Never Again

⁸ Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, ⁹ “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, ¹⁰ and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. ¹¹ I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” ¹² God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: ¹³ I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. ¹⁴ When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, ¹⁵ I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. ¹⁶ When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” ¹⁷ God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

Genesis 9:8-17

A couple of beginning thoughts…this is normally our Old Testament text for the first Sunday of Lent, but our college students are leading worship next week, so we’ll use different texts. Nick, Kathy, and I will also be focusing on the theme of covenant during Lent, so we’ll begin today—at the very beginning.

And at the very beginning, God created, looked around at what had been created and proclaimed it good.  A world full of colors and creatures and sunlight and moonlight; green land and blue waters; a creation bursting with promise and hope and life. And it was good. But in that beginning life began to evolve and humans began to realize their sin as they saw each others’ nakedness. There was jealousy and pettiness in those first descendants that led to one brother taking the life of another, murder that continued through generations. God looked around at this good creation that had been marred by the sin of humans—looked around and saw the wickedness of humankind. The description given to us in the 6^th chapter of Genesis is not a pretty one:

The Lord saw the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord 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 that I have made them.

God grieved over them, hated their wickedness, mourning that beautiful part of creation that had been molded with loving hands, regretting the day they had been made.

But, even in the midst of that madness and chaos and disorder, there was a ray of hope in the midst of darkness—a part of that creation that remained good. There was a man named Noah, a descendant of the murderous Cain. God loved Noah and entrusted him with the little part of creation that would be left after God sent a flood to wipe the chaos away. God planned to start over and created Noah to preserve that new creation. God told him to build a boat strong enough to withstand the flood waters that would soon wipe the earth away, big enough to take in 2 animals of every kind, precious enough to hold Noah’s precious family who would be saved with him. You know Noah must have been good, because most of us would have questioned God about this one. I, for one, would have protested and said, “Maybe I’ll do this God, but only if I don’t have to bring the snakes with me.”

You know, we so often tend to sanitize this story—to not deal with the harshness and severity and destruction of it. Instead of dealing with the reality of what happens here, we want to make it the stuff of nursery walls and camp songs; the cute animals coming on in twosies, twosies, elephants and kangaroosies, roosies—but it’s not. The ark must have been awful and hard to build, with Noah feeling lots of guilt for his family being the last one on the earth. The ark would be burdened with the smell of animals and the territorial fights that were sure to ensue between them. It must have been awful and hard for Noah, knowing that he and his family would be the last part of God’s creation standing after the flood, awful knowing that they would see everyone else washed away to their deaths.

And it was awful. Just as there was nothing good about the Earth that God could find, there is nothing good about this part of the story. The flood was horrible; the death all around was horrible. And God sensed that. After God blew breath and the flood waters receded showing the barrenness left of the earth, God looked around. God made a promise of new life in the middle of the nothingness, a promise never to do it again. God made a promise: “I will never again 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.” It was a beautiful promise to be sure, but, as we all know, promises are easily broken. And God knows us and knows that we can’t help being broken and acting broken because sin is in our hearts from the beginning. So God took it one step further and made a covenant, a promise to be sure, but something more binding—a covenant is a promise, an oath, a hope that comes from the heart, a promise of hope between God and all of us, something that is deep and meaningful. A covenant bears the promise to all of us that God will never break God’s word to us, and so it is lifelong and necessary for us to live in the world. God said to Noah, “I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you…that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood to destroy the earth…I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.” God made that covenant with Noah, makes it with all of us since we are all descendants, God’s children together. Never again, God says.

The covenant, that original covenant with God and with all of us, is binding for God, a promise and oath that will never be broken by our Creator. This covenant reminds us that God is good to us all of the time and always will be. But God also knows that we will not always be good back, knows that we are so prone to breaking covenant. It even happened with Noah—God made that original covenant with Noah after Noah built the ark out of such overwhelming faithfulness. Noah and his family were fruitful—they multiplied and filled the earth just as God asked. But it wasn’t easy. Can you imagine how heavy all that was for Noah—for he and his family to be the only humans who were picked to survive a flood that would wipe out the rest of the earth? Can you imagine the survivor’s guilt? Although he honored the covenant with God, he lived a broken life, weighed down by guilt, one that culminated with him being drunk and naked and having to be covered up by his sons. Even as he continued to spread life as he planted in the vineyard, he was ultimately broken by survival, broken by life. But despite all of that, God’s promise of life, of creation, continued.

There is a lot of darkness in Noah’s story, a lot of broken earth and broken people. I don’t know about you, but I’ve felt a lot of times lately that maybe we are there again, in a place where God looks at the world as broken and broken down, heavy with the weight of sin and violence, heavy with the burden of people who tear each other down and hurt each other without even a moment of hesitation. I’ve felt several times in the last few years that we might be in the time of Noah again.

When I heard the stories from an elementary school in Newtown, stories of 5 year olds who had up to 12 bullet wounds each in their little bodies, I looked to the sky and wondered and asked, “What kind of world are we living in, God?” So many times lately, as I’ve heard of hundreds of school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria, girls who have been raped and held for ransom and have become not suicide bombers—but suicide bombs—as explosives have been strapped to their bodies, I wonder. When I see us all become so convinced that we have the market on truth and everyone else is wrong, and when I see the ways we tear each other down over social media, I wonder. When I hear about three twenty-something Muslim students who are executed in their apartments in Chapel Hill, I wonder. When I watch our elected leaders of all parties act like children who threaten to take their toys from the sandbox and go home instead of talking and compromising, I wonder. And, of course, as I watch the spread of ISIS—a group who kills all the men in Iraqi villages and keeps their women and children, raping and pillaging them; a group who kidnaps foreigners, holding them for years until they know the world is watching, murdering them brutally in increasingly barbaric ways, I wonder. I wonder how the world will deal with these people who kidnap a young refugee worker from Syria, hold her and do God only knows what to her, only to set her up to be murdered. Folks with no conscience certainly won’t listen to reason or suddenly be overcome by compassion and we are left to wonder if even bombs will stop them. I honestly thought this this week after hearing about Kayla Mueller’s death: “Maybe it’s time for God to go all Old Testament and send those flood waters into this broken world again, wipe the slate clean, and just start over.”

Thankfully, though, that’s just my view of our broken and sinful world. And thankfully that’s not God’s view. Although I imagine that God is still disgusted and sad and grieved by what we do to the world and to each other, God still says, “Never again.” Although I imagine that God says it over and over and over again and often tires of it, God still stands by that covenant: Never again. Although I imagine we probably often make God mad enough to fill the earth again, God stands firm to the covenant: Never again will I fill the earth with the flood waters and destroy my creation.

Notice that God doesn’t require any promises, any oaths, any words God knows we can’t back up from Noah or from us. God makes the covenant with us knowing that any promises we make in return will be broken because we are broken, because perfection was broken in the garden by us almost as soon as it was created by God. But God makes the promise of covenant anyway. God sets the bow in the clouds anyway as a sign of covenant for all of us.

I love how my favorite storyteller, Barbara Brown Taylor says it:

From now on, God…will bind himself to creation in peace, promising himself to it…God chooses to ally himself with the cantankerous creation whatever the cost…We have all of us got a place in that ark—not because we, like Noah and his crew, are all that righteous, but because it has pleased God to preserve our lives. Because life is sacred to God, and having destroyed it once, God has promised never to do it again. If we go on perishing, it may have less to do with divine fiat that with our own amnesia. We have forgotten who we are and what we are supposed to be doing. We have forgotten whose covenant partners we are and how that covenant—not to mention that God—means for us to be bailing water and handing out life vests as fast as we can, so that every living creature who rides this ark with us may share the unmitigated joy of walking down the rickety ramp to plant a foot, a paw, a hoof on dry land.

“Never again,” says God, promising, covenanting to Noah and each and every one of us that we have a place in the ark. God makes that covenant with us, even knowing that we are broken and that we can’t help but sin. God makes that covenant with us, promising with every breath and every word and every action that we are a part of the kingdom. And because of that amazing covenant, we are called to every single thing we can to honor God, to honor God’s covenant promises to us—to live in thanksgiving as we make sure that every creature is able to set foot on the good soil of the earth.

I love that this story of Noah and God and covenant is one of our lectionary passages for the first Sunday of Lent. As we are about to journey through these long, barren, Lenten days, we are called to examine our lives in every way. We are called to look at this grace God has given the planet because God wants us to live in harmony, honoring the earth, honoring each other, honoring God. Lent gives us the chance to examine and explore how to reach out despite our brokenness; how to break free from what weighs us down and reach out to those in need; how to love deeply while at the same time recognizing our mortality and sin. Let us be reminded of that during this week as we journey towards Ash Wednesday and Lent.

As we close, I would like to take some time to read some beautiful, haunting words from Kayla Mueller, the American who showed her love for God by working with Syrian refugees. She was kidnapped two years ago by ISIS and proved dead this week. These are tough, but necessary words to hear from a woman of great faith—a young woman who had already done so many great things in the world, a woman who could have done so much more if she had not been taken, a woman who loved so greatly while also recognizing her own sin, her own mortality. She wrote these words in a letter after she had been kidnapped:

If you could say I have 'suffered' at all throughout this whole experience it is only in knowing how much suffering I have put you all through; I will never ask you to forgive me as I do not deserve forgiveness. I remember mom always telling me that all in all in the end the only one you really have is God. I have come to a place in experience where, in every sense of the word, I have surrendered myself to our creator because literally there was no else…and by God and by your prayers I have felt tenderly cradled in freefall. I have been shown in darkness, light and have learned that even in prison, one can be free. I have come to see that there is good in every situation…I pray each day that if nothing else, you have felt a certain closeness and surrender to God as well and have formed a bond of love and support amongst one another. The thought of your pain is the source of my own, simultaneously the hope of our reunion is the source of my strength. Please be patient, give your pain to God. I know you would want me to remain strong. That is exactly what I am doing.

Amen. Let us pray.