The Drowned

Scripture: The First Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

We start off 40 days of Lent by talking about 40 days of Flood.

If there’s any tale in the Bible that has come to be viewed as the consummate children’s story, I think it must be Noah’s Ark. It works so well upon children’s imaginations, and lends itself so perfectly to their interests and art: two of every animal, be they fuzzy, feathery, scaly or slimy, all piled into an enormous ship out on the sea beneath a brilliant big rainbow. The dove and olive branch from Noah’s Ark have come to embody the very notion of peace and prosperity amongst humankind.  If that’s not family friendly, I don’t know what is.

Things get a little darker, however, once we dig a little deeper.  Our son had a Little People plastic ark when he was a toddler—two of them, in fact—full of cows and lions and dogs and elephants, all of which he gleefully played with and adored. But his mother and I never really explained to him why, exactly, they all had to be on that boat, let alone what happened to everybody who didn’t get onboard.  “What about all the other animals?” kids ask us one day.  “What about all the people?”

Noah’s Ark falls in the section of Genesis often referred to as “mythic beginnings”: Creation, the Fall, the Flood, the Tower of Babel—all the stuff before we get into the more historical stories of Abraham and his children. Mythic, mind you, doesn’t mean false.  Calling something a myth doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.  A myth, rather, is a story that explains our world; it tells us deep and abiding truths about God, humanity, and the present state of reality. According to the Bible, once sin and death entered the world, things went to pot with astonishing rapidity.  Jealousy, violence, murder, and all manner of horrors corrupt humanity by the second generation.  Soon everyone had only evil thoughts all the time. There are even monstrous giants that start mucking about.

Unwilling to destroy the world He created good, God instead sends a great Flood to wash away all the evil and destruction before it’s too late.  Noah and his family are the last ones around with even a hope of avoiding complete corruption, so it falls to them to preserve humanity along with the birds and beasts of Creation.

You know the story: Noah builds the great Ark according to God’s specifications, gathers in as many animals of the land as it will hold, and then the floodgates of earth and sky alike open up for 40 days and 40 nights, washing Creation clean. Finally the waters subside and Noah’s Ark comes to rest on a mountain called Ararat, where, amongst other things, Noah plants history’s first vineyard, ferments from it the first wine, and thus becomes the first man ever to get falling-down black-out dead drunk.  Remember, this was the branch of humanity worth saving.

In the last century or so, the story of the Flood has been dismissed as pure fiction, because, by and large, there’s no evidence that the entire planet ever found itself submerged by water in the last several thousand years.  Because of this, Noah’s Ark has been relegated to the realm of children’s story, not worth the time of an educated adult, except perhaps as an allegory. But I for one find this blithe dismissal far too rash.

First off, the Flood may be the only biblical story attested by well nigh every culture on this earth.  The Greeks, the Hindus, the Chinese, the Sumerians, the Navajo, everybody has a story of a vast Flood of divine origin that wipes out the world save for a select few survivors. Second, archaeology has not disproven the events of the story but only our interpretation of the story.  Scripture, for example, never says that the Flood covered the whole planet, but rather “all the land.”  “All the land” is the same phrase used to describe the empire of King David, which wasn’t much larger than New Jersey. Additionally, Scripture speaks of latter-day descendants of Cain and other Old Testament figures who were not descendants of Noah.  Genesis itself, then, supports the understanding that the Flood didn’t wipe out everybody, everywhere.

In point of fact, modern scholarship has found a prime candidate for Noah’s Flood: the Black Sea.  Long before Egypt and Mesopotamia rose to prominence, civilization flourished around the five rivers that emptied into the Black Sea—which was, thousands of years ago, a freshwater lake. Then one day the Bosporus, “floodgates of the earth,” opened up and the Mediterranean came rushing in with a force 300 times that of Niagara Falls.  The Black Sea doubled in size and turned to saltwater, wiping out civilization for another 2,000 years.  Sound familiar? Mind you, the Black Sea borders a mountain range called Ararat, where anthropologists believe that grapes were first domesticated. I find a few too many coincidences here.

At the end of the day, however, what matters about Noah’s Flood is not how much of it we can verify or disprove. What matters is what this story teaches us about God. The Flood reveals a God Who will go to great lengths to nurture even the slightest opportunity for mankind to be saved. He is a God Who loves this world so much that He will limit Himself—making the rainbow into a sign and reminder of His promise never again to flood the world—in order to preserve it.  And it reveals to us the Nature of a God Who seeks always to redeem rather than to replace: to forgive and to sanctify even those who don’t deserve it—especially those who don’t deserve it—rather than give up, destroy, and start from scratch.

Furthermore, for Christians, the Great Flood of Noah stands as precursor to the greater flood of Baptism, which forever drowns we sinners in our brokenness and raises us up to new life in Jesus Christ.  The very reason that we design our sanctuaries to look like boats, calling them “naves,” as in something “naval,” is to recall Noah’s Ark and the Flood that brings us new life and hope through the waters of death.

God cares for this world and for the smallest things in it.  In His mercy and generosity God may allow the wicked freedom to do evil, but He will preserve and abide with the faithful.  Creation itself recalls the covenant that ours is a God not of vengeance or violence or wrath, but of peace, of promise, and of fresh new life. This is what the Flood teaches us about God and Creation and our place within it.  And so Noah’s Ark truly is a myth, in that it allows us to make sense of our world.

Still, though, there remains that uncomfortable question with which we started. What about everyone else? Yes, Noah survived and flourished, but what of his contemporaries?  What of those ancient freshwater settlements now resting like rotted teeth on the bottom of the Black Sea? How many people died in the story of Noah, and how can that ever be set right?  Even if they deserved it for their wickedness—it still seems a terrible tragedy, does it not? After all, there but for the grace of God go I.

To answer this, we must remember that nothing is impossible for God. No one and nowhere is beyond His notice, His mercy, His reach. Not even the dead. “Where can I go from Your Spirit, or where can I flee from Your presence?” sings the Psalmist.  “If I ascend into Heaven, You are there.  If I make my bed in Hades, behold, You are there.”  We’re so used to thinking that the grave is our end, as if death had the final say, that we forget just how far Christ’s authority extends.

St. Peter writes in his epistle this morning that even when Jesus’ flesh was put to death, we could not slay His soul. During the three days when His Body lay in its tomb, the Spirit of Jesus descended to the dead and proclaimed the Good News of His Kingdom “to the spirits in prison,” including—and this Peter states explicitly—those “who in former times did not obey… in the days of Noah, during the building of the Ark.”

Would you get a load of that!  It doesn’t matter that humanity had become so wretched that God flooded the earth in order to save Creation from their perversions. It doesn’t matter that they perished thousands of years ago under millions of gallons of seawater.  Jesus came for them, even for them, in the land of the dead, because even while He's dead Jesus can’t help but save the souls of everyone around Him!

What about all the people who didn’t make it onto the Ark?   Jesus saved them.  Time was no barrier!  Death was no barrier!  All angels and authorities are subject to Christ the King and He descended into Hell to pull sinners back up into Heaven. What about all the people who died in the Flood?  They are alive in Christ.

When we say Christ is King, we do not mean simply King of the Church or King of this world.  He is the King of beasts and of angels, of spirits and ghosts, of storms and mountains, King of stars and galaxies, of space and of time, of words and thoughts and gravitation and existence and primal forces and of reality itself. Nothing is beyond Jesus Christ.  No one is beyond His reach.  Not the sinner, not the broken, not the lost, and certainly not the dead.  No matter where you are, no matter what you have done, no matter how deep in the Flood you have fallen, call to Him and He will hear You.  Call to Him, and He will come.

The King will fight for His beloved.  And not even Hell will stand in His way.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.