The True Story of Noah [Lent 1B - Genesis 9:8-17]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Genesis 9:8-17

 

The True Story of Noah

 

What people always want to know about the oldest stories is: are they real?  Are they true?  And the answer is, that of course they are true.  The best stories, the stories that stick in the soul, are always true – even if they don’t belong in the history books.

 

How I know they are true is that though they are old they continue to be remade and relived.  You likely haven’t built an ark to ride upon the primordial         chaos.  But I suspect you have surveyed the wreckage that chaos left behind in your life and felt the cold empty weight of despair.  You see, everyone talks about Noah’s flood, but they never think about what it feels like to live with the emptiness left behind by the receding waters.

 

This story is marketed to children.  It has cute animals and a boat.  It has a colorful rainbow.  And that is usually where we insert the end.  And we leave out that after the rainbow, Noah gets drunk and passes out in his tent…because,  I suppose, that is not very family-friendly.

 

But the truth is life is not always G-rated.  And in this story, buried just below the animals, is a story of trauma – and the existential threat it imprints on the human soul. 

The Noah story begins in the deep regret of God – which is not a concept with which we wrestle much in the Church.  But the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures were less protective of God.  And so this story opens on God’s broken heart because the masterpiece created in the first six days is falling to pieces.  And God regrets making stuff because humans, created good, made in the divine image, are killing each other and are given to wickedness.

 

In something of a surprising twist, rather than start from scratch, God decides to keep Noah and his family.  And while Noah was likely relieved to be spared from a watery grave, also part of his calling is that he is burying the world.  He will exit the ark with all his precious cargo, including the grief of the entire planet.

 

After the Flood, Noah walked out on the dry land – dry but stained with destruction.  The smell of water but without the life.  Water-logged but not lush.  Earth as a drowning victim.  And so he planted a vineyard, invited the numbness, and tried to forget the world outside his tent. 

 

But at the heart of this story, after the Flood and before the wine, is today’s passage, the portion of this story that opens our Lenten season.  Out of the ark, Noah meets the God who unleashed the chaos, who put the earth under water, but who also saved him.  And they stand there, in the devastation, together.  Life and faith are complex. 

 

And what Noah found in the face of God, in that moment, was more regret.  This regretful God.  A God we have never dreamed of, never imagined, never even considered.  Our God has always been so assured and confident, so omni- in all of the ways.  But not in this story.  In this story God is still figuring things out.

 

It is as if God realized something while Noah was floating above the world with a boat full of animals.  The reset button is not the answer.  The masterpiece will always be messy.  And the people, well, the people will never be perfect or even all that loveable.  And so it was up to God to decide what to do with this realization and God decided to love us – as we are.

 

And that is what today’s story is about.  Rather than release another flood or live with regret, rather than abandon our world, rather than drift away, God decided to get closer.  This is the story of closeness – an ancient people trying to make sense of a God who got much closer than gods were supposed to get.

 

God forms with creation a covenant and covenants assume a mutual relationship.  To do this, God had to open the divine nature to an eternity of mercy.  On the waterlogged earth, in the presence of a man traumatized by a world of death, God decided on an eternal, unconditional love, a love that anchored the cross on the far horizon of salvation history.

 

God destroyed the world because we were too violent – since Eden.  And still, here, in this story, this powerful God did the unthinkable: God lowered God’s defenses.  What is said in this story is that God hung a bow in the sky.  We picture the beautiful colors of a rainbow – a weather event that happens when the sun shines in through a storm.  And that is true enough – in its beauty, in its poetry.  But the text doesn’t say rainbow; it says bow – a weapon, a weapon with no arrow left on the string.  Our traumatized species and this disarmed God: a match made in the aftermath, a match made on the threshold of hope.

 

What people always want to know about the oldest stories is: are they real?  Are they true?  And the answer is, that of course they are true.  The best stories, the stories that stick in the soul, are always true – even if they don’t belong in the history books.

 

These ancient people wrote this story for a reason: because it was true.  Because they were the children of Noah: broken by trauma and ruled by unruly passions and still they felt loved.  Because they had met a God who came close enough to feel their fury and wipe their tears: a God who hung up a weapon of destruction so that both of God’s arms were available to embrace this world, this messy divine masterpiece.  And this story, this story of watery destruction, of an impossibly big boat, and of a disarmed God, reminded them that nothing is hopeless – not even them.