Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Everyone knows the story of Noah well. Perhaps you've noticed the wooden ark in the narthex, created by Leabert Boyles, that has helped to announce the series on baptism sponsored by the Early Childhood Ministry.

The story of Noah is about deliverance through water; it's the wonderful saga of a faithful family and, most interesting to many, their ark. It is a ship that contains the remnants of the entire planet, and it is the seed that restores it. The ark represents the covenant that God establishes here—a covenant which embraces all of the earth.

As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.

But, of course, the story is not all goodness and light. There is darkness here. Nearly all of humanity has so fallen into sin that there is almost nothing worth saving. God almost gives up, but finds Noah and his family who have remained faithful. For their sake, he offers a way out for the few in order that a new beginning might be made. It is a beginning that starts with virtually complete destruction of life on the earth—a flood that covers everything.

This story speaks to us of sin and its consequences as it tells of God's mercy. It hearkens to the cross, on which God made the sacrifice in the form of a Son rather than effecting the judgment that we all still deserved—death. And now both rainbow and cross stand as signs to us of God's mercy.

And still the darkness falls. Still, our planet groans under the weight of destruction that our sin has brought upon it. We continue to abuse God's good creation, and it seems that SUVs have become the latest popular way of symbolizing that abuse—though they are falling into less favor as the price of gasoline climbs.

The darkness that falls is well known to us. We see the effects of pollution, traffic congestion, city sprawl that consumes our farmland, global warming, ozone depletion, massive deforestation, species that become extinct at an alarming daily rate, food that is contaminated, drinking water that many are afraid to take into their bodies.

The effects of this dark sin were portrayed with a playfulness that belies the point of the story by Dr. Seuss in his classic, "The Lorax."

The story takes place in a bucolic setting of heavily fruited Truffula Trees, Swomee-Swans, and Brown Bar-ba-loots; it is a place where "from the rippulous pond / comes the comforting sounds / of the Humming-fish / while splashing around."

This arcadian scene is invaded by the enterprising Once-ler who discovers that the soft tuft of the Truffula Trees can be harvested to make clothes—or Thneeds. The Once-ler proceeds to chop down all of the Truffula Trees for Thneeds. But because the Truffula Trees provide food and shelter for the animals that live in this place, the death of the trees marks the end of all the Swomee-Swans, Brown Bar-ba-loots, and Humming-fish that depended on these trees for their survival. At this point the destruction of the once beautiful countryside is interrupted by the Lorax, a small walrus-like creature with a big yellow mustache, who prophesies correctly that the Once-ler's rapacious abuse of his immediate surroundings will result in total destruction of the environment.

True to the Lorax's prophecy, this sylvan landscape becomes saturated in toxins: the air is filled with "smogulous smoke" and local waters degenerate into "Schloppity Schlopp...that is glumping the pond where the Humming-Fish hummed! / No more can they hum, for their gills are all gummed."

The Once-ler bemoans, "No more trees. No more thneeds. No more work to be done. / So, in no time, my uncles and aunts, every one, / all waved me goodbye. They jumped into my cars / and drove away under the smoke-smuggered stars. / Now all that was left 'neath the bad-smelling sky / was my big empty factory / the Lorax / and I."

In the wake of this ecocide, the Lorax departs from the now ugly world and leaves in his absence a pile of rocks with the word "unless" inscribed in the rubble. In the final pages of the story a young child happens onto this rock pile and is greeted by the Once-ler, who is depressed and alone and living in the boarded-up remains of his once proud capitalist empire. The Once-ler says to the child, "But now, now that you're here, / the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear, / UNLESS someone like you /cares a whole awful lot, / nothing is going to get better. / It's not."

This story is charged with the simple but profound message that all forms of life need and depend upon one another for their health and survival and that the gradual destruction of one life-form (in this case, the bountiful Truffula Trees) eventually results, in a ripple-like effect, in the degradation of the whole ecosystem that originally supported the life-form now under siege. The Lorax is a whimsical but telling children's story about the biological interdependence that binds all members of the life—web to one another, a reflection of the sin of humanity that became a judgment upon the entire Earth in the story of Noah.

Sadly, it is a story that ends on the plaintive note that unless someone decides to care for the integrity of the web of life, the destruction of the places that we dearly love is a foregone conclusion—whether these places are the Truffula lands of Seuss's fertile imagination or the places we call home, where we live and work and raise our families. (The Green Face of God: Christianity in an Age of Ecocide, Mark Wallace, Cross Currents, Fall 2000, Vol. 50, Issue 3.)

Paul writes that human arrogance causes the whole creation to groan in agony as it waits for deliverance; he continues that as the creation sighs in pain, the Spirit on our behalf likewise groans in sounds too deep for words—interceding on our behalf that God's love for all creation will be consummated (Romans 8:18-39).

Note again that when God makes the covenant with creation after the flood, it is a covenant not just with Noah and his family, or even with all future human beings, but with "every living creature that is with you (v. 10). It is as though Noah's action then binds human and animal destiny together forever. What happens to one species of creature affects all, just like the Truffula Trees.

But, of course, Genesis has already suggested, in its first creation story, that this was always God's intention. When God makes human beings in chapter 1, God does so expressly saying that human beings are to be responsible for "every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth" (Gen. 1:26).

According to Genesis, human beings have always been closely bound up with the rest of the created order, so when Noah takes animals onto the ark to preserve them, he is exercising the proper stewardship for which people were created. It is his duty and his joy to care for what God has made. So when God tells Noah that the new covenant is to include the rest of creation, too, God could not have paid him a higher compliment. "Thank you, Noah," God is saying, "you are helping the world to be the way it should be."

This intimate and necessary connection between the human creation and the rest of what God has made is part of what Lent is supposed to help us rediscover. So much of our human lives are constructed around the premise that we can isolate and protect ourselves from the forces that beset the rest of the world. WE build houses to shield ourselves from the elements; we generate electricity to keep the dark out and make night and day bend to our will; we develop medicines to keep death at bay—the list is endless. When the forces of nature break through and we have to submit to them, we are outraged—think what would happen if a blizzard hit during worship this morning and we were all stranded here, and you will get a glimpse of what I mean.

Lent challenges us to remove some of our safety nets. Most of us do that in very small ways. We give up alcohol or chocolate or caffeine, and it's frightening how hard it is to manage without the habits by which we begin to order and define our lives.

But Lent is not only an exercise in self-examination, self-testing, and dwelling on the darkness in our souls and lives. Its basic questions are "What did God create you for?", "What do you depend upon?", "How do you define yourself."

We learn this morning two very important things: that all of life is utterly dependent upon God, and that all of life is integrally linked. If God did not choose to create and preserve, nothing would exist. If we do not behave responsibly in our work with God in the care and redemption of all that God has made, the tapestry of life will unravel. If we forget these basic facts, then we lose the foundation for knowing our purpose in perceiving and railing against the darkness. Noah's ark is the sign that we can only be saved together. The Earth is our ark; will it remain sea-worthy?

Today we are asked to convert our spirits to a planetary vision of an interdependent earth where all persons live in harmony with their natural environments. May the Holy Spirit, as divine force for the sustenance and renewal in all things, come into our hearts and minds reminding us of God's care for all the earth. And may the Spirit persuade us to work with God against the growing darkness.  —  Amen.