Keep Me From Drowning

Scriptures for Lent: The First Sunday

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

The first time I experienced the power of a flood, I was ten years old. Because my family wasn't personally affected, I was excited about this "once in a lifetime" event. I even had a T-shirt that proclaimed, "I survived the flood!" As we drove through flooded areas, I was awed by the mirrored waters reflecting the sky over fields and roads alike.

Years later, I was a pastor in Marengo, Iowa, along the Iowa River. A levee protected the town, but as rain fell that spring, the waters crept up. Communities surrounding us experienced massive flooding, reaching the tops of bridges, spilling into homes, and bringing life to a standstill. I began to panic. This was not the exciting adventure of my childhood but a horrific experience of loss. Homes and businesses in those nearby communities were gone. Families were stranded. As the waters in my town sat mere inches below the top of the levee, I moved stuff out of the basement, put my cat in my car, and got out of town. All I wanted to do was to be with my husband, and he was helping evacuate a family from a nearby city. My greatest fear was that as bridges closed, I would be stranded on the other side of the river.

It was my first year of ministry, not a full six months into my tenure at this church, and I left its members to fend for themselves. I was young and inexperienced, but looking back, I'm embarrassed by my focus on myself. I was overwhelmed and afraid, and I bailed. Fortunately, the levee held in Marengo that spring. Only basements took in water. For that, I am grateful.

Many things can drown us in life. We can sink in temptation and sin. We can get over our heads in opposition and ridicule as we try to live our faith. We can find ourselves neck deep in the muck and mire of life. So, we cry out for help. But as our readings for this week show, there is someone who hears those cries. And in contrast to my failure as a leader, that someone — our Lord — does not abandon us. Our Lord stays with us, suffers with us and for us, and prepares our deliverance.

THE RAINBOW GENESIS 9:8-17

It doesn't take very long before everything goes from "supremely good" (Genesis 1:31) to a big, fat mess. Brothers kill brothers, angels and humans interact inappropriately, and humanity itself is enmeshed in sin and wickedness, immorality and violence. By the time we reach Genesis 6, things are far indeed from the shalom God intended for creation.

As God looks upon creation, only Noah is righteous. God calls him to build a boat. Not just any boat — a ship large enough to hold his family and two of every kind of animal. Shortly after the boat is completed, the skies open up and it begins to rain. The waters sweep every other living thing and person on the earth away. For forty days and forty nights, the rains fall and Noah and those with him on the ark are alone in the world.

God remembers Noah (8:1), and the waters begin to recede. Eventually, the boat settles on dry ground, and Noah and his family come out and give thanks. They had survived, but every living thing that was not on Noah's ark is now dead. Earth's population has been wiped out.

We can't comprehend the devastating force of floodwaters unless we go through them ourselves. As Cedar Rapids, Iowa, began to recover from flooding in 2008, I mucked out homes and walked through neighborhoods, praying with folks who'd lost everything. What remained was under inches of mud and silt. The smell was horrendous. Death and mold and decay were everywhere. Blocks of neighborhoods were still boarded up six and seven years later.

When Noah set up his altar and prayed, he was likely surrounded by bloated animals, dead humans, and muck-covered rocks. As the smoke from the offering rose to heaven, God looked at the destruction and made a promise, which can be paraphrased this way:

Never again will I send a flood to destroy the earth and everything that lives on it. And as a reminder, the rainbow is going to be a sign of that promise, this new covenant. Whenever a storm comes and you see that rainbow, I will remember the promise that I have made to you today.

We may not like this part of the story, where God seems to have a change of mind. God is supposed to be unchanging and not feel regret about the past. But maybe this story isn't about God changing at all. Many other cultures and religions of the time had their own flood stories: gods sending waters to cover the earth. Many of these tales also have a hero who is warned of the flood and who preserves the heritage of his people. It's not surprising that our tradition has a flood story, too. What is surprising, in contrast to those tales, is that the biblical account tells us God is merciful. Our God seeks to save, not destroy.

Ash Wednesday reminds us of our sin, our mortality, and our finite natures. We are all sinners. We are all made of the dust of the earth. We can't save ourselves from drowning in all of that dirt and muck. We might place ourselves in the story and believe we would have been destroyed by the floodwaters.

But our Hebrew ancestors took that familiar story of the flood and retold it with a different ending. Our God made a covenant, a promise, with us. Our God isn't temperamental or callous. Our God seeks relationship and reconciliation. From the very first chapter of Genesis to the very last chapter of Revelation, the message is the same: God loves us, and despite whatever hell we are drowning in, God wants to save us.

This story of destruction and flooding tells us that God made a covenant with all people through Noah. It's the promise of a new relationship in a post-Flood world. Even if "the ideas of the human mind are evil from their youth" (8:21) and we dive headfirst into sin, God will not abandon us or destroy us. God will bring us back to shalom.

In the ancient Near East, the rainbow had been a sign of judgment from the heavens, accompanied by ominous clouds and bolts of lightning shooting forth as arrows to condemn. Yet in this story, as God makes a covenant with all creation, the rainbow itself is transformed. It becomes a symbol of peace and mercy, a symbol of grace even in the midst of judgment.

Rather than gather up wrath and hurl lightning bolts when we do not obey, our Lord sees the rainbow in the sky and looks down upon us without condemnation (9:14-15). Even though we are sinners one and all, God reaches down to us. God, who took a lump of clay and formed us in the divine image, cared for us from the beginning. Our God breathed life itself into us. Our God is merciful and patient.

Though we are drowning in sin, God makes a covenant with Noah to never again cut off all life through floodwaters. In the midst of the death, destruction and loss of the Flood, God blesses Noah's family and calls its members to create life themselves. They are not pristine human beings; they have faults of their own (as the very next verses after this selection remind us), but they now know that every living creature is under the care of the Lord.

God doesn't want to destroy us, even if we are unrighteous and full of sin. God desires not the death of a sinner, but a repentant heart. Our Lord has already set in motion plans to deliver us.

Have you ever felt you needed to be righteous to earn your salvation? How does the promise of the rainbow bring comfort?

A BROKEN CROSS 1 PETER 3:18-22

The Scriptures have the ability both to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable — at the same time. To those who are overwhelmed by religious oppression, like people in the churches Peter was encouraging or like Christians in parts of the world where others are hostile to Christianity, the message of First Peter offers hope.

While Christians in certain other nations are threatened, most of us in the Western world are not experiencing the hell of persecution. There may be isolated instances where one is forced to deny one's faith under threat, but it is not the norm in our part of the planet.

For a long time, the United States was thought of as a Christian nation, though it never was officially so. Still, there's been a strong Judeo-Christian ethic and language in our politics, government, and culture in general. In a world where the lines between Christ, church, and culture were blurred, faith came easily. Perhaps that was a problem. Too often, the forces of this world gain the upper hand when they cozy up next to faith, and we lose our ability to have a prophetic and truth-filled voice. Rather than a conscientious choice, faith can become a fair-weather habit that props up our politics rather than informs them.

In these last few decades, however, that unity between Christians and the nation has started to unravel. The United States today is one of the biggest mission fields in the world. Many living among us find the church a strange and backward place. Alliances between denominations and political parties are dissolving. We are experiencing not persecution, but neglect. Many people simply do not care about our faith. And sometimes we feel as if we are drowning in a sea of secularism as we try to follow Jesus in this postmodern and post-Christian world.

Our attempts to follow Christ faithfully can even cause conflict within us. This is the natural result of trying to live as citizens of the kingdom of God and practice shalom in the face of very different kinds of kingdoms. How will we respond to that conflict? Are we going to hold our allegiance to Jesus in spite of opposition? Are we willing to sacrifice, even our own lives, in faithfulness to Christ?

In March of 2003, while I was a student at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, our country began a war with Iraq. I kept thinking about all of those things I had learned from Jesus, and I felt deep in my bones that this military venture was wrong. In conversations with my roommates and friends, I found others were similarly convinced. Many of us stood together, as Christians, in opposition to the war. If all human beings are children of God, then any life lost is to be mourned. We erected crosses on the lawn in front of the chapel symbolizing the rapidly rising death toll. We intended this as a reminder that there was a real human price to this conflict.

The morning after we placed the crosses, we walked onto campus and found them torn down. Many were broken apart, and the broken pieces were used to spell out "God Bless the USA."

Our campus was torn in two that semester. Faithful people from different Christian perspectives argued with one another. One afternoon, we hung a sheet on the side of our house that read, "Honk if you hate this war." Rocks were thrown through our windows in response. That was a turning point for me. I concluded there was nothing I could say or do to change the minds of those who had already made theirs up. I regretted putting up that sign, which seemed to only escalate the conflict, rather than reach out and speak in love.

In the verses immediately preceding our passage from First Peter, we are encouraged to face opposition with our eyes focused on Jesus: "It is better to suffer for doing good (if this could possibly be God's will) than for doing evil" (3:17). We can endure suffering with faithfulness because Christ suffered on our behalf. He has already been here. Jesus had the worst of this world thrown at him, experienced our death, and was "made alive by the Spirit" (3:18). His resurrection and ascension proclaims that those who stand in the way of salvation, wholeness, and God's shalom will not prevail. The power of the cross as an instrument of oppression is broken. We no longer need to regard it with fear.

Whether we are experiencing active persecution or feeling isolated and neglected, First Peter reminds us that God is still with us. It's a reminder that God has already declared victory over those who have stood or stand today in the way of God's shalom. And the persecuted can be assured that in God's time, victory is theirs, too. William Joseph Dalton says, when persecuted, Christians need to remember the value of suffering for Christ's sake so they can "stand firm and faithful despite their experience of alienation."

Salvation delivers us from enemies only God can conquer. Because we have life in Christ, the one who "rules over all angels, authorities, and powers" (3:22), there is nothing left to fear. As the familiar hymn declares, "This is my Father's world. / O let me ne'er forget that though the wrong seems oft so strong, / God is the ruler yet." In our baptism, we declare our allegiance to the kingdom where God is the ruler. We place our battle in God's hands. Baptism, says 1 Peter 3:21, is "the mark of a good conscience toward God." This does not mean that we are without sin and always choose what is right, but baptism does mark our intended orientation toward God and a desire to live in the way of Jesus.

The season of Lent reminds us that Jesus became one of us and took our life into his own. As he faced the hell of persecution, Jesus did not once curse his enemies. Not once did he wish them harm. Not once did he become like them. He shows us how to love, how to forgive, yet also how not to be a passive bystander in the process.

John R. Mabry describes nonviolent resister Nelson Mandela as "an imitator of Christ, not because he suffered in prison, but because he held out for peace and justice, and led a nation to resurrection." God has reached out to us through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and if we choose to be followers of Jesus, the power of resurrection spills over into everything we do.

I needed that spirit as we engaged in difficult conversations on campus that spring. I needed to stand firm in my faith and continue to call for peace, but I needed to do so in a way that was faithful to the life of Jesus Christ. Yelling at one another and speaking past each other did not lead to transformation. Only prayer, compassion, and the willingness to build relationships can bring about shalom for ourselves and others.

When did you feel a conflict between your faith and other allegiances? What gave you strength in that situation?

NOW IS THE TIME! MARK 1:9-15

"Now is the time! Here comes God's kingdom! Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news!" (1:15).

To repent, to change our hearts and lives, means to turn around and move in the opposite direction. God's covenant with Noah reminds us of God's steadfast love and mercy, but it doesn't restore us to God's shalom. We are still drowning in sin, still craving a fresh start, still crying out for deliverance. "Now is the time!" Jesus declares.

There's a parable about a man stranded by a flood. He crawls on the roof and prays for God to rescue him. A firefighter comes by in a boat, but the man refuses the would-be rescuer and continues to pray. A police officer comes by on a jet ski, but the man refuses help. The floodwaters rise and overwhelm him, and he dies. As he stands by Peter at the pearly gates, he cries out in frustration, "Why didn't God answer my prayers?" Peter responds, "We sent two boats!"

When we pray for rescue, we don't always know whom to trust. Who is this Jesus? How do we know he's from God? Why should we trust him? In a world that overwhelms us with false claims and promises, we can't simply drop everything for some "nobody" from Galilee. So Mark begins his Gospel by making clear that Jesus Christ is the one we have been waiting for. God has patiently loved us and laid the foundation for the good news of salvation. The moment has finally arrived.

John the Baptist sets the stage by calling people to a life of repentance and confession of sin. Jesus goes to John, enters the water, symbolically walking alongside us in our life of sin. He dives into the murky waters of our lives, transforming a simple ritual into a sacred promise. As Jesus rises up out of the water, the voice of God speaks, "You are my Son, whom I dearly love; in you I find happiness" (1:11).

The Messiah, the Son of God, was the one foretold in the Scriptures. The Son of God would bring about God's salvation. This moment of his baptism, like no other, confirms for us who this person was and is and what he does. God creates us, claims us, names us, and saves us. Through Jesus Christ, we become the sons and daughters of God. Through the waters of baptism, we, too, hear the voice calling out: In you, I find happiness. You are mine.

But salvation doesn't stop at baptism. Our declaration of faith is not the end of this journey. No, as soon as Jesus hears that voice, the Spirit of God whisks him away into the wilderness. There, for forty days and nights, he is tempted. The wild beasts surround him, and angels take care of him. Jesus didn't pack an emergency kit. He didn't give excuses for why he couldn't go. He went and completely and utterly put his life in the Father's hands. We might compare these forty days to the forty years of Moses and the Israelites in the wilderness. With the presence of those wild beasts and angels, our minds might wander to the Garden of Eden. We are reminded of people who were called to be God's people and depend upon God's grace and deliverance, but who failed to fully trust in their Lord.