Every time someone talks to me about how bad our world is I point them to two places that have served to give me some perspective. One place is the books of Charles Dickens within which the upright and self righteous Victorians are revealed as cruel and ambivalent towards the great suffering of many on their doorsteps. The other book I point people to is a short book of George Orwell’s letters written from England to a friend in America during the second world war. We look around today and indeed we mourn the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan but still nothing we face fills us with the apprehension that pervades Orwell’s letters. In the letters Orwell is not fearful but the uncertainty of the outcome haunts every word. When we watch “Saving Private Ryan” it is from the perspective of knowing the good guys win - Orwell did not know the future but could only hope that right would prevail. It was not a happy time.
So the world is not necesserily worse than yesterday but it is, it seems, unrelentingly bad. Something at the core of the world pulls it back again and again towards the evil action or the cruel work.
That world is the world of Noah. It is the world God looks at and says enough!
17I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. 18 But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark.
I can tell you now that I will not do justice to the story of Noah. In words the story of Noah and the ark is about the same length as the story of the creation. Strange to think that Moses in writing the early bible spent as much time on Noah as Adam and Eve. So I will not do the story justice but I will ask you to think over just a couple of quick points.
First, the story here should convince us of God’s intention to forever have a relationship with mankind. Even in the face of ultimate judgement God searches out the few, those who have not bowed the knee, and saves them by his specific and all powerful act. The deluge overwhelms the world but a few are chosen to keep the secret of God’s ultimate purpose. This thought has comforted Christians for centuries and it has provided for Christian communities a purpose for their existence. We often over complicate our Christian purpose - even at Crosspoint. What the story of the flood tells us is that wherever we are we are called to be those few who honor God and who bear witness to Him in the world in whatever community we are placed within. Everything else is just stuff that gets in the way.
Second, God makes his covenant with Noah. This theme we will return to for no other reason that the bible again and again returns to this theme. The promise God made to Noah, his covenant, was to save him from the deluge and establish his family on the other side of the flood. How this covenant of salvation works is of course wholly at God’s prerogative, completely an act of his will. God chooses the family he wants to bear witness too him. He then gives them the means of their protection and finally establishes them in posterity. God’s covenant is consecrated in God’s mighty acts. As I said in my last post God’s covenant is a bit like him taking out a mortgage for us and on top of that making the payments on our behalf. That is both humbling and encouraging at the same time. The story of the ark is just one of these payments.
Oh, and a third thought occurs to me. Why are the animals in the ark? Because somehow, even if we are obviously at the head of creation, the creation is not the creation without those creatures. I think this detail is important. We are tempted to see the relationship we have with God in metaphysical terms, like it exists only in our head. But this story seems to tell us that we need land and animals to really be at one with God. We need the creation - in its entirety -to know and understand the creator.
The story ends with God communicating again that he will establish his covenant with the whole of creation. This act of ultimate judgement would never again happen.
8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: 13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16 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.”
17 So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”
Every time I see a rainbow I think of God’s promise and the days I will spend in heaven - we live for ever after the deluge.
There is a lot of talk about worship. What kind of music should be played, what form and style of service is best suited for the church, what is best pleasing to God, and what is best pleasing to us. We confuse the idea of worship with singing, and we turn the focus of our attention to our preferences and what is pleasing to us. We define and re-define worship to accommodate ourselves. 
The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who has a strange fruit tree in his yard. When he was given the land by his father he was warned to leave the tree alone or it would overgrow the whole garden. The man lived there alone for a while, but he was lonely, so he fell in love and was married to a beautiful woman.
