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Over the next two weeks, I want us to reflect on two vessels, two containers that are given to us in scripture that in our English Bibles are both called arks. Now, as it happens, these two arks have absolutely no semantic relationship to one another in the Hebrew, and you might wonder how I know that, and that would be a very reasonable question. But I'm pretty confident they don't. Even so there's a relationship between these two vessels that in the providence of God proves to be far closer than a sheer accident or coincidence of translation, a relationship that is given to us by God in the Lord Jesus. Now, the first of these ark is the most famous of the two.

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Perhaps, and I've deliberately refrained from watching the movie. I'm told it wasn't very good anyway. But if I'm honest, the first thing that comes to mind as I think about Noah's Ark wasn't so much the movie, but the little wooden puzzle that my eldest son was given when he was about two with little colourful animal pieces that you could take out and put back in. Again, it's a little ironic.

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I think that something that from the Bible's perspective is about as dark a tale as there is. Largely survives in the modern imagination as a quaint and colourful children's story, a fairy tale that no one has to take too seriously. But of course, that's a pretty predictable tactic, isn't it? I mean, where would we be without Netflix?

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Where would we be without our sort of macabre appetite for turning murder and lust and greed and betrayal into a whole industry of binge-worthy dramas that never seemed to have enough series? It's a predictable tactic. Instead of facing up to the nightmares of our age or the sinister, brutal forces in our own hearts, we turn them into puzzle pieces and dolls and Netflix series. That we watch or we give to our children.

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But of course, this story embodies a truth about our world that is more dangerous to evade than it is to confront. But it's also a story that embodies a truth about God's people, about us, and that's particularly what I want us to focus on today. Now, I don't actually wanna spend too much time on Noah himself so much as the ark that he's called to build. At any rate, at this point in Genesis, we don't really know that much about Noah.

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We know that he's old, he's 600 years old to be precise. We know he has three sons and a wife, and we know chapter six, verse nine, most importantly, that he's a man of God, blameless in his generation. We're told. But even then, we don't exactly know what that means, except that when God speaks to him, he simply listens.

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He believes, and he obeys. That's all. It's nothing remarkable really, but it seems that at that point in history, it had become something remarkable because just about the whole world had given up on that, except for Noah. I mean, the whole world was carrying on doing all kinds of things, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, being given in marriage, as Jesus says, making love, having children, sewing crops, reaping harvests, telling jokes, but the one thing that nobody was doing was listening to God.

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Believing or obeying his word. No one except for Noah. And on this particular occasion, it was a very strange and ominous word that Noah was called to believe. One day God says to Noah, and we don't know how, we dunno whether it was a voice from the sky or some sort of rumble from within, like a bad case of indigestion.

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But either way, God says to Noah with sufficient clarity for him to hear. I've had enough. I've had enough. The whole earth is filled with violence.

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God says Chapter six, verse 13 there's only corruption and evil everywhere as far as the eye can see. Now, presumably that wasn't a surprise to Noah if Noah was really the last man left To trust and obey the word of God, then it won't have been any surprise to hear God say as much, and it won't be any surprise for him to hear that God had had enough. I want you to build an ark,

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God says, because I'm going to start again. Yes, right out here, miles from any port without so much as a cloud in the sky. I want you to build an ark. Because the dry land that I once called the Earth, that habitable space teaming with vegetation and livestock and creeping things and beasts according to their own kind, all of that will soon disappear and retreat back to the watery chaos from once it came formless and void.

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I want you to build an ark because I'm going to start again. Noah gets to work, chapter six, verse 22. He did everything just as God commanded him. What did that look like for Noah?

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Who knows, we're not actually told. Penny for your thoughts, old Noah. What was the look on his face, do you think as he pounded together this zany craft? Well, the whole world just got on with business as usual.

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White faced with dread as he watched those around him, tottering away like blindfolded drunks on some high wire, or maybe it was more a case of relief as if to say, after hundreds of years of watching, God just stand by as the world collapsed under the weight of wickedness and evil. Finally, finally, God had woken up. Who knows? Maybe it was a bit of both.

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That's Noah, the last man left to trust and obey the word of God. And soon the waters would come. Scurrying over forest and field flooding, valleys and planes sliding in across kitchen floors, rising high above roofs and steeples trapping people in their bedrooms, in their offices. Scrambling for the last bit of dry land, gasping, drowning until everything became submerged and there was only darkness and chaos.

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And the watery silence of death. Except for this ark, this cumbersome old tub, creaking and pitching from side to side on this rising sea of waves and heaving with life. What are we told here about the ark? Well, for starters, it was big, about 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high.

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We're told. Verse 15, that's about the size of a decent cathedral. It had three stories, an upper deck, a middle deck, and a lower deck, and various rooms, and a window and a door, and it was coed with pitch so that it could float. And alongside Noah's family, his wife and his sons and their wives, it was full of animals.

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Seven pairs of every clean animal, male and female, seven pairs of every bird and one pair of every unclean animal, chapter seven, two, and three, and enough food to keep them going for months. Now, in many ways, the ark was a floating paradox. It wasn't a ship. It didn't have a pilot or a captain, it didn't have a rudder.

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It was just this great ponderous box that bobbed around like flotsam on the waves with nowhere to go, and then there was the noise. Can you imagine? And all of those animals with just one tiny little window. I mean, it's one thing being stuck in a crowded lift on a hot day, but this must have absolutely stank.

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You don't need a verse to tell you that. It's what theologians have called a good and necessary consequence. It's a floating paradox. It was a happy place, a safe place, a refuge, but not especially comfortable Place more like cattle class than first.

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See, on the one hand, the ark is undoubtedly a place that's teaming with life. As many have noticed, the way the ark is described here evokes the ordered universe of Genesis one formed as it were after the three storied pattern of the heavens above the earth, beneath and the waters below and filled as it were, with every kind of bird and every kind of animal, and every kind of creature that moves along the ground. A little microcosm, a mini world that's kept and preserved from the watery chaos and destruction outside.

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A kind of Eden where wolf laid down with a lamb, where the lion ate straw with the ox, a holy mountain suspended on the waters, a tabernacle of God's presence and blessing, wandering and encamped as it were in a watery wilderness. Maybe not for 40 years, but for 40 days nonetheless, or 40 days at least, until the deluge finally stopped. So on the one hand, the ark most certainly was not a place of death. No.

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This sanctified sacred space for a world that had been snatched from the jaws of death and destruction. And yet on the other hand, it wasn't straightforwardly a place of life either people and animals alive. Yes. But hemmed in and adrift at sea with nowhere to go and not a whole lot to do.

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Other than to be patient and to wait on the Lord. So when God actually shut the door on the Ark, chapter seven, verse 14, it's exactly the same language that's used by the prophet Isaiah in Isaiah Chapter 26, where God calls his people to hide themselves in a cell and pull the door shut until the fury of his judgement passes. I still remember when I was a kid travelling with my family in Switzerland during the dying days of the Cold War. Now I realise that the Cold War is to most of you, what the Second World War is to me now, it's 40 years ago, almost exactly wondering why every place that we stayed in had this great concrete bunker in the basement with a wall that was this thick.

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Well, that's what the ark was. It was like a great floating fallout shelter sealed shut, like a giant sarkophagus, a floating tomb, and this floating tomb bobbed around aimlessly in the watery wilderness for months and months until one evening. A dove returned with this little sprig of olive leaf, and then sometime later, the waters finally receded. And then chapter eight, verse 15, God would call them out of this tomb and welcome them to a new creation with a new mandate to fill the earth, to be fruitful and to increase in number.

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So the ark itself is this paradox, neither a place of death, but neither straightforwardly a place of life. Perhaps more accurately. It's a place of death giving way to life, or of life emerging from death. There's nothing particularly remarkable about its occupants other than the fact that they have entrusted themselves to a God who could deliver them from an otherwise.

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Certain death, and it just so happens, of course, that the scriptures are full of paradoxes like this one. Abraham's body as good as dead. Sarah's barren womb, Joseph's pit, Joseph's cell baby, Moses's little basket. Literally his ark covered in pitch.

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Israel's Exodus through the Sea, Israel's wilderness, Jonah's Fish, Daniel's Furnace, Daniel's Den, Ezekiel's Valley of Bones, and so on. They are all of course figures of the one body of Christ given over to death. That life might emerge like a seed falling to the ground until its life eventually breaks forth from its garden tomb, as it were, much as life would emerge from that ark when it finally came to rest upon the fertile mountaintop of Ara. So this old, old story of the ark is really a story about us.

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About the body of Christ. Nothing remarkable really, other than it is filled with people who've entrusted themselves to the one who can deliver them from an otherwise certain death. We hardly need this tale to know that while the world carries on around us. With its business, it's eating and drinking.

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It's marrying and being given in marriage, bearing offspring, and then passing this story on to its offspring, like some harmless fairy tale. We know that the turbulent waters of chaos and destruction and judgement arising and we who have entrusted ourselves to God have been gathered into that ark. Into that sanctified sacred space that is called the Body of Christ, but we mustn't forget that for the time being. This is a place of paradox, a place that is neither straightforwardly, a place of death nor straightforwardly, a place of life, and rather a place of death giving way to life.

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There is much about life in the body of Christ, that for all of the joy and the hope that it inspires of our eventual deliverance for the time being, it's pretty confined and cramped and uncomfortable. In fact, frankly, it stinks. It's a place of groaning, subjected by God to futility as it were, a whole little creation, a microcosm. Subjected to the futility of bobbing around aimlessly seemingly ruddle us on the sea in the hope, in the hope that maybe one day it will be finally set free from its bondage when the true glory of the sons of God are revealed.

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That's one of the striking things about this story in Genesis six to eight, is that Noah and his family has no real idea of when or how, or even if, if this flood will end. All he has is the mark of God's covenantal presence, chapter six, verse 15. And it's not so different for us either. No one knows the day or the hour.

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I. And so I think sometimes our desire to break forth from this indefinite prison can kind of get the better of us, can't it? There might be something actually quite noble about that. Well, I mean, what about the drowning world outside us? You know, shouldn't I sort of don my life jacket and jump out the little window and see if I can do my little bit to fish people out of the sea?

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And look, you know, there may well be other ways in which scripture does figure the body of Christ. More like that. Perhaps next week we'll get a glimpse of that as we take a look at another ark in scripture. But that's not really the figure that's given to us here.

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Or perhaps we're inclined to, you know, mark out our little territory for ourselves inside the ark for our own little ambitions and projects. But I think this ark above all calls the body of Christ to wait. I mean it, it's easy to miss how often the scriptures simply call Christ's body to wait. Like Noah, who, if you notice in chapter eight of Genesis, simply waits and waits and waits not knowing the day or the hour when the flood would recede.

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But I'm bored. My children would say, I mean, it's no wonder that anyone who embarks on the utter folly of an ocean cruise has to drug themselves to sleep with an endless stupor of entertainment that's designed to sort of anaesthetise. That's passengers to the. Nauseating claustrophobia of being locked up in what is really, when all is said and done.

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A giant sarkophagus stranded at sea as if to say, wake me up when it's over. But of course, waiting isn't quite the same thing as sheer inactivity or a sort of drug induced sleep. In the figure that's given to us here, waiting calls for a very particular kind of attentiveness. I think a sober mindedness, as Peter puts it, and attentiveness particularly to the Lord's body.

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A family like Noah's family, which as you know was riddled with dysfunction just like any other, but is united by a common trust in the living God. It's a kind of suffering. Good Lord. Why did you shove me in a berth with this rhinoceros?

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You protest only to discover that half a dozen of your fellow passengers have prayed the same thing about you. Oh, well, I've had enough of these people here. Thank goodness I can be rid of them and just move to the church down the road only to discover that the Lord has provided no way outta this ark. So wherever you move within this body, there are the same dysfunctions, the same smells, the same joys, and irritations, all in close confinement.

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It's a suffering. In other words, that calls forth all the hard wrought disciplines of contentment, isn't it? Of love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, faithfulness. Gentleness and self-control, and it's like the Lord is deliberately holding his body there.

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All of those things, as you know, will be sorely tested, but He's holding us, holding us, holding us, for goodness knows how long, oh Lord. But for the time being at least confining us to the discomfort of this ark until it produces in us. The tested endurance and the character and the hope that marked out our lord's own bodily journey through death to life until that day when the waters finally recede and the risen and ascended head says to his body as he did to Noah, come out of the ark. You and your wife, and your sons and their wives.

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Let's pray together, gracious and loving, heavenly Father, we thank you for your kindness to us in snatching us from the jaws of death and incorporating us into the body of your son, the Lord Jesus whose own life was given over to death to give way to an indestructible resurrection life. Father, as we are held in this body, in this age, awaiting that day when you will call us out into a new creation, help us to be attentive to the body, bring forth in us those fruit of Christ's spirit tested and refined in a way that produces in us that character. That character that marks the Lord our living head himself, and we pray this for Jesus' sake.

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Amen.