Noah: God’s Covenant with Creation
Lenten Sermon Series: Remember: God’s Covenants and the Cross
Genesis 9.8-17
Lent 1B
February 18, 2024
From time to time, I have the pleasure of performing weddings. Usually, as is traditional, the couple will exchange rings as a symbol of the covenant they were making with each other. In rehearsal, I always discuss the exact timing of the giving of the ring. I walk the couple through the process. First, I say, “Bob as you place this ring on Mary’s finger, I invite you to say these words: Mary, I give you this ring as a sign of my love for you [here I would pause for the groom to repeat the words and then continue by saying] and my faithfulness to our covenant.” The groom is supposed to repeat the last phrase and then place the ring on the bride’s finger. Well, at one particular wedding which I recall, when we reached this part of the service, I began, “Bob, as you place this ring…” and—in spite of our practice, but likely because of nerves—he slipped the ring all the way down her finger. As I continued with the instructions, the bride made a little motion as if to say not yet. The groom started a bit as he realized he was getting ahead of the proceedings and he pulled the ring back a bit toward the end of her finger. They glanced at each other, smiled and suppressed a laugh before he began to repeat his lines.
Of course, what mattered was the covenant that ring symbolized: commitment and faithfulness in sickness and health, for richer or poorer, until they are parted by death. No matter how many hiccups there were during the ceremony, the ring will always serve as a reminder that they are bound together in covenant.
In Genesis 9, it is not a ring, but a bow that serves as a reminder that God has bound God’s self to creation in covenant relationship. It’s a story that is quite familiar, perhaps too familiar, to many of us. The world that God has made has not turned out too well. It was very good at the beginning, full of promise, a bright future laying ahead. But then things went bad. Sin entered the picture, beginning with Adam and Eve’s consumption of the forbidden fruit. Things soon turned violent between their children when, in a fit of jealousy, Cain slew his brother Abel. The world seems to have quickly gone downhill from there. By the 6th chapter of Genesis, the Lord looks upon humanity and is grieved by their great wickedness. According to the author (J), “Every idea that their minds thought up was always completely evil (6.5, CEB).” The entire planet was corrupted and filled with violence because of the sin of human beings (6.11-13).
So, God decides to wipe the slate clean and begin again. God intends to destroy the earth and all who live on it, save one righteous person, Noah, and his family. They are instructed to build an ark and fill it with plants and animals to ride out the coming flood. Essentially, God has decided to undo the second day of creation. On that day, God had tamed and separated the waters of the primordial chaos in order to form land and make space for life. Now God had decided to open the flood gates and let the waters loose, to let the chaos once more engulf and undo all things. A great reversal had taken place: the waters of chaos had once been restrained and order imposed by God so that life might come forth but that order had been undone by humans whose sin and violence had plunged the world into a new chaos. So God will now use the waters of chaos to cleanse the creation of human chaos. God is so grieved by human sin that God intends to start over.
Rabbi Jane Rachel Litman has rightly observed, "Contemplating the destruction of an entire civilization is disturbing, and so it should be." [http://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/judaism/2000/11/when-bad-things-happen-to-bad-people.aspx] This is not a comfortable story when we really think about it. But we should keep a couple of things in mind. First, as Litman points out, the “flood story is not about bad things happening to good people, but about bad things happening to bad people.” [as summarized by Dan Clendenin, “When God Was Green: The Original Eco-Covenant,” Lent 1B, For Sunday March 5, 2006; https://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20060227JJ.shtml] Genesis suggests that, save Noah, humanity was completely corrupt—such hyperbole is a sign we are not dealing with history but with theologized mythology. Yet, we know all too well the wickedness and violence of our race, and, if we are honest, the potential for evil within ourselves. Ending violence and stopping evil acts is a necessary and good thing (though I admit that the means of doing so in this story give me pause and make me more than a little queasy).
Secondly, no one in the ancient world would have batted an eye at the thought of a deity or deities destroying the world they created. It was simply assumed that this was the right of the creator. And further, it was simply understood that this was just and proper: God was omnipotent and just and would use the Divine power to maintain justice and restore order. The ancient Hebrews no doubt shared these presumptions with the Sumerians and Akkadians and Babylonians whose flood myths they were borrowing and modifying.
But here’s where things get really interesting, because the authors of the Noah story do alter their sources[1]. After the flood has subsided and Noah and company disembarked, God does something remarkable. God hangs God’s “bow” in the clouds. Hebrew has no word for “rainbow,” though that is, on one level, what is referred to here. But the word used here is the Hebrew word for a warrior’s weapon, as in bow and arrow. Other ancient cultures sometimes depicted gods carrying bows and it was commonly believed, even among the Hebrews, that lightning bolts were the deity’s arrows. So, in this passage, God is setting aside the divine weapon, hanging it up like a warrior returned home with no more battles to fight. God is symbolically repudiating the use of violence, the use of overwhelming divine power to deal with human evil. This is an incredible and unique claim in the context of the ancient world. As David Lose says, “A single or even repeated act of mercy may be accounted for by God’s gracious nature, but to forgo for all time the right to destroy is an unheard-of surrendering of divine power.” [“Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word Year B, Vol. 2, 29] The rainbow is to be a sign of a covenant that is grounded in a radical act of grace.
It is also a radical and unilateral act of self-limiting. The whole covenant is decreed and enacted on God’s initiative. God repeatedly says, in various forms, “I am making my covenant with you and all creatures.” Neither Noah, nor any of his family nor any of the animals or plants are consulted—but they are all included. God simply declares that God will never do this again, regardless of what humans do. It is a unilateral act. God is binding God’s self to the creation and to all creatures. It is a global guarantee that God will always be for us and for all created things. God will always seek, and promote and cultivate life—for humans, for animals, for plants, for the planets and stars, for the entire universe. In making this covenant, God freely and unilaterally chooses to enter in to genuine relationship with us and all creation. As Susan Robb points out on our Lenten study, “God prefers to bind God’s self to us, regardless of how chaotic, violent, or destructive we become, rather than not live with us.” [Robb, 9] God commits to us in steadfast love and faithfulness [Ps 25.10], in abounding grace and in an unrelenting commitment to lead us into right paths and toward the Kingdom, the Beloved Community God always intended.
God tells Noah as he announces the rainbow as the sign of the covenant that, upon seeing the rainbow in the clouds, God will remember God’s promises and will be faithful to fulfill them, seeking the redemption and thriving of all life. Robb observes, “God’s memory is salvific, offering deeds of love that fulfill God’s promises.” God has already remembered Noah and delivered him. As the Torah progresses, God will remember the barren Rachel, enabling her to conceive and give birth to Joseph. When God’s people are held in bondage in Egypt, God will remember God’s promises to Abraham and act to liberate the people from slavery to Pharoah. [Robb, 8]
This Divine commitment to remember and save will be most clearly, poignantly, and painful demonstrated in the incarnation, life and crucifixion of Jesus. In Jesus—God incarnate, the Word made flesh—God enters into our human predicament for us and for our salvation. God, in Jesus, thus makes God’s self vulnerable to the joy and grief, the disappointments and the successes that mark all relationships. Christ, says 1 Peter, “suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God.” [3.18] In Christ, God comes to us with forgiveness, reconciliation and the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, because God has remembered us in our bondage to sin and death and determined to set us free.
In the covenant with Noah, God commits to us for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. In Christ, God commits to us even unto death, but not even the grave can separate us from God’s great love for us. Thus, because of God’s gracious remembering, God’s loving refusal to forget us, both the rainbow and the cross are symbols of hope.
Daniel Migliore, theology professor at Princeton, and his wife Margaret, spent a lot of time volunteering with children in the inner-city of Trenton, NJ. One day, Daniel was telling them the story of Noah. He asked the type of a question you might hear in a children’s sermon: “Where do you see Rainbows?” He was surprise to hear the answer, “In the street!” At first, he thought the child misspoke or misunderstood the question. But as several other children enthusiastically affirmed the answer, it became clear that they did not mean “when I’m standing in the street” but literally “in the street.” Still puzzled, Daniel did some checking and discovered what the children meant. They lived in the inner-city, surrounded by high-rises, where there was little open space, much less anything like a park. They could see very little of the sky. But they saw lots of pavement, pavement on which there were often puddles, puddles in which water and oil from passing cars mixed to form rainbows.
Commenting on this story, Scott Hozee points out that it may seem sad that for these children, “Their rainbows were these greasy and grimy ones in the burned-over streets and alleys of their urban world….But there’s maybe something hopeful there, too–an occasion, you might say, for grace. After all, where else do such children need to see the sign of God’s hope than smack in the middle of the world they call home? They don’t need a rainbow soaring over the Rocky Mountains, they need one in the greasy puddles of their everyday lives.” [ Hozee, “1 Peter 3.18-22 Commentary,” Center for Excellence in Preaching: Sermon Starters: Lent 1B, 2015; http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/sermon-starters/lent-1b-2/?type=lectionary_epistle#sthash.yGEuFfc0.dpuf] Even in the midst of their difficult lives, there were rainbows, signs of hope and promise. Even in the midst of the daily challenges and deprivations, there was grace and love. Even there in that often dark, cold, cruel place, Christ was seated in authority over all things seen and unseen. Even in the midst of struggle and depravation, God had not forgotten, but remembered the children of Trenton’s inner-city.
This is all grace, born of a deep, unrelenting love. No action is demanded on our part. This is God’s covenant and it stands for all time and for all people and creatures. The covenant is not predicated on our response but on God’s faithfulness and goodness. No action is required of us, but, if God is willing to lay aside so much power and assume such risk, ought we not also be willing to do the same? If God is so concerned with the life of this world, ought we not also be concerned for the future of this planet and the creatures that we share it with? Surely, we, who have received such grace, ought to do what we can to end violence and preserve the life of our fellow humans. Surely, we should be willing to imitate God and make some small sacrifice to preserve others from want and hunger. Surely, we should be willing to mirror God’s concern for other creatures and the earth and seek solutions to global warming and other environmental challenges.
What if, Susan Robb wonders, “instead of giving up chocolate [for Lent], we decided to give up bitterness and anger and hurting others with our words or actions for forty days? What if we chose not to post derogatory posts on social media pages? What if we made it a point to reach out to someone who is feeling deluged by darkness and storms in their life? What if we replaced bitterness, anger, political vitriol, pessimism, and hurtful words with kindness, gratitude, patience and reconciliation? [What if we prayed for our enemies and political opponents and actively sought their good instead of condemning them and insulting them?] What if we remembered those whom God remembers but most of our society seems to forget?” [Robb, 15-16] Surely, the world would be a little better place for our observing such a Lent. Surely, by God’s grace, sad, suffering, outcast people would be blessed. Surely, we too would discover ourselves to be blessed, and likely happier and more at peace. Surely, God would be pleased and lead us from the waters of chaos to the life-giving fount of Divine love.
God has made covenant with us and all creation. God who is ever faithful has graciously and freely committed God’s self to promote life and thriving for all things. So, let us, God’s people of the covenant, give thanks. Let us rejoice in God’s goodness. And let us observe a Holy Lent by freely joining in God’s work of life and love. Amen.
[1] The Noah story, and Genesis 1-11 as a whole, is largely a combination of two ancient Hebrew sources. The older, dating from the time of David and Solomon in the 10th century BCE, is designated by modern scholars as “J” because of its characteristic use of the Divine name “Yahweh” (spelled “Jahwe” in German and rendered as “LORD” in most English translations). The second source, dating from the time of the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century or shortly afterward, is designated “P” for “Priestly” because of the author(s) characteristic concern with matters of ritual and worship. Genesis 9.1-17 is the work of P. P is also the final editor of the Torah/Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), giving these books their final form.