Rainbow Covenants

I wrote this sermon for Calvary UMC based on one I wrote back in 2014 for Presbury. It is a story that has captivated me and I've been trying to move out of the way enough for the Holy Spirit to share it.

Scripture:

Hebrew Bible: Genesis 9:8-17 (NRSV)

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”

Gospel: Mark 1:9-15 (NRSV)

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Sermon:

Let us pray:

Patient Teacher,

we give you thanks for this scripture even when the stories within it are hard.

Open our minds today. Open our hearts.

Write your covenant within us, so that these stories we read become more than just children's bedtime stories. May they become our story. Amen.

How many of you have heard the story of Noah's Ark before? It is somewhat familiar, I know. Most of us if we have any religious background at all growing up hear about it as children. Look at the animals in the ark! we say, mimicking the lion's roar. When I was a kid, we used to read these silly stories written from the points of view of the animals on the ark. We used to laugh and laugh at Noah trying to keep the elephant away from the mice they were so terrified of. But when you take a moment to read the Genesis account, you realize that this is not a nice happy story. Lots of people die. Earlier in chapter six of Genesis, the scripture actually says that God was sorry God had made humankind. It is a heartbreaking, confusing, terrifying tale. But from the terror emerges this beautiful promise, a covenant, one of many that God makes with us throughout our history as people of faith.

You may have heard a tale of terror this week if you turned on the news. Or maybe you didn't. Can something really be a tale of terror if it replays over and over again to no effect? But surely what happened in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida on Wednesday was the kind of evil that would make God regret creating us.

When I think of the story of Noah and the ark now it is the idea of God who is angry and frustrated and done with the world that sticks with me. It sticks with me because it is an image that makes me uncomfortable. And because it is a feeling I understand. I scrolled through images of the victims, read stories about them, heard the nonsense from Washington about thoughts and prayers but no action. And I thought, you know what we need, God. Another flood. How can we possibly come back from this? How can we rebuild in a world where so much has gone so wrong?

But God does not work like we do, thank goodness. Well, in the story of Noah, God does take on some decidedly human tendencies, which makes me wonder that we decided the destructive flood came from God because humans have a capacity for violence we would like God to have as well. I'm not so sure God does share those qualities. But there is something in this story that God does share with us. And that is grace.

God is able to redeem even the worst of situations. A flood was coming, everyone would die, but maybe God could still save us. And God did. Noah built the ark. Teachers and coaches gave up their lives for their students. First responders saved who they could. And now survivors are claiming their voices and standing up to politicians who refuse to enact common sense gun laws to try and save more children from the horror they lived through.

We may think in these stories of terror that God should pack up shop and move on. But if God does that, then we don't have to change either. We get to wash our hands of the world, stop trying to figure out how God is calling us to change it. We don't have to sit there and be grieved over loss as we move toward new life anyway.

But God has made a covenant with us. Set a rainbow in the clouds to remind God’s self, supposedly, but also to remind us: new life is possible.

I see the story of Noah as a resurrection story. Sure, it is a much more depressing resurrection story than the one we will read in forty days, but it is about new life that comes out of the horror of death. Not because of the horror of death--- God doesn’t need destruction to bring about new life. But new life is always possible for humanity. The thing that makes Noah’s story a Lentan one is that it covenants with us, requiring us to rebuild. To try again. To take forty days to dig deeper into spiritual disciplines, to fast and pray, and turn our lives back to God.

So already I have suggested in this sermon that maybe it wasn't exactly God who caused the Flood like the text says. Now I am reading a responsibility for us into the covenant we read this morning. If you look carefully at the covenant we read, God covenants with us that humanity will never again be destroyed by a flood. There is no response for humans. It isn't a “if you do this, then I will do that” kind of covenant.

Maybe the Gospel story explains this part better. In the scripture we read from Mark, Jesus has been baptized. He emerges from the water, the heavens open, God names him beloved, and then he is immediately driven into the wilderness. We can presume he is still wet, that’s how quickly he moves. He doesn't have time to celebrate his belovedness; he gets right to work in the wilderness, relying totally on God in the midst of difficulty to discover what his identity as Beloved means for his work here on earth. God never says, “This is my Son, the Beloved if he does all the things I want him to do.” But Jesus knows that his identity as Beloved of God means that he has a responsibility to help live into the kindom of God.

And so do we. God's covenant with Noah says there is no such thing as too far gone. We might not believe God, but that is what the rainbow tells us anyway. There is no violence, no grief, nothing that is too far gone that God can't eke some good out of it. And we, as beloved children of God, baptized as Jesus was, also have a responsibility to work with God to eke out this good. We are agreeing to work with Jesus to renew the world from the inside out.

I was talking to Pastor Beth this week about this passage from Noah. When I read it now, I picture less the art we find in children's Sunday school rooms, and instead I picture an experience I had the last time I was in Bosnia.

Bosnia, to those of us who remember the news in the 1990s, is one of those places that seemed to once mirror the wickedness of the world that must have so disappointed God. During the war, neighbor killed neighbor, concentration camps were established, mass rape was used as a calculated tool of war. Today, the violence is not rampant though tensions still course along ethnic lines, but corruption still defines the country. There is apathy, disgust, hopelessness. A dark rain flooded the country with a hate so powerful that it is a wonder anything is left, but even today stagnant water left over from the war seems to cover so much. Bosnians know the wickedness of humankind. They have wondered if God can ever pull them out of the violence they have endured--- if they are too far gone. Bosnians know what Noah felt, looking over the wickedness of his fellow humans as those first fat drops of rain fell on his nose.

That wickedness is always very apparent in graveyards in Bosnia, especially if you can look across and see just how many graves are marked 1993 or 1994. And one day, I found myself in one of these graveyards. I had gone with my friend Đana to visit her family because it was Bajram (or Eid), a family, food, and faith-oriented holiday. First, though, we stopped at the community graveyard; during Bajram, one also says prayers for the dead. The cemetery sits almost precariously up on the mountain, rows of skinny white graves sticking out into the sky. We stopped the car and got out to see Đana's cousin Dijana and her family were already there. Dijana and Đana covered their heads with these huge scarves and went over to the graves. I stood around awkwardly trying to keep Dijana's three-year-old and Đana's two-year-old from falling down the mountain. But at one point I paused and looked up at the two cousins praying, their veils flapping in the mountain breeze, at this little line of graves all with the last name Domazet--- most of whom I knew. Đana's father was killed during the war in 1994, her mother from a heart attack when she was in her early forties, her grandmother from Alzheimer’s, and her aunt from cancer. Đana was crying, and reached over to touch her mother's grave. So much loss in such a young life. So much pain. The floodwaters in life had taken so much from her. And yet, yet here we were. The sun was shining, the grass was so green, and two toddlers were running around hand-in-hand laughing.

Đana rebuilt her life. She decided that the destruction of war, the pain of grief, the constant fear of loss would not keep her from living. Noah rebuilt his life, built a home and planted vineyards. And many in the community of Parkland, Florida, are rebuilding already as well, refusing to let violence have the last word in their community.

Perhaps there is a part of your life that needs rebuilding. Perhaps there is a part of you destroyed by fear or apathy, shriveled by bitterness and loss. Invite God into those places this Lent. Look for rainbows, seek goodness together. Perhaps that means taking up a practice like gratitude journaling--- forcing yourself to look for the good in your life and nurture it. Perhaps that means becoming an advocate as many students are, standing up to death-dealing things in our world and working to stop them. Perhaps that means spending time in service, helping someone else to rebuild.

The rainbow covenant reminds us that God will work beside us to bring life from dead situations anywhere and anytime. Won't we choose to work with God?