Sermon for Memorial Day Weekend, May 23, 2015 (Given at Concordia Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois)

Readings: Genesis 9:8-17; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Matthew12:38-41

            Beloved in Christ, at the dawn of creation, the world was a lifeless place. “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.” All that one could see—if one could cut through the darkness—was the deep, or more accurately, its surface. What was churning in its lifeless waters, no one knew. But already at this point we are given hope, for we are told that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” We are not surprised to see this untamed world give way to God’s good order, as He calls out light from darkness, the heavens from the world below, and dry ground from the midst of the sea. Far from being a lifeless place, the sea becomes a home for “the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm.” And as with the rest of His creation, “God saw” it, “and behold, it was very good.”

            But it is difficult to believe in the goodness of creation, for we live after the fall into sin. Everything has been tainted with sin. The good world is now designed for futility and marred with destruction. And so for the rest of the Scriptures the sea is almost always not a good place to be. Its waves drown sailors and sink boats. Its creatures—leviathan and behemoth—frighten landlubbers. It is wild, unpredictable, and stormy. In the Revelation it is a sea that separates the Apostle John from God, and it is out of the sea that the beast with ten horns and seven heads arises.

            One of my predecessors would have understood that imagery quite well. You know me as the pastor at First Bethlehem Lutheran Church, but for eighteen years I also served as vacancy pastor at Grace Lutheran Church at 28^th and Karlov in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. In July of 1915 my predecessor there, Pastor H. Boester, conducted funerals for twenty-six of his parishioners, many of them buried in this cemetery. They were all employees of Western Electric or their family members, and they had all boarded the Eastland on the fateful day of July 24, 1915. The Chicago River was not a rough body of water, but it was sufficient to drown over 1,000 people that day.

            But the Eastland pales in comparison to the greatest maritime disaster of all ages, the Flood. For it is in the Flood that we first see just how dire a verdict stands against humanity. Yes, before then we had been exiled from Eden and the ground had been cursed. We had been told that we are mortal, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. But how we laughed. What were a few weeds amid a still fertile earth? What was death when we could count on living to 800 or 900 years? And so we grew more insolent. Brother murdered brother, and then each generation grew more violent, more itching for a fight. Even the godly were drawn by worldly pleasures and turned away from God. Noah warned us for over a century, but we could not—we would not—hear. At last, God sent a disaster like none other before or afterwards. He unleashed a wave of death and destruction. For once humanity saw what it deserved, as millions of people died, drowned in the waters. Ever since then we’ve taken death more seriously. We may still deny it. We may still pretend that it won’t come for us. But the Flood taught us to fear death and take it seriously. More than that, it taught us to take God and His wrath against sin seriously.

            The torrents of death will sweep over us one day, for we have sinned against God. We can struggle against the tide and perhaps succeed for a while, but eventually we will be inundated by the flood called death. God’s judgment still stands, and it crashes upon each successive generation of humanity like wave after wave falling on the breakers. Death is wild and savage and hostile to mankind—as untamed as the raging sea. And that is appropriate, for our sin is wild and savage—as untamed as the raging sea.

            But as our Scripture readings today remind us, God intends to calm the raging sea. It began as soon as the Flood was over. Now that humanity had had its first taste of raw death and all the elements of the universe arrayed against mankind, God brokered a peace. He established a covenant between Himself and all creatures, including us. It wasn’t that humanity had all of a sudden gotten religion and had started shaping up. Humanity would soon turn back to its old vices of getting drunk, tyrannically oppressing others, and building towers to drag God out of the heavens. No, it wasn’t that humanity had improved, but rather that God wanted to show mercy. And so He promised that He would no longer deal with mankind through the strict judgment of the Flood. He would no longer use the raging sea to all but wipe out humanity. Instead, He placed a rainbow in the sky so that we would understand that His wrath would end.

            But how? We turn to Peter, who explains. Christ entered the torrents of death that should have engulfed us. He was drowned with the guilt of our sins as He bore them on the cross. But He emerged from the waters of death victorious and unscathed. First, He proclaimed His victory to those who had resisted Noah. He upbraided them for their unbelief, for their refusal to trust in the one proclaimed by Noah and to repent and to receive the forgiveness of sins. And then He rose gloriously from the dead, so that He could give forgiveness and eternal life to all who hear His Word and believe it.

            But how do we receive this salvation? Through the waters of baptism. God saved Noah from the wicked generation that surrounded him by placing Noah in an ark that was buffeted by water from all directions. But God kept Noah and his family alive in that ark, while the world of unbelief drowned and died. In the same way God has placed us in the waters of holy baptism where water comes upon us from all directions. Yet God keeps us alive—indeed, makes us fully alive for the first time—while our old sinful self drowns and dies.

            We see that, both in Noah’s case and in ours, the very same flood that should overwhelm us and drown us instead saves us and brings us life. That is because both Noah and we are connected with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. Because He has overcome death, death no longer has mastery over us.

Christ Walks on the Water
Norwegian Sailors' Mission, San Francisco, CA
The inscription reads, "Be of good courage. It is I. Fear not."

            And so we look at death from a new perspective, as our Lord teaches us to do in our reading from Matthew. Our Lord calls to mind what had happened to Jonah. Jonah had disobeyed God. He had run from God by going west over the sea, when he should have gone east over dry ground. In the end, though, he found himself surrounded by death as well as bringing death upon the sailors and his fellow passengers. No one wanted to die. They bailed water. They dumped cargo. But in the end it was no use. Jonah threw himself overboard into certain death and the sea became calm. He was swallowed by a great fish and thus prevented from dying. For three days he was in the belly of the fish, until he was spit up on dry land.

            So it was with our Lord. Unlike Jonah, He was completely obedient to His Father, but it still landed Him surrounded by death. In fact, His obedience drove Him into death. Indeed, death threated all the people of the world, for we were His fellow passengers and sailors. None of us wanted to die. We took our vitamins. We exercised. We saw the doctor. But in the end it was no use. And so our Lord threw Himself overboard into certain death—and the raging sea of death became calm. Our Lord was in the belly of the grave for three days, until at last He rose from the dead.

            The sea of death still rages, but its days are numbered, now that Christ has calmed it by His own death and resurrection. We still must pass through many waters, but Christ’s love is fiercer than death. When we die, we discover that death no longer rages, but we are instead kept safe in the arms of Christ, more secure than Jonah was when he was in the belly of the great fish. And then one day we will rise. We will see the new heavens and the new earth. And we will look around for the sea that raged throughout our lifetime, but we will not find it. Gone will be the sea that separated the Apostle John (and us) from God. Gone will be the sea that had produced the great beast opposed to God. Instead there will only be the gentle “river of the water of life.” In Jesus’ name. Amen.