The story of Noah
is one of those stories that even those that are unchurched feel they
know. In fact, many cultures have a
flood narrative in their history. My
guess is that if I asked you to raise your hands if you discussed this story in
your Sunday School classes as children, nearly everyone here present would
raise their hands. I see the nods. Good.
That means we can have a bit of an interactive sermon today. What provoked God to flood the earth? Come on.
There is no need to fear a wrong answer.
I bet most of us were taught a wrong answer in our youth. Teach
us who He is from the choir. Power from the left side. How about if I suggested wrath? Righteous anger? Fury?
How many of us were taught that? That’s
a lot of hands. I am going to give you
all a bit of homework this week. It is
Lent, so we should all being a bit more intentional in our walk with
Jesus. Go back and read this story
beginning in chapter 6 and count how many times God is described as angry,
furious, or wrathful. Please do. With that Russell Crowe movie out there, you
might be able to tell a much better story that Hollywood when your friends and
neighbors ask you, their “churchy” friend,” what you thought of the movie.
For those among
us who struggle as parents of adult children, re-reading the story might serve
as a great source of encouragement. I
will not be specific as that group operates in confidentiality, but one of the
weights that parents of adult children feel is the judgment of others. Parenting is tough work, is it not? Those of us with children sometimes
commiserate that it was only by God’s grace that our children survived until
adulthood. As parents, we can’t see and
know everything nor keep an eye on our children all the time. And even when we a screw-up is coming, we
know our children are likely to ignore our warnings.
A great example
in my household was electrical outlets.
Any of you ever have any children bound and determined to see what is in
those sockets? I see a few hands. What do we tell those kids? Do not
stick your finger or paperclip or spoon or whatever in there. It’s going to hurt. That always works as a warning, doesn’t
it? I’m not saying you all were a mean
dad like me, but maybe there came a time when you finally let the child stick
the finger or whatever in the socket and get that zap rather than warn them yet
again. How did they respond? How did you?
That hurt, didn’t it? Don’t do it again or listen to me next time. One
of mine got even. He left the penny in
the socket so that a flame scorched the drywall until dad pulled it out. He stuck the penny in there, but dad had to
get it out, risking a shock and a burn.
As our children
grow up, though, the lessons are harder and more lasting. Blow off your homework in high school and it
may cost our children the college of their choice. Party too hard in college and it could cost a
career or result in an unexpected family or even death. As parents, we often see the end result long
before our children. We tell the truant
children to quit skipping school. We
warn those drinking far too much or doing drugs of the dangers. And do they listen to us? Do they believe we know what we are talking
about? I see lots of no’s.
Sometimes, as a
pastor, I hear people talking about other children in disapproving tones. That
Johnnie/Susie is luck I am not his/her parent.
I would punish them so that they did not know what hit them. I would cut them off so quickly they would be
shocked into sobriety. I would kick
their lazy butts out of the house so fast they would be begging for a job and
to get back into my house. As
parents, we have heard those comments from others, have we not?
The problem, of
course, is that the children in question are not the children of those making
such statements. First, they are our
children. They are not strangers. We birthed them. We fed them.
We changed their diapers, kissed their booboos, held them during storms,
nursed them back to health when sick, listened to their dreams, and picked them
up when they got knocked down. They are
our flesh and our blood, the generation that comes after. And here is the kicker, we think we know why
a child acts the way he or she does. She turned to sex because I did not love her
the way she needed. He turned to drugs
because I failed him. She skipped school
because I did not teach her the value of an education. He loafs because he has had a hard life. Guilt and parentage are powerful when
combined. As parents, we tolerate a lot
of nonsense that we never would with the child of someone else. Just like God whom we worship today.
Those of you who
do your homework will discover the emotion that causes God to flood the earth
is not wrath or fury or anger. God sees
the evil and it grieves Him. Grieves
Him. There are places in Scripture, to
be sure, where God is described as full of divine wrath and fury, but this is
not one of them. For my money, like
Jesus standing outside the tomb of His friend Lazarus, this gives us the best
insight as to the motivation of God. God
is grieved by sin; He cries over our deaths.
His plans for us were so much better; and we, like willful children,
rejected His wisdom and love.
Lest you think I
have hit a discordant note here, how do our children respond to our discipline
of them. Tell a child he or she cannot
play hopscotch on a road because of traffic, and we parents are the
killjoys. Tell a child he or she must do
homework, and we parents are the meanies.
Insist our son or daughter must grow up and take responsibility for
their own decisions, and we parents are unloving or unsupportive. How do we rail at our Father in heaven? Do we not sound like willful or petulant
children? Are we not, to use the words
of Rick Grimes this week, the true “walking dead,” convinced we know better
than Him even those our paths all lead to death?
The flood
narrative, of course, captures two seemingly disparate characteristics of
God. In the beginning of the narrative,
we see that He hates sin. Hates. You and I and often the wider Church forget
that God hates sin. How many of us, and
be honest, how many of us think Jesus may have gotten an extra thorn in His
crown because of our sins, but He did not need to die for our sins because they
were not so bad? As a righteous and holy
God, God can no more tolerate the presence of sin than you and I can refuse to
blink or breathe very long. Speaking in
anthropomorphic terms, God’s autonomous nervous system destroys whatever sin it
encounters. Why, do you think, does God
not let the prophets in the Old Testament see Him face to face? Why do you think Israel trembles at the sound
of His voice on Sinai? Why must angels
bear His messages? Why does the
reflection of His presence, as found on Moses, terrify His people? Because, at a fundamental level, they
understand their danger when their sin encounters the holy, righteous God who
created all things. Israel understood an
encounter with God was to be their death.
The danger of
discounting the cost of sin is to create a predictable, tame God. If our sin is “not so bad,” we have no real
reason to fear judgment. If our sin is
of the “garden variety,” well then God should be glad we chose to worship
Him. If our sin is “garden variety,”
then we can wait to decide until later whether to become a disciple of Christ
or not. The problem with that way of
thinking, of course, is that the fruit of any sin is death. Whether it is the white lie of a spouse or
the umpteenth murder of a psychopath, all sin leads to death. Even our Sunday schools downplay the cost of
sin when teaching us about this story. I
remember the only cautionary tale I ever heard about the Flood was about the
pride of the unicorn. We had to learn
some stupid song about how the unicorns would not accept God’s offer to be
saved on the ark, and so were killed in the Flood for their prideful folly. Ever been around a big flood? Ever notice the critters that wash
downstream? Raccoons, squirrels,
opossums, and deer. Imagine what this
flood looked like those first few days.
And all that death was seen by God.
Sin and death mar His beautiful, magnificent creation! How were those behaving before the
flood? As if death, the consequence of
their sin, was far off!
The other,
seemingly untenable, characteristic of God we see in this narrative is His
desire to be loved as our loving Father in heaven. Better than the best parent, God wants us to love
Him, to follow Him, to obey Him, to trust Him, and to serve Him. He wants us to do these things, and do them
well, so that others might want to become His children. That special relationship He claims with each
one of us, He would like nothing better than to claim with all of humanity. How can He embrace us as a loving Father,
though, if we do not always listen to Him?
How can we even be in His presence, knowing His autonomic response to
sin, given the way we are?
And make no
mistake, God is not surprised by our unwillingness to change. It is not as if God expects us to be sinless
from this time forward. In fact, He
knows the future will prove us to be just as sinful. Noah and the family are barely off the ark
and what happens? Sin is still part of
this righteous family He saved. What
counselors call “dysfunctional,” God will have to work with as normal. Similarly, when you and I are baptized, we
don’t just flip a switch and stop sinning.
It is in our nature now, and He knows that. And His promise is that, when (not if) our
evil grows, He will not destroy the earth and all flesh in a Flood.
Those of us
unfamiliar with the story might be surprised by the references to “all
flesh.” We should not be. Paul teaches us that Creation groans under
the consequence of sin and looks for its re-creation. What God created in the beginning was
good. It was our sins that cursed
nature. Weeds sprung up, cataclysmic
events like earthquakes and tornados and tsunamis happened, and death entered
the world because we sinned. And nothing
will be as it was until He recreates the heavens and the earth. So that bow, which can be seen by children in
a city canyon fire hydrant turned on, which can be seen by a suburban wife
watering her flower boxes, which can be seen by an adult or child looking over
the hills of Tennessee, reminds us that God had in mind a solution to His great
pastoral problem. How could God be
intolerant of sin and yet give unfettered access to those who were sinners, His
children? How could God destroy sin and
yet give life to sinners?
We who are
gathered here this icy morning, we who have braved the elements of ice and
freezing fog and bad drivers know the solution to His problem. How does God show grace to sinners? By imputing the righteousness of His Beloved
to us. Brothers and sisters, make no
mistake about the horror of the passion of our Lord. I know we like to believe that our sins were
not so bad, that God does not really mind small sins, that the God of the Old
Testament is the wrathful or volcano God while the God of the New Testament is
the “loving” God. But that is the very
nature in those “righteous” who survived the flood that caused them to sin that
is lying to us. Lent is that season when
you and I are called to remember our need for a Savior. You and I are called to a season of
self-examination where we, once again, are called to remember that our sins,
yours and mine, caused Jesus to descend from heaven and die on that Cross that
we might be saved! Put in different
language, God takes sin every bit as seriously as He did before the Flood. It took His Son to bridge that chasm between
God’s righteousness and God’s grace,we created so long ago, when we rejected
our loving Father in the Garden. It took
His Son to restore life to us!
This season,
however, although serious, is not meant to be a season of woe, a season of
death. You and I are called to be a
renewed people, a people who know their joy of their salvation, a people who
jump for joy rather than walk as dead, as a people who know a real love story
far better than Hollywood! We call to
mind those sins for which He died, that we might share with the world the love
He has for us and for them! We remember
each and every time we eat this flesh and drink this blood that God remembers
His covenant with us each and every day of our lives!
Peace,
Brian†
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