Preke - Sermons - 2021

Dear Confirmands,

 in two weeks’ time, your confirmation will take place. And you have put a lot of effort and thought into which Bible verse should accompany and guide you in life. 

God accompanies you in life. Sometimes you can feel it very clearly. You can feel that there is power and meaning in everything. 

We call this power God. Your parents had a clear idea when they had you baptized 13 or 14 years ago. I am sure of it.  When a child is born, the parents entrust the child to God through baptism.   And God said yes to you, you can count on that. 

At a baptism, we use water. It is a symbol and reminds us of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. He baptized with water in the Jordan River as a sign of forgiveness of sin. All that was wrong, evil and dirty should be cleaned and washed away. So that life can start afresh, full of hope and trust.

Water can also be dangerous. People who have been affected by floods know this all too well: water can destroy everything you own. Today our sermon text is preceded by a very well-known story. There it becomes clear what kind of power water has.

We find the story in the first book of the Bible, the first book of Moses. (Gen 6-8, 17).

And this is where our sermon text comes in.

 Gen 8:18-22 

18 So Noah went out of the boat with his wife, his sons, and their wives. 

19 All the animals and birds went out of the boat in groups of their own kind. 

20 Noah built an altar to the Lord; he took one of each kind of ritually clean animal and bird, and burned them whole as a sacrifice on the altar. 

21 The odor of the sacrifice pleased the Lord, and he said to himself, "Never again will I put the earth under a curse because of what people do; I know that from the time they are young their thoughts are evil. Never again will I destroy all living beings, as I have done this time. 

22 As long as the world exists, there will be a time for planting and a time for harvest. There will always be cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night."

In other words, God wants a future for mankind. That is why he sends Noah and his family and the animals out into the New World. God knows: life is only possible through community. God wants this world and he starts anew with it. 

God's "yes" to people, to us, is the basic prerequisite for us to be here.

Natural scientists do a lot of research and with their theories, should they ever become complete, they can explain how the universe came into being. But why it came into being remains open. For many of them, belief in God and scientific knowledge do not contradict each other, but even complement each other. That in the beginning there was God's "yes", from which everything else could evolve. 

Noah comes out of the ark just as he went in. Silent. We hear nothing from him. Not even a little bit of relief that the time of this oppressive confinement in the dark ark is finally over. Noah breathes in; Noah squints, but says nothing. This wordless captain expresses his gratitude in a different way. First of all, he builds an altar and makes an offering to God. He holds a service. 

Whoever has experienced their life as a new gift, after an accident or a serious illness, for example, can perhaps sympathize with Noah and his family. The same feeling that nothing can be taken for granted in this world. The very fact that you are well and healthy. Or that you were lucky in one or other situation. Luck is fragile, life is delicate. Perhaps with an awareness of this, life is lived more intently than before. 

Here, perhaps, in this story of Noah and the Flood, we have an example of the fact that people are actually afraid of themselves, of their own sometimes evil actions. God wants the world to go on existing. Unfortunately, it is not impossible that the beings created by him freely, oppose his will. And thus put the world in danger.  The very world that he wants to preserve. 

We constantly mess up what sustains our own life. It is good for us to have respect for what has been given to us. It has been entrusted to us to look after. And maybe that also means to give up something sometimes. 

God attests to man's rooted wickedness before the great Flood. If this was the reason for the Flood, it is now the reason for him to preserve the earth. "Everything that comes out of their heart, all their thinking and planning is evil from their youth." 

This is what God says to Himself. They are the same words as before the Flood. People have not changed. 

Noah is also an example of this. He was pious and good man before the Flood. He still is. But he has also remained strangely untouched by all the cruelty and death around him. He accepted his own salvation as well as the death of all others. He did not try to save anyone else, for example to persuade God to allow him to build a second ark. Even in this good man there is a lot of indifference deep inside.

In God's heart it looks different. There is no indifference. People do not change. God is aware of that. But God does care. God says to himself: "I will no longer destroy all life on earth, as I have done. From now on, as long as the earth exists, sowing and reaping, frost and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease." 

People do not change so God changes. There is a new beginning. 

There will always be a new beginning with God.

 God created us in His image. To be like Him - what that means can be summed up very briefly:

It means holding on to the fact that there is a future and a hope for all of us and for the beautiful earth we live on.

Moreover, we all have a responsibility for it. 

Then it will be possible for us to do what we are about to sing: to be ready to serve, to use our own strength, to reach out to others and not lose patience. A challenge. Our task.