Sermon: The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost- June 21, 2026

"Noah's Ark for Adults", Topical Sermon

The Rev'd Cecil Patrick Perkins, The Rector 

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I speak to you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated. There are lots of good text in the lectionary this week. Lots of things that I would love to comment on, but I'm not going to. But I want to talk about something else that I've been thinking about this week during vacation Bible school. Many of you will be aware that we've had a very successful vacation Bible school, thanks to Dana for all your hard work. Dana's back there, so you'll have to tell her later. But I got the opportunity to play Noah this week and tell the story of Noah's Ark. And I told that story to our children at least 222 times. And I enjoyed every single one of them. And I even dressed up as Noah and wore this funky, chunky yarn wig that Debbie and Carrie Beth made for me that had as many holes that showed my scalp as it did dreadlocks. If you haven't seen the pictures, close your eyes and imagine a Rastafarian high priest midway through chemotherapy, and you will figure out exactly how I looked. But the more that I told the story over and over again, the more I had a question in my mind, the more I wondered how many adult Christians really ever get beyond a vacation Bible school's understanding of Noah's Ark. We learn it when we're little nose miners that we never really think about it again. We can tell the story, but do we understand why the story is there? Do we understand what it means? Now, I have run the gamut in American Christianity. Grew up fundamentalist, and now I'm an Episcopalian, I've been on both sides. And what I know from both sides about that story is that Christians in this country are so busy arguing about whether Noah's Ark is fact or fiction that they never really graduate from vacation Bible school. That's to say, they never come to a mature understanding of what the story was intended to teach. And this morning I want to suggest to you that American Christians have just been asking the wrong question. The crucial issue is not whether Noah's art is fact or fiction. The interpretation is pretty much the same one way or the other. What they need to be thinking about, the crucial issue to my thinking is what sort of literary genre is it? For you see, literary genre in the Bible doesn't necessarily determine whether a text is historically true or false. It's not concerned about that, and I don't think that we should be in this case. But what it does do is it tells us how the text is meant to communicate meaning. Specifically this morning, I want to ask the question: is the story of Noah's Ark functioning as an epic or as a myth? Now be careful. When I say the word myth, I'm not meaning by myth a lie. I'm using that word technically as a literary genre, and I'll tell you what it means. So when you hear myth, don't run out of the room clutching your pearls, saying, Oh my God, this guy doesn't believe the Bible. I promise you I do. I hope that by the end of the sermon today, I'll convince you to believe it a little bit more. Maybe not so much about the history. Now, what is an epic? How many of you ever read Homer, Odyssey, Iliad? Many of you did. That's an epic. It's a story, usually a long story, about a heroic figure that recounts foundational events in the life of a people group in order to shape that group's identity in the world. So you have a figure, foundational events, and something that is to shape a people's identity, the way they think about who they are in the world around them. Now, many people, I would imagine, haven't thought about Noah's art much, but they read it that way. They read it much like the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and they take it as a story about how Israel became God's special people, his frozen chosen. Now, you could summarize the story according to that view as God destroyed the earth because of evil humans, but he saved a few who were obedient to him in order to form a holy nation. That's the way that it's often read. You may already be able to tell that that's not exactly the way that I think we ought to read it. Because I think instead of being an epic, though it has some features of an epic, it's more like an old myth story. A myth is a story that's talking about the nature of reality, the origins of reality, the structure, the meaning, or the destiny of reality. And it's intended to shape a people group's understanding of the world and basically how they relate to the world and how God relates to the world. Read this way, Noah's art becomes more like a story of the bits that come before it, like creation and the fall. A story about why the world is the way that it is and how that relates to God's plan. Now, many of you who have done some study, those of you particularly who have been through EFM will know that the book of Genesis divides up roughly into two parts. Chapters 1 through 12, which is talking about prehistory, and it's talking with more of a universal focus, and chapter 12, beginning with Abraham, going through chapter 50, that talks about the patriarchs and the beginning of what would become later the Hebrew nation. It seems to me, just from where this is located, because this is chapter 5, 6, and 7 of Noah's Ark story, that it relates more to what you see in the beginning with the creation and the fall stories that are meant to be read more figuratively. A summary of the story, according to this view, would say something like: the flood depicts the result of humankind's fall, the ark depicts the structure of God's salvation, and the rainbow depicts the assurance of God's faithfulness. Let me spend a couple of minutes just teasing that out, and we'll go back to the very beginning. In the beginning, God created, and we know God created all that was and created it good, good, and very good. What we got in Genesis 1 was not a scientific account of how God did it, but a simple fact that God did it and ordered it in a particular way. And then when we move to chapter 2, we get an image of the fact that God planted this tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden and told people, you can eat of any tree of the garden freely, but just don't eat of this one. The point of that is simply that God is giving people free will, that the people that he created are not automatons that are there simply to obey him or else, but he gives them a real choice to choose to follow him or not. And that choice is encapsulated in that tree. But he does tell them that if you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die. Now, those of you who, like me, who grew up fairly fundamentalist, read that as an angry God telling them of the punishment that will befall them if they eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But what I want to suggest to you is you need not read it that way. I think it's just a statement of fact. It has to do with what will happen to creation if they eat of the tree. Things will start to decay and they will surely die, as a matter of fact. The idea is simply that if you eat of the tree, creation will start to reverse and eventually things will break to the point that creation itself breaks. And this is a very important thing. And you see it. What do you see in chapter two? It says, Adam and Eve in the garden were in the garden together, and they were naked and they were not ashamed. That's not a lurid detail for those of you who have too much time on your hands. That's a very important theological point. Because immediately after the fall, it says they recognize the fact that they're naked and that they were ashamed, so that something in the fall begins that breakdown. Now we know in Genesis 3 as well that in the midst of God talking to the serpent and Adam and Eve and telling them what the world is going to be like after the fall, God gives what is called the proto-evangelium in verse 15, where he has this kind of misty statement that says, You serpent, because you bit and tried to eat my human image bearers who were made of dust, you will be consigned to crawling in dust for the rest of your life. And you will try to bite the heel of the seed of this woman, and you'll get some poison in. But eventually the seed of the woman is going to crush your head. You've read that and you said, oh, that's very nice, but we never stop to think about what that is. That is the gospel in miniature. That is pointing to the fact that God is going to save in such a way that eventually some seed of this woman is going to crush that serpent's head and bring about a reversal of the reversal. Then what happens? And this is where it gets interesting. Nobody ever thinks about this stuff. You immediately go to Cain and Abel. Why do you immediately go to Cain and Abel? That story. Well, it's because Cain, who represents the seed of the serpent, kills Abel, who is the seed of the woman, in trying to do what the snake idea was to do, was to try to destroy the seed of the woman. And what happens? Abel dies, but Adam and Eve have another child named Seth, a name that conveniently means replacement. And then you move on in the next story, and you hear this thing about the idea of the sons of men notice that the, I mean, the sons of God notice that the uh the daughters of men are beautiful, and they begin to marry them. And people say, that's about angels. It has to do with those who are the seed of the woman, who are faithful to God, looking at the seeds of the serpent, seeing them, and in coming together, kind of diminishing the fidelity by blotting it out, by tarnishing it through families that are together that are not sharing their faith. You see that kind of seed theology going all the way through. And then when you get to the flood, you see the story coming all the way to its crux. You see God saying, I'm looking at the world that I've created, and I notice that it has become corrupt. It's become corrupt because of violence. That's the word that's used in Genesis. Human beings are bringing violence to this world and they're corrupting it, they're breaking it down. Most English translations go from that, and then they say that God said, I'm now going to destroy the world. But the word destroy is never used there. What it actually says in the Hebrew is they're corrupting this world that I made with violence. I'm going to give them over to that corruption to let that corruption do what it does. And so the idea is that the corruption takes place, and the flood is an example, the focus of the fact that because of sin, they will surely die. But God, which are the two most important words in the whole of the Bible, but God was not satisfied, was not pleased to see his creation completely be destroyed. So what did he do? He called out a family, not because they were special. Said Noah's was Noah was a righteous man, but if you've read the whole story of Noah, he was a train wreck. Okay. They read the story of Noah, you know this, but he picked Noah and he said, Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. And Noah believed God when he said, I was about to to to see this world corrupted by a flood. And then Noah built an ark, and on that ark goes representatives of all God's creation, so that all God's creation can in some way, through a remnant, be saved. He puts them in that ark as the water comes up from the ground and the water comes down from the sky and judgment, in a sense, pours out. They pass through the judgment in this ark to salvation. And at the end of the story, God gives a rainbow to these people who represent the first taste of a new creation to say that I will never destroy the world by water. I'm in it, and I'm going to bring it to its telic conclusion one day when all things will be put to rights. That's the story that is going on there. And as you read that story in this kind of viewpoint, you see that there's something of a coherence of what it's trying to teach. It's not simply telling another story about human failure, but it is giving you the architecture of what salvation is to look like. It is God bringing a remnant of people through death and destruction that was caused by sin by placing them in an ark, which simply means a chest. It can even mean a coffin, actually. Bringing them through that and saving them through it. Now, when we think of an ark, we normally think of a boat, and that's great. But I want you to look up for just a second. Look up at the ceiling. What do you see? You see the reason that this room is called a knave. Knave comes from the same word as navy. It means a ship. It's a boat. It looks like an upside down boat, and any priest has experienced enough life in the church knows that sometimes it feels like it's upside down, but it's still floating. And the point is, is in this place, this is where God is delivering people through death and destruction into life. You see an image of what Noah's Ark is pointing to for the kingdom of Israel. It's pointing to the mechanism by which God is going to bring people through death and destruction and into life. And we can run that through Israel straight into the church today. What we're doing here, at least what I hope we're doing here, is participating in God's gracious deliverance of humankind. We're in this place today and have come into this arc of salvation, not because we're good or better or more enlightened than anybody else, but simply because God has pointed us in this direction and moved us this way. And God is bringing us through with the hope that we can talk other people into coming into it. And we're not there as we said in the last hour, just because God puts us on the earth to try to fix everybody's theological problems. I'm not sure that Noah and Mrs. Noah and Noah Jr. and the daughters knew much about theology. They simply knew that salvation was to be found there. What we need to be as a Church of the Mediator is a place that tells people that something that is going to be good for your life that will save you not only in the other world, but in this world, is to be found in this place. It will save you from some of the death and destruction we see in the world around us, whether we're looking at politics or in social things and ideas and such, and it's bringing us through, and God has given a promise to deliver people through this and not to destroy us all. Let me close with this. As we look at our world and as our country right now, it's easy for us to be pretty depressed. When we look at our politics, good Lord. When we look at the shape of society, it makes us worry. And when we look at the church, we can't agree on much of anything. It's easy for us to be depressed by that, but brothers and sisters, let not your hearts be troubled. God is still in the business of moving people through that, through no good of their own necessarily, but putting them in a place where God can bring them through the waters into a place of dry land. And God is still doing that. We don't have to be concerned about the people who come into this church figuring us out or us figuring them out immediately. This is the place where they're going to receive the blessings. It's God's business to teach them the things that God needs to teach them. It's our business to get them in. As we say, we're in sales, not management. But friends, if we do that, if we realize that the Church of the Mediator is in this world to be an instrument of salvation, a Noah's art for people in the here and now, we're closer to an understanding of the sort of salvation that God is working. And friends, we're closer to an understanding of Noah's art that gets us beyond the rudiments we learn in vacation Bible school to a mature understanding of what God is trying to do through that story. So this morning I leave you with that. As you sit high and dry in this ark this afternoon, it's going to start raining again. Amen.