Matthew 8.24–27
There's a particular kind of
cognitive dissonance involved
in decorating a child's
bedroom with a mass extinction event.
Rainbows are everywhere, and
they're always lovely.
They hang over the doorways on
Old Compton Street,
five minutes from
where you're sitting,
and every June they go up
across this city in an arc
under which a
great many people, some maybe in this room today,
first heard, from
somebody or other, that they were welcome.
They turn up on nursery friezes
and ark-shaped toy boxes,
two of every animal in
primary-coloured plastic,
the giraffe's head sticking out of the roof, everybody smiling,
including — improbably — the
crocodile.
And we have one of our own.
It's stood in this Sanctuary
for thirty years:
the peace flag, its rainbow
stripes with that one word laid across them,
draped over its stand with a
candle burning above it.
Thirty years is long enough for
anything to become furniture.
Most of us stopped seeing it
around year three.
And underneath all of that,
holding the whole cheerful edifice up,
is a story about the drowning
of the world.
I want to take the story
seriously this morning,
which means I can't leave it
in the nursery.
The lectionary has made us read
the actual thing rather than the bit we like,
and the actual thing begins:
"The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth,
and that every inclination of
the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually."
Every. Only. Continually.
A total diagnosis.
And what follows isn't a flood
in the sense that the Somerset
Levels might have a flood.
It's the undoing of creation itself,
the waters above and the
waters below,
so carefully separated on the second day of Genesis 1,
allowed to rush back together.
It's the first chapter of the
Bible played backwards.
It's God pressing undo.
So let's not pretend otherwise.
If you've ever sat in a
service like this one and thought,
I'm not sure I
can sing about this,
you're not being faithless.
You're reading properly.
Not noise. Blood.
Israel didn't invent this
story.
Older flood stories were
circulating for centuries before Genesis was written,
and in those the gods send the flood
because humanity has got noisy
and they can't sleep.
Divine irritability at cosmic scale;
the gods banging on the
ceiling with a broom handle.
But Genesis will not have it.
Genesis says the earth was
filled with violence
— the particular violence done
by the strong to the weak,
the wrong the
prophets rage about,
the taking of what
isn't yours.
God says it twice in three
verses.
The flood in Genesis isn't
about noise. It's about blood.
Whoever told this story took a
tale about capricious gods
and made it a story about
moral seriousness.
God is not indifferent to what
we do to each other.
God notices. God minds.
The heart of God
Which brings us to the verse I
think is the hinge of the whole thing,
and which never makes it onto
the nursery frieze.
Genesis 6:6. "And the Lord
was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth,
and it grieved him to his
heart."
Grieved him to his heart.
That's the language of a
parent at a graveside.
The story doesn't open with
divine rage.
It opens with divine
heartbreak.
Before God is angry, God is
bereaved
— and that doesn't solve
anything,
but it tells us what kind of
God we're dealing with.
Not a god with a broom handle.
A God with a broken heart.
Holy Saturday in the middle
of the story
But I'm not going to rush past
the horror to get to the rainbow,
because I don't think we're
allowed to.
Everything drowns.
Every living thing on the face
of the ground.
The text doesn't flinch and neither should we,
and I want to say plainly that
this is a text
in which God does the thing
that everywhere else in Scripture God condemns.
God answers violence with
violence,
on a scale we can barely hold
in our heads.
We know how to sit in a place
like this.
It's the place we call Holy
Saturday — the day between,
when the worst has happened
and the promise hasn't arrived,
and there's nothing to do but wait in the dark with the door shut.
If you've been in that room,
you know the wrong response is
a brisk assurance that Sunday's coming.
The right response is to stay in the room.
So stay in it a moment.
The waters cover the
mountains. The ark drifts.
And notice who's in the boat
with us. Eight people.
Noah, Shem, Ham and Japheth
— named, listed,
remembered.
And Noah's wife. And Shem's
wife, and Ham's wife, and Japheth's wife.
Four women, half
the surviving population of the human race,
the mothers of
everyone who will ever live,
and the text can't manage a
single name between them.
Always ask who's in the boat
and hasn't been given a name.
That answer usually turns out
to answer a good many other questions too.
What actually changes
And then, after the waiting —
and it is waiting;
the raven goes out, and the
dove goes out and finds nowhere to land,
and Noah waits seven days, and
sends her again,
and waits another seven, a man
learning patience from a bird
— after all of that, the waters go down, and God speaks.
Look carefully at Genesis 8:21,
because this is where the
whole Bible turns over
God says: "I will never
again curse the ground because of humankind,
for the inclination of the
human heart is evil from youth."
Read that again.
God's reason for never
doing this again
is word for word God's reason
for doing it in the first place.
The same diagnosis in chapter 8
as in chapter 6.
The flood hasn't fixed us —
the water has washed away
everything except
the thing it was sent to wash away,
and within a chapter Noah is
drunk in his tent and a family is fracturing.
So what changed? Not the human
heart. The heart of God.
The story that began "it
grieved him to his heart"
ends with God resolving to
carry that grief rather than act on it.
God looks at us, sees exactly
what God saw before,
and decides — unilaterally,
with nothing asked of us in return — to stay.
That's the covenant.
And notice there are no
conditions attached. Not one.
Noah isn't asked to do
anything, promise anything, keep anything.
Later covenants will have
terms; this one has none.
It's God binding God's own
hands.
Sit on that for a second,
because unconditional
is a word the church says
a great deal more readily than
it means.
The first covenant God makes
with humanity has no entry requirements,
no doctrinal test, no
probation, no small print about who's really included.
And I don't think it's an accident
that the sign of that covenant
is now the sign a persecuted community
picked up and made their own
— that when people wanted a symbol for being loved as they are,
rather than as somebody else
would prefer them to be,
what they reached for was a
rainbow.
They chose better than they knew.
That flag is telling the truth
about God,
and some of us needed years
and a certain amount of arguing to catch up with it.
Hanging up the bow
And then the sign. "I have
set my bow in the clouds."
Not a decorative arc. A bow is
a weapon
— it's what the prophets and
the psalms mean
when they talk about God's bow
being bent.
An archer, drawing.
The first hearers of this
story didn't think about refraction and raindrops.
They thought about war.
And God says: I'm putting it in
the clouds.
Hanging it up. Out of reach,
on the wall, unstrung.
Look at the shape of a rainbow
next time you see one.
It arcs upwards — a bow
laid down, string slack,
curve turned away
from the earth,
so that if it were ever drawn
again
the arrow would
fly not at us but away, towards heaven.
The one weapon in the story is
now pointing at the archer.
And you don't have to be a
sophisticated reader of the New Testament
to see where that arrow
finally comes down.
On a Friday afternoon outside a
city wall,
in a God who has decided,
permanently and at infinite cost,
to absorb violence rather than
inflict it.
The whole trajectory from
Genesis 9 to Calvary
is God's steady disarmament.
Noah's rainbow is the first sketch of the cross.
Which means the thing standing here
in this Sanctuary,
that we walk past every week
without really looking at, is first-class biblical theology. Somebody thirty
years ago bought a rainbow flag with the word peace across it,
and whether or not they had
Genesis 9 in mind, they got it exactly right.
A laid-down weapon.
A God who has stopped, and
will not start again.
And one more thing, which I
love.
God says the sign is so that God
will remember.
"I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant."
The rainbow isn't a note we've
left for ourselves on the fridge door.
It's a note God has left for
God.
Whatever else you take from this morning, take this:
your security doesn't rest on
your remembering.
It rests on God's.
The boat
Because — here's the honest bit
—
the promise isn't that
there'll be no more storms.
Only that the storm won't have the last word.
The chaos-waters were never
destroyed; they were bounded.
Ask anyone in Valencia, or the
Sindh in Pakistan,
or any of the hundred places where the waters came in these last few years
and the covenant didn't seem much in evidence.
Ask them whether the flood is over.
Which is exactly why Matthew
hands us the boat.
Mark, writing first, uses
ordinary weather vocabulary
— a squall came
down, he says.
But Matthew swaps it for the
word he otherwise saves for earthquakes:
he says that a
great shaking arose in the sea.
And he uses that word in only
two other places that matter
— the moment Jesus dies and the curtain tears,
and the first morning of the new
world, when the stone rolls back.
This isn't a weather report.
This is the foundations of the
world being shaken.
And Jesus is asleep — asleep in
the hold like Jonah,
except that where Jonah was
the cause of the storm, Jesus is its end.
They wake him with three words:
Lord, save us.
It's a prayer. It's the
church's prayer;
Matthew's first readers, huddled in a small and frightened community,
knew perfectly well that the
boat was them.
And Jesus says: why are you afraid, you of little faith?
Mark's version is harsher — have
you still no faith?
Matthew softens it,
deliberately I think.
Not no faith. But little faith.
Which is still faith.
It's the faith of people frightened enough to wake him,
who knew, in some corner of
themselves, whom to shout at.
If your faith this morning feels like a small and battered thing,
Matthew's word for you isn't unbeliever.
It's little — and Jesus says it to the people he keeps in the boat.
The promise was never that we'd
be kept out of the storm.
It's that we're not in it
alone.
Ark-builders
So what do we do with a
covenant like this,
on Shaftesbury Avenue, in
September?
Two things, and they belong
together.
The first is to notice who the
covenant is with.
Read Genesis 9 slowly and
count.
God makes it with Noah, with his descendants,
and with every living creature
that is with him
— and says it again, and again, five times in ten verses,
as if worried we'll skim.
It's the most thoroughly
ecological covenant in the Bible,
made with sparrows and slugs
and things in the sea that
will never know they're party to it.
Noah's job, when the world was drowning,
was to keep the vulnerable
alive.
That was the whole commission.
Which means that when this
church stands with Citizens on who owns our water,
how it's paid for, and who
carries the cost
when a company that's been
extracting from a river and from its customers
arrives at a cliff-edge of its
own making
— that isn't a bolt-on to the gospel.
That's Genesis 9.
Violence includes what gets poured into the Thames
and what gets taken from the
pockets of people who can't pay.
If we're covenant people, we're ark-builders:
our business is building
something sturdy enough
to carry the vulnerable
through the water.
And the second — inseparable
from the first,
and don't let anyone tell you
that you have to choose
— is that we learn to sit still in the boat.
Because Noah's real work, once
the hammering stopped, was waiting.
Sending the dove. Waiting
seven days.
Sending her again. Waiting
another seven.
That willingness to keep looking for a green leaf that hasn't arrived yet isn't
passivity;
it's what keeps ark-building
from curdling into despair.
We sang it a few minutes ago — be still, for the presence of the Lord —
and I'd ask you to take it
away as a working instruction rather than a mood.
The people who last longest in the campaign
are the ones who know how to
be quiet with God in the middle of it.
Never again
The dove, by the way, comes
back at the Jordan.
When Jesus comes up out of the
water,
the Spirit
descends like a dove,
and something that's been
circling since the flood
finally finds a
place to land.
She finds rest for the sole of
her foot, and it's him.
So here's where I'll leave it.
The world is not less stormy
than it was.
The waters are rising in
places we've been warned about for forty years,
the boat is small,
and some mornings the faith
available to us is very little faith indeed.
Genesis doesn't promise calm
seas.
It promises that God has hung
up the bow,
turned it away from us and
towards God's own heart,
and set it where God cannot
fail to see it.
We're about to sing about a God
who holds a promise out in
front of a frightened people.
That's the right verb.
Not a promise we hold, or
manage to keep hold of on the bad days,
but one held out in front of
us by somebody with steadier hands.
And when the storm comes down,
and it will,
and you find yourself doing
the only sensible thing, which is to shout
— remember that the one you're shouting at is in the boat.
He always was. That's the
covenant.
Amen.
