Sermon at the Sung Eucharist on the Sixth Sunday of Easter 2017

We’re all familiar with the story of Noah. We’ve given our children and grandchildren a model of an ark with lots animals to put on board. We’ve read them the story: God’s warning that he is going to send a terrible flood; and the command to Noah to build an enormous ark. All the animals, birds and so on are to be brought into the ark two by two, along with all the foodstuffs which will be needed during the testing time ahead. Finally Noah and his wife and sons board the ark; the heavens open; and the floodwaters rise. After many months, the waters subside again. A raven and then a dove are sent out to scout for dry land. At last the ark comes to rest: all the animals and Noah and his family disembark, and God promises never to bring about such a disaster again. The storybooks normally end with a pretty picture of a rainbow, and a dove flying by with a leaf in its beak. All is well again. Or so the storybook implies.

It comes as something of a shock, then, to discover that the story of Noah in Genesis is one of the darkest and most deeply disturbing in the Bible. We have heard only part of the story today, towards its end. But it begins with human violence and wickedness, and God’s absolute determination to destroy humankind - to cleanse the earth which has been ruined as a result. God regrets having made humankind. We are invited to remember that first garden of Eden: a beautiful paradise created by God, where all is in its place as it should be. But the garden is left behind when the first humans choose knowledge, and their family is torn apart by murder. And now, on the eve of the Flood, humankind has continued its way of disobedience and violence. All is ruined. God looks on what he has made, and his heart is broken. All that God had intended has come to nothing. Even God himself is, as it were, outside Eden now. His dreams lie shattered.

So we are told that God decides to make an end to humankind and the desecrated earth. It is quite clear in the story that this is God’s decision, his responsibility alone. He plans and engineers it. By sending the flood, God is un-creating that which he had previously made ‘very good’. And nowhere in the story are we told that God shows any remorse for the destruction he wreaks. The scholar Trevor Dennis puts this in contemporary terms. Nowadays, he says, we would write not a story of a food, but of a nuclear holocaust; and Noah, and his family and all the animals would build not an ark, but a concrete bunker. By the terms of Genesis we would have to have God pressing the buttons.

This is all profoundly disquieting. What sort of God is it that would do this to his creation, to the people he has made? It’s all very well saving Noah and his family, and some representative animals, but what of all those who drown, people and animals? The story barely mentions them. They are not warned. They are not given a chance to mend their ways. Nothing is said by God, Noah or the people. It’s as if the flood washes away all speech, all song; as if God simply doesn’t care about the consequences of what he has done.

Yet… yet this story is not entirely without hope; but not because Noah and the rest eventually arrive safely on dry land. The hope for Noah and the others turns out in the end to be a limited hope.

No, the hope at the heart of the story of Noah is a hope that arises because the Flood changes God.

The creation story in Genesis chapter 1 presents God in complete control of all events, able to create the world with utter ease and no apparent effort. Towards the end of that creation story, God gives away much of that power to the human beings he has made. Here, in the Flood story, God takes that power back into his own hands – he destroys virtually everything and everyone…. For the last time.

At the end of the Flood story, just after this morning’s passage, God promises that he will never again unleash the forces of chaos. More important still, God implies that he will never again seek absolute control of events. He will honour the status, the dignity, the freedom which he first gave human beings at Creation. We are to have the power God originally gave to us, however we choose to exercise that power, whatever the consequences for the rest of creation.

That’s what the rainbow in the sky means – God knows full well that we haven’t changed. We are still prone to violence, disobedience and wickedness. Yet God now chooses not to destroy, but to let us live with the consequences of the power and freedom he has given us. And God, too, knows that he will have to live with us and our failings, whatever the price he has to pay.

Little did the author of the Flood story know that the power to destroy the earth, which God surrenders after the Flood, would one day be gained by human beings themselves through their invention of the nuclear bomb, and other technological and chemical developments. Little he know that one day, our human wickedness would cost God the death of his Son on the cross.

Here lies the true hope of this story. It is not to do with Noah’s safe arrival with his cargo of animals, not really. It is everything to do with the beginning of a new era of security granted by God’s final definitive choice to act towards us grace and generosity and humility. No longer does the threat of destruction by God hang over the earth and its inhabitants. Human violence will no longer be met with the punishment it deserves. Catastrophe will never again be met with catastrophe. The demands of mercy can and will transcend those of strict justice. As Trevor Dennis puts it, the world after the Flood has more room for God’s grace. Grace is built into the new order of things: a new order of things shown to us most clearly in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is the unshakeable ground of our hope.