At the end of the hallway outside my church office is a mural of a big ark and pairs of different animals all looking cute and happy as they make their way onto dry land. This area used to be part of the children’s wing, but now that it is the hallway where the pastors’ offices are located, the trustees have decided to paint over it. As you can imagine, that has caused quite a ruckus among some folks who don’t want to see it go. When you consider how beloved this mural is to so many people and when you see all the equally cute Noah’s Ark toy sets that are found in many homes and churches, you can get the idea that the story of Noah’s Ark is along the same lines as Doctor Doolittle or Winnie the Pooh. It’s not.
The story of Noah and the flood is more in line with a Stephen King horror story. Genesis 6:5 tells us, “The Lord saw that humanity had become thoroughly evil on the earth and that every idea their minds thought up was always completely evil.” That’s quite an incriminating evaluation! Things had become so bad that the only solution God could come up with was that of near-total destruction. If this story were made into a movie (oh, wait, it has been!) it would not be a movie we would take our children to see.
So where in the world do we see grace at work in this story? As I pondered that question, an answer came to me from an unexpected direction. It occurred to me that God could have chosen to just sweep the whole mess away and start over completely from scratch. After all, if God had done it once, God could do it again. Yet God chose to take what already was and remold it into something new and (hopefully) improved. Rather than recreating humanity and all other life forms, God took what had already been made and said, “Let’s see what we can do with what we’ve got” (my translation).
That seems to be how God handles all sorts of things in the lives of individuals as well as in the corporate lives of systems and institutions. Look back over your life. When has God taken some mess you had created and reworked it into something new? If you’re like me, you have multiple answers to that question. It seems that God values my mistakes and has used them to remake me into something new and (I hope!) improved. That is amazing grace!
When we consider the mess our world is now in, we can see just how desperately we need that grace to be at work. I imagine that if it were up to many of us, we would be tempted to wipe it all out and start over from scratch. God’s grace, however, wants to take what already is and see what can be done with it. That raises some exciting possibilities!
- How might God take our nation with its nasty political, racial, and class divisions and remake us into a true democracy where justice and equality are the markers of our reputation?
- How might God take our denomination, which seems on the verge of splitting over arguments about theology, and remake us into the living Body of Christ with the mission to take God’s love to all?
- How might God take this planet, which has been so terribly and perhaps irreversibly damaged by human greed and abuse, and remake it into the beautiful creation God intended it to be?
We also see grace in the story of Noah and the ark in the fact that God chose not to work alone. God chose Noah and his family along with all those smelly animals to participate with God in the remaking of the world. I believe God’s grace still works that way today – using us to bring about God’s plans. That raises some exciting questions:
- How does God want to use you and me to heal the divisions in this nation?
- How does God want to use you and me to heal the hostility and brokenness in the Church?
- How does God want to use you and me to heal the terrible dis-ease we have caused to this planet?
- Are we willing to be part of God’s solutions or part of God’s problems?
God seems to always be about the business of bringing new life through new means. We can either jump on board God’s ark and get to work or find ourselves swept away by the floodwaters of the Holy Spirit as she cleans up the mess we’ve made.
Rev. Joyce Day
If you would like to view past editions of Grace for the Journey, follow this link: https://sounddistrictnc.org/category/grace-for-the-journey/