05/12/2026
Noah comes out of the ark into a world that has been unmade.
Try to imagine the strangeness of it. The silence. The mud. The wreckage. The memory of what had been lost. Humanity has endured catastrophe on a scale beyond imagining and Noah steps out into a creation that must have felt at once familiar and entirely alien.
The archaeological record does not really bear this out as a literal historical event we can point to and prove, but I have never understood why that mattered so much to some people. Genesis 1 through 11 is not trying to give us a modern history lesson. These stories tell us about the world God intends, what has gone wrong, what God is doing about it, and what humanity keeps choosing to do instead.
And this part of the story is about what Noah does first in a new world.
He does not build a house.
He does not plant crops.
He does not start rebuilding civilization.
He builds an altar.
That is probably not most people’s first instinct. You and I have been taught that after disaster, after instability, after fear, the first thing that matters is survival and productivity. Get back to work. Fix the systems. Rebuild the machine. We are taught that usefulness is the highest virtue humanity possesses.
But Noah steps out after the collapse of the world and his first act is worship.
Because Noah’s story is also about humanity trying to build the world entirely according to our own desires and wisdom. That is the warning underneath Eden too. Human beings keep deciding we alone should determine good and evil, right and wrong, and every time we do, things become violent and disordered. That is how Genesis describes the world before the flood in the first place.
And if worship does not come first, eventually something else takes God’s place.
We worship gods just as surely as the ancient world did. We just call them different things now. Nation. Political party. Money. Comfort. Power. Fear. Even the self.
Something always climbs onto the altar.
And that matters especially during Rogationtide because these prayers are deeply practical prayers. They are prayers for crops and labor and weather and creation itself. Rogation days remind us that our lives depend on things we cannot control. Rain still has to fall. Seeds still have to grow. The earth still has to yield its increase. We can build astonishing technologies and still not create one grain of wheat from nothing.
Everything remains a gift.
That is what Noah recognizes when he builds the altar. The world itself is still a gift, even after devastation. The earth belongs to God and not to the many things we would put in God’s place.
And then comes one of the strangest and most hopeful lines in all of Scripture. God looks upon this broken world, upon humanity which has already proven itself violent and faithless, and God says:
“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
Notice what God does not say.
God does not say humanity has finally learned its lesson.
God does not say people are good now.
God does not say the world will never know suffering again.
Scripture is never naïve about us.
And yet God commits Himself to creation anyway. God refuses to abandon the world. God will reckon with human evil, but He will not walk away from us.
Ours is a God of Mercy, of Grace.
And so worship becomes more than obligation. Worship is the act of remembering what is ultimately true when the world feels unstable. Worship teaches gratitude in a culture of entitlement, restraint in a culture of consumption, reverence in a culture that treats everything as disposable.
And honestly, I think a lot of us know what it feels like to step out into a world that no longer feels quite familiar. The last decade or so has changed people. Changed communities. Changed institutions. There is a low-grade exhaustion humming underneath modern life almost all the time now.
And yet here we are. Still praying. Still gathering. Still hearing Scripture. Still breaking bread. Still trying, however imperfectly, to worship God instead of all the things screaming for our attention.
That matters.
Because in Christ, and especially as we approach Ascension, we proclaim not only that God has not abandoned creation, but that He has drawn humanity itself into divine life. The Risen Christ ascends still bearing human flesh. Which means this world matters. These bodies matter. What we build matters. How we live together matters.
But first things first.
Before Noah rebuilds the world, he worships.
And before you and I can build lives worth living, we too must remember who made us, who sustains us, and who alone is the Genesis of all things.
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