It’s interesting, isn’t it, that our cultural associations with Noah are happy ones of cheerful camp songs and cartoons: a quaint wooden ark, an old  (white) man with a long, bushy white beard, animals with their heads sticking out of windows, and a colorful rainbow arching across the sky. 

We never talk or think about what the earth must have looked like after the floodwaters receded. 

Whether we’ve lived through it and experienced it first-hand or seen images, we know what floods can do. It’s a shocking sight, unfathomable to our human brains, forgotten and skipped over as soon as we can tuck it away. It’s just too horrible. 

I’m not sure why God thinks he has to drown absolutely everything just because of his disappointment in human beings. But a fresh start is clearly what he’s after, with a man and his family that he deems righteous and good enough to be the ancestors of the future of humanity. 

Clearly, God’s first creations were not up to the job. Maybe with some good genes, the future will be more promising. 

Just as clearly, God did not foresee what this destruction would look like after the floodwaters receded. There must have been a moment when God realizes that this was a mistake. A huge mistake. We can imagine God’s shock at what was left behind: the regrowth that needed to happen, the rebuilding required. On a global level! 

Not only has he brought unnecessary pain upon the earth, he awakens to the fact that humans are humans, imperfectly made in the image of Godself, imperfect just as God is, with evil in their hearts. 

God is not the all-knowing, all-seeing God we were sold on. 

How do we know this? 

Because there is a turning point. Noah makes a sacrifice (I suppose thanking God for having made it through this terrible time, stuck in a boat with just his family--and all these animals for months and months). God smells the pleasing odor, and just then, promises himself—in his heart, literally, as the Hebrew says—and later Noah, that he will never again bring such destruction upon the earth. The pain of it must have really hit him.

This is when God awakens to the sacredness of creation--all of creation; God’s promise comes with a warning that there will be a reckoning for every human life taken by another. 

And to be sure that we don’t forget just how sacred life is, God tells Noah and his sons to never eat meat that still contains the lifeblood of the animal; life is sacred, no matter how much evil resides in the heart.

I guess this is when God realizes that you can’t skip steps and get to perfection. You can’t just wipe everything out and jump ahead. 

What God has done seems a lot like what we might call “spiritual bypassing”; we want to skip over the hard stuff; let’s jump over our pain and anger and skip to forgiveness and love. If we pretend it’s not there, maybe it will simply go away. Let’s just go to a mountain top and sit and meditate and we will find enlightenment. If we don’t have to see it, we can pretend it’s not there.

But looking down from that mountain, even if you’ve avoided direct assault, you can still see the destruction. There’s no escaping it. You still have to clean up the mess. 

There’s one last interesting detail in the story of Noah; God knows that he doesn’t have to tell Noah to take two of each species of plant life. The plants will take care of themselves. With their seeds and roots buried in the soil, the plants are safe. 

Deep down in the darkness, the seeds are waiting to sprout as they always do, when the time is right. They are pure and good and nothing about them needs to be fixed, and they don’t need anyone to do it for them. 

We must continue to plant the seeds that will sprout into our future, and we can’t skip any steps. We have to go through it all. We live in a global community now and we’re living in a time of reckoning. There’s no escaping Global Warming, no matter where you go, and we can’t lay the blame on one group the way God blames humans for their humanity. It obviously gets us nowhere—or it leads us to greater destruction.

The seeds that are buried are the seeds of awakening for the entire human race. They’re still buried, but little by little, they are sprouting, no matter what. All we need to do is water them.