Sermon
People were
so horrible that God was willing to cull the whole flock and start over with
one righteous man, his family, and two of every bird and land animal, or seven
pairs of every clean animal, depending on which set of instructions Noah chose
to follow. There was evil, corruption, drunkenness and debauchery. The flood
wiped away all of that. So God set his rainbow in the clouds and promised never
again to destroy all the earth. So what does Noah do? He gets blasted off of
wine—apparently he had seven pair of every kind down in the hold of the
You know
this whole ordeal seems to have been a waste of time. Humankind before the
flood and humankind after the flood are both humankind. Righteous Noah is
wicked and sinful. The flood didn’t do any good. If approached literally the
flood certainly was a waste of time. If approached metaphorically the story
might shed light on us in our Lenten journeys.
We refer to
Noah and the flood in our Baptismal Liturgy, speaking of how God drowned the
sinful and brought Noah safely to dry land. The waters have a purifying
quality—they wash clean the earth. As we have just seen, scarcely have the
bathwaters receded than people are up to no good again. In our baptisms Sin is
put to death. The old Sinful person is drowned and a new, Righteous person
emerges. We are clean and Christ lives in us. Yet the bathwaters do not eradicate
Sin. All of us are living proof of that. Heck, I’m constantly providing
opportunities for you to forgive your pastor. Our baptisms are wonderful
things. They initiate us into the body of Christ and are constant reminders to
us of God’s promises of life and salvation. They are not the end of our story.
Every day as
a baptized Christian is a struggle. I don’t think I need to tell you that you
have struggles in your lives. Baptism is not an end to struggles, but it is our
strength in those struggles. Every day, every second, in a constant, ongoing
act God is drowning Sin and raising up righteousness in each of us. The splash
of water and the speaking of the Word happen to us once; God’s work is ongoing.
We spend every day on the
That rainbow
still hangs in the sky, and God didn’t put it there for nothing. I don’t wear
this rainbow stole because it looks good. The text tells us plainly enough that
God hangs the rainbow in the clouds as a reminder of God’s covenant never again
to destroy life with a flood. One has to wonder if God’s reason is that God
knows that the flood doesn’t do any good. The floodwaters had scarcely receded
and Noah was blacked out in his birthday suit. The only way God could destroy
Sin through wrath would be to destroy everything. The rainbow is God’s radiant
promise that this will not be God’s course of action.
Friends of
Christ, as haunting and cruel as the flood story is, the rainbow is the promise
that God chooses love. God would rather love than destroy. God would rather
justify than condemn. God would rather give life than death, and Friends of
Christ God does give love, God does give life, and God does justify. As surely
as a baptism is good now and forever the rainbow is good news now and forever.
The sign in the clouds is that so long as there is light and water, so long as
there is cloud and rain, so long as there is anything that is, our end is not
in wrath, but in the boundless love of God. Amen