On Ash Wednesday this past week, we entered the season of Lent. During these 40 days, the church turns our focus to prayer, repentance, fasting, and acts of service. Here in worship, we'll be exploring those traditional Lenten themes by focusing on the Hebrew Bible readings for each Sunday.
Starting with the story of Noah, we will hear about the covenants, or promises, that God makes with God's people. As the series unfolds, we will see how these promises shape and form God's people, their relationship with God and one another, and even God's own self-understanding.
First up is the story of Noah, which is told over four chapters in Genesis. It begins with God seeing the wickedness of creation and feeling regret about the whole grand experiment. From Genesis 6: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that 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--people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”
Only Noah and his family found favor with God. God instructs Noah to build an ark of cypress wood, and to fill it with two of every living thing and stores of every kind of food. The rain fell for forty days and nights, and the earth was flooded for months after that, until eventually, finally, the ark came to rest on dry land.
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| Photo by Karson on Unsplash |
Our reading for this morning picks up here, at the end of the story. The floodwaters have receded, Noah and his family are on dry land, and God blesses them and establishes a covenant with them. While many covenants throughout Scripture seem to have expectations of both parties, this covenant is focused solely on what God plans to do going forward.
That’s the powerful thing, here: God wants to continue to be in relationship with humanity, with creation. And yet, nothing about humanity has changed. The inclinations of the human heart are still evil. The flood wiped out individuals, but it did nothing to cleanse human nature. In fact, sending a horrific flood said more about what God is like than anything about humanity. Is this the kind of power God wants to demonstrate? Is this really how God will choose to rule?
God promises Noah, his family, and the whole creation that God will never again destroy all flesh by a flood. As a sign of the covenant, God’s bow is set in the clouds. Though this story is inseparable from the image of a bright rainbow, it is powerful to note that the kind of bow God hangs up is a weapon of war - an archer’s bow. In setting that bow in the clouds, God declares that violence and destruction are not the way God will be in relationship with creation.
It seems that God learns the number one rule of relationships: you cannot change other people, you can only change how you respond to them. Confronted with the reality that “the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth,” God decides to be the one who changes. In the face of evil and harm present in the world, God chooses to respond not with destruction, but with love.
As we’ll find in the readings over the coming weeks, God’s choice is what makes this relationship between God and humanity possible. Human nature doesn’t change. God’s people enter into covenants that they promptly break - following other gods, scorning God’s laws, lying and hurting one another. We, too, know first-hand the brokenness and sin that are ever-present in our lives. We are careless and selfish and destructive - towards one another, and creation, and God.
God, however, chooses again and again to respond with love. In the ultimate self-giving act, God becomes human in the person of Jesus. Walking among us, God eats, laughs, and weeps. God experiences our suffering and our heartbreak, and demonstrates a love so powerful that it stretches beyond a violent and brutal death. God chooses a different way than the regret and destruction of the flood, instead offering grace and mercy to a people who will never - can never - deserve it.
With water in baptism, God cleanses and claims us, joining us to Jesus’ death and resurrection. God again promises life, forgiveness, and relationship - not just for a chosen few, but for all of God’s beloved creation. Time and again, God chooses love.
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