to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord. I’m still a little uncomfortable. As Lutherans, preaching cannot be about what we do, but only about what God does. Maybe I can manage to do both.
Today, we have Noah and his well-timed building project. Or specifically, the end of the flood story, when everyone gets off the boat and looks around at their soggy new home. God has saved them from the waters. Noah builds an altar and offers sacrifice to God, praising him for such great salvation!
If that’s our conclusion, we’re in good company. Christianity has always seen Noah and his wife, their three sons and three daughters-in-law, as prefiguring the way God saves us in the waters of baptism. But things aren’t really so cut and dry. The wonderful story of salvation for eight people is the terrible death of countless more.
Why? To appease God’s anger? Not exactly. We often think that God in the Old Testament is angry and violent, and Jesus in the New Testament corrects all that. True, the ancient Hebrews lived in a violent world, so they described God in terms they understood. But Jesus has his own moments of flying off the handle and turning over tables in the temple, and the Old Testament God isn’t really so terrible. At the start of the flood, God isn’t angry. Instead, Genesis 6 says, “God regretted that he made humanity on the earth, and there was great pain in his heart.”
Great pain. A verb form that shows really intense action, like the difference between simply walking and pacing back and forth. Here, God wasn’t just hurting. He was inconsolably brokenhearted. “I created this beautiful world,” God says, “And look, everything has gone wrong. These human beings are supposed to be my own image, love and life and creativity. And instead, the shape of every thought of their hearts is only evil, every single day. What have I done?”
God cannot ignore the wickedness and injustice of humanity. We do terrible things to each other, and to ourselves, and to our world, and God can’t look away. But God’s response is not about punishment. It’s about ending the cycle of evil we perpetrate.
So God sends a flood to wipe everything clean and start over. He finds one family who isn’t truly evil, and everything else is gone. And then, when the whole thing is finished, that family comes to land, and they thank God for saving them. And God realizes that maybe things are now worse than when they started.
Saving this one family, however righteous they supposedly were, didn’t fix the problem. In fact, in the very next story in our Bible, Noah plants a vineyard, makes wine, gets drunk, and… well, depending on how you interpret the story, maybe his son Ham isn’t as guilty as it makes it sound. So much for Noah’s righteousness.
Widespread destruction isn’t the answer. God makes the first of many world-changing promises. Never again, he says. All this death and destruction is worse than the evil and wickedness that was around before the flood. You don’t ever need to be afraid of such destruction again.
(As an aside, this is biblical proof that all those pundits who insist that natural disasters are God’s way of punishing sin… are absolutely, categorically wrong. If they think they know their Bible so well, I invite them to go read it. No matter what terrible things we might do, God will not respond in this way.)
God doesn’t make this promise to just humanity, either. The first of his great promises is made with the whole earth. All the animals, birds and fish and insects, everything that survived the flood, they all get God’s promise. Nothing in all creation is left out.
And last, God creates the rainbow as a reminder of this promise. Notice who the sign is for: God says, “When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and I will remember the everlasting promise.” God hangs his bow and arrow up in the clouds, pointing upward, to remind himself. If he ever forgets his promise, then before he can carry out the destruction he has planned, God’s own arrow will strike him, reminding him of the pain he can really cause.
The other night, I finally got fed up with my cat. It’s been over three months now, and Moses still hides from me. I reach under the couch to pet him, but he’s not always into it. Sometimes he’ll let me know by moving away, but sometimes he bites me (not breaking skin), or hits me with his paw (without claws). But this night, for the first time, he used his claws and gave me a good scratch.
I was angry, but I was more hurt. After all, I take care of this little creature all the time. I never hurt him. And after three whole months, he still can’t trust me, even a little bit. It breaks my heart. So I decided it was time to speed things up a bit. I took the legs off the couch and set it on the floor, where he couldn’t get under it.
While I had it on its side, unscrewing the legs, I saw the little guy under the kitchen table, watching in terror as his comfort zone disappeared. I thought I was brokenhearted because of the way he was treating me. But I was hurt even more by the way I was treating him. The couch was on the floor for only twenty seconds, and then I turned it over again and put the legs back on.
What is God like? How can we be more like Christ? We ought to be in real, almost physical pain by the way that we see people treat one another. The injustices of the world should hurt us. But not as much as our own injustices. As human beings, we have been charged with caring for God’s world. When our hearts incline toward evil, when we harm ourselves, or each other, or any part of creation, we should recognize that we are wounding ourselves. Our God has promised to be a God of creation, not destruction. We can work toward being the same.
After all, God truly has carried us through the waters. God drowned in our baptism, put us to death. And brokenhearted, he brought back to life with Jesus Christ. God loves us too much to let death be our end. May we also love enough to bring life to our world. Amen.