Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's March 19, 2006 Sunday worship service.

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The older I get, the more I come to think that the most honest day on the calendar for relating to life and its challenges is not Christmas Eve or Easter, days in the church when numbers tend to swell, or even special days like Pentecost, Reformation Sunday, or any of the other usual suspects. I know, theologically, a case could be made for any or all of these days being more significant, but I can’t help but think that Ash Wednesday is the day that, in a way more realistically than all the others, puts everything in perspective. That’s ironic, of course, because the day that traditionally marks the beginning of the season of Lent, two weeks ago now, is characterized by a small church gathering, a deep sense of human sinfulness, and the hearing of those haunting words, “you are of the dust, and to the dust you shall return” as foreheads are marked with the sign of the ashy cross. We do not relish reminders of our mortal nature, and even during this season of Lent, in the run up to Holy Week and Easter, we are surely not supposed to be spiritually depressed by any stretch of the imagination, but we are supposed to be realistic about our failures to measure up and that one day we, too, shall pass.

One Wednesday afternoon, getting ready for the night’s Ash Wednesday service, I had remembered that the previous year, the ashes had been almost too dry, hard to trace a visible mark on the forehead, and so I took the Cokesbury, store-bought ashes I then had and stood in front of the bathroom mirror. I tried adding a few drops of water to the mix, hoping for a grittier, more visible residue, and I practiced the sign of the cross on my own forehead of those watery ashes. While it sounds like nothing much, I can tell you that the combination of seeing your own reflection and watching your own thumb do its work leaves a memory that stays with you.

Maybe its because one of my earliest memories as a child of three or four is of the fire engines that came to my neighborhood in Burlington, NC when a kid about my age somehow got through a neighbor’s fence and drowned in their swimming pool, or maybe it’s because I can still remember, a few years later, jumping into the lake at church camp into water over my head and opening my eyes under water and feeling the sheer terror as I could see only murky light and thought, for a long couple of seconds that I was going to die – for those reasons, watery ashes don’t seem like such an oxymoron to me.

One of the stories that comes around during the Lenten season is a story about water, particularly the story of Noah and his ark, a story about the universal failings of humanity but a story well-known, ironically, I think, because of its appeal to children. “The animals went in two by two, the elephant and the kangaroo.” “Noah, he built him an arky, arky, made it out of birchy barky, barky” we hear the children sing. Every child can draw a rainbow and relate to the disembarking animals two-by-two safely dwelling in peaceful harmony with Noah and his family on the new earth.

Maybe the story, or better yet this parable, with its double message about God’s doomsday and God’s saved remnant is too much for adults, so we domesticate it into a children’s tale with toy arks and a removable roof and pairs of miniature animals with 8 small figures representing the human survivors of the great flood.

If it is anything, this is a tale of God’s terrible despair over the human race and God’s decision to visit them with a great flood that would destroy all except this one old man, Noah, and his family, Noah who went out, following Yahweh’s directive, to build a boat of gopher wood far from any port.

Part of the story’s intrigue is, of course, because there persist researchers and archeologists of ancient Semitic and biblical culture (with varying stripes and degrees of authority) who hint that maybe there are the remains of a ship buried in the year–round snow high atop Mount Ararat, almost 16,000 feet above sea level, the highest peak in the middle east, there in a land today occupied by the Kurdish people. It is a holy mountain to all the ethnic groups around it.

It’s a long stretch, of course, but if it really happened that Noah built a ship to house all the thousand upon thousands of animal species of air and land for their seven month voyage on the flood waters, then, according to zoologists at the San Diego Zoo, anyway, at least 800 tons of manure would have been generated, no easy mucking operation for those 8 humans aboard the ark. And the stench inside would have been unbearable if not for the storm on the outside.

I see this as a story rooted in ancient storytelling traditions, traditions that sought to understand human origins, a story thus from prehistory, but a story that reveals truths about the divine-human relationship. It’s like the native American story teller who begins: “I am going to tell you about something that never happened and it’s a true story.” Some 217 different cultures (Walking the Bible, 23) contain flood stories, so the story of Noah fits into an extensive tradition. Some of those stories talk about a global flood, others about a more localized catastrophe, still others have details about the bird being sent out at the end, while others do not.

In the Genesis story, Noah is represented as the father of a new generation and the flood is another example of land emerging from a watery chaos just as it did in Genesis chapter one. It’s the first covenant God made, a universal covenant, a promise never again to destroy the world by sending waters from below and above to drown all living things. Noah’s story and the ensuing covenant God makes become the basis for a second creation, a new beginning when God’s original intention seems to have been thwarted by the overall wickedness of the human creation.

Going back thousands of years, a story that many civilizations and cultures have told in their own way, Noah and his ark remind us that water is at the beginning of life, that water can carry a double purpose: to sustain and nurture life but also it can destroy life as well.

Sometimes even God can be understood as having a double purpose: You can read the Genesis account as a story about God’s wrath and anger and righteous indignation at the world’s wickedness and waywardness, but more to the point, I think it is a story about God’s sorrow and the deep grief the Lord feels over what humanity has made of itself, and so the word of grace is that a decision is made to preserve a holy remnant.

In the story of the flood and its aftermath, God is not just indignant at the world’s wickedness but God is also wounded and hurt. Maybe the parallel we can see here is that God is like a troubled parent who grieves over the alienation of the human creatures; God seems caught between judgment and mercy, between anger at the mess humanity has made but pain about the passing of judgment. What an awful thing, we think. How can God do this? It’s hard to wrap our minds around the idea of such a universal catastrophe.

You may know, that in the early church, the ark became a fitting symbol for the church, the saved remnant through whom God would bring about a new start, a new creation. And, of course Jesus himself, before he went public with his ministry, endured temptations in the wilderness when he fasted for forty days and nights, and one wonders if he had thoughts and dreams of 40 days and nights of water, the windows of heaven opening, the fountains of the great deep bursting forth, and the rivers slowly rising above their banks.

In those poignant last days on the ark, Noah sets loose a dove from his own finger three times to roam the ruined earth. The first one comes back trembling and hungry. The second one comes back with a sprig of olive branch in its beak. And there he is: teary-eyed old Noah, after months and months shut up in the ark, his grizzled cheek next to the trembling breast of that dove resting on his callused palm. Just a sprig of hope held out against the end of the world, but that’s all old Noah needs. And then a third, which never comes back, and then Noah knows it will soon be safe to leave the ark.

Finally, the ark comes to rest, and the land dries out. Noah removes the covering from the ark and they all march out on dry land. The animals scatter, but Noah does a wonderful thing. He builds an altar and drops down to his knees in the moist dirt of the new earth to give thanks to God. And the text says: And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.”

Then, at the end of the story, God makes a covenant with the earth, with nature, really, a covenant sealed with the sign of the rainbow in the sky. This is not a conditional covenant – if you do this, I will do that. It has no strings attached, but rather it is a divine commitment to stay with this sinful world as long as it takes to fulfill God’s dream for the earth.

Truth is, we are all passengers on the ark. Usually, when the preacher says “all” he or she means the church, with the water referring to the saving power of baptism, and the rainbow as a figure that foreshadows a coming covenant to be made with the sign of the cross. I

But I would hope this Lent that we could have an even more expansive understanding of the “all.” It’s not just this miracle of earth and sky and fragility of ecosystem that calls forth preservation and restoration of what God intended, but more than that, we as a human race must find ways to get along together on the ark, at a time when there is so much that divides or threatens our existence.

I thought about railing against the evils of the age and pronouncing God’s wrath and judgment, as some preachers are wont to do. Today, you know, is the third anniversary of the war we started in Iraq and you know the foolishness of billions spent making weapons and destroying lives, money that could be used for saving life, particularly the hungry, the poor; there are war drums beating to do the same in Iran; and there is famine in Kenya and across much of Africa; there are oppressive regimes in Latin America; there are devastated lives still reeling from natural disasters and on and on the list could go. But you read the paper and watch the news. You know what its like out there. Can’t we find a way to live together on this ark called humanity?

I did find a sermon written by a Presbyterian minister in 1969, a time of great turmoil, that I believe can speak to us and to our world. And with a change of a word here or there, it applies to our times. The preacher says:

“The ark is wherever people come together because this is a stormy world where nothing stays put for long among the crazy waves and where at the end of every voyage there is a burial at sea. The ark is where, just because it is such a world, we really need each other and know very well that we do. The ark is wherever human beings come together because in their heart of hearts all of them – white and black, Russian and American, hippie and square – dream the same dream, which is a dream of peace – peace between the nations, between the races, between the brothers – and thus ultimately a dream of love. Love, not as an excuse for the mushy and innocuous, but love as a summons to battle against all that is unlovely and unloving in the world. The ark, in other words, is where we have each other and where we have hope.

Noah looked like a fool in his faith, but he saved the world from drowning, and we must not forget the one whom Noah foreshadows and who also looked like a fool spread-eagled up there, cross-eyed with pain, but who also saved the world from drowning. We must not forget him because he saves the world still, and wherever the ark is, wherever we meet and touch in something like love, it is because he also is there, brother and father of us all. So into his gracious and puzzling hands we must commend ourselves through all the days of our voyaging wherever it takes us, and at the end of all our voyages. We must build our arks with love and ride out the storm with courage and know that the little sprig of green in the dove’s mouth betokens a reality beyond the storm more precious than the likes of us can imagine. (F. Buechner, “A Sprig of Hope,” 41)

So let it be. Amen.