Re/Store: Genesis 9:8-17
First Sunday in Lent
8 God said to Noah and
to his sons with him, 9 “I am now setting up my
covenant with you, with your descendants, 10 and
with every living being with you—with the birds, with the large animals, and
with all the animals of the earth, leaving the ark with you. 11 I will set up my covenant with you so that never again will
all life be cut off by floodwaters. There will never again be a flood to
destroy the earth.”
12 God said, “This is
the symbol of the covenant that I am drawing up between me and you and every
living thing with you, on behalf of every future generation. 13 I
have placed my bow in the clouds; it will be the symbol of the covenant between
me and the earth. 14 When I bring clouds over the
earth and the bow appears in the clouds, 15 I will
remember the covenant between me and you and every living being among all the
creatures. Floodwaters will never again destroy all creatures. 16 The
bow will be in the clouds, and upon seeing it I will remember the enduring
covenant between God and every living being of all the earth’s
creatures.” 17 God said to Noah, “This is the
symbol of the covenant that I have set up between me and all creatures on
earth.” (CEB)
The last time temperatures in Texas
dropped as far as they did this past week was 70 years ago, a time when the
modern nation of Israel was only three years old and Harry Truman occupied the
White House as the 25th Amendment limiting presidents to two terms
was ratified. “I Love Lucy” premiered on
CBS and the Egyptian riots about British imperialism erupted into full-scale
violence. The last time temperatures in
Texas dropped as far as they did this past week, the United States was only
just able to declare itself free of malaria.[1]
It’s been a while.
So it is not terrifically surprising,
given the rarity of a winter storm this severe, that many modern houses in
Texas were unprepared. Lack of proper
insulation that demanded higher thermostat settings coupled with mismanaged
electricity provisions led to widespread power outages, stealing heat from homes
exactly when it was needed most. Pipes
burst, leading to water shortages throughout the state with cities like Houston
still under boil-water advisories as of yesterday.[2] Over the past several days, videos on TikTok
and other social media showed waterfalls pouring out of light fixtures just
before the ceiling gave way beneath the water’s weight, insulation crashing to
the soaked furniture below. Disembodied
voices behind camera lenses repeated litanies of disbelief over screaming wails
of fire alarms while bare feet sloshed through several inches of water in
ruined kitchens. “We gotta go; it’s not
safe here,” says one man off-camera. “I
have to document this, I have to make sure insurance knows,” says another. One parent showed a video of her daughter’s
fish tank—frozen solid.[3]
The
shortsighted greed that has now caused at least 48 deaths—30 in Texas—and billions
of dollars in property damage, casting 300,000 people into sudden housing
insecurity due to power loss,[4] turns the usual chuckle of
us well-weathered Northerners into horror at just how unprepared those in the
South were for this latest extreme weather swing and how badly those in charge
of infrastructure have failed them. We
watch from hundreds of miles away with our faucets carefully dripping and our
snowblowers in our garages and wonder how on earth that much destruction will
be restored.
“Restore: Give (something previously stolen, taken
away, or lost) back to the original owner or recipient,”[5] from the Latin restaurare,
to bring back.[6]
It is the
first Sunday of Lent, the season preceding Easter in which Christians use 40
days to take stock of our life of faith and our relationship to ourselves, each
other, and the Holy. It is also the
first Sunday of our series “Re/Lent,” focusing on the ways God pulls us back to
right rhythm in a world that is not at all in sync with itself. We come today to a text made familiar by
thousands of cheerful paintings in church nurseries the world over of a rainbow
splashed across a cloudless sky as the pairs of animals leave the ark, smiling.
While such
colorful murals are lovely and helpful for teaching children animal
recognition, they mask the painful reality of this Scripture. Noah and his family stand before God as the
only surviving humans of a flood that wiped out everyone else. Timothy Simpson bluntly and startlingly
describes it as, “Like a battering husband who shows up with flowers and a box
of chocolates, Yahweh shows up with a rainbow, promising ‘no more,’ as if even
he is taken aback at the depth and breadth of the violence he has wrought on
his own creation. That this violence is ostensibly in response to the
creatures’ violence enacted against one another (Gen. 6:11) makes what happens
in the flood all the more remarkable. This story of divine wrath is regularly
smoothed over in the modern church with its discomfort over such things, as the
story morphs from being one of genocide meant for an adult audience into a trip
to the zoo for children.”[7]
It is dark,
this tale of promise. It is a moment
when God’s anger was so fierce that God restarted Creation, drowning the human
race that had gone so terribly awry and fallen into such violence that it
seemed only violence could fix it. Far more than a kitchen, a house, a
neighborhood, the world was flooded.
Such flood stories are fairly common in the societies of the Ancient
Near East in which Israel gathered to itself to write the history of the God
Who called them a chosen nation, so it is likely some catastrophic event
happened in the region at some point.
And after a catastrophe, what next?
What does it even mean to be restored?
“I will set up
my covenant with you so that never again will all life be cut off by
floodwaters.” It is worth noting that
God, in this new covenant, never promises restoration. There will be no bringing back because what
was washed away was done deliberately.
The flood was God’s response to the cruelty of humanity, a cruelty God
has no desire to restore. The reset was,
as insurance deems it, “an act of God”—but it was one God only promises never
to do again, not to undo in the first place.
And the sheer magnitude of restoring a world is staggering—not
impossible for the God Who made it in the first place, but sizable nonetheless.
There are some
saying that Texans deserved the freezes, the floods, the dying and dead. It was their arrogance, their “Lone Star
State” mentality, their misuse of the resources at end. While I believe that contributed to this
mess, I do not think it is helpful or faithful to say that they deserved
this. But I do recognize that, in the
truest sense of the term, there can be no restoration for Texas. The 48 people who died will stay dead. The ruined beds and tables and books and
family photos will stay ruined. The
frozen fish will thaw, but will not swim again.
Moving forward from here can be—must be—a lesson learned of better preparation
to keep power grids safe from extreme cold and roads clear for workers to
travel, but it will not be a restoration.[8] What was lost cannot be restored. Noah and his family standing on the
waterlogged ground of a drowned life knew that what was lost would not be
restored.
“When I bring
clouds over the earth and the bow appears in the clouds, I
will remember the covenant between me and you and every living being among all
the creatures.” God does not
promise restoration; God promises to relent, to abandon harsh treatment, not
only in the moment but forever. Never
again will the floodwaters cover the earth; never again will I wash away
the world. It is an interesting
reassurance and one that may seem precarious at first glance—does our
livelihood really depend that much on a celestial post-it note? What if the rainbow does not come? What if there’s a loophole of destruction—not
by floodwaters but by fire, by drought, by earthquake? What if we humans cause that much anger
again?
We are called to be a people of hope,
especially in these times that often seem hopeless, and Church, here is the
hope of this grim story: this promise,
this covenant, this reminder is now built into God’s relationship to everything.
Professor
Cameron Howard writes, “The first thing to notice about God’s covenant with
Noah is that it is not, in fact, with Noah alone, nor with only his family, but
rather with ‘every living creature’ (Genesis 9:10), ‘all flesh’ (v. 16). God
commits God’s self not just to humanity, but to all of creation. The second
extraordinary detail about this covenant is that it does not involve the legal
reciprocities of a treaty. Instead, all of the obligations rest with God…God
reaches out to the world, and God does all the heavy lifting.”[9]
What was lost
is not going to be restored; instead, something new is being created. God reaches out in invitation to relationship
to every sparrow, every gopher, every koala, every grasshopper, every alligator,
every child, every adult, every single creature—and not only as they came off
the ark but for all time. The promise is
for all descendants of all creatures, an eternally unending reassurance that
the God Who made us all will not erase us from existence, that we cannot earn
destruction because God refuses that kind of violence now and forever. It is a reminder that God is the God of all
things, a God of grace beyond measure Who values this wonder of creation enough
to stick with it, to stick with us, even when staying in relationship is
much more difficult than wiping the slate clean. It is hard work, that kind of relationship,
and there are often dark days, which leads to two important points we may want
to put on our own post-it notes: one, we
are not the only creatures on this planet with whom God has relationship; and
two, the rainbow doesn’t show up in the sun.
The first is
fairly easy to remember when a mouse gets in the house, but perhaps not as easy
when we set out poison for that mouse.
God’s covenant here is almost entirely one-sided—I will be
reminded not to flood your home—but it is an invitation to us to
recognize our own power to do the same.
We are not God, which is an important header to all conversations, but
we in the 21st century have learned how to do quite a bit of damage
to the world God has made. The extremes
of climate change, as evidenced by the fierce weather in Texas, are mostly our
doing; NASA’s climate change statement reads that it is 95% probable that global
temperature shifts are “ the result of human activity since the mid-20th century
and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented over decades to millennia.”[10] God promised never to destroy the earth by
flood again; can we promise the same?
Perhaps what
is being restored in these forty days leading to a remembrance of death and
resurrection is our own understanding of the ways we are complicit in God’s
creative care; God made the promise, but Genesis 2 made us stewards of this
world. Does the rainbow remind us to
invest in a reusable coffee cup or water bottle rather than using Styrofoam or
plastic? Does it encourage us to write
to our representatives and ask that they stand against plans that strip away
environmental protections and encourage them to invest in research for fossil
fuel alternatives and new biodegradable materials? Do we hear God’s promise for every creature
and remind ourselves to see if this year we can give growing our own tomatoes a
try and look into alternative ways to catch that mouse in the house?
It is hard
work, this relationship to the world we have, and it is frustrating that we are
doing such a great job of destroying that world without any help from God. But that is where the second line on the
post-it note matters: the rainbow does
not shine in brilliant blue skies with a smiling sun on painted cinderblock
walls. “I will set my bow in the
clouds,” says God—it is when it is raining, when it is cloudy, when it is frighteningly
possible that this could be the moment God forgets or that we succeed in
destroying what God made; that is when the rainbow shines. It is in the moments when a reminder to stay
in the difficult work of relationship is the last thing one wants to deal with
that such a reminder is absolutely crucial to see.
Noah stands on
the wreckage of the world he knew, surrounded by loss so overwhelming he spends
the next chapter stone drunk to cope with it.
But here, in this moment, in this text, he listens. God’s offer of restoration is not for what
existed yesterday but of what could be tomorrow—it is hope, security, promise, covenant. It is bringing back the reality that there is
life yet on this world, and the waters have receded, and the sun shines just
enough to create the rainbow bent in grief but colorfully daring to remind even
God to take care nonetheless.
May we learn
to trust God’s covenant with us, we who are part of creation; may we learn to do
our part in protecting this vast wonder of a planet; and may we be filled with
restored hope to keep moving in this wilderness as we walk alongside the
Creator. Amen.
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