“Noah’s Ark and Natural Disasters”

September 4, 2005

Scripture Reading:   Genesis 7-9

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr

Blue Point Congregational Church

I always thought of the story of Noah’s ark as a children’s story.  The only time I have seen it represented in churches is in plays that the church school puts on.  That is much like the play our church school put on last year.  Remember?  We had a paper ark up here in the sanctuary.  The younger children had made animal masks.  The came and entered the ark two by two.  The youth read the lines of Noah and God.  We tied it all into the Heifer project.  I have seen Noah’s ark in the toy store.  A wooden boat with little animals that children can play with.  The wall paper border in our nursery is a picture of an ark with happy smiling animals boarding it.

Today is different.  After the catastrophic damage of hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans, the story of Noah’s ark will never again be quaint or cute and relegated to children seven or under.  Noah’s ark is the story of a terrible natural disaster that happened in the ancient world.  It is a story of how our spiritual ancestors of over four thousand years ago at the dawn of the belief in one God came to grips with what we had to come to grips to this week.  There was a deluge, the skies open and rain poured down for forty days and forty night.  The unrelenting battering flooded the earth.  Whole towns were wiped off its face.  People drowned.  Life as it had been known stopped.  Scholars suspect that some sort of natural disaster did happen in the ancient past of the middle east.  Many of the cults and religions from that area, speak of a great flood, not just ours. 

The theologian, Walter Brueggemann in his commentary on Genesis describes the meaning behind the story.  God  is in deep pain when he realizes that his creation which started out so good, for which he was so excited, has gone awry.  The human heart is evil and troubles the heart of God.  So God decides to wipe the slate clean.  He wants to start over again.

 Except for the faith of one man Noah.  Noah is righteous and blameless.  He listens to God and heeds his admonitions.  In the middle of this dismal pain, there is one man, who embodies a new possibility.  Thus, Noah found favor with God.  And then arises the first account of “insider’s trading.”  God gives Noah a tip that he was about to the destroy the world, and to invest not in real estate but in an ark. 

The flood comes as God predicted.  The water rose high above the earth.  The waters swelled so greatly that all high things were covered.  And much died o the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, and human beings.  Sounds familiar doesn’t it.  On the ark as in the Astrodome in New Orleans one can imagine, it is dark and hot.  It is crowded.  It stank.  When the rain finally stops Noah sends out a raven to go to and fro to find where it was dry.  No luck.  Then he sent out a dove.  No luck.  Then he sent out a dove again.  Finally the dove came back with a leafy branch in its mouth.  At last salvation and inhabitable land once again. 

In the end, we learn from the bible, after a natural disaster of unimaginable proportions God and people do not abandon each other, but grow closer.   It seems amazing to me.  It even seems crazy.  I would frankly expect God to have given up.  And I would expect people to turn away from God forever.  But that didn’t happen in the story.  As soon as Noah gets on dry ground he builds an alter to God.  When God smells the pleasing odor of Noah’s offering God has a change of heart.  Instead of splitting apart, the relationship gets closer after the deluge!

What’s the point of the story?  God’s heart changes.  God, through Noah, decides not to give up but to try again.  God gets the idea to fashion a new creation.  A creation where people have the faith of this one good man, Noah. 

Again, as in the Garden of Eden, God gives humans dominion over the earth.  Every animal of the earth, every bird of the air, every fish of the sea are delivered into the hands of humans.  But, there is one further thing, that goes beyond the Garden of Eden.  God now also emphasizes the value of human persons.  In this post-flood decree of creation, the sanctity of human life is established and it can never be cheapened or diminished.  Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind.

But, something even more important happens.  God himself has changed.  God makes a promise to Noah and to himself, that he will never do this again.  There has been an irreversible effect in God.  God will forever more be patient with his creation and with human kind.  God will find another way to bring us to him, never again will it be complete destruction.  Rainbows, rainbows, rainbows.  This is the forever reminder of this promise and never ending love of God for us. 

Reading the story of Noah’s ark and understanding the ending is one thing.  But, I wondered was it contrived in order to fit the religious tradition?  Did somewhere in the ancient oral tradition passing on this story of the great flood, did the Hebrews embellish it.  Did they make the ending a happy one because, they wanted it to fit into their belief system?  God is really not that bad.  We just have to white wash the occasional catastrophic natural disaster that happens to human kind.

I would not know the answer to that question.  I personally, and thankfully, have never been through a natural disaster of such proportions.  The ice storm of ’92 was the worse I encountered which is nothing compared to this.  However, several months ago, I came across the most interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor (April 19, 2005).  I may have never been in a natural disaster of such proportions but the people of the tsunami in Asia have been.  The reporter interviewed some college students in Banda Ach, Indonesia about their faith.  The city of Banda Ache lost more than 200,000 people.  This is more than all the other countries of the Indian Ocean combined.  These students sound strikingly like Noah, and what happened between Noah and God.  They talk about their faith having become even stronger after the tsunami.  One student, Rully and economics major with a hip gotee and black T-shirt says, “I was born a Muslin in my family, of course I believe in God.  After the tsunami disaster, I know my faith is getting stronger, because I see all disaster, it’s s sign of the  power of God.  Human beings are controlled by God.  We cannot do anything without God.”

He is not alone.  This turns out to be a common sentiment. Rully continues to testify.  He talked about a friend who disappeared, an uncle who disappeared.  He mourns the deaths of these people but he says the larger message for him is a call to become a better person. 

A young woman, Sarah says “I think God does not show that he’s angry with us.  In my mind, I just think, “Oh, God really cares about us.’  Maybe God wants the people in Banda Aceh to come back to the right way, not in the wrong way.  So God gives a chance to us…”

Rainbows happened in Indonesia.  Can rainbows happen after this horrible disaster in the Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana?  Although I shudder at the deadly power of such natural disasters, nor do I dodge the point that God was involved in them, I think that the answer is yes.

In my own small way, when I think about it, what happened to Noah, and what happened to these Indonesian students really started to happen to me.  The UCC has a God is Still Speaking, Find a Church Campaign.  They set up a web site where people can go who hear our adds and want to find a UCC church.  So, I went to that web site and searched of New Orleans.  Up on my computer screen popped four lovely churches – New Orleans Central Congregational UCC, New Orleans Saint Matthew UCC, new Orleans Saint Paul UCC and New Orleans Salem UCC.   They showed a picture of each one.  And on the front door of each one, a committee had hung an bright red and black banner.  Just like the one that we have above our front door.  “God is still speaking…”  they proclaimed  Seeing these banners startled me somehow.  I am so familiar with that banner.  It is our banner.  It brought home the truth.   It could have been us.  They are us.  We are they.  All this ran through my mind, and a ball of sadness sank into my heart.  What happened to them.  Where are they now?  What will become of them?  Now, I imagine those banners under water.  “Never put a period where God has placed a comma,…”  That big black comma of ours, floating under water.  Perhaps there web site is the only thing left of their church.  That’s a funny thought.

Where to go?  I didn’t leave my desk.  I didn’t give up.  From somewhere a fragment of words came to me like a Styrofoam life raft floating by.  These word were “God is our refuge a very present help in trouble.”  These words from the 46^th psalm that I started out our service with.   No, after the great and terrible flood, I, felt a rainbow thing happen.  I grabbed a hold of  Gods words and found they hold and support the weight of all my questions and deep concern.  God is nearer than we think.  God loves each of his children.  God cares.  God will get us through.  Rainbows sometime come.