COVENANT, PART £E: THE PROMISE John M. Buchanan

Genesis 9:&-17 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
February 24, 1O85 Columbus, Ohio

If the guiding principle in your life is self-protection: if, more than
anything else, you hope to minimize the possibilities of getting hurt, you
ought not to love anyone or anything. C.S. Lewis advised that if you do not
wish your heart to be broken, you must never give it away.

That is the subject of the second story in the Bible. Couched in
charming, dramatic images it makes one of the most astonishing claims in human
history ~ namely that God is a lover who risks a broken heart for his beloved
and, furthermore, that God wants us to know that and remember it every time
the fragile, paste) colors ef a rainbow appear in the sky.

After Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, and one section of begats, the
Biblical story presents Noah, his ark and the great flood. It is part of the
genesis - the beginnings of a religious tradition.

The whole story of Noah is rich and magnificent and it is clearly related
to a lot of other religious stories about a great flood which circulated in
the ancient near east. Many of the natural Phenomenon used to strike terror

in the hearts of ancient people. A violent thunderstorm suggested the
possibility that the whole system was falling in. An earthquake was more than
& suggestion -hat one’s world was coming apart at the seams. Even the daily

setting of the ‘sun could be a process that might continue indefinitely. GeueOnt
common motif in many ancient religions is the idea that the gods use the more
frightening natural phenomena as weapons to punish wicked people. There are
several ancient religious myths which depict the deity as an archer, shooting ,_. du
arrows ~ lightning bolts ~ at people. It is a powerfully vivid picture and if c

you have ever been 4 near miss in a lightning storm you have a personal sense & -

of the incredible power and the reality of fear the experience can generate.

' So Jahweh, God of the Hebrews, is first portrayed in this story as a deity
who is unhappy with the behavior of his people. It seems they do not wish to
play by the rules, and ag other eastern deities do with regularity, this God
decides to punish, in fact to do away with all of them.

But this story inserts, at the beginning, a fundamental difference. As
soon as God decides to punish he begins to hurt inside, and then to have
second thoughts about the punishment. The Genesis text puts it
beautifully..."the Lord was sorry...and it grieved him.” Walter Bruggemean, &
fine Old Testament scholar, comments: “With amazing boldness the text invites
(us} to penetrate to the heart of God...What we find is not an angry tyrant,

but a troubled parent who grieves over the atienation." interpretation:
Genesis, p. 77)

What parent, or teacher, or significant adult of any kind has not
experienced that. Anger with a child one jloves becomes deeply felt sorrow
that a relationship is strained. Anger, under the benevolent pressure of

love, becomes grief and it is terribly and literally true that to express that
anger is to hurt in a profound way.

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That is what the Noah story proposes about God. Ged grieves over the
alienation in the creation. Unlike other deities, God is not enraged, but
heart-breken.

And so even us judgment. begins to be carried out, this God’s mind begins
to change. He remembers Noah and gives Noah specific instructions and when
the ark is completed and its inhabitants are in place, the ancient story ~ in
one of loveliest ideas in all of literature says: “and the Lord shut them

— God is leeking very much like a loving parent, not a scowling judge.

God remembered Noah, and when the floods subsided, and the dry ground
appeared a@ messenger dove returned with an olive leaf to signify the rebirth
ef life. Noah got off the ark and built an altar, and God blessed Noah and
established a Covenant with Noah which was actually God’s promise not to
destroy life, and then sealed the promise by placing that mythological bow,
with which ancient deities attacked people, in the sky, slack; arched over the

Lereation God loves enough to save and nurture and replant.

is the first Covenant in the Bible; the beginning of an entire new
eertascas consciousness, a new perception into the heart of God. It is not
essentially a story about rain, floods, endangered species, genetics, or life
in the confines of the arc. Tt is an amazing story about a God whose
fundamental characteristics vis a vis the world —- is not anger, but grace.

—_—— The Covenant promise to Noah is that God will not destroy the world or
human life. At the time the story was written - and most authorities agree it
was probably in' the sixth century B.C. - that was an important assertion. It
represented the developing Hebrew perception that nature was God’s gift and
that if one understood enough about nature to live in harmony with it, nature
could be counted on to cooperate with the nurturance of life. It is a
theological position which is the foundation for all physical science
particularly medicine.

It also suggests that the alienation between God and his people is, still a
threat to the whole system. God has promised not to destroy but to enhance
life. That promise has been kept, new every morning. The best natural
theologian I know is a botanist, Lesis Thomas, who keeps reminding us of the
amazing reality of the world in which life is possible. Reflecting on that
wonderful picture the astronauts sent back to us, Thomas wrote:

"Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about

the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs
the dry, pounded surface of the moon on the foreground, dead as an old
bone. Aloft, floating free, beneath the moist membrane of bright,
hlue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this

part of the cosmos..." (The Lives of a Cell, p. 170)

The promise has been magnificently kept. But on our side of it, we keep
fouling the air with industrial pollutants, and poisoning the ground, and then
refusing to spend the money to clean up the chemical waste we have created.
God hasn’t destroyed life —- but we are prepared to - all of it, everywhere - a
thousand times over.

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The chaos represented by the Genesis flood is a powerful symbol of the
threat to order, society, life itself that every generation feels. It was a
powerful metaphor for the Jews in Babylonian exhile, and again in our age in

Ayr" ine Holocaust. And it is a meaningful symbol for a generation of young
\ people, a majority of whom now say they expect their lives to end in nuclear
war. The word here is the Covenant promise ~ that it need not be: that the
God who loved us - will not abandon us: that the world will continue to

sustain us: that the power of God will always be on the side of reconcili-
ation and justice and peace: that within the Covenant promise of God there is

hope as green and good as that beautiful leaf of olive the dove carried in its
beak.

The Covenant with Noah proclaims at the beginning of the Bible story that
God has turned to his whole creation and his people particularly in @ new way.
God has changed his mind, and not only has not abandoned the creation, to his
anger but now joins it. God’s anger has become God’s parental sadness. When
people disobey and do evil things, God is hurt - as a parent is hurt under
those circumstances. It is a theological assertion that proceeds on 4 straight

line to the cross. It was and is the most radical and revolutionary religious
idea _ in all of history.

I had the privilege of hearing the president of Princeton Seminary
recently, Dr. Thomas Gillespie, deliver several lectures on Biblical
Interpretation. He is a scholar and a_ skilled preacher. During the last

lecture he afforded us the rare privilege of knowing his own personal
commitment. He said: ,

"The most critical decision fer any of us.is this: do we truly
believe God is actually present and active in the world? Or does
God simply touch the world peripherally?...I would not dare preach

if I did not believe God was radically and dynamically present in
the world. The peripheral notion is practical atheism."

The fundamental religious question is prompted by the Noah story,:in the

assertion that God not only is, but is a participant, an active and loving
party in the human story.

I found it again in a crisp essay, "Embarrassed by God’s Presence," in the
Christian Century recently, by William Willimon, preacher to the students at
Buke University. “Ultimately,” he wrote, “it comes down to the issue of God’s
presence. The central problem for the church is that it is essentially
atheistic...it builds its structures on the presupposition that God doesn’t

really matter.” (Christian Century, 1/30/85, p. 100, William Willimon and
Stanley Hauerwas }

The Judeo assertion in Noah’s story, which becomes a Christian experience
in Jesus Christ, is that God is gloriously present in the creation; that God,

the lover-creator, is dynamically at work to nurture and heal and reconcile
human life. That is the promise.

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{\ And it is the promise that God will remember. God did sot forget Noah.

God does not forget his people - any one of them - ever. That assertion
approaches the deepest human question and the most profound human need. Is
there any ultimate meaning to my being alive these few decades? Is there
anything lasting about this creature that 1 am and these days and weeks and
years that | am living? Or is life a "walking shadow, a poor player that
struts and frets his hour on the stage and then is heard no more," as Macbeth
suggested?

We know the meaning of that. Our best Literature reveais the dark night
of every honest human soul when one’s own mortality and the sense of being
soon forgotten is very real. Our best thinkers do not shrink from it. Thus,
the late Paul Tillich:

"Is there anything that can keep us from being forgotten’ he asked.
And then, with the elegant simplicity of God's truth, he answered,
“That we were known from eternity and will be remembered in eternity
is the only certainty that can keep us from being forgotten forever."
(The Eternal Now, p. 25 in Bruggeman, op. cit, p. 85)

We celebrate the power and grace of the Covenant promise in the
sacraments. Ged’s promise to remember forever came to Noah, and we affirm it
every time we baptize an infant. We are celebrating God’s persanal love for
each of us: "This is my beloved son, this is my beloved daughter,” never to be
forgotten.

And at tablé, to which we now come we affirm the goodness of God's
creation, so eloquently present in the bread and the wine, and we affirm the
power of God’s saving love to be radicaliy present in the life of our world.
In bread broken and a cup shared we affirm that most amazing grace: that you
and I, through it all ~- are loved by God - and that we, and our dear ones, are
remembered forever. Amen.