“But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. 2 Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky. 3 The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down, 4 and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. 5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible. 6 After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark 7 and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. 8 Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. 9 But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. 10 He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. 11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. 12 He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him. 13 By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry. 14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry. 15 Then God said to Noah, 16 “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. 17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.” 18 So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. 19 All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on land—came out of the ark, one kind after another.”
Two of the last century’s greatest theologians got into an argument the first time they ever met. Not an irrelevant, nit-picking squabble over arcane points, like, How many angels can dance on the point of a pin? or Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons? It was an argument that may have greatly blessed the world. I still don’t entirely understand what it was about. One party to the argument was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who would later become the leader of the Confessing Church, the Church that refused to go along with the Nazi Party line, and who was finally executed for it. The other party in the argument was Karl Barth, a Swiss Reformed theologian.
It happened when Bonhoeffer realized his long held dream of meeting Dr. Barth and hearing him lecture. After the lecture, Bonhoeffer asked a rather pointed, probing question. Barth took it in good humor but got a good lick in as well, when he said something like, “Dietrich, what you say is true enough; I agree. But something about your question suggests to me that you are taking one truth of God’s Word and using it as a club with which to bludgeon to death other truths in God’s Word.”
“Well,” Dietrich later said to a friend, “I’ve probably just blown my chance at any more contact and conversation with the famous Dr. Barth.” But no, later that week, Dr. Barth invited Dietrich over for dinner at the family home. Over dinner, Barth assured Dietrich that he valued and welcomed honest questions and lively discussion and debate in his classes. From then on a warm friendship and much correspondence between the two church leaders ensued.
Bonhoeffer seemed to have learned an important lesson from that exchange: that however true an idea may be, however firmly you grasp a biblical concept, or however firmly that biblical concept grasps you, never use it as a weapon against other biblical truths or themes or doctrines about God, God’s nature or God’s Word, even when those truths seem to be contradictory. More likely, they are complementary, and necessary to each other.
I mention all this because the theme of this week’s Vacation Bible School is “digging for treasure.” We can take that to mean that there is treasure in God’s Word, and that God’s Word is itself a treasure. But what kind of treasure do we imagine? I suggest that we think of diamonds, because a diamond has many facets, each of which reflects a different color from the same light. The Bible is like a many-faceted diamond, and each story, passage and doctrine in the Bible also has multiple facets which reflect different lights and hues from God and from God’s Word and God’s work in the world, all at the same time.
I see at least four facets of God’s Word and God’s work in today’s story about Noah, which come in seemingly contradictory pairs: Judgment and Grace; Promise and Command. I’m sure there are even more facets to the Bible and to this story. And each of these facets—Judgment, Grace, Promise and Command–would be worth a sermon in their own right. But there’s food warming in the church kitchen, and others of us need time to rest and prepare for the activities this evening. So I’ll limit my words to those two pairs of two seemingly contrary facets, and say a little about how and why they are not opposed to each other, but rather, how important and necessary they are to each other.
Those four facets are the very things our human nature wants most to split from each other and to pit against each other. But we do so to our own detriment and impoverishment. Let’s start with probably our least favorite theme in the Bible, God’s judgment. If it should be our favorite theme, that would be scary. By judgment I mean God’s Word of No! and Stop! And “If you persist, these are the consequences you are bringing upon yourselves!” Judgment also means the mysterious work of God in this world that limits, hinders and defeats evil and sustains goodness. Just as there are natural laws of actions and results in Creation, so there is a moral and spiritual order to Creation, in which actions and attitudes also have very predictable consequences, just as inescapable as gravity. For example, every time we lie, not only do we lose other people’s trust, we weaken our own ability to distinguish truth from wishful thinking. Thus evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, and proves its own undoing. The Bible is unapologetically clear that God is the author and creator of both the natural order and the moral/spiritual order.
In Noah’s case, the word of Judgment came before today’s passage, when we read in Genesis 6 that God was so grieved by all the violence in the world that he said, “It’s time to wipe this slate clean and start over.” Judgment played out in the form of that widespread, devastating flood.
God’s judgment here seems like a rather blunt instrument. Of course we wonder why human sin and violence would have such drastic consequences for the rest of creation, including innocent children and animals. But now we live in an era of run-away climate change, when nature again is suffering for our sins, and so may future generations. The fact that innocent parties get hurt by the consequences of other people’s sins should not make us shake our fists at God for being unfair; it should make us more reverent, reflective, restrained and responsible toward innocent others.
But we must not be quick to think we understand how God’s judgment works, and certainly not arrogate to ourselves the right to carry it out. There is only One sinless Person entitled to cast the first stone at sinners, and He so beautifully combined judgment and grace, promise and command, when he said, “Neither do I condemn you; and go and sin no more.”
As painful and disturbing as it is for us to hear and think about judgment, the one who mourns most over human violence in the Noah story is God. Thousands of years later, it would take a bloody cross on a Judean hillside to express the fullness of God’s pain and grief, his No! and his Stop! against the violence that we continue to do to ourselves, each other, and to God himself, whose image we bear. But that bloody cross was also the supreme sign and source of God’s healing, restoring grace.
Grace is a second facet of God’s work and God’s Word in this story. Grace is God’s faithful, unmerited and extravagant work to heal and restore what evil disfigures and destroys. Grace is there in God’s choice and calling of Noah, and in the salvation of Noah, his family and the animals in the ark. We see God’s grace in action again as the waters recede and the mountain peaks start to appear, and the ark comes to rest on the first patches of dry land to emerge. Grace also takes the form of a blessing, when God says to Noah and his family, “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives. 17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.”
Or was that a command? Command is the third facet of God’s work and God’s Word. Like the other commands which God had given Noah and his family, to build the ark, how to build it, when to get into it and shut it tight. And now, God gives the command to go forth, resettle the land and repopulate it. We don’t typically speak of God’s grace and God’s commands in the same breath. Often we even speak of grace as though it were a sinning license, or a Get Out of Jail Free card for whenever we violate God’s commands. We may even think of grace as freedom from God’s commands. But the Bible speaks of grace as a God-given freedom for God’s commands, as the gift of divine, Holy Spirit power that makes us want to do God’s will, and more able to do God’s will, than we would on our own power and virtue. That’s how Paul described grace to Titus in his letter, chapter 2: 11: “For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people.12 It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, 13 while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, 14 who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.”
We do not earn God’s grace by obeying God’s commands; God’s grace encourages and empowers us to follow God’s commands; God’s commands are the way of blessing and grace.
That last command came with a promise that they and the animals they had saved would “multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.” Later would come the promise that God would always restrain the waters of chaos, and never again destroy everything with a flood. That means that each of us here today is the fulfillment of a divine promise given to Noah and his family. So are all the other creatures with whom we share the planet. If there is in your life a loving, faithful companion animal like a dog, a cat, goats, cows, goldfish, a horse, that, too, is the fulfillment of a divine promise. Our delight in these fellow creatures is but a shadow of God’s delight in his living handiwork. God’s promise was as much for all creatures, as for Noah and the rest of us humans. That makes it all the more painful that so many kinds of animal species are endangered or extinct today.
The Christian life is lived on the basis of divine promises. We live and love in the hope of better things which we do not yet see, until we shall know as we are known. And, like the promise spoken to Noah, God’s promises are for all of creation, and not just for our eternal souls, that “the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea,” that this beautiful planet will be as free of violence and as full of peace as it was on the day when Noah and his family and all those animals stepped out of the ark onto dry land.
Promise and Command, Grace and Judgment: don’t treat them as contradictory and irreconcilable; they are different hues emanating from the different facets of the one treasure that is God’s Word, each necessary to the other. But to inflate one truth to the exclusion or destruction of others is a definition of crazy, like the guy who insisted that he was a chicken, because chickens also walk upright on two legs. At the very least, it tends toward imbalance and malpractice; at its worst, it’s also a definition of heresy.
No one pair of eyes can ever see all the colors that reflect from all the facets on all the sides of even just one diamond. In the same way, Bible interpretation must never be just a do-it-yourself exercise. I hope we are all reading the Bible and taking it to heart, personally. But let no one era or generation or culture or denomination or congregation, nor any one person, pastor or preacher approach the Bible, thinking of themselves as their own self-sufficient authorities for interpretation. We need each other across all these different times and places and peoples in order to help each other see most fully all the beautiful colors reflecting from the different facets of the treasure that is God’s Word.
Some of us grew up in churches that may have used judgment and command to bludgeon down any glimmer of grace and promise. Now our tendency may be to use grace and promise to bludgeon down any word of judgment or command. Left to ourselves, we are like the drunken peasant on horseback in Martin Luther’s parable, who leans so far over to the right that he falls off that side of his horse. He picks himself up, gets back in the saddle, and hoping to avoid the first error, leans so far in the other direction that he falls off on that side, too. And so he continues, back and forth, falling off one side to the other, until the horse walks off and leaves him stunned and sleeping by the road.
Fortunately, Dietrich Bonhoeffer took to heart Karl Barth’s rebuke, not to use one facet of the Biblical treasure like a bludgeon to bash and smash the other facets. And that’s what has made his ministry so powerful, precisely because he revered and reflected the many different facets of the treasure that is God’s Word so faithfully, so harmoniously, together. That made his ministry during the Hitler years both so courageous and so caring, so prophetic and so pastoral. And so costly. That’s how that brief argument, and the mild rebuke he got from Karl Barth, in 1932, blessed the world.
As an example of this ability to hold different truths and facets of the treasure of God’s Word together, I close with Bonhoeffer’s famous words about God’s grace from his book, The Cost of Discipleship: God’s “grace,” he said, “is costly, because it calls us to follow; it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.”