"NOAH AND THE ARK"

Now I know of all the biblical stories you feel fairly secure on this one.  However, it can trip you up, and I don't want you falling on your face in front of your children.  For instance, how many of each species does Noah take on the ark?  (Two).  Right.  Well, that is, you are half right.  Noah does take two of each species of unclean animals.  But you are also half wrong, for Noah is instructed to take seven pairs of each of the clean animals.  How many humans were on board the ark? (Guesses)   8: Noah and Mrs. Noah, their 3 sons, and their wives.  How long did the flood last?  (40 days).  No, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights causing the flood, but the flood lasted for over a year.  What bird did Noah first send out to see if the flood waters had subsided?  (Dove).  No, a raven.  Would you like me to read you the story?

You see we do this all wrong.  We should be down in the classrooms studying our Bible and the children should be up here in this big rumpus room singing and praying.  OK, after the raven what bird does Noah send out?  (Dove).  Yes, the dove.  And what does it come back with?  (Olive branch).  No, it comes back with nothing at all.

I'm sorry.  As if you are not already biblically insecure.  All right, 7 days later Noah sends the dove out again.  Now what does it return with?  Yes, an olive branch.  Proof that there is land out there.  The flood is over.  Not after 40 days, but after a year plus.  Can you imagine the ark, seven pair of moose, seven pair of bison...every species?  Have you ever been to the zoo?  And they clean those cages daily.

Yet with olive branch in hand, Noah waits another seven days, and sends the dove out yet one more time.  And this time the dove returns with what?  The dove does not return.  Not only is there land out there, but it is capable of sustaining life.  At least a bird's life.  Nearly two months later still, Noah and his children leave the ark for new and refreshing life.

Well, it is a lovely story, if a bit tricky, told to us not for its historical or scientific significance, but for its theological truth.  I do not know how deep our children will get into this, once can drown in this stuff, too, but let me equip you that you might be their life-guards.  Let's take a rolling start.  The book, Genesis.  God creates.  In six days God creates.  "And God saw everything that God had created, and indeed, it was very good."  (1:31) Including the human being, made in God's likeness.

So God the Creator is very pleased and we are rolling along, very quickly downhill.  Adam and Eve, first marriage, mess up and get us kicked out of Eden; Cain and Abel debut as the first family, need I mention it is dysfunctional.  A descendant of Cain, Lamech, whose father is Methuselah, longest lived person in the Bible at 969 years, kills a young man for hitting him (Genesis  4:27b), thereby introducing us to over kill as a means of settling squabbles.  God settles this by determining man should not live so long, and limits us to 120 years max.  And finally, preceding the Noah story, the last straw, when the sons of gods come down to earth and horse around with the daughters of humanity creating giants whose thoughts are evil and whose behavior is wicked, God decides to pull the plug on creation (there is another test question, from where do the flood waters come?  They come down from the sky, yes, indeed, as it rains for forty days and forty nights, and the flood waters come up from the earth), as God allows the primordial seas of chaos, out of which God had created in the beginning, to inundated God's creation and put an end to it all.

"I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created - people together with the animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have created them."  (6:7) The end of the beginning.  The Flood story, as you may know, is older than the Bible.  It is a universal story known to most of the cultures of the world, each told with its unique theological bent.  Our Judeo-Christian bent is a great one - which is what we will try to teach the children.

God says, "...for I am sorry that I have created them."  (6:7) Next line in our Bible, "But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord."  (6:8) Whew!  What a relief.  And, indeed, this is what the name Noah means in Hebrew, "relief."  This a good thing to do?  "Noah walked with God."  In biblical parlance, Noah was "a righteous man."  (6:9) So Noah was spared, and Mrs. Noah, and their three sons and their wives.  The entire family was spared, 8 in all, along with all the critters in creation, clean and unclean, which shows what a softy God really is.

Our daughter, Sarah, is heard to say, walking away from an animated dinner table discussion, "Dad is really a push over."  Dads are supposed to be pushovers to their daughters.  It gives the developing child a sense of empowerment.  Moms can be mean.  That is a part of the complicated mother-daughter relationship.  But dads are supposed to be pushovers.  The alternative is to be an abusive son-of-a-bitch.  And the world has enough of those.

"Noah found favor in the sight of God."  What I want you and your children to know is the story of the Flood is not about Noah.  Yes, Noah does some good wood work, he's a handy guy, but otherwise he has a small, supporting role.  He is not even entrusted with a single speaking part.  No, the Hebrew story of the Flood is about God.  It answers the question asked by the Hebrew community, "Can we trust the world in which we live?"  And since god is the Creator of the world, the question really is, "Can we trust God?"

Good question.  After all, my father lives in Houston.  When the winds and seas of chaos are crashing upon you, can we trust God?  Can we trust God to care for us?  The biblical answer is "yes."  This amazing story says we can trust God to care for us.  The Hebrew understanding says God is not a remote, removed, dispassionate, distant God, only interested in other gods, as in other cultures, but God is passionate like a parent about God's creation.

"When God saw all the evil the humans had done, God was sorry he had made men and women, and God's heart was grieved."  (6:5-6) Do you hear the parental passion?  Have you been there?  The disappointment.  The anger.  The guilt.

Yet God's caring wins out, the story tells us, sealed in a covenant.  This is the first covenant in the Bible.  After God restores creation, God makes a covenant with Noah.  There will be other covenants, many, with the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with Moses, through Jeremiah and the prophets, and ultimately with us through Jesus Christ, many covenants, for we continually break them.

But God does not.  God remains faithful to the covenant, caring for creation, while "God's heart grieves."  The first covenant comes from this Flood story.  God promises to Noah, and to all creation, to never, ever, destroy the earth again.  Humanity may.  God grants us the freedom and the power to wreck havoc with creation...  But God will not.  God will remain faithfully at work redeeming and renewing creation, including you and your relationships.  We may mess up, and, oh brother, don't we.  But not God, who is faithful and forgiving, a caring Creator, who signs the covenant with a rainbow in the sky.  Why the storm clouds are still in the sky, the rainbow is God's signature that we will weather the storm.

Which is what George Matheson wrote about in the hymn we just sang before this sermon ("O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go").  George Matheson was a 19^th century Scottish minister, as well as composer of hymns.  Of this composition he wrote "It was composed with extreme rapidity; it seems  to me that its construction occupied only a few minutes, and I felt myself rather in the position of one being dictated to than of an original artist.  I was suffering from extreme mental stress and the hymn was the fruit of that pain."

You see, Matheson was a young man who had the world by the tail.  He was betrothed to a beautiful woman, the love of his life.  And then he began to lose his eyesight, an imperfection which proved too great for his fiancé, who therefore broke off the engagement.  Then end.  No, the beginning, as captured in his composition of which he writes (again), "I was suffering from extreme mental stress and the hymn was the fruit of that pain."

Indeed it was, as it begins, "O love that wilt not me go, I rest my weary soul in thee..."  And continues, 2^nd stanza, "O Light that followest all my way, I yield my flickering torch to thee..."  (do you hear this, he is going blind?)  To the third and most sublime stanza, "O Joy that seekest me through pain, I cannot close my heart to thee; (and here it is, no greater words of comfort or covenant in all hymnology), "I trace the rainbow through the rain, (the silver lining) and feel the promise is not vain (the covenant) That morn shall tearless be."  (A new day)

In the beginning "God saw everything that God had created, and indeed, it was very good."  And in the end, it will be very good again.  In between - it is all in between, our lives - in between the beginning and the end, we have the covenant that "traces the rainbow through the rain."  For God said to Noah, "This is the sign of the covenant that make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generation: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the everlasting covenant between me and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth."  (Gen. 9:12-13)

This is what we will seek to convey to your children over these next few weeks in Sunday School.  Thank you for bringing them to church.  By the way, George Matheson did go totally blind.  It was then that he entered the ministry and became a noted preacher, theologian and much beloved pastor for his generation, as guided, it must be said, by his sister who devoted her life to being his eyes.  "O love that wilt not let me go."  And so it is for you. 

AMEN.