The Bow in the Sky

Genesis 9:8-17
Lent 1
2/21/21
William G. Carter

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

 

God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

Years ago, my Uncle Fred built an ark. He didn’t use the kind of lumber that Noah did. Mostly he used scraps of wood from around the garage. And it was an impressive little project! The front door swings down to become a ramp. It’s sturdy enough for the elephants and tall enough for the giraffes. Up on top, there are living quarters for Noah and his family.

With a jigsaw, Uncle Fred cut out the animals from a large piece of plywood. He produced them two by two. When he finished, my Mom painted each one and put faces on Mr. and Mrs. Noah. For years, this was a cherished gift for my children. When they moved on to other pursuits, we brought Uncle Fred’s project to the church nursery, where other children have continued to imagine the Bible story.

All of this was intended by my uncle. He attached a brief note when the ark first floated into my home: “This is for the kids to enjoy.”

This is how we often regard the story: as a gift for children. It is the subject of Vacation Bible School lessons and youth choir musicals. Kermit the Frog sang about rainbow connections. A famous comedian who goes unmentioned these days had a great comedy bit: “Hey Noah, how long can your tread water?”

And I'll tell you what: during this sermon, you could go online to order the Fisher-Price version of Noah and the ark. For only $41.99, you get two elephants, two zebras, two lions, two giraffes, a 600-year-old man, and a big plastic boat that won’t sink in your bathtub. Additional animals sold separately. It's something for the kids to enjoy.

Except that it’s not. The story in Genesis is a dark story, a terrible story. It’s the story of how God intended to get rid of all the people of the world.

Certainly, God had his reasons. God made the world, but it was turning out poorly. One day, God looked around and saw the cruelty and the violence that people inflict on one another. God said, “All they think about is evil. All they do is hurt and destroy.” And God had enough. God was heartbroken about making an imperfect world.

Since God has been around before making the world, God didn’t need a world full of wretched people to feel complete. So God decided to wipe the slate clean. Wash everything away. God would be free to go other places and do other things.

The only kink in the plan is that God looked down and saw Noah. God remembered him and said, “Well, Noah isn’t so bad. In fact, he’s rather good. His wife, his sons, and his daughters in law are good too.” Thanks to the eight of them, that’s why you and I are here today. If it weren’t for Noah, the human race would be extinct. But God remembered Noah, and God said, “Maybe there is a glimmer of hope.”

When we read this story as adults, we hear all kinds of legendary touches. Noah was five hundred years old when he became a father. He was six hundred years old when the rain started to fall. At that advanced age, he was able to build a huge boat, line up the crocodiles and tigers without getting hurt, and make room for the mosquitos. And I imagine Noah and his family made the voyage as vegetarians; there’s no use in eating your cargo.

Just for the record, I happen to believe all of this without having to take it literally, because I happen to believe the deeper truth: that God had every reason to wipe out every person until he looked down and remembered Noah.

It must make God sad to create a world that doesn’t turn out very well. God creates people with the capacity to love and their hearts are bent on destruction. God gives them seeds to plant gardens, and some of them hoard the produce while others go hungry. God gives them hands to work with metal and they build spears. God gives them land of incredible beauty, and they sell tickets for admission and strip-mine every available mineral. 

God made the humans good, but they turned out worse than the animals. In the jungle, at least, animals survive by being fit. Human beings, on the other hand, manipulate, exploit, scheme, and plunder. They don’t have to sink their claws into one another, but they do. Unlike the wild animals, grown-up humans torture one another, teenagers play mind games, and grade-school children humiliate their classmates. No doubt, God has always had every reason to be incredibly sad. In the words of one rabbi, “The great flood was supplied by God’s tears.”

But through the tears, God looked down and saw Noah. And God saw Noah’s wife, whose name was Mrs. Noah. And God saw their three sons and three daughters in law. Something softened in the Creator’s heart, and God thought, “Maybe I can work with them after all. Maybe I can make something of them without having to start over from scratch.”

Several years ago, Bill Moyers brought together a lot of different voices to talk about the stories of Genesis. This is a text held in common by Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Moyers thought it would be fruitful to host conversations around the ancient stories, and he was right.

For the Noah story, Moyers asked his panel what kind of headline they would write to describe it. A newspaper editor said the headline should be, “God Destroys World.” Across the table from him sat the Rev. Dr. Samuel Proctor, for many years the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the leading church in Harlem. Dr. Proctor said, “Oh no. The headline ought to read, ‘God Gives Humans Second Chance.’”

Proctor said, “I learned the Noah story from my father, a Sunday school teacher. When we grew up, we laughed at the far-fetched details, but we didn’t try to rewrite the story. We drew our lessons from it what it said. And it held before us the possibility of another opportunity to get things right.”

He said, “Every Wednesday, my daddy would press his trousers and go down to the Philharmonic Glee Club rehearsal. These sixty black guys – table waiters, coal trimmers, truck drivers – would give one big concert a year to the white population. Even though our daddy was singing, we had to sit in the back. But in the midst of all that rejection, hate, and spite, they went. And every concert they ended by singing the same song: ‘Yesterday the skies were grey, but look this morning they are blue. The world is singing the song of the dawn.”

He said, “That’s the story of Noah! Sixty black guys in tuxedos in the 1920s, with lynching everywhere and hatred. But they had something we need to recover right now. I can’t let go of this story of Noah and the flood because after all of the devastation, there’s a rainbow. I’m not going to live without that kind of hope.”[1]

Here is the hope: after every thunderstorm, there is a rainbow somewhere. God takes his archery bow, the very weapon of war, and hangs it up in the sky. The point is: there will be no more arrows from heaven to earth. God has promised to deal with us by another way. God will influence us without resorting to intimidation or wrath. God decided to wash away the world once before, and realized it was a bad mistake. Why? Because there’s always Noah, that interesting 600-year-old man whose very presence is proof that the human race is worthy of a one more chance.

Our text today is the conclusion of a three-chapter story. God is doing all the talking. Noah can’t get a word in edgewise, and he doesn’t dare interrupt. After forty days and nights of rain, after the terrible washing-away of sin and sinful people, after the better part of a year floating on a flooded earth, God gives a speech to the eight human survivors and a whole lot of animals. The speech is summed up in a single word, a word God uses seven times in nine verses. The word is “covenant.”

“Covenant” begins as God’s word. That’s our word for this season of Lent. A covenant is an agreement. When God makes a covenant, it sounds like God says, “This is the way it’s going to be.”

As we hear the scriptures today, the very first covenant is given to Noah and his children. That means it’s a covenant with us, an agreement with the whole human family. Every person alive today is not only a child of Adam and Eve, but also a child of Noah and his wife. All of us are great-grandchildren of the flood.

The first covenant that God makes is a self-imposed restraining order: “I won’t use nature to wipe out the human race and the animals around them.” That is God’s commitment. What we do with that is up to us. If we choose to poison the environment, we must figure out what to do with the consequences. If we change our own climate by putting toxins in the air, we have a responsibility to thaw out Texas. There is continuing evidence of short-sighted human behavior and self-destructive tendencies.

But sometimes we see Noah – and we remember we have a second chance to get it right.

All the while, God promises to stick with us. “When I look at the rainbow,” God says, “I will remember my steadfast love and self-restraint.” No more annihilation. No more holocaust. No more fury and destruction. Not from heaven, at least. That rainbow is God’s eternal Post-It note. It is the continuing reminder that the Creator of all things is in favor of all people, in favor of the whole rainbow of different colors that make up the light of the world.

Elie Wiesel once said, “God created us because God loves good stories.” The story of the human family keeps on. No doubt, God is regularly disappointed with some of the plot twists. As God knows so well, a flood never did wash away the all-too-human tendency to goof up our lives. Sometimes we get stuck in the mud. Yet God chooses to keep living with all of us.

This is the promise of God’s covenant. God is the beginning of our story. God will be the end of our story. And in the middle of it all, as we heard today in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus steps out of the water – the water of his own baptism - and his faithfulness saves the world from drowning. This is the Good News.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved. 

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[1] Thanks to Carlos Wilton for passing along the story.