Is there anyone here this morning who hasn’t at least heard something about Noah and The Flood? Is there anyone here this morning who hasn’t heard at least something about “Noah’s Ark?”
I’m willing to bet that when you think about Noah and the flood, your mind usually goes directly to the “ark” and all those animals…. And the happy ending to the story.
Well, today, we are going to look at the story proceeding the happy ending… and it is anything but a fun filled story. Now, before we get all worried, remember… there is a happy ending….. but…..
To set the tone, let me paint a picture for you. Imagine a Mom and Dad wandering the aisles of the toy store. They’re looking for the perfect birthday gift for their little one. After passing Elmos and Doras and Barbies, they come across a horrific toy concept — the Concentration Camp play set complete with Holocaust action figures of Hitler, Nazi soldiers and Jewish prisoners. On the shelf right next to it is the 9/11 Twin Towers 3-D puzzle, the Darfur Ethnic Cleansing game and the Bosnian Genocide paint-by-numbers book.
Now, while these are actual events…. how do you think the parents would react to play sets recreating these events?? I would hope they would be outraged…and well they should be don’t you think?
MOVE
But, think about this….. In the Bible, we have an event that would fit right in with the stories and events I just mentioned! It’s the story of THE flood. The Big One. Back in aught 10,000 B.C. or whatever.
Really, think about it for a minute. There is a torrential rain resulting in a horrendous flood drowning everyone in the countryside…save Noah and his family. This event wasn’t a calm and serene end to Noah’s neighbors: It was a horrific and panic filled tragic event.
Yet, we usually hear Noah’s Ark portrayed as a cherry children’s story. Fisher Price Noah’s Ark toys and church preschool rooms painted with blue skies, smiling animals and a beautiful rainbow. Happy melodies that our kids sing in church:
God told Noah to build him an arky-arky
Build it out of gopher barky-barky.
Then after the flood:
The sun came out and dried up the landy, landy.
Everything was fine and dandy, dandy.
MOVE
Fine and dandy… except for the corpses that floated off and landed somewhere to decay.
Now, we all at some point accept the fact that one day, we will die. But, there are some ways we hear about people dying that terrify us. What do you believe is the most feared way to die? The most two often cited fears are burning to death or drowning.
This part of the “Noah and The Flood” story are not fun…. I often use something called the Lectionary to begin preparing a Sunday morning message.. The Lectionary is a schedule of readings from the Bible for Christian church services during the course of the year. It is broken down into three cycles… A, B & C. I discovered that even the lectionary prefers to skip the gruesome realities of The Flood.
Nowhere in Cycle A, B or C do we read “the Lord was sorry 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’” (Genesis 6:6-7). Nor do we ever read the repeated theme of Genesis 7:21-23: “All flesh died that moved on the earth.”
Does that feel just a bit like a cover-up; Kind of, like we’d prefer to ignore the hard parts of Scripture? We seem to want to get God off the hook for the whole Noah story.
Now, there are some who say the flood had minimal impact, i.e., it was local and not global. Some claim the story was merely a myth. Or, like the lectionary readings, some just ignore the death of many in favor of the saving of Noah’s clan.
Surely it’s a hard story, and maybe there are some good reasons to narrow the scope of the story… but one point still sticks out: its here. It’s in the Bible.
We may want to get God off the hook for the death of many, but God’s perfectly comfortable staying on the hook! Ignoring this part of the story, we miss a vital message. God wants us to know that He took lives and it was for a reason.
Now we can all understand that when we tell our children this story, surely it’s appropriate to leave out the full reality and carnage of the flood. However, as adults, recognizing that like it or not, comfortable or not, if God did it, and if God put the story in the Bible, then we must ask “why?” And that’s where today’s text focuses its attention.
Here’s the short answer. Noah’s flood and covenant were theological performance art.
What? Anyone want to take a guess at explaining “performance art?”
“Performance art” is a term invented during the 60’s. It refers to a living, artistic expression embodied, or made to come to life by the artist. Performance art is unconventional, often shocking, and like most art, it attempts to communicate meaning and bring about reflection in its audience.
Now, some of you may have heard of or be familiar with “performing art.” Often it’s alarming and bizarre to most because, unfortunately, some alarming, bizarre and disturbing minds have done outrageous and disgusting things designed to offend and provoke the public in general and Christians in particular.
Still, performance art can be creative and inspiring… and in truth, many churches use elements of performance art in worship every Sunday. So, we can’t simply say that all performance art is bad.
The point or goal is to offer a PUBLIC DISPLAY of startling events to suggest meaning and beg reflection form onlookers. In that sense, God, in this case, the Performing Artist used The Flood and the Rainbow as shocking historical events, captured in Scripture as theological events for the rest of history to understand what God is like, and what people are like.
Folks, we cannot afford, nor does God intend for us to overlook or minimize the tragic loss of humanity in The Flood; we’re to contemplate it carefully.
Genesis 6 give us some of the “rest of the story” the background for why the flood happened… punishment for the holistic wickedness into which humanity had fallen. But we can’t just look at the story and be sad… there is a much deeper meaning here. This is a story about what God could always choose to do in the face of human depravity.
Think about the atrocities occurring in the world today, done by man against fellow man; some of the blaspheming within our own culture. I wonder. If we were in charge, we would simply trash the whole of humankind and simply start over… sort of like rebooting the system on a computer. And we need to understand that God COULD do just that.
But there, in Genesis 9, we read God’s covenant. The covenant assuring Noah… and us… all of us…. That what God could do doesn’t equal what God will do.
God makes a promise; A promise that while His sovereignty, His power… God’s power allows for the wages of sin to be immediate judged, His mercy will not make that the rule. In other words, God’s grace restrains God’s justice.
So God, the Performance Artists, throws a rainbow in the sky. This most important visual sign is a reminder the entire world is under the blessing of God’s common grace. God extends His grace to “all flesh”… It is a promise that disobeying, disregarding and even disdaining the Creator will not result in one’s immediate destruction.
MOVE
Think about what I just said like this. When I write a sentence while composing a message and discover the words aren’t doing what I had hoped they would do… I simply erase, or “delete” the sentence and start over. As creator of those words, it’s within my right and power to alter them. Do we not understand that God, as creator of people has the same right and power? If that which is created does not please the creator, does not the creator justly have the right to decide to start over? However, Praise God, the common grace of the rainbow is a sign of His promise not to immediately do so.
But wait there’s more. There is more in the message of the rainbow. One of which we always need to be aware. The rainbow is a reminder of the redemptive message that God’s grace bridles his justice not just immediately, but eternally as well. The message is one we see visually written in the skies as a reminder of what God has spiritually written across our souls.
Now, you may be thinking that’s great, but… “So What?” What does that mean for me? Okay, here’s what it means for us… As we remember the reality of God’s grace covering and restraining His justice against us, should we not then remember to extend grace covering justice to others?
Do we not see events of injustice all the time – from the most public such as the atrocities of 9/11, to the most personal such as people who wound us emotionally or physically, to the most superficial such as drivers who cut us off. We are quick to feel anger. We are quick to want payback. We are quick to want God’s justice to make things right.
We get angry, irritated, judgmental and spiteful.
We want the flood; God gives us the blood — the blood of Christ, the most provocative, thought provoking, awe inspiring, life-changing performance art of all time.
We want retribution; God gives us a rainbow.
We want a tsunami; God gives us an ark.
We want a sword; God gives us the cross.
So God sends us now into a fallen world as performance artists ourselves with the rainbow, the ark, the cross and the very love of Christ to mediate justice on behalf of others, even those who have sinned against us.
God had a choice, a Divine choice. It could either be all Flood all the time against those who don’t perfectly follow God, or it could be all grace all the time.
God chose the latter, but where does our sense of rights and justice point toward most often?
For these reasons, God left the rainbow as dramatic performance art to be re-enacted time after time in water-laden skies. Rainbows should be moments of comfort to us. They should be moments of conviction. They should be reminders that the Light of God lies behind all beauty. That redemption is always possible. That God’s grace bridles his justice.
God enacted a one-time event that echoes a timeless message through the remainder of human history. After costly loss, God ushers in beautiful redemption. This is quite often the way of God.
God promised that when the bow is in the skies, God will remember this message (v. 16). So will we as well?
This is the first Sunday of Lent. And we all want to get to the happy ending. But Lent takes us to the cross first.
