Readings: Genesis 7. 1-5, 11-18, 8.5-18, 9.8-13, Acts 9. 36-end, John 10. 22-30
The Easter season is the celebration of the New Creation which Christ inaugurated in his triumph over death; Christ is risen! We are risen! because we can share that risen life, and it as a community, as the body of the church that we do so.
The first creation story was carefully timed to a week and set in a specific garden; these features are echoed in Christ rising on the first day of the week and his tomb being set in a garden (and indeed his being mistaken for a gardener). But there seem to have been other creation myths about and the story of Noah, owes a lot to Mesopotamian creation myths in which the world emerges from a great flood. That is not of course so different from the first story in Genesis and while the origin of the story of the Ark and the flood may be older, it has been adapted be consistent with the first version; so God’s anger with his corrupted world leads him to reverse the first acts of creation; water pours down from heaven and shoots up from earth; the most fundamental elements are out of place; chaos returns. And the chaos extinguishes life by expelling breath. Water is deadly because nothing can breathe in it (except fish, of course, but nothing seems to be made of that), the creative spirit is expunged. Not quite however, like the breath of God moving over the waters, there is the Ark floating bravely containing the little family group, the community which is the germ that can set it all going again, once the destruction of the original order is complete.
Re-creation is not only aspect of Easter; equally it is the culmination of a salvation narrative; there are different views as to how Jesus death abandoned, betrayed and reviled should free us from the consequences of sin, but the mysterious reappearance of Jesus is plainly forgiving; however it happened, the risen Lord releases the disciples and us from merely living and allows us to be alive. The Ark is equally a story of salvation, although a rather more drastic one. It ends with God promising never to do the same again, although his sign of this covenant is strangely ephemeral; it’s difficult to think of anything more impermanent, rare and intangible, than a rainbow. It contrasts starkly with the cross, the sign adopted by the newly created Christians; the cross is solid and sinister and was everywhere to be seen in all its ghastliness. But in the end it is a more realistic a seal on redemption than the illusory rainbow.
These themes of recreation and reconciliation come together in what seems to me the real significance of the Ark; that it its sense of community.; There is a microcosm of community in Adam and Eve but in the Ark the seeds of new creation are an extended family of human beings and the animal kingdom put in their care. It’s as if the qualities needed to achieve a new creation need the soil of a community in which to stay alive; you couldn’t keep plants without soil, water and a little sunshine (though that must have been in short supply on the ark) so you can’t keep love alive without a community of some sort. It was that love, a facet of Noah’s faith that expressed itself in stewardship of the remains of creation and the optimism to build a new world gain. This is not to suppose that it was easy; think especially of those three daughters- in- law cooped up for months on an unending family holiday in the rain with the doubtless formidable Mrs Noah. It’s the cruise from hell. Equally, of course, the community whether family or wider, is the necessary context for salvation, as it is for creation. It is by forgiving and being forgiven and accepted by our family, friends and neighbours that we can achieve the new life that salvation brings.
We can see something of this community as the context of new life in the odd little episode among the Joppa W.I.-or are they the Knitters and Natterers?-As we Noah, we see God’s awys as almost capricious-why should Tabitha be chosen? But he is but responsive to prayer, and even if there is death in a community there is resurrection too; in Joppa a very real, literal presence.
Who, charmed by the sight of spring lambs gambolling in the sunshine, has not wondered at the terrible fate in store for them as they develop into robotic sheep? . And yet the imagery of sheep and shepherds despite the grim economic reality of sheep farming is one of the most prevalent models for the ideal community, of Israel or the church. However, the point about sheep in John’s gospel, is their recognition of their master and perhaps too their somewhat unthinking desire to follow their leader. It is the ability of those few around Jesus who recognise him for what he is that distinguishes this community. Forget the sheep and all their unfortunate associations, and this is a convincing model for the Christian community. We may be different and respond very differently but the thing that holds us together, and defines us is the recognition of Jesus as the Son of God; that is the recognition that in his life, death and rising, his example and teaching show us what God is, and that it is something essentially alive and electric, something that brings us life.
Three different communities then in which we find God; three communities which though very different from ours, yet ones to which we can I think relate and feel the re-creative love of the resurrected Lord. Each is a bit introspective perhaps, one positively claustrophobic for a while, but each containing the seeds of future growth.
If these models of community mean anything to us then we need to look to ourselves and see how we are to grow- not necessarily simply by drawing more people into church, but nurturing and maturing our own experience and by seeing how we may be seeds of growth in the wider community about us. What better way of doing that that joining in London Citizens’ assembly on 28th April, where the concerns of the Kingdom can be put to those who want the be chosen to govern this city. Amen.