(Gen 9:8-17; Mark 1:9-15)
First Sunday in Lent, Feb 18, 2018 – UBC Digby – J G White
What a world of violence we see. And we can’t help but see it. From another violent school shooting on our continent to a suicide on a local wharf (Feb 2), the sad news seems relentless.
It was interesting to hear from the Chief of the Halifax Police Department last evening at the Digby Fire Department Banquet. One thing that Jean-Michel Blais talked about was the problem, the danger, of hearing and seeing bad and violent news every day of our lives. It all adds to the trauma of our lives.
We sang (George Matheson, 1882)
O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
and feel the promise is not vain
that morn shall tearless be.
The rainbow covenant; the God of love. Is it true? Our Source and Saviour is Love, is Joy, and takes tears away? Is this what the rainbow’s for?
The rainbow appears in the Bible, famously, after the great flood. And it comes with a promise: never again. It is the Noah Covenant, an agreement between God and Creation in the time of Noah.
There are more than one very important covenants in our Bible. What is a covenant? A covenant is really an official agreement. An agreement between two parties, sometimes like a contract. You do this, don’t do that, & here’s what I’ll do to keep the bargain.
The Bible covenants are not quite like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, but they are agreements. In each case in scripture, agreements between God and people.
There are several main Old Testament covenants. The covenant, or Agreement, with all creation in the time of Noah, signified by the rainbow. An agreement with Abraham and Sara. An Agreement with Moses and the children of Israel. An Agreement with King David. And the promised new Agreement with Jeremiah. We will look at most of these over these weeks before Easter. And they may tell us something about God, what the Creator is like.
Which animal on Noah’s Ark had the highest level of intelligence?
The giraffe.
Why did Noah have to punish and discipline the chickens on the Ark?
Because they were using “fowl” language.
Who was the greatest financier in the Bible?
Noah – he was floating his stock while everyone else was in liquidation.
The flood stories here – Noah’s Ark – are ancient, sacred stories. Told for many centuries, and finally written down and edited into their biblical form. The events themselves were, for centuries, thought to have happened about 2,350 BC, Noah living more than four thousand years ago.
For a long time, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy were considered the Five Books of Moses. So these Genesis stories were thot to be recorded almost 1,500 years before Jesus.
Many Bible scholars of the past century have seen evidence that this was actually written down in the time of the Jewish Exile, just 500 years before Jesus, a thousand years after Moses, who knows how long after Noah himself.
So for thousands of years the flood and Noah’s ark stories have been told. In each era of the Middle East – and now the whole world – Jews and then Christians have found powerful hope in this holy tale.
Such as George Matheson, who wrote that hymn we sang, O Love that Will Not Let Me Go. When he was 19, and finishing university in his hometown of Glasgow, Scotland, he was starting to lose his sight. He told his beloved girlfriend. She said she did not want to be married to a blind man, and they parted.
George went blind. He remained a bachelor. He became a pastor. It was at age forty, on the eve of his sister’s wedding, that an evening of grief and inspiration hit him. And and wrote that hymn, in 1882.
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
and feel the promise is not vain
that morn shall tearless be.
The rainbow is a sign of hope, again and again.
Like so many other foundational Bible stories, this one conveys a profound, repeated message. God is gracious. God is better than people realized. Kinder. Let me show you.
Many narratives in the Old Testament actually do something we usually never think of doing. They tell about God changing. Changing God’s own mind, God changing God’s plans, changing God’s own attitude. Remember, in the story of Jonah, God repented of the calamity God was going to bring upon Nineveh city. Or once the Hebrews had a King, the LORD declared: “I regret that I have made Saul king…” (1 Samuel 15:11)
Today, we are at the finale of the whole flood story; Noah’s Ark has safely weathered the storm, and landed on dry ground. People were wicked, Genesis 6 tells us, a flood was sent to destroy everything and start again, and a few humans and a few of every other animal are saved in the giant boat.
One part of the telling of this story we may not notice is the grief of God. The deep feeling expressed in these chapters. At the start of the whole thing, 6:6&7 says, And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. “I will blot out from the earth the human being I have created – people together with animals…
After the destroying flood, survivor Noah builds an altar and offers burnt offerings. Then God’s heart is mentioned again. We read that when the LORD smelled the pleasing odor, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. Then the Agreement is made, that we read, in chapter 9, with the sign of the rainbow.
Notice that it is God, God alone, who is changed. After the flood, people are the same. The human heart is still evil from youth, the ancient text says. But God changes what God will do. In the same breath, the LORD says, I will never again curse the ground, never again destroy every living creature.
This is the essence of Gospel. God doing more. Doing good. Doing what we didn’t do, won’t do, can’t do. Scholar Walter Brueggemann says, “The one-to-one connection of guilt and punishment is broken. God is postured differently.” (Interpretation: Genesis, 1982, p.84) The ‘guilt and punishment’ system is broken apart.
How many times in the Bible is this told? The story of things going wrong, of God punishing, but then the punishment is revoked, the harm is healed, grace is freely given. It happened in the story of Jonah and Nineveh. It happened for forty years in the wilderness with Moses and Aaron and Miriam. It happened to Job. It happened when the people were ruled by kings. It happened when the Jews were taken into exile in Babylon. The biblical story, again and again, declares the end of violence. In every chapter of history, we find these ‘never again’ moments from God.
It happens with the story of Jesus. As the church season of Lent begins, we hear again the start of the adult Jesus story. He gets baptized; He spends forty days alone in the desert; He starts preaching that God’s Kingdom is nearby, so turn around.
Yet our versions of that Kingdom have sometimes been rather oppressive and, well, even violent.
17 years ago Philip Yancey wrote a book called Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church. Chapter 1 he calls Recovering From Church Abuse.
Yancey tells of One church I attended during formative years in Georgia of the 1960s presented a hermetically sealed view of the world. A sign out front proudly proclaimed our identity with words radiating from a many-pointed start: “New Testament, Blood-bought, Born-again, Premillennial, Dispensational, fundamental…” Our little group of two hundred people had a corner on the truth, God’s truth, and everyone who disagreed with us was surely teetering on the edge of hell. Since my family lived in a mobile home on church property, I could never escape the enveloping cloud that blocked my vision and marked the borders of my world.
Later, I came to realize that the church had mixed in lies with truth. (p. 1) And Philip Yancey gives us a book about learning the whole truth of the Gospel, the amazing agreements of God that are so good.
The rainbow covenant with Noah is one amazing agreement, compared with the usual agreements of the Ancient Near East. The Agreement is with all people of the future, not just with Noah and his surviving family. The Agreement is with all of creation, not just with people. The Agreement is all on God, the people don’t have to do anything to keep up this contract.
And the Agreement is a promise of non-violence. A Rainbow. A Bow in the sky. Not a bow like the knot in our shoelace, or a bow on a box of chocolates for St. Valentine’s Day. No, it’s the weapon, a bow that shoots arrows. God hangs up God’s bow in the clouds. It is not needed. God is no longer in pursuit of an enemy – those nasty humans! No, it is not like that.
Every era in biblical history needs to hear this again, and new stories are told here of the people’s experience of God. God who changes before their eyes. Not the Punisher anymore.
And the next generation needs to hear that same Good News.
What about our generations, and the next generation? The end of the rainbow – the reason and meaning of the rainbow covenant – just may be the end of violence. God is not violent. God is peace and grace.