Proper 4A

1 June 2008

The Rev'd Lloyd Prator

New York City

Natural disasters like floods are frightening. When you are a child, you don’t know about things like flood control, dams, water transfers and irrigation and things like that. When you are alone, you huddle next to the radio and worry if you will be safe.

I lived through times like that when I was a boy. Every year, before the Feather River Dam and the Oroville Dam were built, before the rivers were controlled, there were horrible frightening floods. In those days, before crime got out of hand, my parents used to leave me home alone during Christmas vacation, my job was to clean the house, do any outside yard work that could be done in winter, and cook – not a bad list of assignments for a ten-year old. I suppose these days, it would not be safe to leave a child home like that, but this was a different time and a different place.

And it was a time and place of fear for me. Would the waters come as far as our town? They never did. How sad the downtown Sacramento stores, like Weinstocks, looked with four feet of water buoying up the Christmas decorations. Would the stores survive? They did. At least until the 1990s when Weinstocks became, like everything else, a Macy’s.

But it was a frightening time. Imagine if your whole family had no knowledge about how to control floods, that there was no world of supportive engineering or science, that there was no way of knowing that weather was cyclical. At the time when this flood, described in the first reading, everyone was new and inexperienced with floods and this one was terrifying. The whole world was a ten-year-old boy and no one knew how things would be with a flood.

So naturally, faced with uncertainty, our ancient ancestors ascribed the flood to a disaster, to divine disappointment with creation. And so, today’s story emerges:

This is a story about two things: The grief of God, and the emergence of a new humanity. This is a story which reveals God on its own terms and which prepares the way for the Christian teaching about the Christ.

The grief of God: The story begins with the obvious anger of God at the way in which the world had become corrupt. “All flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth.” God was determined to put an end to it all.

And yet, God was also determined to save a representative sample of life, male and female of all species including humans. And he would save them from the waters of the flood that he sent upon the earth by directing them to build an ark, a great ship. On this ship, the remnant, two of each species would be saved. In the end of the story, the mercy of God has overcome his anger about the failure of humankind. The divine resolve to destroy has been replaced. Not by indulging his anger. Not by indulgence of the evil creation which had gone so terribly wrong.
Rather, the change comes in the heart of God, with the intention to build something new. To start again.

And so, the ship is built, the great ship built of cypress wood, which may have been an especially fine wood for shipbuilding in the ancient world. More about he cypress later.

And creation was saved.

It is important to note, however, that the story of the flood is not only about the anger of God. In fact, a close reading of the story show us something else. This story is about the grief of God because God, past his anger and wrath, is deeply committed to his creation and feels the suffering and the abandonment of all creation. And he works within creation to build something new.

Note, please, that he does not just cause a ship to come into being by fiat. He works with Noah, about whom we know little. We just know that he was faithful, unlike the rest of humanity. And we know that God shows committed compassion to his creation. He stays involved with them, and protects and saves them. He saves them for a new beginning, for the emergence of a new humanity.

The story of Noah and the ark provides colorful imagery and iconography for what would later become the Christian church.

For Christians, Jesus is another Noah, for in him humanity gets a new start – like Noah, through water, in the case of Jesus though the waters of baptism. That delightful feeling we hall have, for however short a moment, upon emerging from a bath, is a little hint about the new, refreshed life which is opened to us by the bath of eternity, our baptism.

The new humanity engaged by Noah became known as the church. When, in the high Middle Ages, architects began to build great soaring churches, it did not take the most sensitive aficionados to look at the ceilings of these buildings and make a connection. The ceilings, with their vaulting and ribs looked much like the inside of a ship, an ark, now inverted, which was the sign of the community saved and renewed.

The ark echoes though the story of salvation. The orthodox, who revel and delight in such parallelisms, point out these: The womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary was an ark which bore Christ, the firstborn of all creation. If the Christmas Crèche was actually in a cave, as some artists paint it, the manager was also in something of an ark, holding th new life of God. The tomb in which the body of the crucified Christ was buried was also the ark of life, for from it came the risen Lord.

From the ark, however comes something more lasting, even eternal. From the ark comes the clear conviction that far from a legalistic, wrathful, vengeful God, ours is a God whom people came to know early on as a God who grieved with and for fallen humanity and who remains intent on giving that humanity a new chance for the victory of love and the hope of renewal. May that victory and that hope be ours now and forever.