“NOAH, THE
COVENANT AND THE TSUNAMI”
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A sermon preached Readings: Genesis
9:8-16, Matthew 3:13-17 |
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I establish
my covenant with you:
Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood;
never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.
And God said, This is the sign of the covenant I am making
between me and you and every living creature with you,
a covenant for all generations to come:
I have set my rainbow in the clouds,
and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.
(Gen
9:11-13)
Someone
asked me last week how we Christians could still believe in God
in the light of what has happened in the Indian Ocean.
Weren’t
we wrong to celebrate the good news of Christmas?
How
could you celebrate the birth of Jesus with so many people dying?
What
sort of God allows the tsunami to strike?
Isn’t
he meant to have made the tectonic plates and the waves and the sea and the
shore?
If
the tsunami was indeed an “act of God” then what sort of God??
And
what have we to say to those suffering and grieving
around the rim of the Indian ocean this week?
Today
is the day we renew our covenant with God,
and we recall the history of the covenants God has made with his people
down through the ages –
right back to the very first covenant God made with his people –
recorded in Gen 9.
Here is the ancient mythical story of a great flood
which destroys nearly the whole of the human race –
but God makes a covenant with Noah, and promises him – what? -
that never again will he destroy humanity with his
judgement.
And yet this seems to be just what has happened.
So
is there a word of Gospel Hope?
It is a
critical question -
for if the Christian gospel has nothing meaningful to say
to the people of Indonesia and Sri Lanka this week,
then it doesn’t really have anything meaningful to say at all
Or – as someone once said:
”…… any theology that can’t be preached
in the presence of parents grieving over their slaughtered children
isn’t worth preaching anywhere else either”
(quoted in “A Sermon of Lament”
by Nathan Nettleton)
So
is there a word of hope?
I
believe there is -
a word of hope promised to Noah and fulfilled in Christ.
Let’s
go back to the story of Noah.
This
primitive myth talked of the survivors of flood and devastation.
They
were given a rainbow as a sign that from henceforth
God
would protect his children from ultimate disaster.
Of
course a rainbow comes when the sun shines through the rain –
the
symbol thus said that God cannot and will not ultimately be defeated or lose us
–
for
like the sun after rain, God will always be there at the end of the story.
The
writers of Genesis who first wrote this down
probably took this as a fairly simple and down to earth promise –
God
controlled the tide and the weather, and he would stay his hand –
no
more devastating floods.
Few
of us believe any more that God works like that –
He
doesn’t sit there like a puppet master
manipulating the tides and the tectonic plates making sure that no one ever suffers
–
You
don’t need a doctorate in theology to figure that out –
You
only have to watch the news for 5 minutes to know that God doesn’t work like
that –
or
if he does he is a particularly brutal and feckless God.
God
does allow us to suffer –
that is part of what it means to be free and human.
God
could have made us into cartoon characters
in
a sugar sweet pre-programmed universe where nothing was ever allowed to go
wrong –
a
dream world where the laws of physics changed every time there was any danger
of pain,
where freewill was taken away every time we thought of making bad choices –
a
world without any real choice, science, physics, good or evil, joy and
sorrow.
No.
God allows us to suffer in this world,
because that is what it means to be human and free.
Yet
the God who allows us to suffer is still a God of love –
and so in this world of suffering he puts a rainbow -
The rainbow doesn’t say that there is no suffering & heartache & death
Rather
it says that suffering & heartache & death are not the end of the story
–
Because
when the flood has done its worst, God is still there with us.
Naïve
optimism says “We will never suffer”
True
Christian hope says “God is with us, whatever we suffer”
If
you need an answer to the tsunami,
then look to Bethlehem, to Emmanuel, to God with us.:
God
is not the one who sits idly by on a heavenly throne
watching the devastation though satellite reconnaissance.
No
our God is the one who is there beside us
on
the beach when the wave hits –
·
God the Father entrusted his son to a brutal world
that his son might be with us in our hour of need. –
That is the story of the nativity.
·
God the Father stood on the shore of life and death
and saw his son wrenched from his hands by the surging flood tide of death-
That is the story of the cross.
I
came across this meditation on the Tsunami last week:
God spoke a Word and the Word became flesh….
….And I reckon that as hard as we might find it
to talk about flesh
while the nameless flesh of countless corpses
are necessarily treated as little more
than a threat to public health
and piled into mass graves
God is still not afraid to be identified as flesh, fragile flesh
brutalised flesh
limp and lifeless flesh
Because the promise of Christmas
is not just that the Word became cute and chubby baby flesh
but that the Word became flesh
and cast in his lot with us
hunted flesh
despised flesh
tortured flesh
dead and buried flesh
three days dead flesh ….
(from A Sermon of Lament
by Nathan Nettleton)
This is the Gospel – that God in Christ is with us even unto death,
And
if God is with us, nothing can or shall defeat us.
That
is why when we are baptised
we
symbolically go down into the water knowing that as we die with Christ,
so
when we come up we enter into new life with Christ –
a
new life which stretches through and beyond the grave.
That
is why when we come to renew our covenant
we
receive the rainbow promise –
that, yes, though the waters cover our heads and we are left dead on the beach,
yet shall the sun shine, yet shall the rainbow appear,
for there in our death Christ is with us –
And
if Christ is with us, then nothing can or shall harm us,
not even the swirling waters of death.
So the promise given and half understood by old man Noah
in the old old story is fulfilled in Christ.
So
we renew our covenant vows –
Knowing that our God is with us in all things.
That
is his covenant promise to us in Christ.
And
what in return does he ask?
Only this – that we live our lives in his service,
always walking along the shores of pain and death,
always looking for and tending the poor, the weak and the needy:
for it is lying in a stable, carrying a cross
and diving into the waters of sin and death,
that Christ supremely meets his children.
·
It is here in our darkest hour
that he holds out his hand to us.
·
It is here in our deepest despair that he promises to be there for us.
·
It is here he bids us go in his name to care for the needy –
and to find there, in the depths, the Rainbow God
who will bring us and all his children safe home.