Keep Me From Drowning

Scriptures for Lent: The First Sunday

Genesis 9:8-17 1 Peter 3:18-22 Mark 1:9-15

The first time I experienced the power of a flood, I was ten years old. Because my family wasn't personally affected, I was excited about this "once in a lifetime" event. I even had a T-shirt that proclaimed, "I survived the flood!" As we drove through flooded areas, I was awed by the mirrored waters reflecting the sky over fields and roads alike.

Years later, I was a pastor in Marengo, Iowa, along the Iowa River. A levee protected the town, but as rain fell that spring, the waters crept up. Communities surrounding us experienced massive flooding, reaching the tops of bridges, spilling into homes, and bringing life to a standstill. I began to panic. This was not the exciting adventure of my childhood but a horrific experience of loss. Homes and businesses in those nearby communities were gone. Families were stranded. As the waters in my town sat mere inches below the top of the levee, I moved stuff out of the basement, put my cat in my car, and got out of town. All I wanted to do was to be with my husband, and he was helping evacuate a family from a nearby city. My greatest fear was that as bridges closed, I would be stranded on the other side of the river.

It was my first year of ministry, not a full six months into my tenure at this church, and I left its members to fend for themselves. I was young and inexperienced, but looking back, I'm embarrassed by my focus on myself. I was overwhelmed and afraid, and I bailed. Fortunately, the levee held in Marengo that spring. Only basements took in water. For that, I am grateful.

Many things can drown us in life. We can sink in temptation and sin. We can get over our heads in opposition and ridicule as we try to live our faith. We can find ourselves neck deep in the muck and mire of life. So, we cry out for help. But as our readings for this week show, there is someone who hears those cries. And in contrast to my failure as a leader, that someone — our Lord — does not abandon us. Our Lord stays with us, suffers with us and for us, and prepares our deliverance.

THE RAINBOW GENESIS 9:8-17

It doesn't take very long before everything goes from "supremely good" (Genesis 1:31) to a big, fat mess. Brothers kill brothers, angels and humans interact inappropriately, and humanity itself is enmeshed in sin and wickedness, immorality and violence. By the time we reach Genesis 6, things are far indeed from the shalom God intended for creation.

As God looks upon creation, only Noah is righteous. God calls him to build a boat. Not just any boat — a ship large enough to hold his family and two of every kind of animal. Shortly after the boat is completed, the skies open up and it begins to rain. The waters sweep every other living thing and person on the earth away. For forty days and forty nights, the rains fall and Noah and those with him on the ark are alone in the world.

God remembers Noah (8:1), and the waters begin to recede. Eventually, the boat settles on dry ground, and Noah and his family come out and give thanks. They had survived, but every living thing that was not on Noah's ark is now dead. Earth's population has been wiped out.

We can't comprehend the devastating force of floodwaters unless we go through them ourselves. As Cedar Rapids, Iowa, began to recover from flooding in 2008, I mucked out homes and walked through neighborhoods, praying with folks who'd lost everything. What remained was under inches of mud and silt. The smell was horrendous. Death and mold and decay were everywhere. Blocks of neighborhoods were still boarded up six and seven years later.

When Noah set up his altar and prayed, he was likely surrounded by bloated animals, dead humans, and muck-covered rocks. As the smoke from the offering rose to heaven, God looked at the destruction and made a promise, which can be paraphrased this way:

Never again will I send a flood to destroy the earth and everything that lives on it. And as a reminder, the rainbow is going to be a sign of that promise, this new covenant. Whenever a storm comes and you see that rainbow, I will remember the promise that I have made to you today.

We may not like this part of the story, where God seems to have a change of mind. God is supposed to be unchanging and not feel regret about the past. But maybe this story isn't about God changing at all. Many other cultures and religions of the time had their own flood stories: gods sending waters to cover the earth. Many of these tales also have a hero who is warned of the flood and who preserves the heritage of his people. It's not surprising that our tradition has a flood story, too. What is surprising, in contrast to those tales, is that the biblical account tells us God is merciful. Our God seeks to save, not destroy.

Ash Wednesday reminds us of our sin, our mortality, and our finite natures. We are all sinners. We are all made of the dust of the earth. We can't save ourselves from drowning in all of that dirt and muck. We might place ourselves in the story and believe we would have been destroyed by the floodwaters.

But our Hebrew ancestors took that familiar story of the flood and retold it with a different ending. Our God made a covenant, a promise, with us. Our God isn't temperamental or callous. Our God seeks relationship and reconciliation. From the very first chapter of Genesis to the very last chapter of Revelation, the message is the same: God loves us, and despite whatever hell we are drowning in, God wants to save us.

This story of destruction and flooding tells us that God made a covenant with all people through Noah. It's the promise of a new relationship in a post-Flood world. Even if "the ideas of the human mind are evil from their youth" (8:21) and we dive headfirst into sin, God will not abandon us or destroy us. God will bring us back to shalom.

In the ancient Near East, the rainbow had been a sign of judgment from the heavens, accompanied by ominous clouds and bolts of lightning shooting forth as arrows to condemn. Yet in this story, as God makes a covenant with all creation, the rainbow itself is transformed. It becomes a symbol of peace and mercy, a symbol of grace even in the midst of judgment.

Rather than gather up wrath and hurl lightning bolts when we do not obey, our Lord sees the rainbow in the sky and looks down upon us without condemnation (9:14-15). Even though we are sinners one and all, God reaches down to us. God, who took a lump of clay and formed us in the divine image, cared for us from the beginning. Our God breathed life itself into us. Our God is merciful and patient.

Though we are drowning in sin, God makes a covenant with Noah to never again cut off all life through floodwaters. In...