Saved from Divine Violence

Genesis 6:5-22; 8:6-12; 9:8-17; Matthew 8:24-27

God said to Noah: “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

If you went to Sunday school you learned about the story of Noah and the ark and all the animals. The animals are fascinating to kids. But to be honest, the story of Noah is not a kid’s story. Because what happens to everybody who’s not on the ark is pretty bad. And the text says that it was God who decided to do it.

As a general matter I tend to believe that God doesn’t decide to send floods, or cancer, or earthquakes, or terrorism. Apparently some people find comfort in thinking that God sent 9/11 – or allowed 9/11 to happen – specifically to punish us for gay marriage or whatever. Maybe it’s easier to think that everything happens for a reason and God must know what God’s doing – so if bad things happen God must want those bad things and we just have to accept it.

But that has never set well with me. I don’t believe God is the author of bad things. Bad things happen, but that is largely our fault, and even when they are just random events, like earthquakes or Covid, I prefer to think of God suffering and lamenting along with us than to think of God as somehow their author. We do a lot of terrible things to ourselves, and to one another, and most of the time the misfortunes we experience are – if anything – God choosing to let us experience the consequences of the choices we have made, in the hope that we might learn and change our ways.

And I think the ancient people who told and retold the story of Noah and the flood would have heard this story as something God allowed to happen rather than something God decided to do. In the Bible creation is often imagined as God putting a limit to the chaos of uncontrolled waters.  In Genesis 1, before God creates there is only darkness and water and a mighty wind sweeping over the water, until God creates light and dry land, until God puts the waters in their place and makes space for trees and animals and humans. In the book of Job, when God basically asks Job, “Why do you question me? Were you there when I created the world?”, the poetic way God asks this question is: “Were you there when I shut in the sea with doors … and prescribed bounds for it … and said, ‘Thus far shall you come and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?” (Job 38:8-11)

Or even in our gospel passage today, when Jesus calms the storm, the disciples’ reaction is: What kind of human being is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him? To people in Biblical times, commanding the winds and the sea is a God thing. If it were not for God, of course the floods would come and overwhelm us all – God is the one who is constantly holding back the flood. So in their way of thinking, a flood is not something God sends, but something that – if it happens – God must have somehow allowed.

And the text of the story we read today of Noah and the flood makes clear why God allowed the flood to take place – it was because human beings were evil, because human beings were violent, and had so ruined creation with our violence that God was sorry to have created it all.

This is true of literal floods – perhaps you’ve seen the news about the horrific floods in Pakistan over the last couple of weeks. More than 1,000 people have lost their lives, millions of homes destroyed, the number of refugees is larger than the entire population of Canada. And with the climate changing these kinds of human-caused literal floods, and fires, and heat waves, and hurricanes, are likely to become more and more common.

But there are other times, too, when it feels like we’ve been swept away by other kinds of floods – a flood of violence as on 9/11, a flood of illness during Covid, a great force far larger than any one human being can comprehend, that sweeps away the defenseless, that tears down everything that once seemed stable and dependable, where we struggle to keep our heads above water amidst the chaos around us and sometimes feel that we just don’t have the strength to do it. These experiences have been common throughout human history and they are common experiences for us today.

So what does God do, when we human beings – intentionally or not – unleash these floods, literal and metaphorical, onto the world? What can God do when the doors have been opened and the flood waters have escaped and people are drowning? How do we see the creator God in all this chaos?

One possibility – and our text today says that God was sorely tempted in this direction – one possibility is for God to say, This is your problem, humans, not mine. You’re so smart, you didn’t want to take my advice on how to live together in justice and harmony, you figure it out. And whatever happens, serves you right. God could just step back and leave us to the consequences of our own choices – and the text says God was really prepared to do it. That God was sorry to have created at all, if this is what the creatures were going to do.

But – the text says, but, Noah found favor with God. There was at least one human being whom God simply could not imagine walking away from. And the animals, too – it’s not their fault, after all. In the end God loved the creation so much that God could not abandon it all. Yes, God was willing to let us experience the flood of our own making, up to a certain point. Quite far, in fact. But not completely. In the end, God’s justified regrets were overcome by God’s unjustifiable, gracious love.

So if God’s response to human evil and violence cannot be simply to leave us to our choices and our fate, if God is going to get involved, what should God do? It is possible that God could choose simply to punish the guilty – and I’ll bet that’s what a lot of people in the days of Noah were hoping and praying God would do. As they felt the waters crashing around them, as they sensed the chaos starting to surround them, they no doubt begged God to stop whoever was causing this by whatever means are necessary.

That was our reaction as Americans after 9/11, wasn’t it? On that day when the genie of violence had escaped from the bottle, when unspeakable and incomprehensible destruction rained down from the heavens, wasn’t that our reaction – find who did this and make them pay? And surely we can imagine a God who would meet human violence with divine violence, a God who would respond to human injustice with just vengeance.

And perhaps that’s what God did, or tried to do, in the days of Noah. To kill all the bad guys and let Noah and his family try again, with a fresh start. But at the end of the story God clearly rejects this kind of response. Never again, God says. Never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. I may allow you to experience some of the consequences of your bad choices, but never again will I allow a flood that destroys everything. No. This is not the way.

In our Lutheran tradition we’ve always recognized that there is a place for lawful authority to restrain evil sometimes through the use of force. That’s why we have police and laws and courts, that’s why we have a military. To use coercion and the threat of violence, and sometimes even actual violence, to prevent even worse things from happening. And within proper limits this is acceptable, even a good thing, and Christians can take part in this work as soldiers and civic officials. But we have also recognized that – as important as it may be to restrain evil and make the world a less bad place – this is not how God ultimately defeats evil. For in God there is no coercion, no violence.

This week we have all been thinking of the Queen Elizabeth II. I was reminded this week of what the late Queen said in her address to the U.S. Congress in 1991: “Some people believe that power grows from the barrel of a gun. So it can. But history shows that it never grows well. Nor for very long. Force, in the end, is sterile.” Throughout history few institutions have used conquest and empire to order human affairs than the British monarchy – and yet, as a faithful and believing Christian, Queen Elizabeth knew that ultimately the way of God has nothing to do with violence.

On 9/11, we saw what happens when people wrongly believe that God calls them to divine violence against their enemies. We can blame adherents of other religions for those beliefs, but Christians have done it too, at least as often as others, even though we of all people should have known better. We of all people should know and trust the promise God made to Noah – salvation from the chaos and violence of the flood will not be achieved by God’s violence.

Ultimately, in the end, we do not simply have to be saved from the violence of the flood, the violence of chaos, the violence caused by human evil and greed. We also have to be saved from divine violence, from violence done in the name of God, from violence done in the conviction that our enemies deserve everything they get and more.

How does God accomplish both of these salvations? That is the story that we have begun to tell in our Bible reading today, but it will take us the whole next year to unfold it. But for today, we are given in today’s Scripture a promise and a sign. The promise: Never again will God use divine violence to make the world right. No Crusade, no jihad, no Inquisition, no holy war can offer us the salvation we need, and God is not to be found in these things.

That’s God’s promise – made to Noah and his descendants, which is of course every single one of us, regardless of race or creed. And the sign God gives to Noah – the sign of the rainbow – is the initial foretaste, the first glimpse, of what God will reveal with greater and greater clarity as the story of the Bible progresses. The bow, the primitive weapon of war, pointed upwards to heaven and not downwards toward earth – a sign of a God who would rather absorb violence than inflict it, a God who saves us from evil and death by undergoing death, a God who will call people of every race and language and people to pass through water into new life, not by inflicting violence but by uniting ourselves in baptism with the one who died and rose to a new life. A new life in which every victim of the floods of history, ancient, modern, and yet to come, everyone can find a place as a beloved child of God.