Today is the first Sunday in the Season of Lent, a day that we usually spend with Jesus on the Mount of Temptation, recalling the forty days he spent immediately after his baptism, wrestling with his call to save the world, and how he would go about it. This year, however, we are starting not there, but with Noah, who was also spending forty days doing his part to save the world, riding the ark to safety, and also coming out on a mountaintop. As the waters receded, he saw a rainbow, and heard God’s promise of a new beginning. After the flood, it was a new world!
It is interesting to note that if you look at the Old Testament lessons appointed for this Sunday in the three year cycle of the lectionary, you will find they have that in common: starting over. One year (Year A, Genesis 2 & 3), the story is about Adam and Eve being thrown out of the Garden of Eden and beginning again in the real world. Another year (Year C, Deuteronomy 26:1-11) it’s about the anticipation of God’s people entering what they called the Promised Land, having come through the waters of the Red Sea and the struggles of their wilderness wanderings. Lent always begins, as it ends, in a new world.
This year for Lent (Year B in the cycle), I am going to preach from the Hebrew scriptures each week, and we will look in on the People of God at various stages of their journey and see how God’s covenant with them is expressed, how it plays out, and how it’s still alive and applicable for us.
And so today, we begin with that old, old story, known to generations of Sunday School children as the story of Noah and the Ark, but which is really, finally all about the rainbow at the end, the covenant promise of God to deal not just with humanity but with the whole created order in a new and loving way.
It goes back to that ancient memory which is common to nearly all cultures and faith traditions, of great floods, when it must have seemed that the whole world was drowning. From Native Americans to Babylonians, as well as Christians and Jews, the stories of creation begin with waters covering the face of the earth. When I studied geology it, I learned that much of the North American continent was once a “vast inland sea.” Geological evidence shows that there have indeed been great floods in the Middle East, with communities if not civilizations, wiped out. And while it is unlikely that the entire earth was ever below sea level, when it’s happening to you, when it’s your world that is drowning, that doesn’t matter very much. Just ask any of the former residents of New Orleans!
Now in most ancient cultures, floods just happened, caused by the capriciousness of the Gods for no particular reason. Only the Biblical version tries to make theological sense out of it all. There is a reason for this flood, they said, and it was the wickedness of humankind.
Many of us would now find such a reason somewhat unsophisticated at best, repugnant at worst. We don't believe that God causes disasters for any reason, whether as punishment or by whim. AIDS was labeled by some TV preachers as sent from God to punish gays. But what about hemophiliacs, or children of IV drug users, or the women of Central Africa where the epidemic is at its worst? Earthquakes were supposed to be San Francisco's punishment for its notoriety. But what about earthquakes in Mexico, or in the Seas off Thailand? The plagues that swept through Europe during the Middle Ages were thought to be a form of God's judgment, when the real problem was poor sanitation. Even the flooding of Hurricane Katrina was supposed by some to be God’s way of dealing with Mardi Gras – except that somehow the French Quarter was spared. Maybe God likes a good party! But God often gets the blame for those things we don't understand.
God has created a world of free will in which actions have consequences. God doesn't have to go out of the way to make us suffer for our wrongdoings. It's like the missionary who was told by some natives, "The gods send us floods because we have neglected our prayers." To which he replied, "No, you have floods because you have neglected the levees!”
Well, it takes both work and prayer, hand-in-hand, and we should not neglect either one.
Nevertheless, the earliest Biblical writers, reflecting back on the memory of periodic, catastrophic floods, decided that this must reflect the ways of God in dealing with evil. When things get bad enough, wipe it out and start over again. I know I’ve had days like that, when I just want to say, I wish that hadn’t happened, can’t I just have a do-over? That’s what they thought God had done.
Now when you look at the state of our world today you may wonder if God is not contemplating another do-over. Before actor Jake Gyllenhaal stared in his Oscar-nominated role in Brokeback Mountain, he appeared in a disaster movie (in more ways than one) called The Day After Tomorrow, which raised the specter of another Noah-like flood in the not-too-distant future, the result of global warming. While it was fiction, and an obvious exaggeration, it cannot be dismissed either, for global warming is real. Articles in the Washington Post this past week told of how British Columbia’s pine forests are being wiped out because recent winters haven’t been cold enough to kill the pine beetles, and how the ice shelf in Antarctica is melting much faster than previously thought, so much that sea level could rise by 20 feet by the end of this century, and we’ll all be like the Netherlands or New Orleans. And while the populated coastal regions of the world would be inundated, one quarter of the lakes and streams in Central Africa may well go dry. Is this climate change or natural fluctuation? Ice ages have come and gone, but there is ample evidence that our behavior is making it worse. On another front, one of our members who works at NIH tells me of her project on what we call “bird flu.” While very few humans have so far been affected, the virus is only a few mutations away from precipitating a global catastrophe that could dwarf the plagues of the Middle Ages or the 1918 flu epidemic. Will we be ready for that? And on still another, what will be the result of the huge national debt being created to pay for the so-called war on terror? What will be the condition of Social Security when I turn 85, assuming all these other disasters don’t get me first? There are plenty of dangers looming, and we can’t say we weren’t warned.
Obviously not every disaster or tragedy can be predicted, as the horrific accident on the Beltway on Thursday reminds us. It touches all of us, whether we were caught in the traffic or not. We do hold the victims and their families in our prayers this day and our hearts go out to them!
We reflect again on the transitory nature of life, but we don’t give up on it. And we remember that while this ancient flood was thought to be caused by God’s unhappiness with the world, we also read on and see that God didn’t give up on it either, not entirely.
For God selected one man and his family to do something, and Noah responded. Fortunately, his last words weren’t “No one could have predicted that there would be a flood...” and we don’t even have to have that on tape. Instead, even though it wasn’t even raining yet, he heeded the warning and got to work. He formed his own version of FEMA --- HEMA: the Heavenly Emergency Management Agency. He built the ark, he gathered his family and the animals, and together they rode out the storm.
That ark has been the subject of countless comic strips and endless speculation. Why did Noah let that pair of mosquitoes on board? What was it like down there in the hold? How did predator and prey manage to survive together? Great questions. I even came upon a website of Noah’s Ark Trivia (“Noah Foolin’): "According to the bible, who was the first financier?" Answer: Noah, because he floated an entire company when the world was in a state of liquidation. My favorite quote comes from the Middle Ages, “The church is a lot like Noah’s Ark - if it weren’t for the storm outside, we couldn’t stand the stench inside!” And while there’s no doubt some truth in that, the church is like the ark for more than one reason. After all, the ark was God’s way of preserving life, of bringing light and hope to the world, which is what we in the church are called to do.
These days our church may seem more like the ark than usual, as we grapple with our budget realities and what it will mean for us as a congregation and a staff, forces us to make painful decisions. We are navigating some stormy seas, and it may get unpleasant down in the hold. But I figure if those animals could survive it in Noah’s time, so can we! If we trust the guidance of our leadership and the Holy Spirit speaking to each of us, we’ll make it. And with our commitment to one another embodied in our Statement of Purpose – remember? “a common loyalty to Jesus, a common passion to serve the world, and a common purpose to do justly, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God” – we shall weather the storm and glimpse the rainbow on the other side.
Our Moderator has spoken and written so eloquently of “arcs and circles,” the things that bind us, define us, inform our mission, and give us congregational hope. And this story also gives us an ark..... and a circle, which is what the rainbow is.
The rainbow is the sign of God’s covenant-promise to never again destroy the earth. From here on out, God will be a God of love and compassion. It’s what Rabbi Michael Lerner calls, in the title of his new book, The Left Hand of God. As he writes, “The right hand of God... sees the universe as a fundamentally scary place filled with evil forces.... (where) God is the avenger, the big man in heaven who can be invoked to use violence to overcome those evil forces.” In contrast, the “Left Hand of God” responds to peoples’ “desire to reconnect with the sacred, to find some way to unite their lives with a higher meaning and purpose and in particular to that aspect of the sacred that is built upon the loving, kind and generous energy of the universe...”
Admittedly, God’s people didn’t fully grasp what this means, and haven’t yet. For most of our history we’ve been more attuned to the “right hand of God,” but right there, almost from the beginning, a different nature is revealed – the left hand of God, which is what our world and our church needs so much right now.
And so, as a reminder, God placed a bow in the heavens. God took what had been a weapon of destruction, a bow, which according to the ancient cosmologies God used to launch arrows of lightning, and turned it into a sign of the covenant. “As long as the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease....” Never again will I destroy the earth; from now on, my way of dealing with a fragile and stubborn humanity is the way of love. And so the rainbow, an arc of a different sort, embodying all of earth’s diverse colors, always surprising.
Now it is a curious thing that, if you read the text carefully, you will note that the rainbow was not a reminder to us of this promise, but rather a reminder to God. “When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember...” says God. Kind of like putting a string around your finger so you won’t forget. But I have to wonder: why would God need a reminder of God’s own promises? It’s a little like wearing a wedding ring, I suppose – and when I bless rings at a wedding I always recall the connection with the rainbow as a sign of promise. You know you can wear a ring for several reasons. One might be so that if you go to a bar or a party, others will know you are “taken” and treat you as such. Or you could wear it so that your spouse will know to trust your promises. Or...you might wear it to remind yourself of the promises you made, for better, for worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. The ring helps you know who you are, and how you will act. It helps you remember the covenant that you made.
But whether or not God needs reminding of the covenant, it should at least reassure us to know that God remembers it, no matter what, and so whenever we see a rainbow, which only comes when there is rain, then we too are reminded. That is just when God's love comes to us most powerfully, and becomes most real -- in the midst of the storms of life. You just have to have the eyes of faith to see the rainbow.
Whenever I am tempted to give up on the church, or give in to my fears of global disaster, I remember the message of this story: God will not give up on us! We talk about faith in God, but it's a two way street: God also has faith in us, and will love us even when we are faithless and betray the covenant. There will be consequences, of course, but even then God will be right there along side us, loving us like a good mother or father loves their children through their struggles of growing up.
Poet Maya Angelou, who turns up frequently at events like presidential inaugurations and Christmas tree lightings, is invited to give a lot of commencement addresses. She often begins with an old black spiritual: “When it looked like the sun wasn’t gonna shine anymore, God put a rainbow in the clouds.” And she goes on to challenge the graduates with this: “You see, each of us has the possibility and the privilege of being rainbows in the clouds. That statement became the impetus, the encouragement for the 19th century spiritual, and it was made first in Genesis... We are told that rain persisted so unrelentingly that people thought it would never cease. So God, in an attempt to put the people at ease, put a rainbow in the sky. In the 19th century, some African American poet, a lyricist—probably a woman—had said that God put the rainbow in the clouds themselves, not just in the sky. We know that suns and moons and stars and novae and all sorts of illuminations are always in the firmament. But the clouds came so lower and lower, that the viewer could not see the possibility of light. But if the rainbow is in the clouds themselves, that means that even in the darkest times, in the dreariest, and the most threatening of times, there’s a possibility of seeing hope. And that’s who you really are—each one of you is a rainbow in the clouds.”
“When it looked like the sun wasn’t gonna shine anymore, God put a rainbow in the clouds.” And didn’t Jesus say, “You are the light of the world?” So, go forth to be the light, and be the one who is the rainbow in the clouds!
