Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to comm.church for more information.

We are making our way through the origins series in Genesis where you have encountered not one, but two creation narratives and the archetypal story of Cain and Abel. Today, we are wading into the flood story in Genesis chapter six to nine. We are talking about discrepancies, decreation, what does it mean for God to remember, and a promise is a promise. That's your outline. But first, let us pray.

Loving God, we take a moment to notice our breath, the rise and fall of our chest, our shoulders, our bellies. Even now, we breathe in a little more deeply. We exhale a little longer. For those of us who have felt like maybe we are coming apart at the seams a little bit this week with stress, with the anxiety of the world, with all of our life admin or details about the end of a school year, may we sense your invitation spirit to be present to our breath and to your wisdom to rest and to wait and to wonder. For those of us who notice ourselves at a point of healing in our lives, what a good thing it is to name our healing and to say thank you.

So Christ with us in all unraveling and Christ with us in all mending, be near. Amen. Now, I imagine that you bring with you a collection of depictions when you think of Noah and the ark, pairs of animals, and a great big flood. That's cool. That whole toy box of memories is welcome to this party.

You can bring your flannel graph. You can bring your coloring books. You can bring Russell Crowe and the whole cast from the 2014 movie Noah, if you dare. By now, you know the first 11 chapters in Genesis are a primeval history. These ancient stories make sense of a different world, the earliest world that ever was.

But none of these stories, creation, Cain and Abel, Noah, Babel exist in a silo apart from the world that they come from. And I have always found this to be comforting. Like, meaning making and story borrowing spreads out across cultures and landscapes. In Genesis chapter six, there is this strange story about the sons of God having sex with the daughters of humans, and this procreative push sets the world off balance. This strange bit of erotica is pretty weird to us, but it is less weird in context.

God's having sex with mortals runs through mythic poetry, and over time, that thematically kind of finds bits of itself in Genesis. Here, the story is the setup for the flood. Why did God allow for such destruction? Well, what else could God do with such rampant evil? And there are two Hebrew words in Genesis six verse five that emphasize just how bad the world had become.

It was a rob kind of evil, meaning it was so great. And it was a coal kind of evil, meaning it infects everything. So our story today begins in Genesis six verse nine addressing all of that. This is the account of Noah and his family. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.

Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight and full of violence. So God said to Noah, I am going to put an end to all people for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. So make yourself an ark.

Now, there are a couple of interesting things, especially for bible nerds, about the story of Noah. When you read the flood closely, you see discrepancies. First, the name for God changes, and some details vary about how many animals are taken up on the ark. That's because at least two similar but different versions of the story of Noah are floating around the community of the Hebrew people. And scholars have given those two versions names, the Yahweh story and the priestly story.

And some biblical scholars argue that the use of two names for the divine, Yahweh and Elohim, are not sloppy errors, but the result of reasonable editing. Rodney Sadler says that the flood story is one of the clearest examples in Genesis of its composite nature. So two sources intertwine. And I like the image of stories braided carefully together. And more on that in a moment.

The other interesting detail is the use of old myths. If you tracked with Jeremy and Scott's messages, this should not shock or surprise you. When it comes to the story of the flood, Genesis is not the OG. By one count, 68 people groups have flood stories. Noah is not the first of his kind.

One Noah before our Noah is known as Utnapishtim from the Gilgamesh tale. So buckle up. It's story time. In the Gilgamesh epic, the hero, Gilgamesh, is in search of immortality. And at one stop on his journey, he seeks wisdom from a man who survived the great flood, Utnapishtim.

Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that the god Ea warned him of the flood. And Ea tells Utnapishtim to load up the boat with the seed of life of all kinds with his family, skilled craft workers, and animals. Together, they ride out the seven day storm until the boat comes to rest on a mountain. Seven days later, Utnapishtim sends out a dove, a swallow, and a raven, and the raven does not return. Utnapishtim offers a sacrifice around which the gods, having smelt the offering, gather like fleas or flies.

Fleas or flies? What do you want? Let's say flies. The reason being that the gods were fed by the offerings of mortals, and the flood had starved them out. And the god scolds the other god, Enlil, for sending such a destructive flood.

And as a result of the tassel, Enlil makes Utnapishtim immortal along with his wife. Yay. And the similarities between Noah and Ut Napishtim are significant. One scholar counts 17 specific points, but as you could see, the differences are significant too. What we see here is old stories to meet new needs.

Before Utnapishtim, Atrahasis told the story of the flood from only the god's point of view. And Utnapishtim tells the story based on what had been his human experience. And the Hebrew people braid together new versions of old stories. And Karen Armstrong explains that for religions emerging in the axial age of which we count Judaism, their myths take on a more interior and ethical interpretation. So a new flood hero is here, and his name is Noah.

And Yahweh doesn't scrap with other gods, and the chaos they live with is of their own doing. And Noah actually becomes a bit of a shadow to Adam. The flip side of creation is the flood's decreation. And just in case you're like creation what now, Bobby? It's the prefix de, which means to reverse or undo.

And I didn't make it up, but decreation. So Noah and his family, pairs of clean and unclean animals, The birds and creatures that move along the ground all load up on the ark, and after seven days, the floodwaters come. For forty days, the flood kept coming on the earth, And as the waters increased, they lifted the ark high above the earth. The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered.

Every living thing that moved on land perished. Birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm the earth and all mankind, everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. All creation, everything not on the boat lets out this last gasp. Read in Hebrew, the words emphasize the loss of the breath of the breath of life. It's chilling.

Now, one way to read Noah and the flood is to just stick with this theme of judgment. Those nasty humans, they had it coming. Who could stand for their perversion of creation? They took everything good and turned it into greed and violence and harm. And there's justification for judgment in the text, but the craft of the story is doing more than just wagging a finger.

As an origin story, we see the flip side of creation. Flood imagery is creation's return to chaos, Where in Genesis one, God put a vault between the waters above and below. Here, that vault collapses. Where in Genesis one, God brought living creatures out of the land. Here, they die and fall back into the earth.

This is decreation, the opposite of life. So much death. Only there's that arc floating on the swelling sea, so not all is lost. And we have an organic metaphor for decreation and what comes next. This spring, I took my gardening up a notch.

And I've never wanted to have my own compost pile. I am committed to that green city bin, so why would I want to dump my kitchen scraps in my yard? Except I kept thinking that my soil could use the boost. And so for my 40 birthday, I bought myself a dual rotating composter. That is self love.

And maybe you have seen one. You fill it. You rotate it. You keep it moist. Yes.

I just said moist. And you wait for it to get warm so the scraps cook up and break down with the brown yard trimmings and the dead leaves from the fall. And after about six weeks, you get grade a decreation compost. That first batch is coming along real nicely. I check it every day.

And when I inhale that dark dying matter, I merely giggle. Now, I'm not just a planter of seeds or a harvester of leafy greens. I am a maker of soil. It's incredible. Yes.

And it's a cycle. Creation falls into decreation and makes way for something new. Now it would be almost enough that the scriptures make space for your decreation stories too. That it could be counted alongside sacred text every time you've noticed the world crashing down around you. Every time you have lost what you cherish.

Every time you have felt like you are coming apart at the seams. It could be almost enough that the Bible says, yeah, that's life, pal. You can't escape decreeation. Life falls apart. But that is not where the story ends.

Miguel de la Torre acknowledges that the story of the flood is really hard to reconcile with divine love as we understand it today. But he asserts that there is a liberative seed of good news in the story. There is benevolent remembrance. Genesis eight. But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him on the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth and the waters receded.

After forty days, Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up on the earth. Then there's more sending out of birds, the next one a dove, but it doesn't find a place to perch. Verse 10, he waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. 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.

Then God says, come out of that ark with your family. Let all the birds and the animals and creatures that move along the ground multiply on the earth. Let them be fruitful. Let them flourish. And Noah builds an altar.

And God says, interestingly, in God's own heart, I will never do that again. Even though humans can be so evil so much of the time. And then God promises to not interrupt the cycle of the seasons, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. Chapter eight is this turning point. After so much devastation, the narrative points us in a new direction.

The creation restored, an offering of thanks, a God who self reflects the waters receding, the divine remembers. But what does it mean that God remembers Noah? I mean, this story is intense. Did the divine just forget that the whole world was drowning? Maybe you felt something similar when you get pulled into a bleak news cycle.

The Hebrew word for remember, zakar, doesn't just mean to call to mind, like, oh, yeah, yeah, I remember her. Zakar means to direct action towards the object of your memory. So the divine doesn't just gather around for a good show or salivate at the offering of a man who survived a flood. The divine directs goodness and promise and peace. And we see this in the symbolic flare of the story, where water is a symbol of chaos.

The wind or ruah is the symbol of order. Where the raven is a symbol of JK, JK, we actually don't know what is up with the raven. I like to think that the raven is just a feisty bird, and that is what's needed in this brave new world. But the olive branch, snapped from a Mediterranean evergreen tree that could have stayed alive for a thousand years, is the symbol of blessing and regeneration and abundance. Now, in some ways, Noah and that flood story, they're not our story.

We know that the Hebrew people took an ancient myth and shaped it to respond to the world around them, a world that was changing like all worlds do. And I think we forget how flexible and malleable ancient stories can be. They can bend and bend and bend and still not break. But just because we don't live on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, though we do live on the boat, waiting for another unpredictable and devastating flood, just because our lives aren't at the mercy of capricious gods who could smite us just when we get to routing, just because most of us aren't Jewish and don't have the Babylonian exile fresh in our minds doesn't mean that Noah in some way isn't our story. Because Noah can absolutely belong to us with these themes of corruption and destruction and waiting out a terrible storm and living to see another day in a world being reborn.

Noah is totally your story. It's your story if you've survived anything horrific. It's your story when you live from the best part of yourself that remembers and acts with justice in a world that can be so unfair. It is your story of honoring life and saying thank you for every gift. So let's finish up today where Noah ends with a pride parade.

Well, the rainbow. Anyway. So now instead of chapter nine, tying this really pretty bow on the story, it's actually brutally honest. We read that life going forward will be marked by dread and fear. People will have to struggle to survive.

God says, well, that will always be true for you, Noah. This experience has changed me. And we hear God say to Noah and his family in verse nine, 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 that ark with you, every living creature on earth. And God said, this is a sign of the covenant I am making between you and me 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 a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.

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. And then after this, Noah gets drunk from the vineyard he plants. His son sees him naked. And something about this is so messed up that Noah curses not his son, but his son descendants forever. The end.

Roll the credits. I told you it wasn't pretty. I once, wisely or unwisely, told a bunch of junior high kids about this actual end of the flood story, and the kid in the back of the class shot his arm up and called when I called on him, he said, pastor Bobby, pastor Rebecca, the kid's pastor, never told us 80 of that. And of course, we all laughed, and it is a moment I'll never forget because I think we were all so glad at just how human the Bible can be. Now, unfortunately, the story of Canaan being cursed will later be used to justify the destruction of a people group, so we really do seem to go from bad to worse.

In our fear and in our dread, we can be a wellspring of creativity when it comes to the harm that we do to others. But don't forget for a moment that there is more to this story Because all of our messes, all of our man made horrors, all of the ways that we rip at the seams of the world take place under the promise of God to always, always, always be for us and not against us. Because that's what this rainbow is meant to say. It's not just Roy G. Biv up in the sky.

It's actually a tool of war, a warrior's fighting bow, and it's unstrung, and it's retired, and it's no longer in service of devastation and destruction. God has made a pact to stick with creation just as it is, saying that divine love and patience will never ever ever run out. Early Christians read Noah as a biblical character who prefigures Christ, and they read the ark as the church. And the sacrament of baptism is how we say with our bodies that we get it. God creates.

And we are born of water, and we will die of extinguished breath. And the love that brought us into the world will never ever ever leave us. A promise is a promise. Let us pray. Loving God, we take a moment to be with our own hearts, to listen for your stirring within us, for a wind, a word, a phrase, an idea that we wanna carry with us today, maybe even into our week.

Maybe it's this idea of braided stories in our lives, bringing us wisdom and meaning in all their complexity. Maybe it's this cycle of creation to decreation to something new where everything belongs. Maybe it's the reassurance that God does remember us and does make all these beautiful promises to us. Maybe it's this idea that we live under the colorful promises of God, and they are always for our flourishing. There's so much going on in these origin stories, and I love that we can bring our own origins to them.

So as we go today, we pray spirit of the living God, present with us now. Enter the places of our pain, our anxiety, our distrust, and heal us of all that harms us. Amen.