February 26 -- First Sunday of Lent

Grace to you and peace, from God who creates and waters the earth, from Jesus who redeems, and the Holy Spirit who comforts and challenges. AMEN.

Today’s Old Testament lesson – on which we are focusing here at the beginning of Lent – picks up at the end of a very frightening story.

It’s amazing that it seems to have become one of the main children’s bible stories. But I wonder if we can look at this story again with more mature eyes.

Let’s be honest. God wanted a redo. The earth God created in love and majesty had come face-to-face with the corruption of humanity. [screech-crash] Earlier vs. 6: “And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” God’s idea smashes up against the cruelty, the selfishness, the pride and the anger of humanity. And it makes God sorry. How do you imagine God here? Angry when he says he’s going to “blot out humanity”, or with tears in his eyes. This is actually a challenging story. I can just hear Micah asking me, when we read this “children’s story”: “Daddy, if God is Love, then why did God kill all those people and animals with a flood?”

What do you make of God’s decision? Forget how you would explain this to a little child, how do you explain it to yourself? I invite you to read this story again and ponder it this week.

One thing we can say for sure is that God’s idea of a good and harmonious creation, came to a screeching halt and crashed into a broken and sinful world.

(We see a very similar thing, by the way in our Gospel lesson: where Jesus – freshly baptized and named beloved, coming up out of the Jordan, good and harmonious – comes face to face with a world of temptation. And Jesus prevails…for our sake)

God is sad, God gets angry (we can only presume), and so the floods come.

But the waters that destroy are also the waters that save.

Let’s get back to baptism this Lent. On Ash Wednesday, I said that I hope you think about your baptism all the time this Lent. (And I’m going to make it hard for you not to, at least when you come to church—but that will only add up to a few minutes.) Remember your baptism all the time these 40 days! And here’s what learn about baptism from our story today:

The waters that destroy are also the waters that save. And God makes a covenant with Noah and with you, a promise, having come through those waters. The good news is that we live on this side of the flood waters. We live in the world of rainbows – God’s sign of the covenant. We live in the covenant.

I don’t think we’ll ever know the answers for the things that happened on the other side of floodwaters and the covenant, but we live here. Cleansed, washed, nourished, saved and sent by the rushing waters.

Remember you baptism. I say it so much around our kids that they remind me. (Dishwasher broke one time, spraying all over the kitchen…Micah: “Remember your baptism.”)

We live on this side of the flood. The bow in the sky is a symbol of God hanging up violence forever. (Last week we had an image of peace coming in the cloud on the mountain of Transfiguration. This week peace comes in the cloud again, but a rainbow is added to the image.)

Most prehistoric cultures had a flood story, a way of pointing to supernatural forces to explain. The difference is, for this Judeo-Christian flood story, it ends with a covenant – our reading today. It ends with a promise of forgiveness. And it describes a God who is deeply in relationship with humanity. Who cares deeply about what happens.

This is the true story: that God cares about what happens. With other gods, ancient or contemporary, there is no feeling towards humanity. Other ancient deities sit on high and could care less about what happens to the world and to humanity.

Even those things that we are tempted to make gods – money, power, leisure, happiness, possessions, prestige – they too, it’s like they sit on high and don’t care about us. They are what they are. But our God is deeply in relationship.

And that’s how the story of Noah and the ark ends! And this is how our Lent begins – with God connected to us, grieving, covenanting…but ultimately loving. God’s mercy is steadfast. And God is waiting.

God still grieves. And waits for us to turn from our reckless, self-centered and destructive ways. We humans are still at it, [pause] but we live on this side of the waters. How is God calling back? How is God calling you…on this side of the waters? How is God calling you off the ark? For you have been saved! AMEN.