This was my sermon for the 2022 James Kenneth Echols Preaching Celebration at LSTC. It was delivered over Zoom, as I was still in Arizona, preparing to move to Chicago for Clinical Pastoral Education in June. I was selected as runner-up for the prize in 2022.
If someone asked you what is the saddest phrase in the Bible, what would you pick? How could you choose?
This is not some hypothetical question. One can find many responses to this same question online in Biblical blogs. Some people think the saddest phrase comes within the first chapters of Genesis: “So the Lord sent them out of the Garden.” Others select “there was no room for them at the inn” from Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ birth. Still others point to some later words from Luke, spoken by Cleopas on the road to Emmaus: “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” Or many people name those two words in John, chapter 11, “Jesus wept,” upon the death of his friend Lazarus. Or perhaps you can think of others.
All of these are tragic commentaries: on the brokenness of humanity, a lack of hospitality, the hopelessness of Jesus’ followers after his crucifixion, the sting of death that even shattered Jesus’ heart.
But after reading today’s lessons again, I can find nothing more heart-wrenching than the phrase that begins the flood story, the introduction to the narrative that concludes in today’s lesson. From Genesis Chapter 6, verse 6, “God was sorry for making humankind on the earth, and it grieved God to the heart.”
Only six chapters into the Bible, sin had so thoroughly ravaged humanity that God regretted creating us, not just a fleeting moment of regret, but such unbearable grief that God contemplated obliterating us – not just the troubled human species, but every living thing.
Genesis 6 doesn’t go into the specifics of humankind’s depravity. The text leaves it up to our imagination what humans were doing that disappointed God so deeply.
However, God revises the original plan and decides to redeem Creation by selection. One human family. Pairs of all types of animals. And the rest of God’s creation, well…
This flood story – Noah and the Ark – is not really what you want to paint on your congregation’s nursery wall. Not the best story for toddlers in Sunday school. Despite a torrent of artistic picture books and a deluge of kids’ songs, this narrative, allegory, or myth from the beginning of the Hebrew Bible is at its heart a Creator’s dilemma. Let humankind continue in its evil ways and perhaps destroy all living things or commit near genocide to try to redeem Creation.
Flood stories, as well as fires, stars falling from the sky, shaking earth, and exploding mountains are common to every civilization’s history. Geomythology was the way our ancestors tried to make sense of massive planetary events.
However, geologic evidence never has been found for a global flood that covered earth’s highest peaks and every continent. But geologists have found massive floods, including a large regional one in Mesopotamia that may have corresponded with the account from Genesis, chapters 7 through 9, and the nearly identical account from the Quran. Theologians have surmised that the Priestly writer of this section of Genesis spun together this regional flood and the account of God’s despair. This has led to deep divisions between those who would see the story under a lens of Biblical inerrancy and others who ponder the story as a glimpse at the complex and compassionate nature of God.
Compassionate may not be the word some might choose to describe the metaphor of a disappointed deity who decides humans are behaving badly, and the corrective action is to wipe out all living things. But at its heart, this IS a redemption story, a covenant story, not just between God and homo sapiens, but between God and humankind and the whole earth.
In the story, God does not reduce the earth to clay again, but saves humanity and life itself by choosing a family set of each species to repopulate the earth, a reset so to speak, a reboot of Creation itself. In effect, a third Creation storyline. And when the water recedes, God doesn’t throw out a bunch of punishments or rules. It is a merciful, thoughtful God who meets Noah’s family in Chapter 9, having taken the biblical measure of 40 days to determine how to proceed from this new starting point.
“Never again,” is God’s opening line. And three times God repeats “Never again.” Never again will I send a flood like this. Never again will I destroy life to restore it. Never again will the earth be a weapon against living things. And this arc of color, set against the gray and black forces that are storm clouds, this will be the seal of my promise to you, to all living things, to Earth itself, that henceforth, these clouds will provide needed rain to nourish the earth, not to annihilate it. Look to the sky, when you see storm clouds building and fear overtakes you, and remember this covenant. Never again.
As far as covenants go, this covenant following the flood, sometimes called the Noahic Covenant, is somewhere down most people’s lists of the most important covenants. God’s covenant to make of Abraham and Sarah a great nation, the covenant through Moses to provide a land and promise to God’s chosen people, God’s covenant to David to make him the beginning of an everlasting royal lineage – those are the Covenants people recall from the Hebrew Bible. And Christians add to that list the New Covenant, spoken by Jesus to his disciples, “for you and all people,” on that last night in the upper room. The New Covenant – the restoration of relationship between God and God’s people for all time.
Yet, the covenant from today’s text is not one that we should dismiss lightly. It is not a bilateral covenant, requiring a commitment and action from both sides. Like the New Covenant, it comes with no strings attached, a gift of grace for all people, for all time. Out of the depth of God’s grief, a gift of grace, as God bridged the gap between Godself and Creation. And unlike the others, this covenant was not between God and Noah, but between God and all living things, as well as the earth itself. God’s heart was broken, but God acted to restore humanity and protect all the Earth.
So, how does this covenant speak to us today, millennia later? Is there a promise in these words for us as we ponder the broken environmental accords, witness species after species of God’s creation becoming extinct, and see the clock ticking toward time when our planet may no longer support life as we know it?
While God did not ask our opinion in creating this world or restoring life through the creative waters of rain and flood through the ages, God said this covenant was “everlasting” and “for all future generations.” God was looking ahead, knowing that this covenant would speak to people in difficult times. In times of brutal dynasties. In times of World Wars and bombs that could destroy life itself. In times like today when our nation’s leaders and citizens are not on the same page on dialing back climate change.
Perhaps our role in God’s rainbow covenant meshes with one final covenant: the one spoken in each of our baptisms. In our baptismal flood waters, in which we were washed and welcomed into God’s family, we were baptized into faith in action, living with and loving one another, striving for justice and peace in all the earth. This is the time for God’s people to live into those words, and help assure the promises “for all future generations.”
The opening line was perhaps the saddest one in the Bible: “God was sorry for making humankind on the earth, and it grieved God to the heart” The story of God and God’s people is one that still is being written with us. Perhaps it is our thoughtful, every day actions of living together, loving one another, and striving for justice and peace that will change that sad opening line to a different kind of ending, for all future generations.
Amen.
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