Text:  Genesis 9:18-27, James 5:16, 19-20                                                                    W 3^rd Lent Midweek

“Cover Me”

            In the name of him who has spread his protection over us, dear friends in Christ:  thus far in our evening meditations on Law and Gospel in Genesis, we’ve seen how these two opposite yet complimentary spiritual principles (Law and Gospel) have been presented first in the form of the two theologically “loaded” trees in the Garden of Eden, and then again last week in the lives of Cain and Abel.  In the latter story, we saw how Cain sought to approach the Lord by means of the Law; that is, he wanted to earn God’s favor by the works of his hands – by what he did.  And since we’re all like Cain in this regard, we can sympathize with his efforts.  We can’t help but feel that his hard work and sincerity should be worth something.  But no:  The Lord rejects his offering.  It’s like Jesus said, “Bad trees produce bad fruit.”  Even the very best sinful man can offer still stinks to high heaven. Abel, on the other hand, approaches God through the Gospel – through what God does for him.  Abel understands that his sin deserves death, and that nothing he does by the works of his hands can save him.  But he also understands that God has promised a Savior – one who will be a substitutionary sacrifice – whose shed blood will be a covering for sin.  Abel offers his lamb, shedding its blood, looking forward in faith to that greater sacrifice that the Lord will make for him.  And the Lord smells the sweet spirit of faith in the promised Savior rising up with the smoke and looks upon Abel’s offering with favor and forgiveness.

            The seeming lack of justice, however, infuriates Cain.  His pride is offended.  “I worked harder”, he thinks.  “I did better.  God’s not treating me fairly, and he’s letting that little snot Abel get away with …”.  And as he sits sulking, the Lord intervenes to caution him, still calling him to repentance; but to no avail.  Cain’s heart is set on what he thinks of as getting even. Deceitfully masking his murderous intent, he lures his brother to an isolated field and kills him.  And so it always is:  those who try to live by Law lash out against those who live by Gospel.

            They lash out against each other too – each person trying to justify himself in his own eyes – each one looking out for himself, and not truly ever thinking about being his brother’s keeper.  That’s what we see as the storyline in Genesis continues. People multiply and spread out over the earth; but it’s a frightful place.  The Lord looks from heaven and sees nothing but violence.  “The heart of man”, he sees, “is only evil all the time.” He decides in good Lutheran fashion (for it should be clear by now that God is Lutheran) that it’s time to apply some Law and Gospel.

            The Law, as you know, comes as universal destruction in the form of the Flood.  In it all the wicked are swept away and drowned.  And I hasten to add that this included those few who went about as thugs and robbers preying on their neighbors and the larger majority of those who lived what we would all think of as pretty much normal lives, who just struggled to survive by working, building villages, raising families … but who thought they were earning God’s favor by their personal goodness and righteous deeds.  And this is important to see:  everyone who lives by the Law is equally condemned by the Law, from the worst of criminals to the best of the best.  The Law judges the heart of man; and by its perfect standards God looks and sees “only evil all the time”.

            But Noah finds favor in the eyes of the Lord. Why?  Was he a cut above the rest – less evil in his heart than others? No.  He found favor before the Lord for the same reason Abel did:  he saw no goodness in himself, and he rightly feared the judgment of God; but he looked forward in faith to the Deliverer that God would provide.  He lived by the Gospel.  And so (here’s what’s interesting) the Lord made Noah life’s work a living picture of the Gospel – the story of the whole Bible in miniature.  Think about it:  the whole Old Testament is about revelation and preparation, building layer upon layer of truth as the promise of the Savior is passed down through the generations.  Through all Scripture’s intricate structure, God shows us himself and reveals his plan for our salvation.  It all comes to a head when Jesus Christ comes into the world.  He is the body God has spent all this time preparing to be the instrument of salvation – to be ultimate sacrifice – through whom all who fear God’s righteous wrath and trust in him (that is, all who by faith are found in him) will be saved.  They are the inheritors of the new heaven and earth.

            That’s what Noah’s life is about.  God directs him to build an ark:  a great big wooden barge.  It sounds crazy.  It doesn’t make sense.  But Noah believes the Lord.  He fears the coming judgment.  So with nothing more than faith he spends over a hundred years on the huge, complicated project, building layer upon layer of a massive … body:  a body that has just one use:  to be sacrificed, as it were.  It’s to weather the storm of God’s wrath against sin in the water that destroys everything else on earth.  But everyone who trusts in it – everyone who by faith is found inside it – is saved.  They live and inherit the new earth.  And so what Abel does by sacrificing a lamb, Noah does by building an ark.  Both the lamb and the ark are pictures of the coming Christ, and so both men by doing what they do are not trusting in their work, but rather looking forward in faith to the sacrifice God will provide to atone for their sins.

            So, after the flood has come and gone, Noah and his family find themselves in a situation very much like our own. They’ve been saved by grace through faith in the body that was prepared for their salvation.  They’ve been removed, as it were, from the old land of Law and threat and judgment and they’ve brought into the new kingdom of God’s grace – and yet, at the same time, they are still very much in this old fallen world. The question before them is how now will they live?  Will they continue to live by the Gospel of grace or will they slip back into life under the Law?  And how will they deal with each other?  Having been the recipients of God’s grace, will they extend it to others?

            These are the questions raised and answered in the readings for this evening’s meditation.  There we find Noah settling down to business:  tilling the soil, raising crops, and planting a vineyard. With the fruit of the latter, Noah becomes the first vintner.  And in sampling one of his early vintages, he experiences the pleasures of God’s gift of wine.  Unfortunately, he enjoys it so much that he drinks to excess and also experiences the inherent hazards of wine.  Perhaps he was the one who coined the phrase, “Get drunk and go naked.”  And something to understand is that this unusual story probably happened many years after the flood.  It takes time to get a vineyard going – and it was probably not the first order of business after getting off the ark:  more pressing needs of basic survival would have been foremost on everyone’s mind.  So, just assuming it’s been maybe ten, twenty, or thirty years since the flood (or maybe more since Noah lived for several hundred years after he got off the ark), things have changed quite a bit.  Noah is by now the esteemed patriarch of an entire community; and all revere him as their wise and venerable leader.  He is in the mind of many simply above reproach – which makes his behavior all the more scandalous – especially in that culture which like most Middle Eastern countries still today believe in keeping skin exposure to a “bare” minimum. The whole episode would have meant humiliation and a measure of disgrace for Noah.

            Which is why I’m glad this story very unusual story is here.  Without it, there may have been a tendency to see Noah as some kind of super righteous person and conclude that’s why God chose to save him and make him the builder of the ark.  But no, here we see that Noah not is a perfect man.  He’s revealed for what he is:  just another sinner in need of God’s grace and forgiveness like the rest of us.

            And oddly enough, it’s wine that reveals it to us.  That’s significant because elsewhere in Scripture wine is associated with the Law of God – especially in those passages that relate wine to drunkenness.  (I’ll just mention here that wine sometimes also has a Gospel connotation, but since it doesn’t appear in this particular text I’m not going to unpack it.)  Now, the reason wine is sometimes used as a metaphor for Law is because of the way it tends to reveal a person’s true character.  It does that because it lowers a person’s natural inhibitions. This is what social drinking is all about:  alcohol helps you to relax and unwind; it lowers your guard, so to speak.  That’s why it helps you get to know people better: it takes away some of the masks and fig leaves we use to conceal the real self so people open up more.  But there’s a downside:  too much of it and you lower the guard too far.  It always amazes me how sometimes people use the fact that they were drunk as an excuse for doing some really stupid, outlandish, or illegal.  Alcohol never makes you do anything you don’t really want to do – it only takes away your judgment and inhibitions that tell you it’s not a good idea to do what you really want to do.

            And that’s what we have going on in this story. It’s an illustration of a godly person – a person who is a sinner declared righteous by faith – who is nevertheless revealed by the Law to be what he really is:  a disgraceful sinner, naked and ashamed.  Oh, and he’s also helpless to do anything about it since he is either asleep or unconscious.  And because of that, it think it’s fair to say that he represents a penitent sinner in that he is not actively continuing in the sin, he’ll surely be ashamed when he awakes, and right now he is totally dependent upon the mercy of others. The question is:  what is the appropriate response of others to this situation?

            Noah’s son Ham, who is the one that finds his father in this compromised condition, provides one possible answer to us.  His response is pure Law:  to be judgmental, condemning, and to go around spreading the word about his father’s shame and faults to others.  It’s a very popular response.  We love nothing more than to see the high and mighty fall.  The current media feeding frenzy over the Martha Stewart conviction is a case in point.  Why is this so?  It’s because it makes us feel good about ourselves.  It means there’s somebody else whom I used to look up to who’s really not so good after all – and that moves me up on the ladder of personal holiness. That’s why too that the “juiciest” gossip is always about the sins and shortcomings of others:  the worse they are, the better I must be.  It’s those who live themselves by the Law who always delight in applying it to condemn and humiliate others.  They need to in order to justify themselves.

            But Noah’s sons Shem and Japheth respond to their father’s fall with Gospel.  When they hear of his openly displayed disgrace, they resolve to put an end to it. The last thing they want to do is go about talking about it.  They even refuse to look at it themselves.  All they want to do is contain the sin.  They want to restore him to a state of grace by covering him.  And that’s key theologically because the basic meaning of the word “atonement” that the Bible uses when it speaks of the sacrifice Christ made to secure for us the forgiveness of sins actually means, “to cover”.   The idea is that underneath the righteousness of Christ that we wear and that God sees when he looks at us, we are still very much sinners, naked and ashamed.  But we are covered by him – and those who live under that covering for themselves, who know that they are sinners covered by Christ’s blood – want nothing more than to extend that covering to others.  Or to say it another way:  those who live by the Gospel deal with others according to the Gospel.  They restore the fallen sinner and cover a multitude of sins.

            When Noah awakes and comes to discover what has taken place, he issues a prophetic decree cursing (surprisingly) not his son Ham directly; but rather the curse falls on Ham’s eldest son, Canaan.  Slavery and servitude are to be his lot for all generations.  Why take it out on Canaan when Ham was the guilty one?  It’s important to remember that Genesis is a book of the Bible that focuses a lot of attention on seed lines or descendants.  Recall that in the original promise of the Gospel to Adam and Eve, the Lord said Satan, “I will put enmity between your seed and the Seed of the woman”. The idea is that there’s going to be this perpetual conflict between those who are the descendants according to the promise (which is the Gospel), and those who are descendants according to the curse (which is the Law).  It’s the same thing we see now in this story:  The descendants of Ham are cursed to be slaves.  And in a spiritual sense we’re not talking about literal descendants, we’re talking about those who have the spirit of their father Ham and live under the Law.  They are slaves of sin and death.  Meanwhile, the seed of Shem and Japheth are blessed.  That’s important, because Shem’s is the line of the coming Savior – his principal Seed is Jesus – and he is blessed above all.  It’s further stated that the seed of Japheth will dwell in the tents of Shem.  That would be those like us who though we are not of the Messianic line nevertheless find shelter in the Gospel – and who are covered by Jesus and his sacrifice for sin. So we see that this prophetic curse and blessing are still in effect.  The question before you is always, “Am I living as a descendant of Ham, or am I living as an heir according to the promise?”

And before I close, I want to make one point of clarification on this story lest there be misunderstanding.  The passage has its application to those who are in the church, who believe and trust in the Gospel, who then fall into sin of some kind, and who are then exposed and find themselves wallowing helplessly in shame and disgrace.  Such a person is to be covered by the others, forgiven, and restored.  The situation would have been quite a bit different if Noah had awoken earlier, said to himself, “Hey, whaddaya know?  I’m naked”, and then got up and started wandering all around town as if nothing were wrong.  There is a time and place to apply the Law to those who need to hear it.  And we treat people with contempt when we fail to approach them when they’re walking around with their sin and shame exposed for all to see acting like they either don’t know or don’t care.  In such a case the only Christian thing to do is to gently approach that individual and tell them that they’re naked – which means that as long as they persist boldly and brazenly in their sin, they are not covered by Christ – and that’s not only shameful, it’s a very dangerous condition in which to remain.

            So in God’s great mercy, may we who have been covered by the protection, forgiveness, and salvation of Christ serve him as ambassadors of his grace, applying to others the covering we have ourselves received in Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!