Lent as an Ark
Thumbnail image by Ceinturion, used under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
February 21, 2021—Lent 1B
Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; Mark 1:9-15
Note: the connection I make in this sermon between the Noah story and Creation care owes a great deal to Wil Gafney: https://www.wilgafney.com/2012/02/27/noahs-earth-ark-and-our-creation/
There’s an advantage to hearing just the rainbow part of the flood story. Because by this point we’ve reached the promise part, the part in which God has repented of the anger and haste with which he decided to wipe the slate (almost) clean and start again. So we could, if we wished, simply rest in God’s promise not to do that ever again: God’s promise that the bow in the clouds would no longer be a weapon pointed at humans when we go astray, but would now be a promise of a different kind of relationship between God and God’s creatures.
But it’s hard to really appreciate the promise without reckoning with the emotion of the whole story. Because the Flood is a tricky one. As much as the animals make for a really cute children’s story, the arc of the story isn’t cute or sentimental at all. One can’t really ooh and aah about a devastating flood that kills so many people it feels like everyone on earth has been washed away. Those kinds of disasters hit us at the very deepest level of our vulnerability and fear, leading us to question how the world works and what it means when these kinds of things happen.
The biblical story of the Flood connects us to the age-old human struggle with fate and fairness, with security and catastrophe, with the ideas of sin and punishment, actions and consequences. We desperately want a world in which things seem fair, in which bad things don’t happen to good people. Frankly, we’d also like it if good things didn’t happen to bad people, either.
It feels like that should be the way the world works. Barring that, it should at least be the way God works. If not now, then surely in the end, God will reward the good and punish the bad.
This is, in fact, the core of apocalyptic literature: an insistence that the unfair suffering and reward of the world around us does not reflect God’s desire or God’s justice. And in the fullness of time, God will bring about a world that does.
That’s good news. But it does not entirely prevent us from believing, to some extent, in a more immediate redressing of the balance. At least occasionally, it seems as though God launches a lightning bolt, just to keep us in check. Which means there will always be a part of us that resonates to the story of the flood. When we feel cynical about the world, or filled with personal guilt and self-loathing, up comes the sneaking suspicion that God sometimes regrets creating us. That she wonders what she was thinking when she labored to birth a universe, to bring forth stars and seas and plants and animals, and then stooped to form us from the dust of the ground.
No doubt about it: each of us, as individuals, might sometimes seem like a lost cause. And as a whole, humanity could well be described as a bad bet. Which is why we believe, even as we are horrified by the idea, that God could choose to wipe the slate and start over.
But then … there is the rainbow. There’s the reminder that we need not live in fear of such things: that God has made a covenant with every living creature on earth, that He will never again react to our failings by destroying it all.
That doesn’t mean it’s smooth sailing for us, however. God may have promised to never again destroy the world, but our sins (our inattention, our greed, our self-indulgence) are fully capable of doing it without any assistance from the Creator.
We can destroy our world: polluting air and water, destroying habitats, strip-mining and clear-cutting, and knocking the whole system off-balance by our production of so much greenhouse gas. As a species, there’s no way around the fact that we put an immense strain on this beautiful planet of which we are a part; this piece of Creation God placed into our care.
In the end, the planet will survive us. By which I mean it will almost undoubtedly outlive us, and shelter new and different life-forms. But our failings, our sinfulness, make it less and less hospitable for us, and for many of the creatures we currently share it with. Our sin is destroying it, and thus, our sin is destroying us.
This is not, I suppose, surprising. That’s what sin does: it corrodes, pollutes, warps, and destroys.
Which is why we are still in need of an ark, even with a rainbow in the sky. There is, in fact, a tradition that describes the Church as an ark, in which humanity can be saved from destruction. But there is a complacency lurking if we apply that metaphor too easily. After all, it is perfectly possible for me to consider myself “in the church,” and still be doing things to destroy myself and the world.
As arks go, I believe the church actually offers us a better one, every year, with the season of Lent. Lent, with its capacity to remind us; it teaches and strengthens us in practices of introspection, self-examination, and repentance. So that we might once again acknowledge that we are utterly unable to save ourselves from ourselves, and might then (humbly, gratefully) place ourselves in the hands of Jesus, whose job it is to save us from ourselves! Who works in us, to center and reorient us to the care of Creation: this achingly beautiful, dazzlingly complex world whose stewardship is our responsibility and calling. Who works in us to center and reorient us to the welfare of neighbor and self, the love of whom is our commandment and our salvation.
After the Flood, God set the bow in the sky as a promise that He would never again destroy the world because of our failings. Perhaps we can also see it as a reminder that our failings might nonetheless be destroying us, and take refuge in the ark that is Lent. May its practices lead us into the strength of the one whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine (Eph 3:20). May it be so. Amen.