This Week's Sermon: "Shall Never Cease"

(A programming note: I likely will not be blogging this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, but I will be back with new entries next week.  Have a safe and happy holiday, y'all! -E.A.)

Genesis 8:13-22

"13 In Noah’s six hundred first year, on the first day of the first month, the waters dried up from the earth. Noah removed the ark’s hatch and saw that the surface of the fertile land had dried up. 14 In the second month, on the seventeenth day, the earth was dry. 

15 God spoke to Noah, 16 “Go out of the ark, you and your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives with you. 17 Bring out with you all the animals of every kind—birds, livestock, everything crawling on the ground—so that they may populate the earth, be fertile, and multiply on the earth.” 18 So Noah went out of the ark with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives. 19 All the animals, all the livestock, all the birds, and everything crawling on the ground, came out of the ark by their families.  

20 Noah built an altar to the Lord. He took some of the clean large animals and some of the clean birds, and placed entirely burned offerings on the altar. 21 The Lord smelled the pleasing scent, and the Lord thought to himself, I will not curse the fertile land anymore because of human beings since the ideas of the human mind are evil from their youth. I will never again destroy every living thing as I have done. 22 As long as the earth exists, seedtime and harvest, cold and hot, summer and autumn, day and night will not cease." (CEB)

What’s Asked in Worship Stays in Worship: Banned Questions About the Bible, Week Four: Is There a Scriptural Basis for Changing God’s Mind?

It was the day after the election two weeks ago.  I was driving at eight in the morning to meet a fellow colleague for coffee and fellowship.  And I saw it arching up from the center of town: one of the clearest, most beautiful rainbows I had seen since I moved here over a year ago.

(Yes, you’d think with how often it rains here, I’d see more rainbows.  I thought so, too.)

It was an appropriate symbol for that day—it was a sign of happiness and celebration if the electorate went your way, and if they didn’t, well, if you know the story of Noah and the Ark and how it ends—which is the part we just read together (the covenant continues for a whole other chapter, which is where the rainbow comes in, but I wanted to include the poetry of chapter 8)—then you’ll know that rainbows are also divine signs that the world isn’t going to end after all!

And ESPECIALLY after an election, keeping that sort of perspective is pretty clutch, I think.

This is the conclusion of a four-week sermon series that has taken us up to the week of Thanksgiving.  Thematically, this new series does a lot, I think, to build upon our previous sermon series, “They Like Jesus, But Not The Church.”  That previous series was based on peoples’ impressions of us that they are sometimes afraid to share, and this series is based largely on peoples’ questions for us that they—or even we—are sometimes afraid to ask, perhaps because church is seen sometimes as a place not to ask questions, only to receive answers.  But, in order to receive the right answers to begin with, we must start by asking the right questions.  And one of my fundamental, non-negotiable beliefs about what church is, and what church should be, is that we must be in the business of encouraging people to ask the right questions, the tough questions.  Not the clichés, not the easy answers that you can recite the same way a child recites their favorite McDonald’s order.  So for this and the following three weeks, we’ll be looking at some of those big theological questions, guided by the book “Banned Questions about the Bible,” which is edited by Disciples journalist and blogger Christian Piatt.  We began with the question, “Is there a right or wrong way to read the Bible?”  The questions then got even tougher: “How can God be all-loving yet allows people to be thrown into hell?”  This was followed last week by, “Why doesn’t God intervene in a disaster?”  And finally, today, we end the series with another deep, potentially provocative question: “Is there a Scriptural basis for changing God’s mind?”

This is one partial response to that query in Banned Questions About the Bible:

"Traditional theology is troubled by this notion of God’s mind-changing, for this means that God is not all-knowing.  The traditional view maintains that God’s mind is immovable and thus interprets these texts anthropomorphically—that is, the writers “humanize” God in order to understand God’s mysterious actions.  In other words, from our finite human perspective, it seems as though God changes God's mind.

Some nontraditional approaches have either rejected or redefined divine all-knowing…after all, “I am that I am” can also be translated “I will be what I will be.”  As such, the future is unknown, even to God.

Among Evangelicals, there’s “open theism.”  Open theists assert that God is all knowing: God knows all that exists.  But since the future doesn’t exist, God doesn’t know the future and is “open” to it.

Are we then at the mercy of an unpredictable God?  …Two things should be highlighted:

1.      When God (seemingly) changes God's mind, it’s always on the side of mercy.

2.      God never changes God's mind about the promises God has made."

Let’s unpack both of those ideas for a minute.

The first idea—that whenever God might change his mind, it’s always on the side of mercy—is pretty straightforward.  And it’s one that is all throughout Scripture.  The first promise that God makes to someone is, in fact, a promise of mercy—after Cain murders his brother Abel and is sent into exile east of Eden by God, Cain objects.  He says that going off alone like that, as a fugitive or an outlaw, is a death sentence, because he’ll be vulnerable to anyone else who simply wished to harm or kill him.  In essence, he is saying that by exiling him, God has sentenced him to death.

It’s the same logic we use today—you know, not walking by ourselves after dark, carrying our cell phones, that sort of thing.  It’s basic safety in a world that isn’t always so hospitable.

And God says, “Not so!  For anyone who harms you will suffer far greater punishment.”  But it doesn’t even come to that, God marks Cain so that those who see him know that he is protected by God and will let him be.  And so God spares Cain’s life, when God had no reason to.  God’s first promise to a human being is one of mercy, and it sets the trend for the rest of Scripture: when God does shift in His decisions, it is always in one direction, not the other.  It is for mercy.

But let’s talk about the second one for a minute.  Because it’s what necessitates the first point.

God is a vibrant, active, and dynamic deity in the Bible—He is not simply a statue, a golden Buddha whose belly you rub (likely shallowly and superstitiously, if you’re not actually Buddhist) for good luck.  In fact, honestly, I think that is partly why there is the commandment of not making any graven image to God—it cements God; it puts Him in only one place, when God is a moving, creative, vital, awe-inspiring deity…and we choose to worship around this carved rock instead?  God rightly and understandably tells us to pass on that sort of worship.

But this also means that God goes back and forth in how He interacts with us.  Part of the reason I think we struggle with parts of the Bible is because of how human God does appear in them—that He is capable of anger, and sadness, and things that we would just as soon not want to associate with a powerful deity.

But Lord, in the story of Noah and the Ark, does God appear human.

He pulls a complete 180—he goes from seeing the world we have made saying, “I regret that I have made them” to promising Noah, “never again” will God curse us because of who we are.  Never again will something so destructive and violent as the flood ever, EVER happen.

That’s a promise we like to tell ourselves, and tell other people.

After an atrocity like the Holocaust, we said, “Never again.”  But then genocide happened in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur.

After slavery, we said, “Never again,” yet thousands of God’s children are trafficked into sex slavery across the world every year.

We make the “Never again” promise and usually fail to keep it.  But God doesn’t.  He won’t make promises to us that He cannot keep.

And so when God says to Noah, “For as long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall never cease.”

And the Bible is, then, a wonderful, amazing, incredible collection of accounts of God doing exactly that—of moving heaven and earth to make sure that we still have a chance to live and to love and to be the children of God we were made to be.

God saves His children from slavery in Egypt, from oppression under the Philistines, from exile into Babylon, and then, and then, He saves us from ourselves by offering us His only Son.

God moves and works and changes in all of this precisely so that one reality will never cease: the reality that tomorrow will always come, that we will always have a future, and that hatred will never have the final word.

And so while God may change His mind, it is so that other things, more important things than the divine ego shall never cease.  God needs to be right, but that need not be at humanity’s expense.

Yet, it is not merely seedtime and harvest that never ceases, it is not merely cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night that never cease.

It is so that God’s love and mercy and redemption for each and every one of us shall never cease!

And following God’s example as Christians means that our own love and mercy and redemption for one another shall never cease.  It means that our burden, crazy as it is, to actually offer people hope and grace and salvation shall never cease.  And what a wonderful burden it is!  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

November 18, 2012