First Sunday of Lent – morning
Sunday 18th February 2018
Lent 1 – morning
Genesis 9. 8-17
Mark 1. 9-15
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
“Red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue …
I can sing a rainbow” etc.
Yes, you all remember Cilla Black too – or maybe you just know it now from watching Youtube with your children and grandchildren?
The rainbow has always been important to human beings – magical even. Coming as it does after rain, but also implying that better weather is to come, no wonder that ancient peoples saw it as a special sign from God. A particular message painted by God right across the heavens for all to see. Wonderful, miraculous…. and no amount of scientists explaining away the action of sunlight falling on droplets of water in the atmosphere and using their prism-like qualities, can ever completely destroy the wonder and the lift of the heart that we all get when we see a rainbow in the sky.
And today the rainbow has taken on a new significance for many, as it has become the symbol and flag adopted by the LGBTQ communities at Gay Pride marches the world over. Some may think that it is wrong to politicise a natural phenomenon and a gift of the Creator to a world that too often seeks to ignore God and God’s place in creation, but as Desmond Tutu once commented, “People who tell me that politics should be kept out of religion, are reading a different Bible, a different Gospel, to the one I am reading!”
The story of Noah makes some profound spiritual points. It suggests that human beings have disobeyed God’s instructions about caring for the environment, to such an extent that God would be quite justified in destroying the whole creation and starting over again with a less stubborn set of creatures. This gives a rather ominous slant to what environmentalists have been telling us for the past few years and what we can all experience in more severe weather events, not to mention the problems of plastic pollution.
But rather than destroy everything and everyone, God chooses a single family and through them rescues a breeding stock of every species to build a new and optimistic future. It is optimistic because God calls it a covenant, not a contract. And as I was explaining to some of our wedding couples yesterday, a covenant is very special because it is unconditional. One party promises something to another, but does not depend on any reciprocal action – although of course, it is to be hoped that a reciprocal reaction will be forthcoming! So God promises that never again will he threaten all of humanity with destruction. The promise is binding.
And the story of Noah replaces that of Adam, re-emphasising that we can all trace our ancestry back to a common ancestor… With the discovery that Cheddar Man had a dark skin and blue eyes, this seems ever more plausible! That means we must all treat each other as brothers and sisters; Jews and Arabs, Africans and Asians, black, white, brown or yellow, if we attack each other we are attacking members of our own family…. no room for any kind of racism there.
Now there are many stories of a man surviving a world flood in many of the cultures of the ancient Middle East, but none with such a depth of spiritual wisdom. So whether it is historically true, or whether God inspired the author of Genesis to take and old legend and re-interpret it to become a work of genius, does not really matter. It is the moral wisdom that counts.
Christians took this Jewish story and made a Christian parable out of it. Noah comes through the waters (in a kind of baptism) and emerges into a paradise of multi-coloured light (red and yellow and pink and green all over again!) . similarly when the convert is baptised, he or she comes out of the moral darkness of atheism – where there is no reason for behaving kindly and no grace to help them to do so – through the waters of baptism, into the glorious, multi-coloured light of Christ’s love. That is what your baptism meant, even if you were too young to remember it.
The spirit descends on Jesus as he emerges dripping from the Jordan river, and before long he is pushed by the same spirit out into the desert, where he has to depend on the company of the wild beasts while he is cared for by angels. Just as in the earlier story, the ancestors of those wild beasts had to depend on Noah and his family for their survival.
Lent has begun; we turn our thoughts towards the Cross and Jerusalem; the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near – a kingdom that surely is for the wild beasts, for those on the margins of society; for those who are persecuted for who and what they are – just as much as it is for you and for me. That, perhaps is the significance of the rainbow in the sky for us today. God reminding us of his covenant but also warning us that he may well be a lot less picky and discriminating than we arrogant humans would sometimes make God out to be. And that song I talked about at the beginning goes on to say something else quite profound that I leave you with this first Sunday in Lent –
Listen with your heart, please listen with your heart – and sing everything you feel…. and we too will find that we can sing a rainbow……Amen.