The Park Road Pulpit

  Sermons from Park Road Baptist Church 

      Russ and Amy Jacks Dean, Pastors

Covenant, Cloud, and the Promise of Water

Genesis 9.8-17; 1 Peter 3.18-22

Russ Dean, March 9, 2003

            We were in a little town just west of St. Louis, Missouri. Four miles from the river. The little, white clapboard house was built off the ground, founded on pillars of granite rocks. Midway across the windows of that one-story structure was a line that formed a perfect, muddy trail, circumscribing the entire home. The waters of a swollen river had left their mark. Standing outside that quiet home, the water line met us at about eye-level. As we began cleaning inside, a foot-deep in silt and mud, I understood something of a flood’s destructive power. A flood, which leaves everything in tact – but drowned of its life. A terror which brings the snakes out of the ground. A menace which causes sewer systems of developed communities to pour out their poisons indiscriminately.

            As we destroyed that home, stripping a family’s memories and comforts to a skeleton of dried-in two-by-fours, I thought of the peaceful Mississippi River, which we had just crossed. The beautiful Mississippi River, whose headwaters begin in Minnesota and whose natural beauty flows through ten states and into the blue green salt of the Gulf of Mexico. The teeming Mississippi River, which provides food and jobs and recreation. The mythical Mississippi River – whose very name represents life. And up to our eye-balls and our noses with the destruction of flood all around, I knew…

            Nature, too, is a conversation in contrasts.

            Perhaps nowhere in all of scripture is this contrast more evident than in the well-told, if not so well-understood, story of “Noah and the Ark.” For many people, this story provides a first encounter with difficult questions about God. In his wonderful book, entitled, Genesis: A Living Conversation, Bill Moyers records a number of conversations between members of the three great, monotheistic religions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity). Their dialogues center on the epic stories of the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Concerning our story for today, author Karen Armstrong says,

I began life as a nun, with very simplistic beliefs about God, but not much faith in God. That is, the opinions I held about God did not actually yield any sense of life’s ultimate meaning and value. I found I was haunted by stories like Noah, in which God would look at a certain sector of humanity and wipe them out forever, and put them into hell. Hell was very much a part of my religious worldview in childhood. And God was a terrifying God for me. Whatever they said about God loving the world and dying for us on the cross, God was terrible. I get all this back when I contemplate the Flood story.[1]

            This may be your experience with this story, but it was never mine. I cannot get enough of the questions now, but even as an obnoxiously inquisitive child, the simple answers of faith were always sufficient. They should not have been. I did not grown in faith by taking well-meaning but un-engaging answers and blindly fitting all of life’s contrary evidence into those stories.

            We could talk for forty days and forty nights about Noah and the Flood, and we would only scratch the surface of the meaning which it holds – insights into the nature of God, the nature of humanity, the nature of religion, the nature of the world, itself. I can only tell you today, a bit about what the story means – to me.

            Please take this as an invitation to conversation. Please feel free to contrast!

            I do not take the story of Noah and the Flood to be a literal telling of an historical event. The Bible is not a newspaper. I believe this wonderful narrative was never intended as such, and if we treat it only as an eye-witness account of some great cataclysmic event, then we will get out of it only the kind of sensational stimulation that we get out of newsprint – Bad people. Terrible God. Lots of rain. One family spared. Altar built. Father gets drunk. One son cursed.  – Tune in tomorrow for the same headline!

            The author Tim O’Brien has said, “Just because it didn’t happen, doesn’t mean it isn’t true,”[2] and so it is Noah’s story, which is truer than fact. Because of this, I do believe it to be a story that we can, and should, tell to our children.[3] I have spoken of something that was lacking in my childhood experience, but there is a contrasting conversation in my story as well. I learned the story and never questioned, but what I learned in that story was not the fear of God so much as the Grace of God. Noah was saved. Noah thanked God. Noah planted a vineyard. And the rainbow, which I could see in the sky with childish delight, was my very own Promise from God.

            So, from a story that is more than fact, that is worth our telling, here is what I tell you today.

            Creation itself is fallen. Broken. Representative of some failed covenant. Floods happen. We can explain much of the evil that befalls human beings as a result of the inherent destructiveness of humanity – in freedom, we make decisions that bring disease and death. But no emphasis on free will can explain the pain and suffering of earthquake and flood, of drought and hurricane.

            The Apostle Paul recognizes this fact in his letter to the Romans where he acknowledges that God’s salvation has even an ecological dimension:

For the creation waits with eager longing… in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves… while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies[4].

            I believe that just as God desires to “save our souls,” just as much God desires to “save the earth.”

            What is that picture from the Revelation of John that gives so many Christians their ultimate hope? It is a picture of heaven. But even a literal reading of scripture has to acknowledge that “heaven” is no celestial, ethereal party of angels with wings and harps. John’s dream sets heaven on earth – and sees the consummation of God’s purpose as an earthy salvation – God, living with us, forever, here.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God… And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals.” (Rev. 21)

            Salvation as a biblical concept is holistic.[5] The eager longing of the creation, its groaning in labor pains, is nature’s own way of struggling, like you and me, to “work out its own salvation.”

            I also believe that we should not be surprised or offended to read that God “sent the flood.” Of course God “sent the flood” – to the people who first read this story God also sent the gentle rains and the refreshing breeze. God also sent the warming sun and the bountiful crop. The scripture of this ancient people dares to admit that God makes life and creates evil. For these people, God’s hand was on everything – the time to live, and the time to die. (Blessed be the name of the Lord!)

            Having made those two points, I read this wonderful story as an incredible “aha moment” for a people struggling to understand this “terrible God.” As they wrestled with the problem of natural disaster and unjustified suffering, the story is their acknowledgment of the undeniable brokenness of creation. The “aha” comes as they recognize that God is no longer to be understood as the willful agent of such destruction.

            In our recent Advent series we insisted that there are no “good ol’ days” with God. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.[6] So, if lightening is no longer to be understood as a direct manifestation of God’s anger, then we may not regard The Flood the same way, either.

            God’s people were growing up. The question is, “Are we?”[7]

            There are two brief lessons I would like to draw from today’s texts.

            1) The environment matters. If we have a responsibility to save God’s children (and we do) – by feeding them, clothing them, freeing them from bondage, and teaching them Christ’s love, hope, and Good News, then so do we have a responsibility to “save the planet” – which is also longing for salvation.

            This is our only home.

            The environment is a hot topic these days. It should be. In the “Global Center” on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, there is a huge, revolving globe, and above it a population clock. You cannot count as fast as those red numbers tumble by. When I was last there, the clock was rapidly approaching 6,000,000,000. What kind of home will our planet be when the number is twice that? Forget the price of gasoline – what will we have to pay for clean water and simple flour for making bread? I worry about such questions.

            Yet in my “Environment” file, I came across “The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship,” which is a statement from an interfaith coalition of environmental activists, who, yet, deny the claims of global warming, population over-expansion, and other such issues. In other words, on “the environment,” intelligent people are lined up across the board.

            Would Jesus drive and SUV? I don’t know! I don’t think so, but that doesn’t mean I’m on the bandwagon to ban such vehicles either. I will, however, consider fuel efficiency and emission ratings as a significant factor in making my next purchase. If more Christians were so concerned, we might again be able to see the Bank of America building from the top of Crowder’s Mountain. But yesterday, we strained our eyes through the thick, dark cloud of smog to barely make out the outline of our city’s skyline – and this is the air we breathe![8]

            As stewards of God’s groaning creation, we owe it to ourselves and to all of the children of the world to “Recycle, Reduce, Reuse” – or we will find our own human freedom compounding the problems of the natural order, over which we have no control.

            2) In a broken world, where water carries disease, provides fertile nesting for malarial mosquitoes, swells beyond the banks of peaceful rivers to become raging torrents of muddy death… God, yet, saves us in baptismal waters.

            Of course, I don’t believe that, literally – but neither do fundamentalist Christians, who have to recon these words with Jesus’ own promise to the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”[9] (The thief was not baptized!) But water, the same stuff of destruction and death, provides healing, refreshment, cleansing – life. We stand by our practice of Baptism by immersion, as an incredibly powerful sacrament. It is a sign, like the rainbow, a sign dependent on water, which is a full-bodied reminder of the constant presence of God, engulfing us, always, even in a fallen creation.

            The sign is a reminder us of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection – which made him alive in the spirit.

            Oh, that we might know such life, today.

            May it be so!

PASTORAL PRAYER

“Rain can ruin your weekend,

or save your life

            -- it just depends on what your thirst is.”[10]

Cleansing, Healing, Creating God

            change our thirst, today:

                        give us a thirst for righteousness;

                        give us a thirst for justice;

                        give us a thirst for your salvation

That in the midst of broken covenants,

            natural and human

We might see you at work,

            using the stuff of this natural world,

                        even the stuff of our own natural lives,

            bringing about good,[11]

Making all things, alive in the spirit

Rain on us

O God of Heaven.

            Open the floodgates

                        of your life-giving Grace

That even in the flesh, we might see you.[12]

That even in these Lenten Days, we might know

            the power of Christ’s resurrection.

Amen!