Any army, any party, any class that thinks the world is its oyster to pry open and snatch the pearl while God looks the other way either does not understand or does not care that God is the Creator, made everything that is for the purpose of loving communion, and wants every creature to have its own share of the fruits and potentialities of creation. When the people of Israel forgot that—when they began to take pride in their own accomplishments, their own technologies and their own schemes; when they began to exploit the poor and abuse the powerless; when they began to trust in their military might and their economy; when they began to neglect worship and turn their sabbath into a day for profit—then the collapse of their nation was assured. Drawing on the limited science of the times and the character that God had always shown, and remembering the promise, the writer of Genesis put Israel’s faith in context. He reminded the people dejected and bewildered in exile that the God who loved Israel into being was the God who loved the whole world into being for a purpose that no army could defeat and no sin could spoil. All of creation and each person in it is the Creator’s own delight. How could King Nebuchadnezzar and all his Babylonian idols match the Truth that made the universe with a word? How could any army, how could any illness, how could any deed of injustice or instance of oppression, how could any cruel word or act by any human being defeat someone who knows that he or she has been wonderfully loved into existence by the same God who made the earth and the heavens?
We don’t know exactly when Matthew’s Gospel was written, except that it was probably a few years after Jerusalem had again been destroyed by a foreign army from a pagan land—this time, Rome—and the temple that King Herod had built had been toppled. Again, the unthinkable had happened. Again, there must have been faith-testing and gut-wrenching questions about where the God of Israel was when it was all happening, whether this God had lost power even to save the great house of holy worship. Some people might have remembered wondering, many years earlier as they watched Jesus die on the cross, where God was that day, that dark and gruesome Friday, and whether this God had lost power even to save his Son.
The evangelist was writing his Gospel for people in exile—Christians of Jewish background living in Syria after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. In his faith community, there was probably a fair amount of bewilderment and uncertainty about God’s seeming powerlessness to stop the pagan rampage. But the evangelist reminded his Christian readers that what had appeared to be powerlessness on Good Friday laid the necessary foundation for God’s mightiest act of redemption on Easter Sunday—the redemption of his own Son from the grip of death. The creative power that by a word brought forth life on the face of the earth with all its variety and all its complexity and all its amazing interdependence, had also brought forth life from the grave. The God who made a precious promise to the people Israel long ago now, in Christ himself, made a new promise just as precious: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt 28:20b, NRSV). Creation was still the Creator’s delight. The people would still not be abandoned, though nations and even temples might fall.
And the comprehensive breadth of the promise became newly apparent in the words of the risen Christ himself to his followers: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matt 28:19–20a, NRSV)—they were to make known throughout the world the commandments about love of God and love of neighbor and who God is and who our neighbor is, the commandments about trust and dependability, the commandments about witness and devotion, the commandments about forgiveness and self-sacrifice. And all of that was for the Creator’s loving purpose of restoring creation to the fullness that the Creator intended, the Creator’s absolute delight. God’s creation is not a place where humankind and other creatures exist to be abused by a cruel and capricious tyrant, but a place where the Creator freely shares creative power and responsibility. God’s creation is not a place where the Creator might shut us away when we bore or tire or exasperate the one who made us, but a place where every conceivable measure has been taken for our permanent joy and well-being. God’s creation is a place where there is sufficient for all, if it is shared and not hoarded. God’s creation is a place where no one and no thing feeds to the detriment of another, if pride and greed yield to forgiveness and generosity. God’s creation is a place where every creature, animate and inanimate, is dear to God, rather than a place to be exploited and despoiled ruthlessly and without thought to future generations of all living things. God’s creation is a place where the rhythms of creation itself are received as a gift of God, rather than something to be schemed around. God’s creation is a place where truth is spoken in respect and love, rather than allowing fear and falsehood to work their destructive disharmony. Far from allowing them to feel defeated, and that creation was out of control and that life was without purpose, the risen Christ gave his followers a new commission in God’s ongoing task of bringing creation to perfect fullness. On God’s very own authority, Jesus declared that God still loves this creation, and all of his disciples are to testify to that boldly and continually in our words and in our actions toward all people everywhere. Creation is not God’s whim. It is, and it will remain, God’s delight.
Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Spanish Springs Presbyterian Church, Sparks, Nevada
June 2, 2002
Genesis 6:9–22; 7:24; 8:1, 14–19
Romans 1:16–17; 3:21–31
Matthew 7:21–29
“The Faith of God”
Of all the stories in the Bible, I suppose that none is more well-known than the story of Noah and the flood. Certainly, no other biblical story has so captured the popular imagination and been turned into product lines from children’s bedding to Bill Cosby records. But as often happens when a Bible story becomes public currency, details get lost, plot becomes simplified, and, in the process, the reason that the story is even in the Bible becomes obscured and its message becomes garbled. It becomes “de-biblified,” if you will. So the vast majority of people who “know all about” Noah and the flood could not even tell you where to find it in the Bible. Like another story about salvation and perilous waters—the story of Jonah, the theological point of which is forgotten almost entirely in the popular fascination with the “great fish”—the fundamental truths of the Noah story usually get lost amidst cuddly pairs of stuffed animals in the gift shop. Driving to and from Wichita on presbytery business, I used to pass a church in the little town of Maize, Kansas, called “The Ark,” built in the shape of a big boat—a statement that here was a place of safety and salvation. But driving through the St. Louis area en route to and from Virginia, where I was working on my PhD, I used to pass a hotel in St. Charles, Missouri, called “The Ark,” and the animal theme (Noah wasn’t depicted anywhere on the premises) showed that the whole motif was purely for the sake of novelty.
Almost anyone could tell you that the waters rose for forty days; very few people could tell you that the reason the Bible gives for the waters beginning to subside was that “God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark” (Gen 8:1a, NRSV). Some will know that the story has something to do with a rainbow. Not many will be able to tell you that the bow in the clouds is a sign to remind God of the promise God gave to Noah that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.
And it wasn’t just a matter of a lot of rain. The Bible says that, on the day it all began, “the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened” (Gen 7:11b, NRSV). The chaos that God had tamed back in the beginning of the world, when God created a dome to separate