God, Noah, and the Rainbow Genesis 6:5-8, 13-14, 17-22 and Genesis 9:8-17 First Presbyterian Church July 1, 2018 First Reading 5 The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. 6 And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 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. 8 But Noah found favor in the sight of the LORD. 13 And God said to Noah, I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth. 14 Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in the ark and cover it inside and out with pitch. 17 For my part, I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons wives with you. 19 And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. 20 Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive. 21 Also take with you every kind of food that is eaten and store it up; and it shall serve as food for you and for them. 22 Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him. Second Reading 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. Sermon 1 Tell me, is there anything more uplifting than suddenly catching sight of a rainbow? There s really nothing like it, is there? Whether you re stuck in traffic or sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch there s really nothing like it. And it s especially cool when the first sighting is made by a child. Just looking up and seeing a perfect arch of the purest color when you least expect it. Doesn t it make you wonder who in the world would make something as beautiful as that? As you may know, lots of folks see rainbows as signs or omens or blessings. I read this week of an 8-year-old boy in Macon, Ga. who was inside his house listening to the radio when he heard the news that World War II was over. Bounding out into the street, he found his whole neighborhood already there all of them cheering and crying and falling into each other s arms. He didn t remember who saw it first, but someone said, Look! and pointed down the street, where the oak trees parted to reveal the top of a bright rainbow. And all at once the street got quiet as a prayer. It was God s promise of peace, he said, and we all knew it. This story of God, Noah, and the rainbow is one of those Bible stories that has gotten down deep inside us. The rainbow is God s promise of peace the symbol of God s everlasting covenant with all creation. The rainbow is God s pure gift to us providing a very colorful corrective to anyone who believes that all the grace in the Bible is in the New Testament. Because it is certainly not! From the very beginning this sacred story is overflowing with grace when God says, I choose you. Will you choose me? And we say, Sure, why not? But before you know it, we re off choosing all kinds of other gods instead which leads to terrible consequences. And that s what happened in today s story: God made the whole world in one short week pronounced it all good, in fact, very good, and gave us the keys to all of it with one notable exception. One fruit tree one beautiful, prolific fruit tree had a picket fence around it and a small sign that read: Private stock. Please do not pick. Yet, as we know the temptation was too much and before creation was even good and dry, there it was already broken first the trespass with the fruit, then the hiding from God in the garden, then the shameful, sad eviction, which, by the way, even God could not stand. So before sending the two human creatures out of Eden forever, God sewed them their first set of clothes so that they would have something to cover them when they walked out those gates for the last time. Again, my friends, grace from the very beginning. But things continued to get worse, not better. Adam and Eve s son, Cain, killed his brother, Abel the first murder and humankind went on and on breaking what God had made until in the sixth chapter of Genesis, God says, Enough is 1 Significant parts of this sermon are adapted from Refreshing God s Memory, a sermon by Barbara Brown Taylor published in Gospel Medicine (Cowley-1995), p. 27-34.
enough." The world has betrayed God s intent its creatures have refused to honor God as God. And at this point God has had enough: I will blot out from the earth all the human beings I have created, God said, people together with the animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them. For I am sorry that I have made them. You know, that may just be the most sobering verse in the whole Bible. And yet for all its pathos, this sobering sentence invites us to penetrate the very heart of God where we find not an angry, capricious tyrant bent on total annihilation but a troubled parent who is deeply hurt and is grieving over the rejection of his wise and loving care. There is one person who found favor in the sight of the Lord, however and to him God gave the drawings for an ark a big, roofed boat that looked more like a floating barn than a boat. God told him to fill it to the rafters with zebras and flamingos, black snakes and box turtles and barn owls, giraffes and hyenas and ground hogs (although I have to say I wish he had just left the groundhogs behind their ancestors are now filling their bellies with my green beans and cucumber and squash plants). But here s the picture all of them - representing ALL of creation floating above the wet chaos below where everything else was perishing. Now, this is clearly a horrible thing to think about which is why when we tell the story to children we focus on Noah and his zoo because they survived. But no one and nothing else did. The cleansing was total just as God had willed. And yet, the result was so devastating that God willed never to do such a thing again. I will establish with you, God said to Noah when it was all over, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood and never again shall a flood destroy the earth. And as a sign of the covenant, God set a rainbow in the clouds as a reminder not for Noah but to jog God s own memory. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember, God said. The history of the world and here I mean history as the Bible writes it the history of the world is the story of promises like this one the story of God s promises to all of us. For when we tell our sacred story, we organize it around the telling of these promises: the promise of peace to Noah the promise of a land and a son to Abraham and Sarah the promise of a law to Moses the promise of child to Mary. They are all the same promise, at heart the promise of relationship with God (intimate relationship) which for eons God has struggled to keep alive with some of the most ornery and rebellious people a deity ever had. Covenant is the Bible s word for this relationship and this covenant relationship is based on this promise: I shall be your God and you shall be my people. That is the heart of it our belonging to God, God belonging to us the covenant of relationship with God. Now, I know when WE hear that lots of us hear an IF at the end. I shall be your God and you shall be my people IF IF you obey my laws, IF you heed my commandments, IF you sell all you own and follow me. And we are right to expect something like that because most covenants DO HAVE expectations and responsibilities for BOTH parties. But not God s covenant with Noah there s not one word about what Noah will or will not do. It s all about what God will do and will not do. It s all about God saying, I will never hurt you like that again I will never hurt the earth like that again.
I won t do it and I won t forget, because I m hanging up my bow where I can always see it not a weapon anymore, but a reminder of my covenant with you and every living creature for all generations. Well, you might well ask what the heck happened? At the beginning of the story God is ready to drown the whole earth, but here at the end an unconditional promise of life. Something has shifted something has changed. What is it? Well, it s sure not US and God surely knows that. In no time, Jacob will be stealing Esau s birthright Aaron will be dancing around a golden calf and David will be trying to get rid of Bathsheba s husband. So, the story of the flood is not a story about a change in people What it DID change was the heart of God who in this pivotal moment swears off retribution as a way of dealing with creation s resistance and chooses relationship instead. From now on God will not repay our betrayal with his vengeance he will not let HIS sorrow lead him to kill. Instead, he will bind himself to creation even though he knows it will hurt even though God knows he will be wounded so be it. If there is to be pain in the world, God will share it. Never again will he protect himself from it by killing off those who have caused it. God s promise to them is life not death an everlasting covenant between God and every living creature and all flesh that is on the earth. And Noah this prehistorical biblical figure is the bearer of this promise. 2 Though the story has a very dim view of the human heart and though the flood does nothing to change our heart, the story also announces something we were not expecting a minority report, so to speak: that faithfulness is possible even in this evil world. That s who Noah is he is the bearer of an alternative possibility the possibility of walking close to God the possibility of obeying God s commandments the possibility of accepting who he is as creature and letting God be God. To be sure, humankind if left alone to its own devices is hopeless deeply, deeply set against God s purposes. Which means that any hope for the future will not be come from human ingenuity or possibility thinking or self-actualization. Hope will depend on a move from God God will need to fashion a way forward. And this is precisely what God did in choosing Noah to build an ark on which to put every kind of animal and creeping thing and bird. God fashioned a way forward. And the truth is God continues to do that and in a sense, we are all Noahs. 3 We all have a place in that ark not because like Noah and his crew, we are all that righteous but because it has pleased God to preserve our lives. Life is sacred to God and having destroyed it once, God has promised never to do it again. If the earth ever perishes by flood again it will have less to do with God than with our own forgetfulness. 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 means for us to do everything we can to tend and care for every other creature on the ark. Which, I suppose, is why God is not the only one who needs a rainbow we need one, too, don t we? To be a reminder between us and every living creature that shares the breath of life with us. 2 I am drawing on the work of Walter Brueggemann for this reflection on Noah. See his excellent commentary on Genesis in the Interpretation Series (John Knox Press-1984), p.73-84 3 Though I am using it in a different way, this idea came from After the Flood, a sermon by Anna Carter Florence and published in the Advent 2002 edition of Journal for Preachers, p.39.
However hard it rains outside however stuffy the air gets inside this boat we can still, like God, remember. And we can search the sky for a sign that we know is there, even when we cannot see it. We can stay awake to it, and to God, and to one another. And every time we look up and DO SEE that perfect curve of color stretching across the sky we can remember God s everlasting Yes to all who live within its embrace.