The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Do you have a recurrent nightmare? I’m regularly suffocating in too many clothes which I struggle and fail to take off. I am, of course tangled up in the duvet and my feet probably pinned down by a sleeping cat. No question what the nightmare was for the Israelites; again and again we hear of their ordeal by water and the theme of drowning and the destructive force of rivers and the sea is everywhere in their poetic imagination.
 It unsurprising then that, although they lived on the edge of the Mediterranean, the Israelites were not great mariners and sea journeys, from Jonah to Paul tend to be disastrous. They looked instead to Mesopotamia and Egypt for their cultural inspiration. These were the cultures which were among the first to control the threat and exploit the potential of water and to create as a result the first civilisations, and, thereby the first literatures and mythologies. It is from those Mesopotamian cultures that the Biblical stories of creation and the Flood derive, and they reflect the historical development, as God’s first creative act is to sort out and re-order the primeval watery chaos, and to put water to constructive, life giving use.
 The story of Noah also reflect another feature of these, and perhaps, all civilisations; the control and exploitation of water, although fragile,  created an economic surplus which meant for some there was sufficient leisure to develop literature and self reflection, out of which sophisticated religious and social ideas could grow. With this reflection, the lucky aristocracy must have developed too an awareness of their fortunate but precarious position; a consciousness that some were chosen and more were not. And selection, being chosen by God, is a central idea in the Biblical creation stories, including that of Noah’s Ark, and, of course, remains a constant theme throughout the Old Testament, and has continued unabated throughout the history of the Christian Church. We hear a hint of this in our Gospel; the chosen sheep know their master’s voice; others are excluded. The most momentous selection, involving a watery near death experience in the Red Sea, was the saving of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. This  was not, of course, the saving of an aristocracy, or even a bourgeoisie, although the chosen people knew that they were not meant to be slaves and maintained an strong consciousness of their identity- as they have done ever since.
Noah’s salvation, however,  and the saving of his companions, human and animal, is equally dramatic and the destruction more drastic, as the waters pour down from the sky and well up from the earth beneath; this is the reversal of the first acts of creation. It is the return of disorder and watery chaos. God’s creative force had been his spirit, a fresh breeze moving over the face of the water, and later breathing life into the nostrils of his new creatures. The Flood has expelled that breath and it is bloated corpses that float on the surface of the water, a terrifying reminder to the cooped up animals and men on the Ark, drifting on a sea with no coasts or islands.
Frightened though Noah and his family must have been in the Ark, they must also have been acutely aware that they were a chosen few and they must have had confidence too. The nature of the Ark itself perhaps helps to understand why. An “Ark” is not the standard word for a boat or ship; it means a box or chest and by far the most famous Ark is the Ark of the Covenant; that which contained the tables of the Law brought down by Moses from Sinai. It was the holiest object of the Israelite people; the physical evidence of the covenant between God and his people and constructed like Noah’s Ark to very precise divine specifications. Along with the lucky pairs of animals Noah’s Ark carries the hope for mankind just as the Ark of the Covenant does, symbolising the promise between God and his people.  The essence of the Law that expressed and realised that covenant was respect; respect for the order of creation in all it aspects, most obvious, in the Ten Commandments, social order but also respect for biological and geological order. Those early river civilisations new how fragile the ecological balance was; and we have learnt this too.
So the story of the Flood has resonances with our own predicament; the parallels between the Flood and the reality of global warming and rising seas is plain. Perhaps less obviously the Flood is metaphor for the social disasters on the brink of which we are teetering; I mean the growing chasm between the rich and the poor;  between the northern and southern hemispheres; and the West’s inability to engage at all constructively with the notion that not every society accepts our materialist values.  The little community in the Ark puts me in mind too of our privileged position in this comparatively wealthy community in Hampstead- and extending it further, in Britain and the developed world.  Noah and his crew, like us, must have felt relieved but anxious too; would there be enough fodder to fill the troughs which the animals crowd round in the increasingly foetid air? Would the Flood really subside and what sort of world would remain? We continue to enjoy our prosperity but increasingly wonder what will happen when the water and air, never mind the oil, have run out?
Alongside these anxieties in the Ark there must have been other feelings of remorse, guilt and unfairness over friends and families left behind, their fate only too evident floating the sea around them. However, despite the anxieties, and frustrations of their cooped up life, the Ark also contained hope. Noah and his family knew they were to be saved and carried with them the promise of new life. They were the contents of the box carrying God’s covenant .
There is a sense of unfairness and unmerited selection in all miracles; did Tabitha’s good works and skill as a seamstress make her deserving of resuscitation? If, and to the extent that we have achieved, by the grace of God, some measure of salvation, as John’s community clearly felt it had, we can only think that like the floating zoo, we are just lucky. That sense of luck may bring a feeling of guilt; more positively, it makes us grateful and the expression of our thanks should be shaped by hope and promise. We are each of us an Ark, carrying the seeds of the Kingdom, capable in some small, and perhaps some great, way of starting new life and sharing in the creation of a new world. In this way selection, or good luck, carries with it a sense of purpose.
For Noah the seal on the promise and the sign of hope is the rainbow; brilliance grace and colour linking earth and sea and sky. Its simple beauty and order are the antithesis of the turbulent and lifeless darkness and chaos which it promises will never return. But as Noah must have known rainbows occur before or after a storm; they are reminders of that watery chaos and the precariousness of our position just as they remind us of the rain that sustains life and growth.
 For us the promise and hope for life are sealed by the resurrection; through it we have the confidence that life has a meaning beyond the cycle of decay and regeneration, beyond the failures of human enterprise and despite the horrible cruelty man inflicts on his fellow creatures and damage he does the world his home. Like the risen Christ, the rainbow is a sign of hope, elusive and recognised only gradually, but once seen, brilliantly clear, albeit fleeting and intangible. The resurrected Christ and the rainbow share a dream like quality; a dream that may dispel those nightmares and inspire us to strive for new life. Like the tablets of the Law in the other Ark, and like the harmony and respect that must have existed among the animals in Noah’s little zoo, that new life will be based on respect for our place in creation and the value in our creator’s eyes of all his creatures. That new life will release us from suffocating materialism and excess; draw us out of the sink of greed and the whirlpool of envy; and anger; it will enable us to live, and to help others to live, as God created us to live. Amen.