ADRIFT ON A SEA OF UNCERTAINTY

Genesis 7:1-24

 ¹ The LORD then said to Noah, "Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. ² Take with you seven^] of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, ³ and also seven of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth. ⁴ Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made."

 ⁵ And Noah did all that the LORD commanded him.

 ⁶ Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth. ⁷ And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons' wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. ⁸ Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, ⁹ male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah. ¹⁰ And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.

 ¹¹ In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. ¹² And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

 ¹³ On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark. ¹⁴ They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings. ¹⁵ Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark. ¹⁶ The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah. Then the LORD shut him in.

¹⁷ For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. ¹⁸ The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. ¹⁹ They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. ²⁰ The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet.²¹ Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. ²² Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. ²³ Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.

 ²⁴ The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

Outline

  I.   Those adrift in Noah’s time

II.   Adrift through the centuries

III. You are not adrift.

Introduction

Many of you have seen the TV program “Lost”.   A number of survivors from a plane crash on an undisclosed island,  each with a past that is less than savory, are confronted every week with a new crisis that brings them death or destruction or disaster.  An unseen evil which is never disclosed looms in the background, offering fertile fodder for more episodes of, well, death and destruction and even more evil.  It’s a mystery that fascinates millions of viewers. It’s a story of broken lives awash on an island of uncertainty. It’s never-ending!

With that in mind, let’s consider the theme,

     ADRIFT ON A SEA OF UNCERTAINTY

I. Adrift in Noah’s Day

You all know the story of Noah. His grandfather was Mathuselah. His father was Lamech who named him Noah which means “comfort" or "rest” in Hebrew, because, as a baby, Noah, comforted him as he labored to work the ground that had been cursed due to the sin of Adam and Eve.  Noah had three sons, named SHEM, HAM, and JAPHETH  mentioned in the text.

You know the story: it rained 40 days and nights, an undisclosed number of animal pairs were placed aboard, the ark lifted up and floated away and all the wicked were killed.

God said of Noah “I have found you righteous in this generation”. In Genesis 6:9, we read "Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time." Now the word "blameless" doesn't mean sinless. It literally means "uncontaminated."  He was unsullied by the rampant sin around him.   “By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.”  (Hebrews 11:7).

Noah’s world was adrift in uncertainly.  It was a world gone mad – a world unimaginably evil. Corruption was the norm. Mankind was lost on island earth with no hope and no purpose.

Even their thoughts were a constant mental stream of evil. They had already drowned everything good. They lived in blissfully in their moral decay, eating and drinking and going to weddings and living out their corrupt purposeless lives.

Amid this lawlessness, Noah appears. He distinguishes himself as a preacher, railing against the godlessness around him and pointing to the salvation at hand.  He brings hope. If only people would listen.  The ungodly are given chance after chance.

By faith in God he breaks step with the tempo of the times and offers a permanent solution to the sinning around him.  He marches to another drumbeat.  He embraces a deep faith in the one true God.

He knew the unrighteous could be saved if they repented. He knew that God is merciful. He followed the path of most resistance; a path that today still distinguishes the faithful.  He had a faith that St. Paul refers to when he says of Christians that they ….”shine as the stars in the universe, amidst a crooked and depraved generation”. (Phil. 2:14-15)

By faith Noah followed a seemingly frivolous path.  For one hundred years he built an ark. Scoffers came and went. He was probably tagged a lunatic. “You’re building a what?” But he preached, prayed, built and believed.

So God, after over a hundred years of warnings,  brought the deluge to cleanse the earth.  The warning period lasted over 100 years. 

But, just for a moment, don’t you imagine that Noah himself had periods of uncertainty?  Don’t you suppose he felt alone at times and asked himself, “Why am I doing this?”  It’s not unlike the faithful of all ages. Satan, the world and our corrupt flesh intrude on our thought and cast us adrift on that same sea of uncertainty, lostness, and hopelessness.  Noah prevailed however.

II. Adrift through the ages

The history of man is one of repeated drifting from God or outright denial of God. Like Noah, Abel and Enoch and Abraham and Moses Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, the children of Israel in the desert, all faced the moral decay of their times.

In fact, some of the faithful themselves like Aaron, Joseph’s

brothers,  and David, were joint partakers in the evil around them.

The history of the world is one of godlessness, war, pleasure seeking.  The calamity of the universal flood,  the sins of Egypt, of Sodom and Gomorrah, of Babel,  of the wanderings and disobedience of the children of Israel,  the Babylonian captivity,  and later, the Mongolian hordes, the Germanic tribes, the Greeks, Romans all were the same.  Corruption abounds.

 By faith Lot was saved, Abraham, and Isaac, and Moses and the children of Israel were delivered from the depravity of the world around them.  Time after time in the course of history, the world has been offered the cleansing and redeeming power of God and has rejected it.

What’s this?  Segue a few millennia ahead to our era and guess what?  The same age-old problems again.  The same all-encompassing flaw that faced the ancients still faces us.

There’s nothing new under the sun.  Same situations, different people.  Same old sins, different millennium.

The world doesn’t change.  The flood changed the physical earth, but the reality of sin was not washed away.  Its still there. People are still adrift on a sea of uncertainty.

Noah’s era has been revisited  by every subsequent generation that followed him.  In my life time we have been through three major wars, wars of evil and destruction, of genocide and hatred and fear and depravity.

Still, people do not change.  We improve our technology and so often it makes evil more available and more readily applicable.  The internet spreads porn, offers access to terrorists, tells us how to make bombs, preys on our children, and brings corruption into our homes and businesses. War brings profiteering. Peace brings

a people that soften with pleasure and self-indulgence. Neither war nor peace offers us a sin-free society.

The calamity of four major wars in this century has not brought a return to God.   Calamity is never a consistent path to Christianity. It has been said that there are no atheists on the battle field, but, alas, the battlefield experience so easily yields to the life of armchair convenience and complacency.

III. Are We Adrift today?

Are you adrift today?

Just last week, I had a couple of those episodes of when I asked my self,   “What am I doing here Wouldn’t it be easier to settle into the glorious obscurity of retirement and forget the work load of Trinity?  Why am I doing all this? Where am I going?” 

In some way, I bet everyone here has asked that question: “Where am I going. What’s it all about.”There as so many “fun things” out there. Why am I going to church and meetings and gatherings?  There’s so much in this age of technology that could offer me more.  Movies and music and travel and, well, lots of things out there are exciting and offer new horizons of life and experience.

To paraphrase Cindi Lauper, “we just wanna have fun.”

Look what the church costs me in time and money.

Could I use all of that elsewhere for “the good life”?

But then, the still small voice of faith answers my query and

I know that I have a purpose.  Faith drives me.  God has a plan for me.

God separates us from the raging evil about us.  He protects us in the faith of the Gospel. We are different.  The world rages with hate, greed, war, violence, gluttony, and rampant pornography and genocide abound.

As that abounds, Christ comforts us with the knowledge that  He came that we might have life and that we might have it more abundantly. He means NOW.  His peace reigns NOW in this

world that’s drifting toward destruction.

Just as Noah and all the faithful before and since him have done, we WEREfaithful this week.You’re here!  By faith in our Lord, we survived the week.  By faith we survived ourselves.  By faith we survived the sea of uncertainty around us and the deterioration that pure pleasure brings.  We survived and revived to carry on in service to others and to God.

We are uncontaminated by the sin around us.  We have been

found to be righteous, just as Noah was.  We have been cleansed and been made holy by our Lord.

In this Lenten season we again realize that the gathered storm of doubt and servile pleasure, the sin that plagues us and is resident in our entire being, has been washed away by the blood of the Lamb.  We are at peace.  We are able to fight that internal struggle that comes to us every day through faith in his sacrifice for us.  “ For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39)

So it was that eight people climbed aboard a boat laden with an undisclosed number of animals. As time passes, the stench of corpses floating in the sea surrounded them. Conditions must have been dreadful on the ark full of animals and their waste.  Yet, despite the dreariness of that cramped and seemingly pointless journey,  their faith prevailed.  They became the generation that repopulated the world – a world cleansed, for the time, of overt evil.   

It’s a simple story.  It’s a powerful witness.  A boat adrift on water saves eight and countless animal pairs.  It also prepares to understand the forgiveness that water offers in baptism. - eternal life and salvation through the the atoning work of Christ. 

It is soul-pleasing to realize that wood and water figure so prominently in our salvation.  By a tree in the garden mankind was felled.  By a tree in the wilderness the children of Israel were saved from fiery serpents.  On a tree the Savior of our souls suffered brutal physical and spiritual pain life and to deliver us from the pangs of our original sin and present us spotless before God. 

Water, the staff of life.  Water, the primary component of our bodies. Water, the universal solvent.  Water, the vehicle of our forgiveness in and with the Word. As faith carried Noah and his family to safety on water, so faith in and with the water of baptism forgives and carries us through this sea of sins uncertainty to peace and forgiveness in Christ.

Noah and his family weren’t perfect, yet through the provision of our God they survived. 

The lesson is simple. Through that same faith YOU can survive.  Whenever you are assailed by the enemies of our God, remember them!  Whenever you are depressed and feeling like

giving up.  Remember them!  Whenever people press you or doubts assail you, YOU can survive.

In our text we read “And NOAH did ALL (not most, but ALL) that the Lord commanded him."  Unlike many so-called Christian preachers  today who pick and choose which commands of God they will apply to their lives and excise sin so they can be comfortable in their material lives, Noah embraced the kind of love for God that Jesus described in John 14 when He said, "If you love Me, you will OBEY what I command."

You have that same ability.  You have that same surety.

You can mimic that righteous life.  Just as Noah walked with

God, so do you.  The sacrifice of our Savior guaranteed that.

You are not adrift, lost, confused.  That episode in your life is

closed. Through the righteousness of Christ, you obey his commands like Noah.

Noah's life shows us that true faith has its only basis in God’s Word and in the sacrifice of His Son.  The reliance on our Lord is backed up through that precious gift of faith.

When you live by faith, it is evident in your life. Faith is invisible but its workings aren’t.  People notice.  You are different, because “The just shall live by his faith”.

Luther once said, “God our Father has made all things depend on faith so that whoever has faith will have everything, and whoever does not have faith will have nothing.“

That faith expresses itself in action – participating in the life of the church, in meetings, services to others, celebration of the sacrament, coming to church, and helping as the body of Christ to care for souls, to reach out to the lost of our generation.

The lost on island earth. 

We see that storms like Noah endured stretch and mature our faith in God. We ALL have storms: marital conflicts, disobedient children, discord at work, economic loses, and a whole host of other problems which test our faith.  Reflect on them a moment.

I bet your still thinking about what I said earlier, about that “Why and What for” moment you had this past week.

I bet you realize that you were able to survive because of that

simple faith.  It is the faith of our fathers.  It is the faith of all the patriarchs, martyrs, persecuted, and true believers that have gone before us and those who share island earth with you today.

It is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” 

That faith sustains us day by day as we live in a world adrift in a sea of uncertainty, of separation from God.

It is interesting that there is no parallel with the flood in the history of man.  ALL the evil generation of Noah’s time was lost.  In subsequent wars and disasters throughout the ages, the good and the bad have both perished together, because God promised never to visit man with a universal disaster again. 

The ark reminds us that on the last day the world will again suffer a cosmic tragedy, not by water but by fire.

The people of Lost are adrift.  Many from our world today are lost and adrift.   You will never be lost because that same simple faith, will sustain you.  It has been purchased at a great price, the blood of the Lamb, Jesus Christ.  It offers us safe passage through the storms of life and eternal peace.

You know, as I look up at the roof of the church, I cannot but help think of Noah.  The body of the church is called the nave which means “ship” in Latin.  Whoever name it, probably did so because the roof rafters remind you of an inverted boat.  Whatever it origin, the nave still reminds of the ark and the flood – the ark that saved. The ark that pointed to our purification through baptism.

and the Word incarnate who became the salvation for all.

It is that redemption that we celebrate during this Lenten season.

The church has always been a symbol and place of refuge, reminding us that our God  is always here.  He is our refuge and strength. He protects, guards, guides us and is the gauge for our good works and our power to spread the Gospel.  In this world adrift in sin, as he sustains the good and the evil in their daily

concourse of life, He also expects us, like Noah, to preach repentence.

I feel safe here. I am not lost. I am not adrift. As water saved in the

past, I am reminded of the glorious future that awaits: Isaiah 35:10, “and the ransomed of the LORD will return. They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads.  Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.”  That’s our legacy. Our future is assured.

Even so, come Lord Jesus.

AND NOW MAY THE PEACE, FAITH AND HOPE OF CHRIST THE SACRIFICE FOR ALL BE WITH YOU ALL THROUGH THE COMING WEEK AND FOREVER.

Amen.