Thomas J Parlette
“It’s Not About the Water”
Genesis 9: 8-17
2/21/21, 1st Lent
I remember when Juliet and I first learned that we were expecting. We did what many first time parents do – we started reading all the books and making our preparations. One those things we did was fix up a nursery with a crib and a rocking chair and educational mobiles that spin and beep and light up.
We chose to do a Noah’s Ark theme in our nursery. It’s a pretty popular pick. It works for a boy or a girl and who doesn’t like all those animals.
We always think of the story about Noah and the Ark as kid friendly. But when you read the story closely, it is one of the more violent stories in Scripture. God decides the world isn’t worth saving – God decides to wipe the slate clean and start again. God decides to kill all life on the face of the earth. Pretty horrific really.
When I was studying for my Master of Biblical Storytelling Certificate, one of the requirements was to present and record a 2-hour story concert. So I learned a variety of Old Testament stories combined with some folktales to present for the first half of the concert, and then some Gospel stories for the second half. And one of the stories I learned was Noah and the Ark. I want to tell you, this story is hard to tell because it is so violent. In fact, I remember one of the times I told this story at a neighboring church, a lady scolded me afterwards because she thought I made up all those quotes about God killing every living thing on earth. “That isn’t in the Bible, God wouldn’t do that, I don’t appreciate you playing that up so much,” she said. I had to open up one of that church’s own pew bibles and point out to her that the text notes on 5 separate occasions over the course of 3 verses that “all flesh died…” “everything with breath died…”, “God blotted out every living thing…”, “They were all blotted out from the Earth…”, “Only Noah was left…” I admit it’s a bit excessive, but the author wanted to make that point crystal clear. But alas, she wasn’t happy with that realization and left saying, “Well, I don’t use that translation.” It’s a hard story to tell, and a hard story to hear.
I’m told that there is a museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan that has the unofficial name “The Museum of Failed Products.” It’s shelves are lined with all the products and inventions that were taken off the market because nobody bought them. Things like Clairol’s “Touch of Yogurt” shampoo. Or Gillette’s “For Oily Hair Only”. Or Pepsi’s AM Breakfast Cola that was supposed to compete with straight up coffee as your morning drink. And I don’t know why Colgate-brand TV dinners didn’t make it.(1) I don’t know, did their meatloaf taste like toothpaste?
Can you imagine the disappointment of the inventor who poured his or her time, energy and intellect into creating a product that failed?
Or, can you imagine how disheartened and disappointed God must have been in looking upon Creation and seeing that it had all fallen apart?
Former Beatle, Paul McCartney, once coined a word to describe the letdown fans experience “when a new song by an old group fails to make them feel young again.” The word is “Anticipointment.” Anticipointment, says McCartney, is the feeling of disappointment you get when you’re expecting something really great, but you get something entirely different.(2)
Perhaps God was feeling some anticipointment about what had been created. When the Lord took stock of the earth, the Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind. It grieved him to his heart. So God decided to put an end to all flesh. As Walter Brueggeman puts it, “God is deeply upset with the world gone crazy. God is sorry that the project of creation was ever started at all. In an emotional frenzy over betrayed love, God decided to drown his sorrows. All the spigots of heaven and earth were opened to full blast.”(3) And everything on earth died.
The water flowed for forty days and forty nights. Even the highest mountains were covered with water! Everything died! All were blotted out: human beings, animals, creeping things, birds… everything – for 150 days the water covered the earth.
But Brueggeman reminds us, “This story in not about the water.” It’s not about the death and destruction. “It is about God’s emotional attachment to the earth. It is about God the way it is about a parent of a teenager who loses it in a frenzy over teenage insanity and recalcitrance. The waters come up to match the rising affront that God felt with a failed earth, the same failed earth we observe all around us.”(4)
This is a God who cares in excessive, frenzied ways about the earth.
The most important part of this whole story, Noah and the Ark, is really what happens later. It’s not about the water. It’s not about the death and destruction. But we need to experience the violence of this story to appreciate its resolution.
After the waters swelled for 150 days, the Scripture says “God remembered.” God remembered Noah. God remembered that there was some goodness in the failed creation. As Brueggeman wrote, “God remembered the faithful who had not joined the insanity. God stopped short in the frenzy of emotion the way a parent of a teenager is stopped short when one remembers that this object of rage is a well-beloved daughter or son. God comes to God’s sense, after having lost the way.”(5) No, this story is not about water. It’s not about death and destruction. “It is about God and God’s deep love for the earth, God’s raging anger at betrayal, and God’s abrupt about-face when God remembered what God had forgotten, what God had forgotten about loving the earth and the creatures in it.”(6)
Yes, God remembered.
The theologian Jurgen Moltmann once wrote “The ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found in what we want, wish for and wait for. The ultimate reason for our hope is that WE are wanted and wished for and waited for. God is our last hope because WE are God’s first love.”(7)
So yes, God remembered God’s first love.
And with that remembrance, God made some promises. Which brings us to our text for today. God makes a covenant with Noah and all his descendants. God says, “Never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. I have a 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. I will remember my covenant.”
In this covenant, God puts the bow, a weapon of war and destruction on the shelf forever.
This is one of the traditional texts for the First Sunday of Lent because just a few days ago we marked ourselves with another sign, of another covenant. The covenant, or promise, of forgiveness and new life that we signify with the mark of ashes. God’s first covenant sign was the bow in the sky, and now we have another covenant sign of forgiveness and new life through Jesus death and resurrection.
Major Barbara Sherer served as a military chaplain in Kuwait. She wrote about the time a fire swept through her camp one day, destroying the tents the troops were using as a dining hall and a chapel. Amazingly, the fire started right after breakfast in between the times for the Protestant and Catholic services. No one was in the tents at the time, so nobody got hurt. The fire also happened just a few days before Ash Wednesday. Major Sherer decided that instead of burning palm fronds and collecting the ashes for Ash Wednesday as she normally would, she would use some of the ashes from the burned military tents to anoint the foreheads of the soldiers.
After the fire cooled down, Major Sherer got permission to visit the site to collect some ashes. A firefighter scooped up a cupful and put it in a plastic bag and gave it to her. Later, as she was pouring the ashes into a bowl for the service, she spotted something shiny in the bag. It was a small silver cross that had survived the fire. On it were inscribed the words “Jesus is Lord.” The fire had burned through five very large tents. Everything in the path of the fire had been destroyed. How had the firefighter, in scooping up a random cup of ashes, managed to pick the exact spot where this tiny cross lay hidden?
Major Sherer writes, “The message to me is clear: God walks with us through the terrible firestorms of our lives, and we are lifted unharmed out of the ashes. We may be marked in some way, like the cross of ash on Wednesday. However, that mark is a symbol of God’s love and protection.”(8)
The story of Noah and the Ark is not about the water. It’s not about the death and destruction. It’s about the sign of the bow. The first sign of God’s covenant of love for creation and for us.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. Dynamic Preaching, Vol. XXXVII, No.1, p39.
2. Ibid… p40.
3. Walter Brueggemann, “Flooded with Fidelity”, The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann Vol. 2, Westminster John Knox Press, 2015, p67.
4. Ibid… p68.
5. Ibid… p68.
6. Ibid…p68.
7. Dynamic Preaching, Vol. XXXVII, Vol. 1, p41.
8. Ibid… p41-42.
