Drowned
Propers: The First
Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2018 B
Homily:
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Every culture has a Flood story—which is good indication
that something happened far enough back for all of us to remember it.
The broad strokes are ever the same. Humanity’s wickedness
becomes a threat to the world, to the very order of the cosmos. And so the
powers that be smite us, wash us away in a Flood greater than any natural
catastrophe, in order to prevent us from doing yet more harm to the world. There
are, however, survivors—obviously—who are borne atop the waters in a great
ship, an Ark, that preserves both human and animal life. Thus is civilization,
and the whole of Creation, given new life, new birth, a second chance.
Everyone tells this story, every human society. We read it
to our children and paint it on the walls of our Sunday School classrooms. We
differ in detail, yes, but more fundamentally in interpretation. We all have a
Flood; what does it mean? Psychologists might call it a Jungian archetype, an
image common to the imagination of all mankind. Geologists might point to the
Black Sea, where a great Flood indeed wiped out a prosperous civilization thousands
of years before even Egypt arose.
But there comes a in life time when this story makes us
uncomfortable. There comes a time when we look beyond the bulkhead and wonder,
What about everybody else? Did God really wipe out the world? Is His wrath so
great and terrible? And if so, then the Ark ceases to be for us a sign of hope,
of wonder, of promise, and becomes instead an emblem of destruction, of horror.
And so we relegate it to the status of a children’s story, a fairy tale, so
that we don’t have to think about it. We don’t have to take it seriously.
Look at the animals, kids. Ignore whatever’s floating in the
water.
The story of the Flood and of Noah’s Ark is not important for
what it teaches us about psychology, geology, or history. It’s important for
what it teaches us about God.
So let’s recap. According to the Bible, God made the world
good. There was no wickedness in it, no violence as we think of it. Human
beings as moral agents did what was right. It was our purpose, our blessing, to
care for the world and for all that God has made. We were gardeners, farmers,
caretakers, sub-creators, agents of the living God. Human beings were the
bridge, the lynchpin, between the spiritual and the material. We were the
capstone of Creation, the kings and priests who served Creation by leading all
creatures in proper praise and love of God.
But we screwed up. We didn’t want to serve, though such
service was our freedom, the source of all our life. Unlike the birds and the
beasts, humans possessed free will. That means that we were, and remain, moral
agents, able to judge good and evil, able to discern between the way the world
is and the way it ought to be. If a dog is bad, it’s not the dog’s fault. All
he has is instinct, experience, and training. A bad dog is the result of a bad
master. Not so with us. We have free will. We have responsibility and culpability.
When we screw up, whatever the extenuating circumstances, it’s our own fault.
And it was our fault that broke the world.
Once we rejected God, in hopes of becoming our own gods, the
whole system began to spin out of control. The center cannot hold. We got worse
and worse and worse. Our wickedness was pervasive and infectious, corrupting
both the physical and the spiritual. The whole of Creation groaned from the
sins that we poured out as innocent blood upon the earth.
And according to the Bible—this is straight out of Genesis—things
got to the point at which “every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts
was only evil continually.” Think about that for a minute. Our every thought
was only evil all the time. And it grieved God that we committed such
atrocities. This was not what He intended, not for us and certainly not for the
good of all Creation. We had become a cancer upon the healthy body of the
world.
And just to be clear, God could have given up. He could have
started over with literally no effort whatsoever. He had spoken the world and
all things into existence with but a Word. It would be no difficulty at all to
simply speak us back out of existence, making it so that we never were nor would
ever be. Then He could’ve started afresh with new worlds called forth from
nothing and made good.
But it is not the nature of God to give up, to abandon. Rather,
it is the nature of God to love, no matter how difficult or onerous that might
be, no matter the price that loving us might ultimately demand.
And so humanity was saved, through Noah, through the one
family not completely and utterly corrupted by sin, the one family still
maintaining a spark of hope for what humanity was truly meant to be. And this
Flood was in fact an act not of wrath but of mercy, a cleansing and a washing,
a second birth for Creation, liberating man from his madness and the world from
man gone mad.
But I want to be clear. It’s not just mercy for Noah. It’s
not just mercy for the animals. The Flood was mercy for the dead. Humanity was
absolutely, utterly corrupted. Our every thought was only evil all the time. We
were like a zombie horde, except that zombies don’t have a choice. We chose our
slavery to sin. We chose to be a plague upon the world.
Yet God would not abandon us. God would not give up on us.
100% pure evil, and still He loves us! Even death, even the collapse of
civilization, cannot separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ! And do
you know how we know this?
Just look to the words of St Peter this morning. Look to
them and see if they don’t blow our collective minds:
He [Jesus] was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, in which also He went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the Ark, in which a few, that is eight persons, were saved through water. And Baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you.
He [Jesus] was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit, in which also He went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the Ark, in which a few, that is eight persons, were saved through water. And Baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you.
In other words, when Jesus died on the Cross—when we
murdered God in the flesh—the Spirit and soul of Jesus Christ descended to the
dead, down into Hades, down into hell, where He preached the Good News to the dead,
to the spirits in prison from the time of Noah, who did not obey! Mankind
murdered God, and in response God descended into the very depths of hell to
bring life and liberation to the very worst of the worst, the souls drowned in
the Flood, the utterly corrupted, whose only thoughts were only evil all the
time!
These are the people for whom Christ died! These are the
unforgivable whom He now forgives! What happened to all those damned who
drowned so justly in the Flood? Jesus saved them! Jesus loved them all the way
to hell and back!
And that’s how much He loves you. Because Baptism is not the
Ark. Baptism is the Flood. It is death and resurrection for every sinful soul,
drowning to our wickedness to rise again in Christ. And no matter how twisted,
no matter how evil, no matter if you’ve pulled the whole world down with you in
your sin, Christ has come for you, come to die for love of you. And nothing,
nothing—not even the very gates of hell—can hold back the Flood of mercy poured
forth from the side of the living God.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment