Deluge

Ulmo, by Kip Rasmussen

Propers: The First Sunday in Lent, AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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

Once upon a time, a great Flood swept away the world as we knew it. Those few human beings who survived the deluge had to restart civilization with the domestic animals they’d managed to save. Yet Creation was never quite the same again.

Now, you may be thinking: that’s Noah’s Ark, Genesis, a story from the Hebrew Bible. And of course you’d be right. But it’s also tale told in Akkad, and Sumer, and Babylon, and Persia, and Greece, and India, and China, and North America. By some counts there are 175 variants of this myth. If multiple attestation establishes veracity, then it would seem that we’re all remembering something rather large indeed.

One needn’t be a strict biblical literalist to wonder at the origins of the Flood. Theories range from the bursting of the Black Sea through massive global glacial melt to a comet impacting somewhere in the oceans. Others consider it to have been something simpler: an archetype of the mind, associating water quite naturally with creation, destruction, and renewal; turning all localized floods into instantiations of the one original Flood, the primordial spiritual sea.

Regardless of how we might look at it today, the Flood was simply a fact of life in the ancient world. It had happened. There wasn’t much doubt of that. What mattered was what it meant. How do we interpret the Flood? What do our stories tell us? In all the versions current when Genesis was written, the gods had tried to wipe out humankind. Because we were annoying. We were noisy. We bothered them. Not to put too fine a point on it, human beings are a nuisance.

In Mesopotamian mythology more broadly, the gods arose from chaos; the world is at best an indifferent and more often an actively hostile place; and mankind matters little in the great schemes of the cosmos. We’re something of an afterthought. The early chapters of the Book of Genesis specifically refute these myths at each and every point. Genesis takes the mythology and flips it on its head, inverting the worldview of the entire Ancient Near East.

In Genesis, the gods do not arise from chaos. Rather, in the beginning is God, Yahweh, the great I Am. He has no beginning, for He is all beginnings. And from nothing, He fashions the world—from nothing, that is, other than Himself. And the world that He makes, that He speaks into being through His Word and His Spirit, is not savage nor cruel nor indifferent. It is good. At every stage of its evolution, the cosmos God creates is good.

And humans, far from being afterthoughts, far from being incidental, are the culmination of this process, the finishing flourishes on the canvas divine. We are called to steward Creation, to manage and to care for it, as sub-creators, as agents of Heaven on this earth. All of us kings, all of us priests, in the service of the Most High, the Creator of us all.

That’s a shocking take; a radical reinterpretation of how most people, most civilizations, had understood their place within the grander scheme of things. The Bible was then, and remains today, a revolutionary document, a collection of books which have both challenged and changed humanity in fundamental ways, and across generations.

Human rights, women’s rights, abolition, the rule of law, separation of church and state: these might all have arisen without the Bible, but it’s hard to imagine how. And if we can no longer see that—if we view the Holy Scriptures as outmoded or irrelevant or alien—that’s only because they’re a victim of their own success. We don’t notice the impact of the Bible any more than a fish notices the water in which it swims. It’s part of our environment, the air which we all breathe.

Genesis approaches the myth of the Flood with a similar iconoclasm. Here it’s no longer the tale of wicked gods eliminating our species as a pest. Now it’s the story of God saving humankind, delivering Creation through a cleansing of the waters. According to Genesis, sin had so thoroughly infected the population that “their every thought was only evil all the time.” Imagine that: every thought in your head, every choice in your day, only ever the worst possible option.

We had failed in our duty. We had failed to care for and to steward God’s Creation. But He did not give up hope. He did not snap His almighty fingers and start the world anew. No, He found the one remaining person not completely irredeemable and set him to the task of constructing a massive ark, a second Garden of Eden. Here he gathered animals, two-by-two, and shut the doors of this ship of salvation against 40 days and 40 nights of rain, the opening of the floodgates of the earth.

The waters of death and resurrection cleansed this fallen world, and the seed of goodness, the seed of God’s intention for Creation, survived upon the surface of the sea. In Noah and his family, the world, or at least civilization, gains a second chance, a rebirth. And God sets His bow in the clouds as a sign of His peace, that whenever we might see it, we would know He’s on our side, that divine violence had been renounced.

That is quite an inversion. The Bible took a story that everybody knew, a story of terror and destruction wrought by wicked deities, in which humankind survived by the skin of our teeth, and turned it into the tale of a wicked humanity, ravaging the world, stopped by the love of God who gives us all a second chance. What’s important here is not the historicity of the Flood. Again, that was assumed. What’s important is how we understand the work of God therein.

Imagine a terrible disaster. And one person says of it, “Look, here’s proof that the gods must hate us all.” But another says of the same event, “Behold how God loves us and is with us even now, even in this.” Same event. Different narratives. Within them are implicit assumptions regarding how we understand God, the world, and our place in it. And that’s what makes it a myth, mind you.

The word “myth” doesn’t mean that something didn’t happen. A myth is a story that we use to make sense of our world: to impose a narrative upon it, or to distill a narrative from it, that answers our longings for meaning and purpose and value. We are mythmakers, meaning-makers. Or at least meaning-discerners. Every big story that tells us who we are is a myth.

That includes the Big Bang, Darwinism, the Revolutionary War. The question isn’t whether these events occurred but what they mean for us today, what they tell us about who we are and what we love and how we ought to live. Do not judge the story of Noah’s Flood merely by modern sensibilities. Compare it, rather, to the stories of its day, to the myths of 3000 years ago, and ask yourself, “What were they trying to tell us? What wisdom does the Bible here impart?”

And the bottom line is: God doesn’t hate us. God doesn’t kill us. God loves us and gives to us new birth, a fresh and second start, purely out of grace. That’s the moral of Noah’s Flood, and the miracle of it, to take a tale of death and woe and make it a story of life.

And if that doesn’t satisfy our misgivings, if we still look to this with modern eyes and wince at the destruction, at the drowning of all those sinners, the great mass of humankind, then take heart—for the story isn’t done. Turn to the New Testament, to the First Epistle of Peter, who writes that Jesus Christ “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 … in the days of Noah.”

St Peter, or at least the author of 1 Peter, explicitly states that in between His death and Resurrection, when Christ descended into hell, He brought the Gospel to those who had died in the days of Noah, those whose “every thought was only evil all the time.” Think about that. 100% absolute pure evil—and Jesus died for them! Jesus rescued them. Jesus resurrected them, went to hell and back for them. What happened to all the people who had drowned in Noah’s Flood? Jesus saves them all.

If the Bible is the progressive revelation of who God is for us, then the true Word of God, the ultimate and total self-expression of God to humankind, is Jesus Christ our Lord. And there is no soul beyond His redeeming, no sin beyond His expunging, no sinner beyond His mercy, His grace, His compassion and love.

If you want to know who God is for us, look to Jesus Christ. He is the myth written into history, the myth written into human flesh. He is God-With-Us, God as us, and He will save us all! By the waters of our Baptism. By the waters of the Flood.

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

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