Chaos swirls all around us. Another school shooting and ongoing wars. We have chaos in our personal lives as well. For me it is coming up on the one year anniversary of the death of my father. Chaos is part of our everyday life. The story of Noah and the flood is a story of chaos as God uncreates the world and begins again. We have tamed the story with our floating zoo images and it is time to reclaim it as a story of the chaos as well as a story of God's steadfast love for us made in a promise to all of creation never to destroy the earth by flood.

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Picher, Oklahoma. Treece, Kansas. It is likely you have never heard of these towns, yet both Picher and Treece along with others in the NE part of Oklahoma and the SE part of Kansas no longer exist, except in ruins. These ghost towns have been deserted because they are uninhabitable. Mining companies pulled the lead and zinc out and left behind a toxic dump. Flint, Michigan a decade after the water crisis started is still trying to fix the damage done by old pipes and years of pollution. Creation is ours to care for, not to dominate. We must care for the world around us.

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In a world split between "us" and "them" how can we work to be us? We have my football team vs your football team; Coke vs Pepsi; political parties; and any number of divisions. In Matthew 25 we have the sheep and the goats. What would happen if we adopted an attitude of everyone were sheep? Everyone fed the hungry, clothed the naked, cared for the sick, etc. What if we were all "us"?

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