Sermon – God Remembers

(I preached this sermon on Sunday, September 13, 2026 at Christ Lutheran Church, Harrisburg, PA. It was in response to Genesis 5:5-22; 8:6-12; and 9:8-17. You can also listen to the audio by going to this link.)

We start a new stretch of scripture today. For weeks we’ve been in Exodus, with Moses and the commandments and a people learning what it means to be free. Today we go back to the beginning. Genesis 6 through 9. The flood.

Let me read you the line that stops everyone in their tracks. God saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the human heart was only evil, continually. And God was sorry that he had made humans on the earth. It grieved him to his heart.

Sit with that for a second. The God who spoke light into being. The God who looked at everything made and called it good. That God is heartbroken. That God regrets.

How did we get here?

Genesis 1 opens with chaos. Darkness over deep water. No shape, no order, nothing alive. Then God’s breath moves over the water, and God starts building. Light. Sky. Land. Plants. Creatures of every kind. And finally, people, made in God’s image, placed in a garden, told to tend it and to fill the earth with life.

It’s good. God says so, more than once.

But good was never the same thing as finished, and it was never the same thing as safe from harm. The people in the garden reach for the one thing that was fenced off, and they eat it. Shame shows up. Blame shows up. It doesn’t stop there. Their son kills his own brother in a field. A few generations later a man boasts that he’ll take seventy-seven lives in revenge for one wrong done to him. The violence doesn’t slow down, it spreads. By the time we reach chapter six, the text says the whole earth is filled with it.

This is a story about a slow unraveling. Something planted good, growing crooked, generation after generation, until the ground itself is soaked in what people have done to each other.

That’s the setup for the flood. God isn’t losing his temper out of nowhere. God is watching what humanity has become, and grieving.

I want to pause here and talk about what kind of story this actually is, because it matters for how we read it.

Genesis 1 through 11 is what scholars call primeval history. It’s the part of the Bible before there’s a Abraham, before there’s a nation, before there’s a temple or a king. It’s ancient people trying to answer the oldest questions there are. Why is the world like this? Why do we hurt each other. Why is there suffering, and death, and evil? Is God distant, or is God close?

These chapters aren’t interested in the questions science answers. They weren’t written to tell us how old the earth is or how many species fit on a boat. They were written to tell us something truer than that. Something about who God is and who we are.

We do this too. We have our own stories that work this way. Most of us grew up hearing that George Washington chopped down his father’s cherry tree, and when his father asked who did it, young George couldn’t tell a lie. It never happened. Historians know it never happened. But the story got told for over a hundred years because it says something people wanted to pass down about honesty and character. Nobody who tells that story is claiming it as a police report. They’re telling you what they think matters.

I want to be clear about something here, because I’ve run into a lot of people who hear the word myth and assume it means lie. It doesn’t. A myth is not a story that fails to tell the truth. It’s a story that tells the truth in a way that plain facts can’t reach on their own. Some truths are too large, or too painful, to hand somebody as a list of information. Story is often the only door into them.

I know this firsthand. Years ago I wrote a novel called American Roulette. It grew out of a mass shooting I heard about on the news, and the response that followed, which had already become a script. Thoughts and prayers, offered and forgotten. A debate where people talk past each other with competing statistics. Then silence, until the next one. What felt missing was any real attention to the human beings caught inside it. So I wrote about eight people who never existed, because fiction let me sit with that kind of violence in a way that reporting on an actual shooting, with actual families burying actual children, never could. None of those eight characters were real. What they carried was.

Genesis 1 through 11 works the same way, except it’s not about one founding father, or eight invented characters. It’s about all of us. Ancient people looked at a world full of both beauty and violence, and they told a story to make sense of it. That doesn’t make the story less true. It makes it true in a different way than a newspaper article is true.

And once we let go of needing it to be a science report, we’re free to hear what it’s actually saying.

Every other flood story in the ancient world has the same basic shape. There’s a group of gods, and the gods are annoyed. Sometimes it’s because humans are making too much noise and the gods can’t sleep. The gods send a flood, one favored human survives, life goes on. But there’s no promise at the end. No commitment that it won’t happen again. Just an uneasy peace between quarreling gods and the people they barely tolerate.

This wasn’t the only flood story ancient people were telling. There’s a flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh. There’s one in the Atrahasis story. The names change, the gods change, the details of the boat change, but the shape underneath stays the same. Most ordinary people back then would only have known the version told in their own town. But scribes knew more than one. So did merchants and travelers, the people who moved between cities and empires and carried stories the way they carried goods. When Israel’s storytellers shaped their own flood story, they were telling it into a world that already knew several others, and they shaped it on purpose against that backdrop. We can’t read this story as if it dropped out of nowhere. It was written to stand out from what everyone already knew.

Genesis tells the story differently, and the differences carry the whole weight of it.

In the other stories, humans were made to be servants, laboring for gods who wanted to rest. In Genesis, humans are made in love, to be in relationship. That’s why God’s response to human violence isn’t annoyance. It’s grief. You don’t grieve over furniture. You grieve over someone you love.

And ancient people pictured the sky as a solid dome holding back an ocean of chaos above the earth, with more chaos underneath. When the flood comes, Genesis says the windows of that dome are thrown open and the deep bursts up from below. The waters of chaos come flooding back into the world God had ordered. It’s creation starting to come undone.

But it doesn’t stay undone. After forty days and forty nights, a wind, the same Hebrew word for breath and spirit that moved over the water in Genesis 1, blows over the earth, and the waters go back where they belong. Dry ground appears. Every creature walks off that boat into a world beginning again.

And then comes the line that the whole story turns on. God remembered Noah.

That word remembered is doing more work than it looks like. In scripture, when God remembers someone, it never means God had simply forgotten and then recalled a fact. It means God looks on someone with compassion, and then acts. God remembers Noah, floating in the wreckage of a broken world, and God moves the waters back. God remembers Israel groaning under slavery in Egypt, and God sends Moses. God remembers a woman named Hannah crying out for a child, and gives her one.

That’s what remembering means in the mouth of God. Compassion that turns into action.

That’s the good news buried in the middle of this hard story. It isn’t the flood. The flood is horror, plain and simple. Whole villages gone. Whole families gone. This is not a nice story, and we shouldn’t pretend it is. The good news is what happens after the waters recede. God remembers. God acts. And then God does something the gods of every other ancient story never do.

God hangs up a bow.

In the ancient world, a bow in the sky was understood as a weapon. Think of lightning as an arrow. A god with a bow drawn was a god at war. And what does God do with that bow, at the end of the flood? God sets it down. Hangs it in the clouds, pointed away from the earth.

Every other pantheon in the ancient world stayed locked in conflict. Gods fighting each other, gods fighting humanity, an uneasy truce that could break again at any moment. The God of Israel looks at the ruin the flood has caused and says, never again. I am done making war on what I made.

And here’s the detail that gets missed. This covenant isn’t only with Noah’s family. Listen to how many times it’s repeated in chapter nine. Every living creature. All flesh. 

The birds, the cattle, every animal of the earth. God makes a promise that includes the whole created world, whether or not any of them ever say a prayer or offer a sacrifice.

That’s a covenant. And a covenant is not the same thing as a contract. A contract is conditional. You do your part, I do mine, and if you break your end, the deal is off. A covenant runs on something else. It runs on a promise that holds even when the other side can’t hold up their end. God already knows, in the very next verse, that the human heart is going to keep bending toward evil. God says the promise anyway. Not because we earned it. Because God decided to bind himself to us, and to the sparrows, and to the soil, no matter what we do next.

That’s the first covenant in scripture. Every covenant after it, with Abraham, with Israel at Sinai, the new covenant we remember every time we come to this table, grows out of the shape God set here first. God moves toward us before we move toward God. That’s the pattern. It never changes.

I don’t think this story stopped meaning something after the ark landed.

We still watch the waters rise, just under different names now. Families get pulled out of their homes and off their jobs by ICE and disappear into a system that won’t tell you where they went. Rent and groceries cost more than a paycheck can stretch to cover, no matter how careful anybody is. A war grinds on in a country most of us couldn’t find on a map, and it keeps costing lives and money with no end in sight. People get treated with contempt because of who they love, or where they were born, or the language they speak at home. Healthcare people depend on gets cut over accusations of fraud that nobody can actually prove, while the corporations holding the contracts post record profits. It can feel like we’re drowning in it, one story rolling into the next, with no dry ground anywhere in view.

This is not ancient history. This is the news.

I don’t have a clean answer for why the world keeps doing this to itself. I don’t think the story hands us one either. What it hands us instead is a God who looks at all of it and grieves, the way God grieved in Genesis 6. And a God who remembers, and acts, the way God did in Genesis 8.

Right before I sat down to write this sermon, we found a used needle on the church property. Somebody, not far from where we worship, is in enough pain that they’re doing terrible things to their own body to survive the day. It’s hard to see that and not feel some of what God felt looking at the earth before the flood. The weight of it. The grief.

And an hour later, a group from a local business walked through our doors for United Way’s Day of Caring. They came to paint, to fix, to haul, to make our building and our clinics a little more whole, because they believe in the work we do here and they know we can’t do it without help. We are not a wealthy congregation. Almost everything that keeps our clinics running comes from people outside these walls who decided to remember us. Grants. Partners. Volunteers who show up on a Friday morning with paint rollers instead of staying home.

Both things happened on the same morning. The needle, and the volunteers. The wreckage, and the rebuilding. I think that’s closer to how the world actually works than any story with a tidy ending. Horror and hope, sitting right next to each other, most days of our lives.

This Sunday falls two days after the twenty fifth anniversary of September 11th. Most of us remember exactly where we were that morning. Thousands of people did not come home. Air travel across the whole country stopped. Fear moved into the ordinary parts of daily life and never fully moved back out. It was its own kind of flood, a wall of grief and shock that swallowed the country whole in the space of a morning. I’m not going to get into what caused it. That’s a different sermon. I want to stay with what happened in the days right after.

This week I’ve been watching friends post photographs from those days, the ones who went down to New York to help. Pictures of them standing alongside firefighters and first responders at Ground Zero, handing out water and food, staying present with people who had just lost everyone in their unit or their family, in the middle of wreckage that was still smoking. Nobody sent them there. They went because people needed someone, and they showed up.

That’s what it looks like when God remembers. Not lightning from heaven undoing what happened. People walking into the wreckage, carrying water and food and their own presence into a place most people were running away from.

Nobody who went down to serve undid what had happened that morning. Nothing could. But something did happen in that going. Care moved into a place that had only known destruction, and it mattered, even though it came after so much had already been lost.

That’s closer to what God does at the end of the flood than most of us picture. God doesn’t erase what happened. God ends the war.

Jesus talked about this story too. He said the days before his own return would look like the days of Noah, people going about their lives, not paying attention, until the flood came and swept them away. He wasn’t trying to scare anyone into behaving. He was warning people to stay awake, because in the very next breath he’s telling them the good news of the kingdom, a kingdom breaking into the world to set people free. The warning and the good news arrive together. They always do, in Jesus.

I don’t think this story is asking us to have the right answer about how old the earth is, or how a boat held two of every creature. I think it’s asking a harder question. What does God actually want from us?

Not the right beliefs memorized and recited back. Not a flawless record. God wants what God has wanted since the garden. Relationship. Right relationship with God, with each other, and with the ground we walk on and the water we drink.

We’re not going to get there by being perfect. Noah wasn’t perfect either. A few verses after this story ends, he’s already stumbling. The covenant was never about our perfection. It was about God’s promise holding steady no matter how many times we fall short of it.

There’s one more thread worth pulling before we close. In scripture, an ark is never just Noah’s boat. It’s whatever God uses to carry someone safely through water they could never survive on their own.

Generations after Noah, a Hebrew mother sets her infant son adrift on the Nile in a basket coated with tar, because Pharaoh has ordered every Hebrew baby boy killed. The Hebrew word for that basket is the same word used for Noah’s ark. That baby is Moses, and the water that should have killed him becomes the water that saves him instead.

Later, Israel carries a wooden chest through the wilderness holding the commandments and the story of who they are. They call it the Ark of the Covenant. It travels ahead of them into danger, holding what’s most precious to them safe inside.

And centuries after that, a teenage girl named Mary carries God’s own presence inside her body, hidden and safe, on the way to being born into a broken world. The church has long called her a kind of ark too.

An ark isn’t a boat. It’s whatever carries the vulnerable through what would otherwise destroy them. And this room gets to be that for each other. When somebody here is drowning, in grief, in fear, in a system that’s failed them, we get to be the ark. We get to carry each other through the water until there’s dry ground again.

So when the water rises in your own life, and it will, hold onto this. God is not the god who made war on creation and never let up. That god exists in a hundred other stories, but not in this one. In this one, God grieves what we do to ourselves and to each other, and God remembers, and God acts, and God hangs up the bow. And God puts people around you to carry you through, the way this church carries people through, the way God has always carried people through.

You are not alone in the flood. There is an ark. And you are already inside it.

Amen.