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Beginning Again: The First Covenant
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis June 18, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 6:5-8; 13; 7:4-10, 17-24; 8:1, 13-22; 9:8-17 Matthew 24:29-31; 36-39
This morning marks the beginning of a series of Sundays that will lead us through the story of God's saving purposes in human history by way of God's covenants. "Covenant," says Walter Brueggemann, "is the deep and pervasive affirmation that our lives in all aspects depend upon our relatedness to this other One [this quite specific, identifiable other One] who [takes] the initiative in our lives and who wills more good for us that we do for ourselves." Specifically we begin this morning with what is called the Noahide covenant, the promise God made to all of God's creatures through Noah. Then on the Sunday before the nation connects its own founding to covenantal theology, we will consider the Abrahamic covenant. Next we will turn to a very different sort of covenant, the covenant made through Moses with Israel on Sinai. By mid-July we will arrive at the Davidic covenant, a precursor to the New Covenant made by God in Christ, the covenant of our final Sunday of the series. So to the Noahide covenant and the very human question this story prompts: have you ever wished you could start over again? Wipe the slate clean? Erase the mistakes made? Leave the whole mess behind? Begin life here, now, today, as if for the first time? It would seem that the story of Noah is a story that anticipates our human desire to begin again. I think of so many who have been in marriages or relationships gone awry and who have longed either to return to the days of wine and roses or run as far as they could from the destruction wrought by a broken promise; I think of others who believe they have bungled the job of being parents, fathers or mothers who would wish away the angry words and the raised hands that have built a wall now too high or too wide to scale.or of parents who would reverse the years of indulgence which have made of their offspring persons who no doubt are loved but are very hard to like; I think of young people whose unforgiving peers magnify the memory of social failures, thereby making each morning cause for dread and each evening enormous with self-hatred [Would that we would move, I remember praying night after night as a teenager, so I could begin again]; I think of those for whom financial irresponsibility or substance abuse or domestic violence or sexual addiction has dug life into a hole wherein only death seems an adequate metaphor to name the longing for new birth. In fact I expect there is not one of us here this morning who has escaped the cry for deliverance from a sorry past, coupled with a prayer for a new beginning. According to the story of Noah and the flood, such was also the case with God. This is God's sorry story: the story of an Almighty Father who wanted to start over again, wipe the slate clean, erase the mistakes made, and leave the whole mess behind. In the beginning God pronounced creation good. But when the creation story is told for the second time, the sum is sin: Adam and Eve sin, we say on Christmas Eve to set the stage for our redemption, and are expelled from the Garden of Eden. Then Cain murders Abel and so begets generations of jealousy, anger, violence, greed. Ironically the subtitle in my Bible for the section following the story of Cain and Abel is "The Beginning of Civilization." Oh really? "It grieved God to the heart" Genesis tells us, this turn of human beings away from God's purposes. So God said, "I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created-people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry I have made them." The story, then, is not about us but about God, the God who set out to drown a world full of sorrows only to find that the cause of such grief was God's steadfast love for the world God had made and could never again destroy. So first, we are given the story of "a troubled parent," says Walter Brueggemann, "who grieves over the alienation." "The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth," says Genesis, "and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually." "God is aware," Brueggemann goes on, "that something is deeply amiss in creation, so that God's own dream has no prospect of fulfillment [because] God's world has begun to conjure its own future quite apart from the future willed by God." Therefore the God whose mighty power had "formed the creatures with a word and then pronounced them good" was now about to change his Almighty mind. "I will blot out.I will destroy.I will bring a flood" says God. Here, of course, the whole story could have ended with creation reversed, chaos reinstated and God returned to the community that is God and is love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, world at an end. "But" says the Bible, and with that minor conjunction speaks a major word meant to act as a toe in the door of creation's future, as a foot in the mouth of God's judgment: "But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord." If in the first place we have to do with God and God's grief over these creatures that have cut and run from God's love, then in the second place we have to do with the nature of such creatures, specifically we have to do with Noah. At the outset, we know nothing about Noah save for this: he does as he is told. Contrary to Bill Cosby's midrash on the story, Noah questions neither the definition of a cubit nor the details of God's command. In fact, "Noah did all that God commanded him," cooperating with God's purpose and thereby, as we shall see, confounding God's resolve to quit the human race. In addition to Noah, the ship's manifest reads, not coincidentally, like the first creation story, God stowing on board "every wild animal of every kind, and all domestic animals of every kind, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every bird of every kind.two and two of all flesh in which there was breath of life." The very existence of the ark and all of its animals allows us to hope that God is not only a God who blots out, but is also a God who holds out the possibility of beginning again. Yet exactly how, we wonder, does God accomplish this with the likes of creatures who would prefer to live without God in the world? Does God's saving grace take hold when the wicked have ceased treading water, leaving God's pets to inhabit the earth again? If we look to ourselves for a clue, we can conclude nothing. As far as Scripture is concerned, nothing happened of significance on the ark as regards our basic human nature. "They put the behemoths in the hold" reports Julian Barnes' stowaway woodworm, "along with the rhinos, the hippos and the elephants. It was a sensible decision to use them as ballast; but you can imagine the stench." Yet the stench was more than merely biological. It remained, according to Augustine, ontological-that is to say in the very fabric of our human being-sin constituting the existence of humanity even after the flood. All of which leads us to conclude that the story of the flood is not about some disaster which frightened human beings into being human and thus altered the course of history. One has only to read the rest of the Bible.or even the first few verses written on dry land after the flood.to know that things continued as they had been. Again says the woodworm, "Noah was the pick of a very bad bunch. As for his drinking, to tell you the truth, it was the Voyage that tipped him over the edge.that turned him into a soak..You could even argue, I suppose, that God drove Noah to drink. Perhaps that is why your scholars are so jumpy, so keen to separate the first Noah from the second: the consequences are awkward. But the story of the 'second' Noah-the drunkenness, the indecency, the capricious punishment of a dutiful son-well, it didn't come as a surprise to those of us who knew the 'first' Noah on the ark." Neither possibility thinking nor human actualization, says Brueggemann, can contain the hope toward which the Noah story turns. Rather God alone is left as the character whose intentions are forever altered by forty days and forty nights at sea. After every living creature "in whose nostrils was the breath of life, dies" Noah and those who were with him in the ark are forgotten on the high seas for five more months. They must have been months of darkness, though the rains had ceased; months when no one on board knew what was ahead save a slow, stinking death; months when there was no word from the Lord nor land on the horizon. These are months we have known, you and I, months many even now endure. Then we are told, for no apparent reason, the Lord remembered Noah and so remembered in this one creature God's purpose for all creation. "Noah I will name him" said his father Lamech at his birth, for "out of the ground that the Lord cursed, this one shall comfort." The name Noah meant comfort and is rendered in Isaiah's fortieth, "Comfort, comfort my people," a word which announced the end of exile. The Noah story, it turns out, was a story told first in exile, told in the land where there was no word from the Lord, no homeland on the horizon, no hope of being saved from certain death. God remembered Noah, says Genesis, and with that the tide turned, the waters subsided, the land appeared and a promise was made: "Never again," says God, "will I curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done." This was the first covenant. Never again, no matter how dark the sky, no matter how deep the waters or how strong the winds, never will God destroy. To live in the light of that ancient promise, my friends, is to live as those who begin again every morning: our slates wiped clean, our messes left behind, our mistakes erased and forgiven. You and I rise each morning with this confidence, of course, not only because of God's promise to all humankind through Noah but more because of Another who turned the story of the flood inside-out. At the center of human history stands One who was destroyed in place of the many, thereby assuring us and all humankind of a future which depends not upon our righteousness, nor upon our good intentions, nor upon our obedience, nor upon our turn toward God, but upon God's turn toward us forever in Jesus Christ. By his death, death never again can destroy God's good creation. "'Never again,' God said, and Noah clung to those words like a raft in a high sea," wrote another preacher. "No matter what the new meanness [mortals] might think up, surely this terrible thing would never happen again..In the meantime, Noah "would keep his eye on the rainbow and his hand near the corkscrew and try to be fruitful and multiply just the way God had told him." May we, for the most part, do the same! Thanks be to God. |