Still Standing

Genesis 9:8-17

Then 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, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant 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.’ God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.’ God said to Noah, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.’

There’s a lot to debate and interpret in the Bible. There’s parsing what Jesus is saying when he’s practically speaking in riddles when he recites his parables; there’s the often cryptic poetry of the psalms, cryptic sayings of the proverbs; there is some times incredibly difficult and violent imagery to wrestle with, imagery and stories that can make us deeply uncomfortable; there’s a whole bunch of seemingly misogynistic notions from Paul’s letters; there’s the perpetual debate of the end times and the meaning of the extreme imagery of Revelation… And with all these things, there’s so much digging to do, finding the historical and spiritual context to help us make sense of this strange and difficult and wonderful book.

But this passage church—this, I believe, is one of the small handful of verses in the Bible that’s not really up for much debate. Listen to the language in this, that our youth just so beautifully read: “establishing a covenant with you and your descendants, with very living creature…” “…a covenant between me and all future generations…” “…never again shall all flesh be cut off…” “…never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth…” “…the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh..” “…I have set my bow in the clouds and it shall be a sign of this covenant…”. Church, this is clear. This is clear, it’s repetitive—God will never again do anything like this. God has hung God’s bow in the clouds, never again to be used for violence or destruction.

While there is certainly hope on the horizon right now church, we still really need this reminder right now—this reminder of God’s promise of unconditional love. It’s easy to worry that we must have done something wrong for God to sic this pandemic on us. It’s easy to worry that we’re being punished. Over the 30+ years, some of the louder supposedly Christian voices have spewed the idea that these illnesses, these natural disasters, have been God’s doing in order to punish us for our alleged sins. But it could not be clearer here, church—this pandemic is not God’s doing. The rising waters are not God’s doing. The unprecedented low temperatures, ice, and snow that killed dozens people in the South last week, that was not God’s doing. God made a covenant. God promised.

So church, the hard swallow pill is: it’s all us. It’s all our doing. We’ve taken advantage of this earth and driven temperatures to new extremes. We’ve taken advantage of God’s love; we’ve taken advantage of God’s promise, and we’ve taken too much too fast, and now, here we are. My friend Dan brought a quote to my attention recently—a quote by Jewish rabbi and theologian Abraham Heschel: “…morally speaking…in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

This quote really got me thinking, especially in terms of this Lenten season. We’re officially in the midst of Lent, having just observed Ash Wednesday this past week. And as I spoke about in the pre-recorded Ash Wednesday service, Ash Wednesday, and Lent, is a time to repent; a time to contemplate the ways in which we can work to turn back to God, and turn back to doing the work that Jesus calls us to do. It is a time where we must atone for the ways in which we have been responsible for contributing to the ills, to the brokenness of this world. I don’t believe any of us, church, are guilty of creating the ills, of creating the brokenness. Logistically, we just don’t have the power to be wholly guilty. The system is guilty; and unfortunately, we are living within this system, and more often than not, we are unwittingly responsible by contributing to inequity, to a sinful caste system.

I promise I’m not trying to guilt-trip you, here (though if I was, Lent is certainly the time for it)! I just think, especially in a world full of so many overwhelming crises that are so much bigger and overpowering than we can handle, that we find a safe place inside our own worlds, and we forget about the world outside our own. We forget that our actions make a difference. Now please don’t misunderstand me: I am not saying that we should be shamed for continuing to use disposable plastic straws, or running the water while you brush your teeth. By doing things like this, you are not single-handedly destroying the climate, I promise. But indifference and ambivalence to the guilty system in which we live—that is something we can take some responsibility for. There’s that statistic from a couple years back that has been lodged in my brain—that on this entire planet, it is only 100 different companies that are responsible for 71% of global emissions. That’s what I’m talking about when I say the system is guilty. That’s what I’m talking about when I say we can’t be indifferent or ambivalent about that. We can’t single handedly change the way corporations or the ultra-powerful function, but we can work at a congregational and a community level to raise awareness, and we can do our part, with the humbling knowledge that we are each responsible on some level.

Now, the first thing that was brought up in Bible Study the last week was: how angry God must have been to destroy God’s own creation. And it had been a while since I had read about the great flood and what led to it, and in my readings, it’s less that God was angry, and more that God was grieving. God was grieving that God’s children had “betrayed God’s intent,” according to the theologian Walter Brueggemann. It had gotten so bad on God’s earth that there was truly no hope. It had gotten so violent and horrible that an aggrieved God had to destroy it to start over. There was no coming back from how broken the world had become. And then, inspired by the goodness of Noah and God’s own grief, after everything was destroyed, God promised that God would never do that again. And despite that what preceded God’s covenant was such an extreme story of grief and destruction, it gives me hope. I so desperately hope that the fact that we are still standing, the fact that we are still worshipping and working together, the fact this world is not yet ruined—it gives me hope that we are not a lost cause. It gives me hope that there still is a little time to come back from the brink of destruction—to come back from extreme temperatures and weather, to come back from extreme violence, to come back from extreme inequality—it gives me hope that we can work towards a new start without destroying what we already have.

Church, Lent is a season of solemn contemplation. As I spoke about in my Ash Wednesday reflection, it is a time to think about how we got here—to think about how we got here, to a world in which thousands and thousands of people in the south went days without heat, electricity, or water while single digit temperatures remained. It’s a time to think about how we can be a force of good in this world, and how we can work to change huge systemic failures in this guilty system into which we were born.

I couldn’t help but agree with many other thinkers and theologians regarding this part of the Bible, in thinking of God as a sort of disappointed parent—in realizing that the great flood was a result of a grieving, disillusioned God, as opposed to a rabid tyrannical one. I couldn’t help but think of that classic, gut-wrenching phrase we’ve all heard from a parent—“I’m not mad… I’m disappointed.” That feeling of disappoint and grief that comes when you’re deeply wronged by someone you love.  As this Lenten season begins, I’m finding myself wondering if, though God promised that the world being destroyed would never be God’s doing again, if God regrets making that promise. I look at the world today, and confess that I wonder how on earth we could be any better than the world that was so beyond repair that God felt there was no other option but to destroy it and start over. But, I also have hope. I have hope that we are not beyond repair, because we’re still standing; and in my short time in this congregation, and this community thus far, I can see that you all take your respective and our collective responsibilities seriously.

I wonder about people who believe that the ills of this world are God’s work, are God’s doing—I wonder why anyone would want to believe in a God who would not only do such catastrophic things, but also would want to believe in a God that would break such a promise, as this one God made with Noah. And I think that, if we blame God, we let ourselves off the hook a little bit. If we blame God, then we don’t have to take responsibility for the clearly and proven human-made disasters, wars, and violence in this world. It’s tempting—it’s tempting to believe these things are so far out of our control. It’s tempting abandon our responsibilities, especially considering how dire things are right now, to throw our hands in the air, to give up, to assume we’re as beyond repair as God’s children apparently were before the flood.

But church, we are still standing. We’re still standing because of God’s undying, unending, unconditional love for us. We’re still standing because of God’s promise. We’re still standing because God never forgets this promise. God never forgets us. Like Moses and his people throughout the book of Exodus, and as the Jews’ exile continues into the time of Isaiah, many of us lately are feeling forgotten and cast aside. But the bow in the sky—that is the eternal sign, the proof that God does not forget. “When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God will remember the everlasting covenant. It doesn’t get much clearer than that, church.

I’m going to borrow a story from our own Daun Smith for this sermon—Daun told a beautifully poignant story a while back, that growing up in Marblehead MA, close to my hometown of Salem, on the rocky, cold, New England coast, her dad would take her to the ocean on windy, stormy days so that she would learn an understanding for how angry, how uncontrollable, how cosmically chaotic the ocean could be. It was way to learn to have a real fear and a real respect for the ocean, for nature. I’ve been thinking of this story all week. I’ve been thinking about how the climate crisis is so much a result of disrespecting nature, and disrespecting this planet that God gifted to us. I’ve been thinking of this story in relation to the term “God-fearing” and about how we don’t need to fear God, but we need to respect God and love God, as God unconditionally loves us. And we love God by loving and respecting God’s good earth.  We need to recognize the mighty power nature has, and we need to bow down to it, and we need to respect and care for this world.

God promised that God would never destroy the world again, but God didn’t make any promises about stopping us from destroying ourselves. So in a guilty, broken system, church, we have to take some responsibility. And maybe we can start out by taking a cue from Daun and her dad—maybe we can really meditate on how small we are compared to the vast ocean, to the impossibly tall mountains. And maybe we can meditate on the unprecedented and tragic extreme temperatures and destruction that continues in the American South, and think about how we got here. And we can take some comfort in knowing that the God we know worship and love is not doing this. And then we can take some responsibility  for the ways in which we’ve contributed to the brokenness of this earth. And then, together, we will work to fix the guilty, broken system, to bring about a new beginning—to start over, without destroying ourselves. As long as we’re still standing, there’s still hope. Amen.