The Whelming Flood

“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.” This is how the flood began, the flood from Genesis, for which Noah built an ark. We all remember the detail that it rained 40 days and 40 nights – an old biblical way of saying it rained real hard and it rained for a real long time. And so it did.

In our recollection of the flood, we often skip past the description of the flood’s beginning. In our minds we can picture a rain that begins one day, and simply doesn’t relent. Maybe it doesn’t start out as a flood in our minds, but becomes one after the 5th day, the 10th day, the 12th. But right there in Genesis, the story is told of an immediate and indescribably overwhelming deluge: the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened. Our ancient ancestors believed in a flat world with water below and water above – water being held back by the gates of the seas, by the firmament of the skies, and by the power of the God who wanted us to live against all odds.

When the great Flood came, it was immediate and incomprehensible. There was no way to prepare for it, no way to avoid or deflect it. The water burst forth from below and above, and all in a moment everything changed. It didn’t matter what you believed about God or yourself, it didn’t matter how you voted or if you acknowledged it was happening or not – in a moment the world changed. In a moment life, or at least life as anyone understood it, was gone forever.

We tend to judge ourselves for not fully grasping what is currently happening to us. We are reticent simply to acknowledge the relentlessly overwhelming reality of our times. We have an unspoken belief that if we would just keep on the sunny side of life, we might wake up tomorrow to find it was all just a figment, and we could get back to whatever normal was. Or maybe if we just read enough think-pieces or listened to enough podcasts we could understand our way out of this moment.

You cannot understand your way out of this moment. This powerful, painful time is part of your story now, part of our shared story, and we cannot outsmart it anymore than Noah could outsmart the flood. Sure, he built a boat, but he still had to make it through the months of the flood, and he did not emerge from the ark the same as when he went in.

My Dad used to tell me this joke about Noah. Noah and one of his sons are sitting on some crates in the belly of the Ark while the waves roll them around. And after a long silence, Noah says, “Well: It’s warm in here, and it’s dry in here, and it’s safe in here...but boy, does it smell like crap.”

The ark that saves Noah’s family is not a cruise ship. It does not save its passengers from fear and uncertainty. This vehicle of deliverance and transformation leaves nobody within it unchanged. But the ark has always provided us with two very clear, very gracious, and very interconnected realities: God gives us hope, and God gives us each other.

While the story of the Flood is deeply disturbing, it is also utterly rooted in the fact that God does not give up on creation, on humanity, not then, not now, not ever. Even in the midst of overwhelming trauma, God is seeking a future defined by relationships of love and fidelity.

It may have been scary - and smelly - on that boat, but it wasn’t lonely. A new community was being forged in the shelter from the storm. As much as the people and creatures of the ark belonged to God, they just as surely belonged to each other. There was no way around that.

There is a way forward for you and for me. That way is a way of love and a way of hope, laid down by the God of this overwhelming world. We are sometimes scared to accept the challenge of walking this way because it means we will be changed. But one thing that has become inescapable for us now is that we are all being changed, whether we walk the way or not. This is scary to consider, and impossible to grasp. But we are not alone. God gives us hope. God gives us each other.