A sermon for the First Sunday in Lent, 2024

Earlier this week, along with a few other Episcopalians and a bunch of other Ohioans, I attended a Gun Violence Prevention summit at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. The State Representative who introduced the work noted that they chose the date originally, February 15^th, as being the day after the anniversary of the deadliest high school shooting in America to date, on Ash Wednesday, which was also Valentine’s Day, in 2018. The day after. The day after the shock and terror, the day after the numbness of grief, the day that we pick up our dusty feet and turn our ashen faces toward the rising sun, to do what we can to ensure that it doesn’t happen again; because, I would add, in our faith, death does not have the final word. Because the Son rises, and so do we.

On Thursday, of course, we were in another “day after”; the day after the victory parade in Kansas City that ended in a mess of death, injury, and trauma, (apparently) because a couple of kids got into a beef, and because they were carrying guns.

In the days of Noah, God saw that “the earth was filled with violence” (Genesis 6:11b), and so “God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them’” (Genesis 6:13).

Because of our violence, our tendency toward bloodshed, our refusal to bow down before the image of God in the other and our pride instead in our own image, because of the violence of these things, so the story goes, God “was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved [God] to the heart,” (Genesis 6:6), and so God determined to wash it all out and begin again.

But not altogether. Because God’s heart was grieved, and we do not grieve the loss of that which we never loved; because God’s heart is love, God chose a remnant, Noah and his family, to keep the covenant that God initiated when God breathed life into the first human made of the earth, when God placed a part of God’s Spirit, God’s heart, God’s life and invested it in our humanity.

God chose a remnant, because God knows we are made in God’s own image; we are never beyond hope, or help.

Each Lent we pick up our penitential practices and our ashy faces and head into a season of temptation; the temptation to carry on as though nothing had happened, as though we were never lost in the wilderness of sin, as though the earth were not filled with violence, as though we had never tarnished the image of God within us, as though we were still upon the mountaintop, with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah; as though we had pitched tents there, and stayed in the clouds of glory. The temptation to denial is strong.

But after the flood, God made a new covenant with Noah and his family, the remnant of humanity that God had plucked from the dumpster fire before dousing it with water. God promised that never again would God go to such extremes to try to cleanse the earth and its humanity; that instead, God would bear with us, work with us, try God’s best to save us from ourselves.

In the verses just before the ones we read today, God reasserted that as part of this covenant, a reckoning would be required for the blood of a stolen human life, since that life is made in the image of God (Genesis 9:4-7). There would not be another flood, but God made clear to Noah that we are expected to be co-conspirators with God in the remaking of the earth into something better than violence, something more beautiful than a dumpster fire, something deserving of the rainbow.

One of the details that stuck with me from Wednesday’s outrageous news was that the children’s hospital there in Kansas City was treating 11 children and one adult, because the mother of one of the children, injured herself, refused to be taken from her child to be treated elsewhere.

The heart of God is grieved by violence, hurt by our harming of ourselves and one another, but God refuses to leave us alone, first choosing Noah and his family to float upon the waters, then promising no more divine catastrophes, finally washing us clean with the Incarnation of Jesus, as a mother bathes her child.

After the flood, God placed the rainbow in the sky and Noah and his family on dry ground. After his baptism, Jesus, driven by the Spirit, went into the wilderness, to contemplate the human condition. After Herod laid hands on John and arrested him, Jesus returned to his people and said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news,” that God keeps God’s promises.

Today is another day after, another new beginning, another chance to repent and believe in something good, to do something good; something to gladden the heart of our faithful and long-suffering God.

 Genesis 9:8-17, 1 Peter 3:18-22, Mark 1:9-15