Genesis 9:8-17
March 5, 2006
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
The worst natural disaster ever to strike the United States was Katrina. This hurricane left tens of thousands of people displaced and homeless, hundreds dead and a political rainstorm that is still drenching the nation’s capitol on who should have been better prepared. I doubt many new born babies would be named “Katrina” last year since it is now synonymous to devastation and untold suffering.
News about the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina is still making the front pages of our papers. With the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, we heard and read about Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Although the crowds were smaller than in the past, the revelry still went on. I read that some homeowners in the haste of rebuilding are not following the recommendations to build houses on 9 feet stilts to avoid future flooding. The levees in New Orleans can’t take a category 4 let alone a category 5 hurricane like Katrina.
We don’t have to look so far away such as Louisiana in the Gulf States to know about flooding. We have our own floods here in the Bay Area! Marin towns like San Anselmo and Fairfax sustained over $30 million dollars of damages in the New Year’s Eve floods. And what did we get this past week? Rain, torrential downpours and floods; we lost power in Sausalito for over 12 hours! Governor Schwartzenegger declared a state of emergency to repair and strengthen California’s levees known to be vulnerable much like those in New Orleans if the expected earthquake were to happen. Enough of the weather and disaster report!
Noah’s Ark
Flooding is not a pretty picture. On this first Sunday in Lent, our Scripture lesson follows not a pretty one either. It is the story of the great flood that wiped out every living thing from the face of the earth.
I don’t know about now but I’m sure that Pastor Lauren and others at our church who are expecting babies can tell me whether baby toys and furniture still feature Noah’s ark and the animals. When Pastor Lauren was a baby, I can still remember Joy making an embroidered picture of Noah’s Ark with all these happy-looking animals stretching their necks out the little windows in the ark for her baby room. I think that the musical mobile over her crib was comprised of Noah’s Ark animals. There are lots of children’s stories, and children’s pictures, and songs about Noah’s ark. We have somehow Disneylized a rather sad story into a happy one. We have emphasized the cuddly furry animals and have forgotten about the reality that every living thing was wiped out from the face of the earth. When the flood came, there was water, water, everywhere!
The story of Noah and the ark is not as much a children’s story as it is an adult one. It is the story of a creative God who first made a world that was pronounced, “Good, very good.”
And yet, in just a few chapters later, the world has gone from good to bad because of human sinfulness. Human beings, created to be obedient creatures in the Creator’s world, began to act like creators ourselves, gods unto ourselves.
And it was then that God regretted the world that had been created, particularly God’s human creations. In anger and regret, God made the rains to fall, the waters to rise, the waves to beat, the rivers to crest over their banks, the levees to break, and the muddy water to seep over the sandbags. The water rose and obliterated every living thing. Water was everywhere.
Only one family was preserved on the ark, Noah’s family of eight and their collection of animals. Everything else was gone.
It is a terrible, terribly frightening story when you think of it. There’s lots of death and destruction in this story. You can imagine for yourself the horrible aftermath of the flood when the waters subsided. It was like New Orleans! We may try to turn it into a cute little children’s story like in one of those Little Golden Books. But we can’t, not with all the death-dealing water. We can’t think of Katrina in any positive way. We shouldn’t think about the great flood and what happened to every living thing on earth other than it’s a sad, horrifying story too.
Lent
To focus on the great flood on this first Sunday in Lent is appropriate because we are to look at ourselves honestly. On this 40-day journey whether you are doing daily devotions or attending the Lenten Bible studies or coming to worship for the next seven weeks, it’s a season of honesty. This is the time for us to confront our sin and confess our guilt. Perhaps we have lived in such ways as to make our Creator regret having given us life.
The rest of the world thinks that we are making too much of our sin. They think that focusing upon evil, sin, and wickedness might lead us to negative thought, might engender in us a bad self-image. It’s like the controversy we are having over high school exit exams in California. Opponents of the standard exams claim that failing the exam would cause students to have a bad self-image while proponents for it believe that high school graduates need basic competencies to succeed in the world.
I know that knowing enough English to pass the exit exam is not a sin but the point here is that we live in an age that believes, not in the reality of standards or the devastation of sins, but in the need to go along in order to get along.
Who am I to judge? We’re all doing the best we can. Why must an exam reveal what we don’t know when we are not tested for what we do know? Why must the church dredge up this sordid story of our ill-fated misbehaving ancestors? Why must we in the twentieth-first century, far from these ancient peoples, admit to our continuing wickedness?
Because the church is not only about reconciliation, love, and comfort. The church is not only about affirming God’s grace and love for you. The church is also about telling the truth. And this ancient story tells the truth about how we got to where we are today. We have sinned from the beginning.
Read this morning’s newspaper, check out a book on the history of our generation, and there’s so much death, so much chaotic destruction, so much more violence and dying in the Middle East that we have become desensitized about wickedness and we just want to go to Disneyland and forget all about sin.
Destruction is not by water, not through the punishment of God, but through our own wickedness. Here’s an illustration. Our sin has become cosmic. In the story of the great flood, God destroys the world with water. It’s interesting that our sinful abuse of creation is gradually destroying the world that God has given us.
During a 20-year period, the world lost 200 million hectares of tree cover. What’s a hectare you might ask? It’s probably in the California’s high school exit exam! A hectare is 10,000 square meters. This doesn’t matter. This is roughly the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River. In most cases, the lost forests were replaced with deserts, which grew by 120 million hectares, a half of the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, claiming more land than is currently under cultivation in China.
We lost 480 billion tons of topsoil to erosion—the equivalent of almost all of the acreage under cultivation in India. The loss of forest contributed to a further reduction of our planet’s ability to process carbon dioxide, a green-house gas contributing to the threat of global warming. And the shrinking supply of cropland made it that much more difficult to provide food for the 1.6 billion additional people added to the world’s population during the past twenty years.
We’re not talking about ancient ancestors like Noah who sinned against God or even about our parents or grandparents who may not know that much to have caused this global sin. We are talking about the past twenty years—and the last time I checked, everyone here is at least twenty years old!
We must remember that it was not the great flood that caused the destruction or that God is a harsh and judgmental God but rather through our own wickedness, our human desire to act like creators of ourselves, gods unto ourselves that have led to such terrible problems around the world. Remember the recent mudslide in the Philippines? This catastrophe was caused by the deforestation of land and when the rains came, the water move the land causing all living things in its path to perish.
Last Word
But the story does not end in our terrible sin and God’s terrible judgment. The waters recede, the clouds fade, the sun comes out, and a rainbow arches over the whole muddy mess. The last word will not be our sin, but rather the Creator’s awesome love. Humanity is forgiven, the human journey begins again, and a rainbow is given as a sign of God’s promise that the flood will be “never again.”
Read Genesis 9:8-13.
The story ends in good news because God is determined to have the last word in our story. Our sin, our chaotic wickedness that made a mess of the good world, this is not the last word. God continues the conversation with Noah and the world, resumes the journey with us, all under the rainbow, a sign of a covenant between God and his people.
Baptismal Waters
Just as God devastated the world through water, God also preserved humanity on the waters in the person of Noah and his family in the ark. When we realize the sinfulness in our lives, we also are drawn to the baptismal waters when the old self is drowned so that our new self might arise.
Just as in the great flood, when water washed away a terrible past and made possible a bright and colorful future, so in our baptism God pronounces judgment on our tendency toward wickedness, and grants us mercy on our future.
Martin Luther once said something to the effect that baptism takes only a few moments to do, but your whole life to finish. We keep dying and drowning in our old, mistaken past so that we might arise to a new future. In order for us to come to God, to be with God, something must die in us in order that something might be born, something must end in order that there might be a new beginning. We keep being dependent on God to take us back, forgive, and to enable us to begin again. Time and time again, God does. Baptism is a sure promise that no evil we can do is great enough to defeat the purpose of God for our lives.
It’s like how we sometimes find ourselves talking with our children. In your fit of anger when you yelled a bit more than you should have, you children may have responded something like, “Daddy, do you still love me?”
You are taken back and a bit surprise about how your child interpreted your burst of anger. You answer her something like this: “Of course I love you. No matter what or when or where you are, you are stuck with my love. That doesn’t mean I won’t get angry—I will, but I will always love you and want to make things better. That doesn’t mean your actions won’t have consequences; all actions have consequences for good or ill. But I will love you and help you if you need help. From now until the time we are both dead, I will love you, and then, in heaven, I’ll love you even more. No matter what happens, you cannot get rid of my love for you. Always remember that.”
This is what the Bible says God’s love is like. This is what the rainbow means when God promise that he will never again make the rains come and the waters to rise to destroy his creation again.
Lent is an opportunity to renew your baptism, once again to embrace the mystery of a God who both judges us and loves at the same time. What needs to be washed away from your life right now? What bad habit, sinful inclination, or dark secret needs to be drowned away? And what sun needs to shine, what good work needs to be undertaken, what new practice needs to be ventured?
Our sin is serious. Our alienation from God is severe. Storm clouds gather and the rains fall with water everywhere. The waters rise flooding over the banks of our lives. Yet, so is the goodness, grace and mercy of God—over us all, over all of humanity whether you’re on the top of the hill or on the bottom of the valley, God’s love like water is everywhere.
Let us pray.
Lord, we come to you in all honesty that we have sinned against you. In this season of Lent, we pray that we would seek your forgiveness for the times when we thought more highly of ourselves when we should have given to you the credit of praise and glory. Drown away our sins and wash us in the baptismal waters of Christ to become renewed in our faith both in words and in deeds. We see O God that your love for us is like water—it’s everywhere. Amen.