Sermon: "A World Worth Saving," June 20, 2021

"Noah's Ark," Edward Hicks, 1846.

Preacher: The Rev. Ryan Slifka
Scripture: Genesis 9:8-17

The Noah story is one of the most familiar biblical stories. Humanity was tainted by wickedness, and the earth was so full of violence that God—whose heart was so deeply grieved—regretted creating humanity in the first place. So God decided to flood the earth, to erase humanity altogether and start again. God recruited the upright Noah and his family, loaded them into a giant boat with representatives of every animal on earth, their mission being to repopulate the earth. This time with righteousness. It’s a new beginning, a fresh start.

It’s a rather brutal way to solve a problem, it’s true. This text raises a lot of questions about the character of God, questions that are completely valid. But let’s put aside these for a moment. To be fair to God here the plan has a kind of logic to it, one we deploy all the time.

There was a great book a few years ago by author and journalist Andrew Scott called The Promise of Paradise: Utopian Communities in British Columbia.[i] From Doukhobor farmers to Finnish coal miners, to Quakers and hippies, our province has been home to many experiments in living where people have left hopeless civilization behind to start afresh. The pilgrims who arrived on the shore of America in the seventeenth century also came with the intention of building a “city on a hill,” that wouldn’t be marked by the old oppressions and class structures of the Europe they left behind.  The intention in each case was to pull a Noah—to create a new community, to build a new, righteous society untainted by the brokenness of their old ones.

It’s a universal impulse, really. And with good reason. More often than not, we would much rather pack up and start over rather than dealing with human brokenness. Churches know a lot about this. There’s a great joke where a guy shipwrecks on an island. There’s one other guy living there, but two churches. The new guy asks the old guy why there’s two, and he replied “that’s the church I go to and that’s the one I used to go to.”

Protestant Christian ones like ours—are known for splitting into ever-smaller sects, the idea being that we can start over finally with a fresh righteousness. It’s all over our society and the internet. All across the social and political spectrum we’re building separate communities, arks of ideological purity in the hopes of finally cleansing ourselves from unrighteousness. It all follows the same logic and the same impulse. To leave the bad behind and start all over from scratch.

The problem is, of course, that this never actually works. At least not the way we’d hope. Soon these experiments start to develop their own unique problems.

And this is one of the most fascinating things about the Noah story. After the flood recedes and the family disembarks from the floating zoo, we’re told that Noah takes the “clean” animals—those who are ritually acceptable, i.e. no pork or shellfish—kills them and burns them as a sacrifice. It’s a bit of a wonder. I mean, the sheer volume of animals sacrificed is outstanding. But it’s also a wonder in that Noah offers any kind of sacrifice in the first place. Biblically speaking, sacrifices are acts of gratitude on one hand, but also offered for the purpose of atonement on the other. Atonement, meaning mending the rift caused by sin. You give up something important to make up for wrongdoing. Noah’s supposed to be a new Adam presiding over a world cleansed of human depravity. And yet, here he is acknowledging that very thing, and atoning for it.

Which is to say, the flood doesn’t actually work the way it was supposed to. It may have blotted out a generation of sinners, but the original issue remains inside the survivors themselves. Noah knows it, and now God seems to know it, too. Because if it had worked, we wouldn’t have the rest of the Bible! We also wouldn’t have the rest of the human story til now.

I’m reminded of the late Russian writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who converted to Christianity while he was imprisoned in a Soviet gulag for eight years after criticizing Josef Stalin in a private letter. His experience of being isolated an imprisoned as a threat to the state transformed his vision of human life. And he put it like this:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”[ii]

This is why utopian experiments always end up being less-than-utopian. It’s why the great moral promise of communism turned to gulags and re-education camps, why campaigns to stamp out terrorism are usually crushed under the weight of their own hypocrisy, and why starting out fresh rarely lives up to our expectations. Because the problem’s in all of us. No matter how righteous we are, or how big or stable the ark we build is, how far away we sail, no restart plan can wash away this aspect of human nature. It’ll always crop up again. “There is no one is righteous, not even one,” in the words of the Apostle Paul.[iii] That’s why neither washing away, running away from, imprisoning or out and out putting an end to anyone never actually solves the problem. Because the line separating good and evil runs through each and every human heart. Noah can’t start fresh because we can’t start fresh. We can’t escape it because it means we’d have to escape our own selves.

So the flood doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. And you know, God knows this. The moment the smell of Noah’s delicious sacrifice meets God’s nostrils, Gods comes to the conclusion in God’s own heart that the (quote) “inclination of the human heart is evil from youth” (end quote). It’s one of these weird moments in the Bible where God tries to fix something and then says “well… guess that didn’t work out.”

I suppose God could have just gone all the way at this point, and just wiped out Noah and company too. But God has this soft spot for humanity. God would rather have a sinful humanity than no humanity at all, it seems. So God makes this pledge to never to flood the earth like this, to never try the total reboot method again. God says that I have “hung my bow in the sky,” as a sign of this promise never to wipe out all creation again. In the ancient world, rainbows were thought of as signs of as divine wrath, like a bow and arrow to fling judgment, it’s in the bible too in a couple places.[iv] But here God has hung up the ol’ cosmic crossbow forever as a remedy, aiming it away from the earth. The rainbow says that rubbing us out, and starting again is simply no longer an option to solve the problem of sin, the dilemma of the human heart. The God of the Bible is fundamentally a God of mercy. In God’s heart humanity’s worth saving… we’re worth saving. Warts and all.

It’s a bit of a strange affirmation to make right now, considering the mess of things. But it’s the point of this passage, and one of the overarching messages of the Bible. Humanity’s worth saving. Not for the conventional reasons, like on account of our intelligence, or our artistic and creative talents, or our technological power. Cuz most of those things have their shadow side, too. I mean it’s incredible that we can have people tune in to this church from the other side of the world, but this has also been made possible by extreme stress on the planet. Even our capacity to love can be limited and self-serving. Like Solzhenitsyn says, we’re a mixed bag.

Even so. I mean, this month is Pride month, and there’s rainbows all over the place as a welcoming emblem of inclusion. And rightly so. But biblically this image is even more inclusive. Even more expansive. Here we have an emblem of divine mercy for all living things. Not just the people who have the right opinions or the right ideas, have done all the right things or supported all the right causes, or have been on the right side of history. But it’s for the just and the unjust, saints and sinners alike. People like you and me. The rainbow says we’re worth saving not on account of any merit of our own as a species, but we’re worth saving because there’s a Love that burns hot at the heart of all things that says we are. A Love that is moved that is internally grieved, moved by our suffering and pain rather than pissed off by our predicament. A Love that is wounded by our woundedness, the kind of Love that would be wounded for us, would hang up his bow for good, and take the arrows of the world on a cross rather than leaving us to sink in the deep dark waters of our eternal, self-made misery.

Humanity’s worth saving. Which means you’re worth saving, too. In all your faults, all your failures to do right, to live up to what you oughta do and oughta be, and your inability to start all over again. In your victimhood and your victimization. You with your heart problem and your neighbor with hers. Not on account of any merit of your own, but on account of Christ’s. On account of the truth that there is a God. One whose very name means “salvation”[v] and whose very being is truth, beauty, and goodness. That rainbow promise is the final word. And it’s for me, and it’s for you. And it’s forever.

Unfortunately, friends, there’s no starting again from square one. Take it from the Noah story, take it from God I guess. That we can’t solve the human predicament by stamping out badness from the earth… because we’d have to stamp out ourselves. We can’t run away or hide from it, because we can’t run or hide from our own hearts. It just doesn’t work. Fortunately, though, there’s a heart bigger than our own, the heart of God. One that has deemed us, has deemed you and this beautiful earth as worth saving, since before the foundation of the world. It’s a promise… one written in the sky after the rain. It’s good news in what’s so often bad news world. May we be given the faith to believe it.

Amen.

[i] Andrew Scott, The Promise of Paradise: Utopian Communities in British Columbia, 2nd ed. (Madeira Park: Harbour, 2017).

[ii] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 (New York: Harper and Row, 1973) 168.

[iii] Romans 3:10 (NRSV).

[iv] See Habakkuk 3, Lamentations 2:4.

[v] Jesus literally means “Yahweh saves.”