We all remember the story of Noah’s Ark from our Sunday School days. It has all the sorts of things that would hook small children: nice boat, cute little animals, death, destruction, (well maybe not those last two.) Although, in spite of that, it does seem to be the perennial child’s Bible story. What kid in the church didn’t have a storybook of it, or maybe even that little plastic toy with all the miniature animals?

As you can probably already guess, I want to do something a little different for my preaching this Lent. I want to revisit these old stories, many of which we’ve not heard since the days of our childhood. I want to look at them with fresh eyes and a more adult understanding. I want to understand why we’ve told these stories, what do they say about God and his relationship to humanity? Today we start with Noah and the ark.

Every ancient culture that touches on the Middle East has a flood story: Greeks, Babylonians, Sumerians, Egyptians, and, of course, the Hebrews. But even to these, peoples we regard as parts of an ancient almost forgotten past, the flood was to them ancient history. We have no accurate way to date this event, but whenever it was, it was a very very long time ago. At the dawn of human civilization.

And perhaps that is telling, since we’re talking about a time when there’s been very little social evolution in the human species. Might makes right is probably the operative rule. Violence, pillage, rape, and rampant warfare are the norm for human society. Hardly a golden age for us.

God, looking down upon us, has a different perspective on things. He sees this as the inevitable result of our sin. He granted us the gift of free will and all we’ve done since is seek to destroy and dominate each other and have sought also to supplant God from his throne.

So what’s God to do about this? Adam and Eve in the garden with the apple was bad enough. This is far worse. God basically has two options for dealing with human sin. He can seek to redeem us or he can destroy us. The story of Noah and the flood is the story of that second option: destruction.

So God seeks out the best of a bad lot; he seeks out Noah and says “I want you to build an ark. And it’s going to be made of this kind of wood and it’s going to be this long and this wide and this tall.” God gives Noah very detailed instructions for how to construct this thing, and then tells him to take his wife, his sons, and their wives inside it. God leads the animals to the ark, and they come aboard. Two of each kind for the “unclean” animals and fourteen of each of the “clean.” So Noah does all this, he builds the ark, goes inside it, the animals come, and then God unleashes the floodgates.

We all remember this part of the story. Forty days and nights of rain and the world is covered in water. All those not in the ark are destroyed. Eventually, the waters recede, the ark makes landfall, and all is right with the world.

Or is it?

Well, one of the very first things that Noah does after making landfall is that he plants a vineyard, makes some wine, and gets drunk and naked. Woohoo! Let’s party! Not a good sign of things to come.

The flood accomplished nothing.

God realizes this. Nothing’s really changed. Destruction does not work. Humanity is still the same. We go from drunken Noah to the squabbling of his sons to a few generations later, the tower of Babel. Hey, let’s build a tower and conquer heaven. Once again human sin emerges as the dominant force for our species: destroy and dominate each other and supplant God from his throne.

The flood accomplishes nothing. Destruction does not work. Humanity is still the same.

God decides therefore on the other option. Not to destroy evil, but to redeem it. It is for this reason that he makes a covenant with Noah. He says to Noah, never again. Never again will I destroy all flesh upon the earth. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t solve anything. I will choose the harder road, the path of redemption. And to remind myself of this pledge, I put down my weapons of war. I set them aside. In fact, I will put my bow in the sky to remind me that destruction does not work.

The tale of the rainbow is filled with images. For what is a bow? The archer’s weapon, a mechanism for dealing death. God sets down his bow and he sets it in the sky, not so that we humans would be reminded of God’s promise to never destroy us, but so that God himself would be reminded that he made this pledge. Reminded that the path of destruction does not solve the problem of human sin. Another road must be taken.

It is this other road that the entirety of the rest of the Bible concerns itself with and we will touch upon that as we continue this series of preaching through all the Old Testament stories: through Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets, all the way to Jesus himself.

Thousands of years have passed since God chose the other road. And what I find remarkable is how many Christians seem to think that this world will end in death and fire. They read into scripture images of destruction, as if God will once again repeat the flood story at the end of time, perhaps not with water, but with death nonetheless. I have a hard time ascribing to such readings of books like Revelation and the apocalyptic chapters of other Biblical texts, because of the flood story, because of the rainbow, and because God has pledged never to destroy us again. God placed himself on a path to redeem us from our sins, a path that led to Jesus, to the cross, and to the empty tomb. That’s a path not of death, but of life. It began when God said “never again” and put down his bow in the sky, and began his work to save us, not to destroy us. Amen.