The Covenant of the Rainbow- Wendy McCormick
“The Covenant of the Rainbow”
February 18, 2024
Is there anything better than a rainbow? Sometimes after a storm when the skies begin to clear and that beautiful arc appears in the sky, people come outside or even get out of their cars and stand together in awe. People who might not otherwise agree that tomorrow is Monday feel a connection with one another as they experience this miracle of nature together. You even hear people talking about it later – where were you? Did you see it? And then the photos appear on Facebook. It connects us not only with our neighbors – the ones we know and the ones we don’t know --- but it connects us with our ancient ancestors as well. That remarkably beautiful reflection of light and color that stretches across the sky only happens after rain, after a storm – and it is fleeting.
The rainbow is the connection to God’s covenant with Noah, the first of three Old Testament covenants we explore this Lenten season.
But first we have to go back about three chapters. Despite the huge popularity of the story of Noah and animals as a story for children, it’s actually a horrifying tale not appropriate for children at all. Just as we cheapen our Easter celebrations and our resurrection faith when we minimize or explain away the horror of the crucifixion, so too with this story. We read that beautiful passage from chapter 9 today – the end of the story – but the story begins back in chapter 6 when “the Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings that I have created – people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’”
Before we rush to paint the nursery with happy animals under the care of a benevolent Noah with a beautiful rainbow stretching over it all, let that sink in. God was sorry about creating humankind and resolved to blot out human beings along with all living beings – collateral damage for the animals and birds and creeping things, I guess.
And so follows the story of the Great Flood and the detailed plan of how two of each kind of creature + Noah and his family are designated as a surviving remnant, as God “uncreates” the creation from chapters 1 and 2.
We know about flooding of the river systems on our continent. We also know that climate change is causing different kinds of unprecedented flooding. In the ancient near eastern world, turbulent water was the symbol of ultimate, even mythological chaos. A vast and terrorizing flood was viewed as a return to the primordial chaos our of which the world had been created in the first place. If we are paying attention to what is happening to the creation these days – not at the hands of God but at the hands of human action and inaction – chaos surely would be the word. A terrifying chaos as we experience that the created order literally cannot be counted on anymore. All kinds of things that aren’t supposed to happen are happening in the natural world. Chaos. Destabilizing, terrifying chaos.
In our story, this primordial chaos is at the hands of God. God regrets creating the world and setting human beings on earth to tend and care for it. Human sin – violence, mean-ness, injustice, all of it. God throws up the divine hands and resolves to destroy it all, preserving just a small remnant. And, honestly, is it surprising? Can you blame God? In the words of Lutheran scholar and church leader David Lose, “Called to being out of chaos and nothingness at creation by the breath of God, humanity seems at every turn bent on returning to chaos and nothingness. Simply open any major newspaper or turn on the evening news, and you will find story upon story of corruption, violence, greed, and environmental degradation, all of which provide ample evidence for the judgment that opens the story of the flood.” God’s deep regret is not surprising. God’s judgment about humankind is not surprising.
No, the real surprise is in the lesson we read today, the story that gives us the rainbow. The real surprise is the covenant. In our short passage God uses the word “covenant” seven times. In the aftermath of this unbelievable destruction, as the attentive reader or listener is still breathless at the trauma --- every living creature – death by drowning – God offers this covenant to Noah.
We think of a covenant as a special kind of contract – sometimes we refer to a marriage as a covenant. My agreement for pastoral services with this congregation is called a covenant. Sometimes people agree to behavioral covenants – how we will treat one another when we disagree, how we will behave in a meeting or a special gathering. “No phones during our meeting” is sometimes included in such a covenant.
What’s important about our covenants is that they are mutual. All parties agree to bring or provide or do something . . . and it is generally assumed that if we don’t hold up our side, the covenant is damaged if not invalidated. If I don’t do what I’ve agreed to do in our covenant, you cannot be expected to do what you have agreed to do – like pay me. We understand covenants, like contracts, as mutual.
In the ancient world, covenants were legal contracts between unequal parties. A covenant detailed what a weaker power owed to the greater one that had conquered them. They were by definition unequal. The party with the greater power held all the cards.
Which brings us to the covenants of this tiny ancient nation of the Hebrews – Israel – the covenant with their God – our God (surely the greater power) – which is woven throughout our Bible. Humans being humans, the people never did – never do -- fully uphold their side of the covenant. Human nature is nothing new. But what is new, what is amazing, is what we learn through these covenants about the character of this God. A god so often portrayed as wrathful, as punishing, as demanding blood sacrifice as payment for human sin . . . this god turns out to be quite surprisingly different.
All covenants assume some degree of quid pro quo. One’s obligations are always dependent on the other’s fidelity to her or his obligations. Yet, in this covenant with Noah, the promises are freely made by God and do not count on any reciprocity. None. This God – our God – extends a covenant that is basically one-sided. Not really a covenant at all, one Old Testament scholar has said, but a promise. A one-way promise.
This same God who was so grieved and sorry about humanity as to wipe out every living thing except a small remnant, this same God now resolves to change in ways we could not have expected. God decides to voluntarily and unilaterally limit the divine power to destroy. I’m not going to do it again, God promises. Not because I can’t. Not because I think things are going to turn out radically differently this time. But because I want relationship more than I want perfection. This is our God.
When you hear people drag out that old saw about how the God of the Old Testament is a god of wrath, remember this story, and think of the rainbow.
We know only too well that humanity will continue to disappoint God, that God’s heart will continue to break, that God may again feel sorry for having created. And yet here so early in the story, God decides not to indulge regret or anger or the desire to punish and destroy. God decides and commits not to be wrathful and destructive.
Instead, God decides to voluntarily limit divine power and to endure sorrow and heartbreak. This is a glimpse of the god who will come into the world as a baby and grow up to take on everything it is to be human, including suffering the worst that human beings can do to one another.
And it begins with the rainbow, the symbol of the covenant God makes not just with a chosen people, not just with the good people or the faithful people but with all people, and with all the creatures on the planet. The rainbow reminds us of God’s incredible promise, but in the story God actually says the rainbow is a reminder for God. “When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant,” God says. God’s great reminder – when I look at the rainbow I will remember – don’t do it, don’t give up on them, maddening and frustrating and disappointing as humanity is, I won’t do it. I won’t wipe them out.
Imagine God needing a reminder --- the great god almighty needing to count to ten, to have a visual cue not to indulge the desire to destroy, to lash out, to give people what they actually deserve. The almighty, the omniscient, the all-powerful God of the universe is choosing not to be that way.
What might it mean for you and me to serve this God?
What might mean for you and me in this Lenten season to find ways to draw closer to this God?
What can we take from the rainbow?
A rainbow remains for the religious and the non-religious alike a sign of the beauty and majesty or creation and the hope and promise that come after a storm, after literal storms and after the storms of life.
But for those of us drawn into relationship with this amazing God, the rainbow is so much more than natural wonder and metaphor for beauty and hope. For us, it is first a reminder of God’s radical inclusivity. This first covenant, this first promise, is with every living creature, every human on this earth and every bird and animal and, as the Bible says, “creeping thing.” Surely following this God calls us to be similarly inclusive – and our world desperately needs people demonstrating radical inclusivity in the name of God. In the name of God. We live among those who use religion for every kind of exclusivity imaginable including license to destroy creation. As people of this God, our rainbows must extend beyond the walls of the church, beyond our own familiar circles, to give witness that God’s promise is for all people and every living creature. What might you read or watch or listen to this Lent to expand your horizons about those who are different from you, those who come from another part of God’s great rainbow? Or how might your Lenten journey lead you to learn something about what climate change is really doing AND what you and I can actually do to align ourselves with the one who wants creation never again to be destroyed?
And if we do that, if we open ourselves to a broader spectrum of humanity and of the created order, if we do that, we are sure to feel what God felt in Genesis chapter 6 and what God has surely felt on the daily since making that promise. We are sure to feel sorrow, perhaps anger, sure to feel the pain of a broken creation of people mistreated in countless ways of innocent animals and birds and creeping things whose habitats are being eliminated by human carelessness and greed and unspeakable selfishness.
My instinct is to push those painful feelings away, to plaster rainbows and smiley faces everywhere I can. But this God beckons with an enormous heart. This God who CHOOSES to suffer the pain and heartbreak of loving humanity and being in relationship with creation invites us to return, to turn toward the one with a heart that would rather break than harden in anger. We are called by a God who chooses to be close to the world and those in it, painful though that can be, rather than sitting on high in apathetic disinterest.
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” is a Lenten prayer for a heart open like God’s heart is open.
A heart willing to follow the way of Jesus who unleashed this same radical openness and great love in acts of mercy and justice and, yes, standing against the dominant religious and political voices, to embody this God who chooses the way of love even when it comes with suffering.
May the rainbow remind us of God’s great love in choosing a heart ever open to creation in all its pain and brokenness, and may it invite us to follow that way of active, self-giving love even when it hurts. For surely this is how we draw closer to God. Amen.
