As we left the story last week, God covered the whole earth with water, let it rain, pour for 40 days and 40 nights.   After our own little rainstorm and flood for about an hour and half last Thursday evening, can you imagine 40 days and nights of that stuff?

            And Noah, his wife, his sons and their families, and a pair of every animal on the planet ride it out on the big boat.   Finally, the flood begins to subside, and the ark comes to rest on a high mountain.

            After forty days, Noah takes a raven and releases it from the ark.   The raven flies to and fro over the waters of the earth.   Then, Noah releases a dove.   It returns to the ark as it could find no solid ground on which to set food.  Noah took it back into the ark.   He waits 7 days, and releases the dove again.    This time, the dove returns, but with a freshly plucked olive leaf in its beak.   A sign of hope. 

Noah waits 7 more days, then sends the dove again.   This time, it does not return, presumably because if found a place to roost.

Then, on what would have been Noah’s 601^st birthday, the 601^st year, the first day of the first month—time has been measured throughout this story using Noah’s age, he celebrates by taking the door off of the ark and gets his first look.   He sees that things are beginning to dry up.  However it is two more months before Noah bring his family and the animals out of the ark.  

I want you to take note of something.   Noah did NOT proceed on his own, when he determined that it was safe to come out of the ark, but waits patiently for God’s own time.   God had provided for his family, and told them when to get onto the boat—God would be faithful to tell them when to come out.

The Lord does, indeed, tell Noah to come out of the ark.   It has been more than a year since they boarded ship.  Now God beckons them forth, to abound in the land, to be fruitful and multiply.

Then God makes a promise.  A covenant, between the divine and the creature.  The promise is that God will never again allow the waters to pour forth and become a flood to destroy all flesh.  Most agreements and contracts and covenants, the promises we make and intend to keep, are completed with a signature.   God’s signature for this promise is a colorful bow in the sky.  But not in just any sunny blue sky, no, the bow would form in the gray clouds of rain.  Just when the people would need assurance.   So that they wouldn’t have to wonder, every time the storm clouds appeared, “Is this the end?   Has God lost his patience?”   The bow would appear in the rain, and proclaim the covenant, and interestingly, remind God of the promise.

            Even today, we look at the bow in the clouds, and we don’t think of the mechanics of it.  Light refracted through prisms of raindrops to break the light into a spectrum of pure hues:

         Red on the outside of the bow, turning to orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and finally violet.    I learned the science of a rainbow somewhere in grade school, and yet….when I see one in the clouds, I am not thinking of the science of it.   I am awed by the beauty of it.   And I know I am experiencing something of the divine architecture.  I see a rainbow, and I think of God.

            That’s how it should be.  God’s signature on an everlasting promise.  Throughout Scripture we witness God making covenants, promises to humankind.  And to each covenant, God is faithful.   The rainbow proclaims the truth to us even today, God is faithful.   God is steadfast.  God keeps promises.    This is important, not just for great floods, but for the promise we ultimately pin our lives upon…and out deaths.  The covenant with humankind made with the blood of Jesus.   To rely upon that promise, we have to trust:  God is faithful.   God is steadfast.   God keeps promises.    Each rainbow might serve to remind us.  God is faithful.   If only human beings could be so faithful.

            We finally, before we leave the Noah story, have to read the unpleasant ending to the story.   After the BHAG, after the flood, after the saving mission, after God’s promise, after God’s covenant, comes this mess.  This is the part of the story we NEVER teach to the children, it’s never touched upon in the Sunday School or Vacation Bible School.   Parents:  I’ll warn you now; this is the “PG” part of the story.  But it’s important, and it teaches us an important lesson.

Noah, being a man of the soil, planted a vineyard.  The first one ever.  And he made some wine—the first wine ever.  And he drank it. The first taste ever of fermented alcohol.  And he drank too much of it.  The first drunk ever.  And he passes out in his tent.  Yes, this is the same Noah, the righteous, faithful man God chose out of all of humanity to be his instrument of God’s first saving mission, and here he is, drunk, naked and asleep in his tent.

And his son, Ham, looked in his tent and saw his father there, in his vulnerable display.  He goes back out and tells his two brothers about the awkward situation in the tent.

The two brothers, Shem and Japheth take a robe, and they lay it on their shoulders, and they back into the tent so as to avoid seeing their father’s body, and they cover Noah and provide him some dignity.  

When Noah awakens from his drunken sleep, he notices that he has been covered up.  The story says simply, “Noah knew what his youngest son had done to him.”  I’m not sure what Noah knew, or thought he knew, or how exactly Noah thought that he had been harmed.  It really doesn’t matter.   Noah’s reasoning is the reasoning of a man who wants to transfer any personal responsibility for his own actions to someone else.  He wants someone else to blame.  For a 600 year old, it’s a rather adolescent thing to do.   But Noah becomes angry, and in his hung-over rage, he looks for a scapegoat.

That scapegoat is not Ham, interestingly enough, but Ham’s son, Canaan.    Noah, rather than accepting the consequences of his own drunken actions, decides instead to curse Canaan for what Noah perceives to be Ham’s fault.   Of course, we can plainly see, Canaan is cursed for Noah’s indiscretion, not Ham’s.  It was Noah who drank too much.   It was Noah who lay uncovered in his tent as he slept it off.   Not only is there no indication that Ham did anything truly wrong, but Noah doesn’t even take his misdirected anger out on Ham.  Instead, he triangles his grandson into the mess.

Here, so soon after this story of hope and promise, we find this unpleasant and awkward episode of Noah’s curse upon Canaan.  God had tried to wipe out wickedness with a flood, had used this one faithful man to start all over, had delivered them and made a promise that there would never again be such a flood of destruction on the earth, and then….this seed of hurt, of brokenness, of blame and distrust.   Makes me wonder if there is any hope for humanity after all?

Well, there is no hope if the future of humanity depends upon the goodness of any human being.   Throughout Scripture, the Bible gives us the heroes of the faith, warts and all.   Every one of them…flawed, impaired, and at times, downright immoral.    If our hope is in the hands of any human hero, we’re in trouble.  Noah will come to the end of his days pointing fingers at his family.  Abraham was no model husband and father.  Jacob was a conniving cheat.  Moses is a murderer.  The judges each had their own human foibles.  The kings…well the kings were often downright evil.   Even the best of them, David, was a two-faced adulterer.  Over and over, the heroes have a common quality.  They are human.   And as such, are prone to stumble and fall.   But the future of humanity does not depend upon any human hero.  The future of humanity depends solely upon God. 

            In my imagination, I see Noah sitting there in his tent, the confusion of his hung over mind still swirling.   He sits there, in his post-inebriated rage, and in my imagination as I see him sitting there, I can hear the rain falling outside.  The flash of lightening and the clap of thunder.  It’s just about sundown.  And the rain is pouring down.   And Noah sits there in his tent. 

And outside, the light of the setting sun shoots through the clouds.   There it is.   God's signature.  A colorful bow in the sky.  Whether Noah sees it or not, the signature is there:  To let him know.   To let us know.  God is faithful.  God is steadfast.  God keeps promises.