Noah

Lent 1 B February 18, 2018

 

God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you . . . that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Our Lenten readings from the Hebrew Bible tell us of God’s Covenant with his people. Today the covenant is with Noah and his descendants. Next Sunday God’s covenant with Abraham (Genesis 17), then the Covenant of Sinai and the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), the healing in the wilderness (Numbers 21), and the new covenant on the heart prophesied by Jeremiah (31), fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus our Lord.

About 15,000 years ago the ice age ended and over 7,000 years the sea level rose over 300 feet. Farm land in present Persian gulf area and similar areas all over the world was drowned. Many cultures have a flood story in which a few people survive, by divine providence, to repopulate the earth.

Genesis chapters 6-9 combines two stories. Today’s reading is from the earlier story.  The later one tells how when Noah came off the Ark he offered a sacrifice of thanksgiving and in response “the Lord said, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” We can rely on God’s promise.

In today’s reading, God offers a covenanted promise never again to destroy the earth by flood, and gives the rainbow as a covenant sign. Noah and his descendants are free to repopulate the earth – and to eat meat. Before the Flood all were vegetarians! Unchecked human violence was one of the causes of the flood. In the new creation one of the signs of the covenant was that human conflict was to be mediated by a recognition of the importance of human life, expressed as “of every man’s brother I will require the life of man.”

The rainbow is a sign of God’s offer of the covenant. God has promised not to destroy all life. But God gives us freedom to accept or reject the human side of the covenant, our human promise to recognize the importance of human life. God calls us to respect one another’s life, to recognize that every human life is s gift from God, and precious in God’s sight.  

We are horrified by last Wednesday’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida. I heard a parent say, “We send our children to school and we expect them to come home.” Once again someone rejected God’s covenant of life and chose to kill. The news media reported that he had been expelled from that high school, that his adoptive parents had died, that he was living with a friend’s parents. We can imagine, and  appreciate, that he may have had feelings of exclusion and isolation, of loss and anger at loss. We have all shared feelings like these. But we have not taken up a rifle and shot up a school. We have dealt with our feelings. We know ourselves as part of a community. We know we live under God’s covenant with Noah and his descendants. We see the rainbow; we are free to eat meat if we want; we are here because our parents took seriously their freedom to be fruitful and multiply. We recognize that every human life is s gift from God, and precious in God’s sight.  

Noah made a sacrifice to God. Jesus offered on the cross the supreme sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, from Adam through Noah and Abraham and Moses, the prophets, the kings, the chief priests, Pontius Pilate, and even the horrible murders of Nikolas Cruz last Wednesday. Nicholas is the name of a saint, a bishop in Turkey. Cruz is Spanish for cross. On the cross Jesus offered the supreme sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, his and ours.

God knows in Noah “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”  We are all sinners, saved by God’s grace received in faith, saved by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

The Parkland reports tell of a teacher who stood between the murderer and a student, who saved a student’s life as he sacrificed his own life. That teacher’s life sacrifice joins with Jesus’ supreme sacrifice, joins with our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving this morning, to witness to God’s love for his creation and for the sacredness of human life.  So let us give thanks for God’s sure promise, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” And let us show in our lives God’s eternal love in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.