By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
St. Stephen Presbyterian Church
Fort Worth, TX
February 26, 2012
You probably remember the discussions between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell after Hurricane Katrina about their belief that this natural disaster had hit New Orleans because of the city’s acceptance of gays and lesbians but also because of their sexual immorality in general. Their perspective was of course offensive at many levels, but it also reflects some pretty commonly-held notions about how God has ordered the universe. Basically the notion is that God has ordered things on a reward-and-punishment system. Bad natural occurrences, like earthquakes or famines or hurricanes, are sent as punishment by God for our moral misbehavior; likewise good things like a successful crop or a child born healthy and whole are the results of good behavior.
Deep down, there’s a level where all of us think this way: that there’s some kind of karmic proportionality between our actions the behavior of nature.
Certainly the story of the Great Flood in the Old Testament begins from that presumption. Humanity has gotten so bad, so evil, so willful, that God has had it with them. God wants to wipe out the whole rotten mess and start over from scratch. So God sends a great flood, but decides to warn Noah, the only righteous man on earth, so that he can build a boat to save his family and the male and female of every single animal on earth
This is the ultimate example of what we in seminary called DER—Divine Earthly Retribution. The God of Justice leans toward vengeance and harshness.
We sometimes take a perverse pleasure in thinking of God this way. This is the God who punishes the wicked—by which we generally mean someone other than ourselves—but who also watches us, too, with strict scrutiny and punishes us for any lapses.
The God of the Flood is also the God we Christians dismiss when we talk about how the Old Testament God isn’t as good or kind as the New Testament God, by which we mean Jesus. And it’s true that many of Jesus’ teachings go exactly against this “Divine Earthly Retribution” way of thinking about God. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” Jesus taught, “so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. For God makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust” (Matt. 5:44-5).
And when Jesus was asked whether people who’d suffered a terrible death at Pilate’s hand were being punished because of their sin, He dismissed it as an arrogant question. “Do you think those Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you: but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the Tower of Siloam fell and killed them: do you think they were worse sinners than all the offenders in Jerusalem? No, I tell you: but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13: 3-5).
Basically what He’s saying is that, If God engaged in Divine Earthly Retribution, all of us would be punished in some horrible way, just like what happened in the story of the Flood. But that’s not how God operates. God makes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on the just and the unjust, without regard to whether they actually deserve either to be flooded or to enjoy a beautiful Spring day. The God Jesus stands for is not the God of the flood, the God of disaster and Divine Earthly Retribution. It is the God of freedom; it is the God of repentance; it is the God of second chances.
And it is also most certainly the God of the Old Testament.
Jesus is standing up for the belief system of this exact Old Testament passage that we read today, the passage about the Covenant of the Rainbow. In this passage, God makes a covenant, not just with humanity, but with the whole earth, with all creatures great and small: God will not use the forces of nature to exact punishment on human beings because of our sins. Biblical Scholar Gerhard von Rad calls this an example of “prevenient grace”—because of this covenant, God has promised that human beings have the freedom to act morally or immorally, in a godly or an ungodly fashion, without the fear of divine retribution. If there is retribution, it will be through history: there will be human consequences to human behavior.
This is good news: God has ordered nature in such a way that we are free to make our choices for good or ill. Think about it: if such a “prevenient Grace” did not exist, human freedom would be sorely constrained. If the world existed on a “reward and punishment” system, it would be obvious that good behavior returned a reward, so everybody would be good. We wouldn’t be free to choose, because only a fool would choose evil.
But still, we fear that there is some kind of cosmic scale in which God weighs the good against the bad. Many of us have worried occasionally that God will once again be exasperated by human folly and just want to blow the whole thing up. We see how bad man’s inhumanity to man and beast gets, and wonder how long God can let this go on without just saying, “I’ve had it! I’m mad as heck and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” And the rains start to pour down and the flooding begins.
God won’t do that. God doesn’t do that. God has set the rainbow in the sky to seal his promise, made to humans and to all creatures on earth. The bow was to ancient people a symbol of war, and God has set the bow in the sky to say, “I’m not at war with my creation. My creation is free. I will not punish them.”
Of course, there’s a BUT. There’s always a BUT, right?
We are free. God will not punish us, at least not through natural disasters like earthquakes and famine. But God won’t necessarily get us out of any holes we dig for ourselves, either. To paraphrase Spider-man, “With great freedom comes great responsibility.” God frees us to split the atom. We have all the possibilities that nuclear power offers us. But we also have the risks. We could, and do, pollute the environment with nuclear waste. We have turned this power source into a weapon that’s now so prevalent it could blow us all to Kingdom Come. If there’s another worldwide disaster like Noah’s flood, then we will likely have brought it on ourselves.
We do not talk enough in the church about human freedom and its full implications under God. Human freedom is this amazing gift freely given us by God before we have a chance to earn it. But we often misunderstand freedom to mean that we can do whatever we want. At one level, it means exactly that. We can do what we want, and don’t need to worry about divine punishment raining down from the sky.
But we do have to worry about natural consequences.
There is a disturbing reason we sometimes like to invoke God’s name. It is to absolve ourselves of responsibility. We cynically call a disaster like Katrina an act of God, as a way of minimizing the responsibility of the New Orleans’ Army Corps of Engineers who didn’t build a levy system well enough, or of police officers who abandoned their posts, or of elected officials’ poor disaster response, or of FEMA’s complete incompetence. It was God’s will, we say. No, it wasn’t. It was human sin. And it was specific, cause-and-effect human sin, not something we can say was caused by the city’s quote immorality unquote.
God gives us freedom, but it is responsible, adult freedom, and we do not take it seriously enough if we don’t take human sin seriously enough. Human sin isn’t something somebody else is doing. It’s something you and I are doing. Our freedom will become willful and self-indulgent and self-justifying if we start to believe that somehow we ourselves are not at fault, but somebody else is.
Here’s another “God” mistake we make. We believe that if we are engaged in foolish or sinful behavior, but don’t experience the natural consequence of our behavior, it must be because God doesn’t care, or maybe even God is on our side. Nazi Germany made that mistake. For years, Hitler engaged in politically and militarily foolhardy behavior without experiencing the consequences people predicted. Hitler and Germany believed that God was therefore on their side.
Mistake. The hammer fell, and hard.
God sometimes gives us an extended grace period so that we can reconsider our behavior. But we’re mistaken to think that’s the same as a blessing. It’s just one last chance to repent.
In fact, these curious periods of extended grace are another example of the “prevenient grace” of God’s covenant with Noah. An important part of this covenant is that God gives us another chance. And another. And another.
The great terror of the flood was not only that disaster had befallen, but that it was ultimate disaster. God seemed intent on destroying all of creation and just starting over again. God had given up. That’s how it seemed.
Turned out, God hadn’t given up. God saved a remnant. God gave creation a second chance. And this covenant says, God continues to give us second chances. God enables us to learn from our mistakes. New Orleans has had an opportunity to improve its levy system and its emergency response. FEMA has had to take a hard look at itself and learn from its mistakes.
Part of our incredible freedom is that God gives us the grace to learn from our mistakes. God gives us the possibility of repenting of our sins. We’ve polluted our world, and continue to do so. We have sinned against God’s covenant with us and creation. But the world hasn’t ended yet. Are we learning from our mistakes? Have we at least begun to repent of our sinful self-involvement that makes us think of nature as a resource we can use and throw away rather than our partner in a covenant that God has made with all creation?
God’s gracious promise is that, God will keep giving us another chance—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences to our intransigence. As long as we keep avoiding responsibility, things are only going to get worse.
But if we do what’s right, the covenant promises a multiplier effect that we may not see, but which is real nonetheless. If we, in our freedom, act in good and faithful and loving and just and godly ways, then we’re playing a key part in God’s salvation history. Remember, this is how God acts in the world: God acts through history. That means: God acts through us, through you and me, through the church, through people trying their best to do right by God and their neighbor and the creation over which God has made us stewards.
Sure, human freedom provides us ample opportunity to do things wrong—but God also gives us chance after chance to learn from our mistakes. And human freedom also gives us the opportunity to get it right, and blesses the good that we do in ways we often don’t see.
That too is part of this covenant. Bad things happen to good people, it’s a part of life; but good things happen to people too, and while God doesn’t shield us from the bad things, God has a tendency to bless the good things to do more good than we can imagine.
All in all, the covenant God made with creation after the flood is a covenant that is heavily stacked in our favor. It’s a covenant that allows us to act as free agents in God’s creation. But it’s also a covenant that requires us to take responsibility for the choices we make in our God-given freedom.
The Good News is God has made us free. But freedom always comes with responsibility. Which is also good news, because apparently God has taken the chance of trusting us.