Lent 1, Year B
March 5, 2006
Christ Church, Covington
“The waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh’” (Gen 9:15).
About 40 million Americans watched Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War when it
was first broadcast on PBS back in 1990. There are eleven hours of it:
interviews and narration, still photographs and a little music. The fact that so
many people watched such a thing, about a bloody conflict that concluded over
140 years ago, is an indicator that the events documented still resonant with
the viewers. This shouldn’t be surprising: the Civil War was the defining event,
bar none, of American history since the Revolution. It’s still acting as a
marker for our society, informing political and societal conflicts in the
present, and not just in the South. Maybe we’re just more conscious of it, since
as William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (Requiem
for a Nun).
Maybe you have events in your life that act as markers like this; past events
that are still alive for you, and to which you return. The story of Noah and the
Ark has a similar significance as a corporate marker for the Church. It’s an
event in the past; but from the earliest times it’s resonated in the
consciousness of ancient Israel. The Prophets and the Psalms kept looking back
at the Flood as a marker that pointed forward to the future, when God would
finally and decisively bring a new world into being. Christians did something of
the same sort, using this story (as in our second reading) as a prefiguring of
the sacrament of baptism. Through water, people are saved from destruction. This
happens (our reading goes on to say) through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Christians live a new life through the power of God. Like ancient Israel, the
early Christians also saw the Flood story in terms of an old life that was
ending and a new life that was beginning; an old world doomed to destruction and
a new world that was being brought to birth.
So what kind of marker will our own experiences of recent days on the Gulf Coast
be for us? The story of the Flood suggests the theme. What will the events of
August, 2005, mean for the citizens of “Hurricane Land”? I guess our Lent, as a
period of spiritual questioning and challenge, began back in August, so this
First Sunday in Lent with its story of the Biblical Flood is only fitting. I
don’t think anybody really knows what sort of marker these events will be,
though if I were PBS I’d be trying to sign Ken Burns up to do the documentary.
Let’s go back to Noah and the Ark again, since in our own situation we ought to
look for some reliable markers. Things to note: 1) Our tradition insists that
the Biblical Flood has a moral frame. God was attempting to re-establish and
re-found the human race. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Babylonian text
with a very similar Flood story, the gods destroy the world because humanity is
noisy. By contrast, catastrophic events, in Biblical perspective, are not random
or capricious, but opportunities for moral transformation. They shape character,
and call upon our moral resources, the virtues.
2) The emphasis in the Jewish and Christian traditions of interpreting the story
of Noah and the Ark is, in both cases, on new life: an emphasis that is
well-founded in the text itself. Noah is not the survivor of a vanished world, a
castaway from Atlantis (another ancient myth that echoes the Flood story) but
the first citizen of a new world. For Christians, the Flood story is a story of
Crucifixion and Resurrection, of new life that is wrested from the midst of
destruction and sin. This is the new life that we celebrate in Baptism and
Eucharist, our passage in Christ from death to life.
We cannot know the mind of God with any certainty when it comes to events like
the storm. But we can say this with certainty, relying on the markers our faith
gives us: God means for us, in all the events of our life, moral transformation
and new life, forged from the chaos and from death. That’s not a bad place to
begin this Lent, no matter when your Lent started and no matter when it may end.
God is bringing new life to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ.
John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.
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