09/13/2026 - "Flood & Promises" (Genesis 9:8-17)

You can watch the sermon here.

Scripture: Genesis 9:8-17

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth.  I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”

~

One of my favorite comedians is Taylor Tomlinson, and she recently released a comedy special called Prodigal Daughter that opens with her talking a lot about her religious upbringing.

And one of the jokes she makes is about Noah’s Ark. I’m going to tone down the language a bit, but she said that “I assume, even if you didn’t grow up religious, you know Noah’s ark. Most people know that. That’s our big one. It’s on the cover of all our coloring books. It really is a testament to how messed up the Bible is that we read Noah’s ark and we’re like, “That’s the kids’ story.” That story is dark…And we’re like, ‘Yeah, that should be the mural in the nursery.”

And there’s some truth there! How many of us have seen a mural of Noah’s Ark in a nursery, or a Sunday School wing, or even in a daycare?

It’s an excuse to paint friendly animals in a cute little boat, because what kid doesn’t love animals?

But when we dig deeper, this really isn’t a kid-friendly story. The Bible is not a kid-friendly book; when we teach it we have to be sensitive about what our kids are ready to hear and process at their age, and what we may need to wait to talk about in the future.

But most of us here are adults, so let’s dig a little deeper beyond just the cute animals in the gently rocking boat.

Our flood story in Scripture is just one of many that show up in different religions and cultures throughout the generations. The one it most often gets compared to, because they come from the same geographic region, is the flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia.

In it there is an eerily similar story to that of Noah, where an immortal man named Utnapishtim survived a world-ending flood sent by the gods by building a boat at the command of Ea, one of the gods who didn’t agree with the plan to flood the world. The overall structure of the story is familiar, the details about how dry land is discovered through doves line up, and Utnapishtim conducts similar sacrifices to Noah after they get off the boat. There is a lot to suggest that there is some relationship between this story in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible. Or at least there was some sort of flood in the region that ended up being written into both texts.

But there are some distinct characteristics of the story of Noah’s Ark. One of them is that God is both the God who judges, and the God who covenants. In the Epic of Gilgamesh they are two separate gods, actually a whole pantheon of them with their own machinations and schemes. But in Genesis we just have one God who both sends the flood, and promises never to flood the earth again.

So what do we make of that?

In order to get the full picture of the story and themes that the writers of Genesis are trying to portray, we have go back to the very beginning of the book. Genesis 1 is a poem about creation that begins like this:

“When Got began to create the heavens and the earth - the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters - God said, “Let there be light.” And so light appeared.”

We often talk about God creating the world out of nothing so much, that I think we can forget that our creation stories tells us there was something there before God started speaking creation into existence. In Genesis 1 we’re told of this deep, dark sea. In other translations it’s talked about as primordial waters, chaotic and uncontrollable until God begins to put boundaries around it and call forth order from it.

And there was wind. The specific word here, ruach, appears a lot throughout the Hebrew Bible, and it’s translated in three different ways. One way is wind, another is breath, and the other is divine spirit. Because they are all often one and the same in the Hebrew Bible.

And out of this chaos of water and breath comes creation and life. And God initially declares it “very good.”

But as is the case with a lot of life, good things don’t always last. Because humanity started calling what was good, evil, and what was evil, good, and they could not be swayed from it. Humanity was destroying each other and the rest of creation, with no path to redemption in sight. So God decided to call forth the primordial waters of chaos God had created from once before, so God could create the world anew.

Except God went against their own plan just a few verses after making it. God didn’t return the entirety of God’s creation to the waters. Noah, and his family, and a pair of each kind of animal, floated on the surface of the waters as they crashed back in.

We can hardly imagine what it would be like to be if we were in Noah’s shoes. Crammed onto a dark ship with a wide variety of chirps and growls and howls and meows and barks. The noise nearly drowns out the rain pounding down and the floodwaters sloshing against the ark. It’s chaos and fear outside in the floodwaters, but it’s also chaos and fear inside of the ark as well.

Friends we have found ourselves in the waters of chaos time and time again. From the chaos of navigating cancer, chronic illnesses, mental health diagnoses;

to the chaos of family tragedies and deaths and estrangements;

to the chaos of bullying in our schools, conflicts with our neighbors, and sudden deaths in our communities;

to the chaos of wars and food shortages, people disappearing off our streets, wildfires, and yes, literal floods -

it seems as if our entire world is awash in chaos and fear and violence.

It can seem as if there is no end to the deluge, no way that the chaos will ever cease.

Just this past Friday we remembered 9/11, a day twenty-five years ago where the violence hit close to home and nothing would ever be the same. Then just six years ago, COVID changed a lot, and revealed a lot. Our political climate has changed a lot and revealed a lot of things we probably wish we didn’t know. Our climate has changed a lot, and is continuing to do so.

So maybe we do have an idea of what it was like for Noah and his family on the ark.

But after forty days and forty nights, the same ruach, the same breath, that had hovered over the deep sea in Genesis 1 blew away the floodwaters that covered the earth. The ark settled onto a mountaintop. The massive door fell to the earth with a loud clap like thunder. Noah’s family and the animals crept out, blinking against the bright sun, footsteps still shaky from the up and down of the waves they’d grown accustomed to. And as that new life stumbled forth, the ground still damp from the floodwaters, God covenanted to never destroy the earth again by flooding it. And to seal that covenant, God hung up their bow in the sky.

Rainbows in a variety of ancient belief systems were thought to be the bows of the gods, with the lightning of storms being the arrows being shot from the bow to earth. So the reminder of the rainbow in the sky is essentially us still seeing that God’s bow is still hung up, and that God has covenanted with us to never pick it back up again. And this covenant was not just with Noah and his family and with them the rest of humanity. This covenant was with the entirety of creation, from wolves and deer to dogs and cats to the smallest bug underfoot.

God promised to never return the earth to the primordial waters to start over. This time, creation was here to stay.

Even though consequences would follow for our actions, those consequences would never be to the point of the entirety of creation being erased and made again.

Because God couldn’t destroy all of what God had created. God couldn’t end the promise of humanity; capable of so much evil and yet also capable of so much goodness as well. Because throughout the Hebrew Bible we see God capable of judgement and not afraid to let the chaos of consequences of people’s actions find them. But we also see a God who never lets that chaos be the end of the story. Instead we find a God who ensures that there is always a way forward towards new life and peace, a better place than we were in before.

It will probably be very different than what we knew. But it also has the promise of being better than what we could’ve ever hoped for.

So on Sunday, even in the midst of all the chaos in our world, we joined in with many churches in celebrating the beginning of fall, the return of our choir and Sunday School, and the start of new programming for the year.

We’ve already been through a lot of change and chaos in the past few years. And there will be more changes and chaos over the next year.

Some of it will be changes we choose to make to try and improve our lives and the lives of the people around us. Others will be changes that the chaos pushes us into unwillingly, changes we have to make in order to survive and keep moving forward.

It may feel like our world is coming to an end in a flood of chaos, but that chaos still holds within its waves the potential for something new.

We just have to get comfortable with the rocking of the waves beneath our feet. We have to learn how to live with the uncertainty and fear that Noah and his family did as they cared for their little community on the ark. And we can do that by doing what they did; focusing on what they could do. They couldn’t control the chaos outside, but they could make changes and adapt and care each other and their animals as they lived through it. And we the church are at our best when we do the same; adapting to the storms and figuring out how we are meant to care for God’s beloved creation through it.

Because the promise of the story of Noah, the promise of God hanging up God’s bow in the sky, is the promise that none of that chaos will be the end of us.

It’s the promise that the storms will fade, the chaos will settle, and we find ourselves on dry land again.

And when that happens, we will be able to take what we learned in the storms to build a new life together that is more beautiful than all the colors of the rainbow.