The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
March 9, 2003

In the Navy
Genesis 9:8-17 and 1 Peter 3:18-22

Noah’s Ark. Now there is a story for our times. I know that it hasn’t rained for forty days and forty nights yet, but it sure seems like it. With all the rain we have received, it should be easy to get a few volunteers together to start cobbling together an ark. Let’s see, how do we make an ark anyway… 

God told Moses to make an ark. What is an ark anyway? It was to be 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide. How long is a cubit anyway? Noah and his sons were to make the ark out of gopher wood and fill it with pitch inside and out. And what exactly is gopher wood? 

There are, of course, answers to those questions. The word for ark is the Hebrew word meaning “box” or “chest.” A cubit is roughly a foot and a half in length. The meaning of gopher wood is not exactly certain, but there is good reason to think it refers to cypress. So, if you are thinking of volunteering to build us an ark, you’ll need to find a big grove of cypress trees before we even think of rounding up animals two by two. 

Nevertheless, we don’t need to build an ark. The world will never need an ark again, right? Our Old Testament reading for today is where God promises never to destroy the earth by flood. God does not promise that one given area won’t flood. God promises that a flood will never again cover the whole earth. God makes a covenant, not with humans alone, but with all the animals on the earth and then gives the rainbow as a sign that this will never happen again. 

The story of Noah’s Ark is problematic for folks today. We can get too smart for the story of the rainbow. The story of the rainbow sounds a lot like myths from other cultures, stories that came along after the fact to explain an occurrence. Some might say that primitive peoples did not know about how light refracts causing a rainbow and so they created this story. What good is this story anyway?  

The Apostle Peter answers that question in the Epistle reading for today. Peter is not concerned with the question of whether Noah’s story was historically accurate in every detail. Peter is convinced that the story is true and Peter knows that it is true because he has experienced the story for himself. Peter writes that the flood in Noah’s day prefigured baptism. It is through baptism that Peter knows that the hope a rainbow represents is real. 

A rainbow representing hope is fine. Yet it’s a scary idea to me to think that Noah’s story prefigures baptism. How? In the story of Noah’s Ark, practically everyone dies. Every person in the world save the eight in the ark. Every animal on the earth save the pairs rescued from the flood. Sure inside the ark, it’s a story of hope and salvation. Take a look outside the ark and Noah’s story is about loss and death.  

What do the flood and the ark to do with baptism? Baptism is about life and new birth. Or is it? The Apostle Paul wrote, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Romans 6:3)  

In baptism all die. We die to the old life. We die to sin. We die to the way of death. Paul goes on to write, “Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that...we might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). 

In Noah’s story eight were saved from death. In baptism all die and are reborn. Where is the common ground? The common ground is the ark. Genesis tells us that all the animals that walked on the earth died with the exception of those on the ark. Peter compares this to baptism. All will die except those who are cleansed of sin in baptism. The baptized are in the ark for the ark is the church. This is not my comparison. There is a long tradition of interpreting the church as the ark in which those who are being saved gather. Baptismal fonts of the middle ages often had carvings of Noah’s ark on them as Noah’s ark was viewed as a type for the church.[1] 

One way of showing this visually is in a church building. Instead of our humble garage turned sanctuary, imagine a noble cathedral. In a cathedral, great stone arches rise from the sides to meet in the center, supporting the outer walls of the church. The pointed arches of a gothic cathedral are not unlike the architecture of a wooden ship, which has timbers arching downward to the keel. The keel forms the spine down the middle of the bottom of the ship. Take a cathedral or any gothic church, turn it upside down and you get the basic design of a ship. What’s even better, with the church turned upside down, the steeple takes the place of the rudder. The cross becomes the guide that turns the course of the ship. This is what it looks like to take the analogy of the church as ark seriously in a physical sense.[2]  

This analogy plays itself out further in architecture. In traditional church architecture, there are three main parts to the worship space. There is the sanctuary, the holy place around the altar. This holy place is usually cordoned off with an altar rail. The altar rail was first added to keep livestock, who sometimes roamed into ancient cathedrals, out of the sanctuary. The next area was the chancel, a mid-point between the sanctuary and the congregation, the chancel was an area for the choir and clergy.  

The largest part of the church was the nave, the area for the congregation. The word nave, comes from the same Latin word for ship from which we derive the word Navy.[3] This is not incidental. To be in the nave of the church was to be in a ship, to be in the ark itself, that great means of salvation in the storms of life. To be in the congregation of a church was to be in God’s army, or in another sense this soundtrack might be more fitting. To be in church meant to be… 

[play brief sound clip of the Village People singing “In the Navy”
available here as a .WAV or .MP3] 

In the Navy. Talk about accelerating your life, you’re in the one ship capable of riding out life’s storms. In the Navy. The few being saved out of the many. In the Navy. It doesn’t mean that you get to ride to salvation in comfort. You aren’t just idly sitting in the audience, you are in the congregation, in the nave of the church where the real workers of the church gather to retell the old, old story of God’s love for all creation. You are in the Navy, in the service, but in this case, the service of God. 

With the Navy comparison in mind, let’s go back and take another look at Noah’s Ark and the rainbow. The story of Noah’s Ark is not a myth trapped in time, but a living story in which we learn that God wants all creation in the ark too. The story of the rainbow teaches us that it is not God’s will that life on the earth be wiped out. Rather it is God’s will that all life on earth be redeemed. 

The great tragedy of Noah’s Ark was the noise outside the ark as the lost and dying world discovered that it was indeed a lost and dying world. The rain poured. People cried out for salvation. The doors of the ark stayed shut. It doesn’t sound fair. Where is the God of second chances? First, Peter writes that after his death and before his resurrection, Jesus went to preach to spirits in prison, which refers to Jesus giving people who had not obeyed in former times another chance. That’s great for them, but what about folks living now? If Peter was right, the scenario is playing itself out again and this time we are in the ark but the lost and dying world doesn’t necessarily realize that it is even sick.  

Those of us gathered here are in the Navy, we are in the service of God to give the good news. Here’s the message we have for those outside the ark: There is a God. God created you. God loves you. God wants a relationship with you and you can have this through the person of Jesus, the Christ. That message is for the whole world. The salvation that exists in this ark is not meant to be hoarded as a private treasure. 

Looking at the church that way, you can see that King of Peace is building an ark. In fact, the steel arrived for our ark just this week. No the church is not the building. The church is us, the people. But the church building is like the ark—the place where those being saved gather safe from the storms of life to get their spiritual batteries recharged. Our new building will be an ark, a sheltered haven away from the battering tide of life.  

I laughed when I realized that the windows, front doors and trim work for our new church are being made of cypress, which may well be what gopher wood referred to in Genesis. Our ark may have some of the same type of wood as Noah’s ark. Yet the task for our new ark is quite different. The task for Noah was to get his family and the animals to safety. Our task will be to bring that safety of God’s presence to as much of our community as we can possibly touch. Getting God’s love out to the community is not my job alone. Sharing the love of God with our community is the job of everyone who gathers in the nave as well. For like being in the Navy this is no pleasure cruise. This ark of the church is a voyage for crew only. Welcome aboard!