Genesis 6-9 "The Divine Change" Scott Hoezee

As we have seen once again this evening in the piece played by our Junior Handbell Choir, the famed story of "Noah's Ark" is a great tale for children. Scores of "fun" songs exist about this story. There are also many toys that tie in with Noah's ark--my in-laws have a lovely ark made out of wood with hand-crafted little animals and people. And until two weeks ago when it got painted over to make way for our new downstairs meeting room, the main wall in our former church nursery featured a very large mural depicting Noah's ark. Of course, the sight of a rainbow still reminds children and all of us of this story.

Scholars tell us that just about every ancient culture told some form or another of a flood story. The biblical story in Genesis is about the only such tale that has survived into the modern world such that even today it is fair to say that most people, whether they are particularly religious or not, know the broad outlines of this story. Images of an ark stuffed with animals even crops up now and again in advertisements just as people make jokes about "building an ark" whenever we endure a real rainy stretch of days.

Given all of that, not to mention how well-loved this story is, I would probably become quite unpopular if I suggested that most of that misses the main point of this story. But I wasn't ordained to be popular so I'll say it: most of that misses the main point of this story! The narrative details are important, of course--the Bible certainly takes its time in giving us a great deal of details. And let's just admit that it is pretty hard to think of this story without envisioning the animals, the raven and dove Noah released, the rainbow. But in our attention to those dramatic elements of the story, we miss the central part of the tale: the heart of God. This story is first and last about what happens inside God's heart.

It's about Noah and his family, too, of course, but not centrally. Did you ever notice that Noah never says a single word? Only at the very end of chapter 9 does Noah open his mouth. But otherwise throughout the whole course of the story Noah doesn't utter a peep, nor are we given even cursory glimpses into Noah's thoughts or what may have been going on inside his heart. Noah is marked by his swift and faithful obedience to God. He is described as righteous, and on numerous occasions throughout the story he is shown as obedient--whatever God says, Noah does (and swiftly at that).

But other than that Noah is something of a shadowy, insubstantial kind of stick figure. In his famous comedy routine, Bill Cosby puts lots of words into Noah's mouth. Children's Bibles often have Noah speaking, and we certainly have let our imaginations run free in wondering how Noah explained to his neighbors why on earth he was building an ark in the middle of a meadow. But none of that is in the Bible.

Yet over and over again we do get a rare but intimate look into what is happening inside God's heart and mind. God talks quite a bit in this story. More than that, God's thought process is described in a quite detailed way by what in literature is sometimes call "the omniscient narrator." Furthermore, what we see happening inside God's heart is the core of the whole story. Because listen: God changes. God has a change of heart by the time the flood waters dry up.

Most everyone, even those who don't come to church much, knows that when this story concludes, a rainbow is set into the sky as a sign that God would never send a flood again. The rainbow is a perennial sign of hope for that very reason. But what we don't always wonder about enough is why God set the rainbow. Will there never be another flood because the first big deluge succeeded in washing the grime of sin and evil from the earth?

Alas, the answer to that question is "No." In a way, God is starting over with Noah and company, and at first glance you might think this indicates that indeed, the flood was successful in getting rid of the wickedness that led God to open up the flood gates. But that hope is quickly dashed before Genesis 9 is even finished. The last image we get is of a potted and naked Noah, lounging around in his tent whistling a tune into an empty moonshine jug. When his son, Ham, tries to help by enlisting the aid of Shem and Japheth, things get ugly fast. At the end of Genesis 9, for the first time, Noah opens his mouth to say something. And guess what: the first thing he says is a curse on his own son! Commentators have scrambled for millennia to figure out what Ham did wrong. Most have concluded that he should have quietly covered up Noah himself and not gossiped about it to his brothers. That may be the case, but Noah's response seems a bit harsh even so.

The point, however, is that this concluding vignette is almost certainly included to show that things had not changed that much after the flood. Humans were still prone to sin. Families still fell apart (even as Cain's murder of Abel fractured that first family in Genesis). Noah was a good and righteous man whose obedience throughout Genesis 6-9 stands in stark contrast to the evil of the larger world. But he wasn't perfect, and neither was his family. Sin and evil and temptation would continue after the flood even as they did before.

But we knew that even before the very end of Genesis 9. God admitted as much in chapter 8:21 when he promised that he would never again send such a flood because one thing had not changed: "every inclination of [mankind's] heart is evil from childhood." God himself knew that what was wrong with humanity at a very basic level was still there. So humanity was not so different after the flood. The creation itself was not particularly cleansed of anything after the flood. So what changed? God did.

Indeed, this change of divine heart is nowhere more dramatically evident than in that verse from Genesis 8:21. Because turn back two chapters to Genesis 6:5 and notice that the reason for the flood is stated there: "Yahweh God saw . . . that every inclination of the thoughts of [mankind's] heart was only evil all the time." In the original Hebrew as in the English translation, 6:5 and 8:21 are nearly identical. The inclination of the human heart is evil, from childhood on up. The odd thing, however, is that in Genesis 6 this is the reason why God sent the flood yet in Genesis 8 this is the reason God will never send a flood again!

The NIV has tried to soften Genesis 8:21 a bit by throwing in the transitional phrase "even though:" God will not send another flood even though the inclination of man's heart is evil from childhood. But as the translators admit in a little footnote, what it literally says in Hebrew is "for" in the sense of "because." God is never again going to send a flood because the inclination of our hearts is toward evil. But how can that be? How can the same feature to our fallen humanity be both the reason for the original flood and the reason there will never again be another flood?

Clearly what is different after the flood is God's attitude toward our wrong inclinations. But before we ask what the post-diluvian divine attitude becomes, let's ask the logical prior question: what was God's attitude toward us in the first place? What does Genesis 6 show us when it lifts the lid on God's heart so that we can peer inside? Wrath? Fury? No, hurt. You can read all four of the Genesis chapters that contain the flood narrative and not once will you find the words "anger," "wrath," or "fury."

God is said to be greatly grieved. God is shown to have the biggest broken heart of all times. He is a wounded parent lamenting a wayward child. Have you ever talked with parents whose son or daughter is rebellious? Most of the time what you detect in such hurting parents is not anger but deep, deep pain and heartache. True, sometimes anger flares, but even so it is borne of love offended. If parents genuinely love their children, then the response to waywardness is more often tears than tirades. From the outside looking in, sometimes other people speak the language of anger and retribution. Have you ever found yourself saying to someone, "Man, if that were my kid, I'd let him have it!" Yes, but it's not your kid, and if it were, you'd probably dissolve into tears not lash out.

The creation is not going God's way in Genesis 6. And it hurts God. These chapters speak of holy sadness, not divine wrath. The flood surely ends up looking like an angry outburst, even as a parent who does finally resort to kicking a child out of the house may appear to be reacting in anger. But what really underlies such actions is deep hurt. "What else can I do?" God in Genesis or a parent in crisis could say.

Tragedy and pathos fill these chapters. So does an unspeakable amount of death. We may have grown up liking the image of all those animals tucked safely into the ark, but there's a reason no children's storybook has ever shown dead animals floating all over the place on the floodwaters. I myself don't know what to make of that part of the story. Seeing God in the light of grief over against seeing God as a ruthless dispenser of divine fury helps to soften things quite a bit, but it does not remove the scandal of the cataclysm depicted here.

At the very least we have to see it as yet another indication of how terribly serious human sin and evil are. They bring death. Sin and evil unmake creation. Whatever else we may make of the carnage of this story, it at least means this much: sin is desperately deadly. But it is no less serious after the flood, so we circle back to our question: why in Genesis 8 does God use our inclination to evil as a reason not to send another flood when that same bad bent-of-heart was the reason to send the flood to begin with? It is a glaring question that Genesis does not answer for us. But it does bring us back to the phrase we've thought about the last two weeks: God insists on life.

The flood narrative situates God between grief and grace, with grace speaking the final word. God is not going to stop being offended and grieved by sin, of course. But from now on, God says in chapters 8 & 9, grace is going to lead the way. God is going to find a way to see our proclivity for sin yet without destroying us in that sin. God will find a way, in other words, to forgive. It's still going to involve death, though: it's just that in the biblical long run the death will be taken up by God himself. In fact, God's worst grief will come on a dark afternoon when God the Father will have to turn his back on his Son, leaving the Son to bawl out "Why have you forsaken me?!" We can be thankful there was not another flood that day, this one caused by the tidal wave of the Father's tears.

Grief and grace. Both are responses to our sin, but it is grace that will lead the way in the Bible once Genesis 9 is finished. In a way it was a mini-outburst of grace that saved Noah even before Genesis 8-9. God provided an ark to float on the same waters that brought death to others. Ever since then God has been keeping his people safe through perilous waters: Moses in his little reed basket, the Israelites through the Red Sea and then the Jordan River, and ultimately all of us through the waters of baptism.

That's why in a real way the Church is the ark now, bobbing around on this world's dangerous seas. God's grief but also God's grace rescued Noah and company. The same combination of grief and grace does this for us now by creating a safe haven in the church. As you know from your own experience, a common question people ask about this story is, "Do you think this ever really happened?" A good answer is to tell people, "It's still happening! The storm surge of sin still rises and threatens life." Most days many people manage to miss seeing those dangerous flood waters all around us.

Once in a while, however, the water rises so quickly that no one can miss it, as happened last month in the terrorist attacks and as is still happening as anthrax sickness has spread a bit more out East. And suddenly some of the people who don't mind treading water on their own most days find themselves going back to the ark--churches were quite full for a few weeks last month, especially on the East coast. A friend from Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, where my family attended last fall, told me that for a few weeks there, they couldn't seat all the folks who showed up for the two morning services. Another pastor from New York City finally resorted to having five prayer services a Sunday, starting at 6:30 in the morning and continuing most of the day.

Even though some folks mostly think they can do without an ark, they somehow know where to find it when the waters get rough and deep. This recently prompted historian Martin E. Marty to write a bold column. Everybody has been thinking about the heroes of September 11, Marty observed, and rightly so. But there are other heroes among us: these heroes are the Christian folks who come to church every week, crisis or not. It's the faithful folks who pray for the world every Sunday, attacks on the homeland or not. On all those days when the foxhole pray-ers and the crisis pew-sitters are not praying or coming to church, others are maintaining the ark so that it's still afloat when people need it.

It can be a little lonely in the ark sometimes. The prayers we utter here, the work we try to do in Christ's name, the vocabulary of gospel hope we nurture and keep alive and proclaim: most of that goes unnoticed much of the time, and it is surely not something for which people seem terribly grateful most days. But those of us who understand the weightiness of God's grief but also the gravity of God's grace know that this old world needs the ark of the Church. We need the Church not just for ourselves but for the whole creation--for all those creatures with whom God made his remarkable covenant.

Most Bibles label Genesis 9 something like, "God's Covenant with Noah." But look again: it's not just with Noah but with sea lions and monkeys, with sunflowers and giraffes, too. God is going to save the whole kit-n-kaboodle, but not without the ark of the Church. It may be comforting for us to know and to ponder that in the grand scheme of things, those of us who regularly bob around in the ark of God's covenant love really are necessary for the ultimate well-being of this creation. This world needs the hope we proclaim.

Years ago I told a story that I first heard from Princeton Seminary professor Daniel Migliore. Dr. Migliore and his wife, Margaret, do a lot of work with inner-city kids in Trenton, New Jersey. One day in re-telling the Noah story to some of the children of Trenton, Professor Migliore asked the children's sermon-like question, "Now then, boys and girls, where do you see rainbows?" "In the street!" several replied. Migliore thought they misunderstood the question, but on further checking, he discovered the truth: about the only place these kids, consigned to asphalt jungles and high-rise tenements, had seen a rainbow was in street puddles that had become slicked with oil from a car with a leaky engine.

There's something sad about that--a cause, you might say, for grief. But there's maybe something hopeful there, too--an occasion, you might say, for grace. After all, where else do such children need to see the sign of God's hope than smack in the middle of the burnt-over part of the world they call home. They don't need a rainbow soaring over the Rocky Mountains, they need one in the greasy puddles of their everyday lives.

Now as much as ever, the world needs the gospel's rainbow of hope. We keep coming to the church, saying our prayers, and doing our work because we know that in the end, the world needs the ark of the Church and the world needs it to be seaworthy and ship-shape. We, too, grieve over how things go in this world. But even our grieving is done with the knowledge of God's overarching grace. We may not be certain just what it was that changed God's heart between Genesis 6 and Genesis 8, but what we can know for certain is that the change spells life for the whole creation. It's our job to take this rainbow of hope to the streets to keep inviting folks into the ark of God's grace. Amen.