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After the creation of humans, they were fruitful, they multiplied, and they were noisy. They were so noisy that Enlil, far off in the realm of the gods, couldn’t sleep, so he sent a plague. One wise and bold human Atrahasis advocates to the Enki and Namtar, the god of plagues and gets them to stop, but by then, the noisy population had been decreased and was less noisy, and Enlil could sleep. Until another 1200 years past and humans were fruitful and multiplied, and were so noisy that Enlil couldn’t sleep, so he has Adad, god of thunder to withhold the rains so a drought reduces the population of humans. Atrahasis, still alive, advocates for humanity to Enki and rains return. But enough people did not survive the drought and Enlil sleeps in peace… for 1200 years, but in that time the humans were fruitful and multiple again, Enlil couldn’t sleep due to their noise. And decides this time he will solve his problem once and for all with a flood, but he makes a fundamental mistake, Enki finds out about this plan. And Enki goes to the still living Atrahasis and warns him. And before Adad starts the storm, Atrahasis makes a reed boat, fills it with his family, and a bunch of animals. The human race persists.

It is easy for us to call that a religious myth, an Akkadian Sumarian epic of gods and flood from 4000 years ago, a religion and a people that have been dead 3000 years, because our understanding of myth is that which isn’t true.

So… how does it feel we call our reading today “religious myth?” Can a living tradition have religious myths? Do they have to have some lesson in them because I have to say, I’m very glad that I don’t have to figure out how to write a sermon about a god who really needs a nap.

This isn’t really how most would start a sermon, I understand. But, as we start this round of the Narrative Lectionary, at this time in history with the easy access to information and that anyone can say anything on the internet, claiming it is true, I wanted to remind us that we are a community that takes the Bible seriously, but not literally; that the stories are important enough to hold as sacred, and to challenge, and to ask questions; that the bible was written by and for people who were of a different time, place, and culture that is completely foreign to us; and that humans are growing, become, and in many ways the same as they have always been so they are stories of us too–there is still truth in them.

The story of Atrahasis was based in the ancient Mesopetamia, which looked completely different thousands of years ago, with regular flooding and glacial levels rising. It must have sometimes seemed like the world was ending. It might have lived in the global consciousness and stories of of the people, passed down through trade and bards, and with names and places and languages changed, and until it came to us, as we have it.

Genesis 6:5-22 doesn’t ease us into anything. We’re told every inclination of the human heart, only evil, continually and that all the the earth filled with violence. And God — grieved, was heartbroken that God that all that God has made wasn’t turning out like God planned. Like maybe it’s medieval Europe and you want a picture of a cat… and what you get is a medieval cat nightmare. Or like a parent whose child does something outside of what you taught them, in a bad way, and the parent say: I’m not angry, just disappointed.

Here’s something I noticed working through this passage this week: the word “earth” shows up again and again in these verses. The earth was corrupt. The earth was filled with violence. God saw that the earth was corrupt. It might seem redundant but it’s important to storytelling and story listening–we wouldn’t want you to miss it or think the earth isn’t important. This isn’t only sin tucked away inside individual human hearts it’s gotten into the ground, into the water table, into the air. The whole structure has become compromised.

Every fall we start with creation, in a 4 year cycle. Genesis 2 where God molds the mud-creature and breathes life into them. Genesis 3 that reveals humans desire for more, to be more like gods. And Genesis 1 when all is welter and waste, and water covers the earth. And God separates the waters with some above and some below, creating structures to hold by the waters of chaos so that life can come forth. Maybe there was a leak in the door dripping the waters of chaos onto the earth, maybe some of the waters of chaos were oozing through the gates. Maybe God opening the gates and the doors that hold back the waters of chaos were the inevitable end of the actions of the humans, of the broken-ness of creation. Maybe it’s like an artist seeing the painting of a cat, hating it, and painting over it. Or collapsing clay on the wheel when the jar doesn’t work out. God unlocking a door and letting the old chaos back in is un-creation. The structure God built is collapsing back into what it was before God ever spoke order into it.

I don’t think I need to convince anybody in this room that we know what that feels like.

This has been a catastrophic stretch of years. I mean that in the most literal sense — catastrophe, an overturning. Some of it really is water and wind and fire: storms wrecking towns that used to feel permanent, weather that used to be “once in a generation” showing up every other summer.

But so much of what’s felt catastrophic lately isn’t weather at all. It’s what we’ve done to each other. Research funding that used to go toward keeping mothers and babies alive gets quietly redirected. Trans folks and the wider LGBTQ+ community watch protections disappear one by one and find the door to basic healthcare closing, particularly for children, while also ending the suicide prevention hotline. Women die — even women who wanted their pregnancies, who wanted to become mothers — because somebody decided a hospital shouldn’t act until they can say the mother’s life is actively at risk, dying,  and by then it’s too late. There have been 7 black people in this country who have been found hanging from trees, and 3 young black men who died under suspicious circumstances while with their white friends; and the case gets closed within days, and families are told not to ask too many questions.

That we have taken on what Divine like powers laying waste to communities. Every few generations right now. It is again that those who practice Islam are not real. Americans don’t have a place here. In the ’40s those are Japanese descent and who practiced Buddhism because Buddhist could not be real Americans and we, the collective weed who represent the powers powerful lay waist to communities, overwhelm them like a flood, the band of them, and the Waters clear

It can start to feel like the ground itself is corrupt, down to  the water table.

And underneath a lot of it, I think, is something this text names better than I can: entrenchment. “Every inclination of the thoughts of their heart was only evil continually.” We might picture mustache-twirling villains when I read that. I don’t think that’s what it’s describing anymore. Maybe it’s describing a people who have gotten so certain, so dug into their own right-ness, their own dogma, their own side, that they’ve stopped being able to see the humanity of the person standing right next to them. That’s not always obviously villainous. It might look like sitting across the table from your own family and realize you can’t finish a sentence about the news without somebody standing up and leaving the room, or yell a response because being the loudest means you’re right, or someone throwing the yams or fists.

Maybe that’s our wickedness, in days like these. Most of us are not cartoonishly cruel. But that we’ve let our certainty get so loud it drowns out the person in front of us, until we no longer see them as creature like us, but as other, dispensable, a problem. It doesn’t always happen but it does, and it can, in large, institutional, and catastrophic way, and in small, day to day, often non-reflected by us ways.

And we might wonder what made Noah so special that he could be saved, that God decided not to follow through with destroying everything but save Noah, his family, and give them responsibility for creatures. Genesis 6:9 tells us Noah was righteous, blameless, walked with God. Sounds like Noah earned his spot on the ark — good behavior, good outcome.

Except — before any of that. Before “righteous,” before “blameless” — Noah found favor/grace in the eyes of the Lord. Which, could mean that God gave favor to Noah for reasons we’re not really clear on, or, maybe, Noah looked into the eyes of God and saw grace. Noah looked at the God made creation that seems to be soaking in corruption and evil and violence, and yet found grace in it. Wouldn’t it be interesting if it was less about being favored by God, but seeing there was yet something good in God and the creation that God first called God.

Because God’s plans change over the course of the story from planning to start over from scratch to saving Noah, his family, and the animals. And when the rain has ended and the waters finally receded, God’s promise was to never do that again–whether the chaos starts leaking out again, if the people contaminate the land, if the earth and the creatures on it are broken, God’s promise isn’t to just not flood the earth again, it’s to deal with this creation differently. God saw that humans are going to be drawn to the wickedness, and instead of giving up, God chose in that moment to live with, to work with, to continue to participate in the world, with all the creatures, with us humans, as we are.

So God places their weapon on the wall or dome of creation. God hung their bow for it to never to picked up again. And its intent is to serve as a reminder to God, not to us (although it is) of God’s promise saying, “I am choosing, permanently, to stay bound to this fractured, still-flawed planet.”

The covenant is not just with Noah’s family. Not just the people who did it right. But with every living creature, and the earth itself. The birds. The livestock. The things that crawl. For every generation that would come. With us too. The whole fractured web of it, wrapped into one promise. God didn’t wait for us to stop being entrenched with each other before deciding we were worth binding to.

I wish I could say that the good news of this story is that God is going to swoop in and fix the ecological crisis, or stop the next storm, or personally close every unjust courthouse. That’s not what this covenant promises. What it promises is presence. God says: whatever comes, I am staying bound to you. Not to the sanitized version of you. To this version — entrenched, frightened, sometimes cruel to each other.

But here’s what I keep coming back to. In one of the commentaries I read this week, there was a line I couldn’t shake: God handed the problem of violence back to us. God isn’t going to solve human cruelty with another flood — that experiment failed, and God says so, plainly. So the work of curbing violence, of tending peace like an olive tree, of seeing, holding, acknowledging  each other’s humanity again — that work belongs to Noah’s family now. It belongs to us.

The things that divide us, that devastate us, that fracture the earth, the dehumanize, that have left us entrenched isn’t agreement, isn’t accepting the worst or lies from other people in a way to “keep the peace,” that isn’t real peace. I learned from the Musical Rent that the opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation. But I might take it further, it’s creation of community–with our neighbors near and far, those like us and especially those not like us, with the creatures of the earth that fly, crawl, swim and run, with the grasses, trees, dirt and sky, with the creator who hasn’t given up on us. It means we stay too, when it is easy to grab our weapons–be they our judgment, harsh words, hands, anger, indifference. We create community by leaving them hung up on the wall and staying.

That is how we counter the wickedness of this world, that is how we participate in the kin-dom of God, that is how we live into this covenant with God–how we learn to live well with each other and all of creation, with the whole fractured world, we create community, together, by rising up side by side, restraining greedy hands, working till the earth is whole again. That’s the shape of covenant life on this side of the flood. Not certainty. Not being right. Staying bound to each other, and to this fractured, beautiful, still-flooding world — the way God stayed bound to us.

Tender shoots spring up from the mud. Repairs get planned. Helpers come to lend a hand. And beauty blossoms out from the bud.