"RAINBOWS AND
ASHES"
Genesis 9:8-17 and Mark
1:9-15
The scriptures for this first
Sunday of Lent present us with potent faith symbols -
Water as in Noah's flood and the baptism of Jesus; the
spiritual wilderness, as in the forty days temptation of
Jesus in the desert; Noah's rainbow of hope and Lenten
ashes.
In the bible, water is a sign of
God's blessing and of His judgement. Water, as we all
know, is essential for life. The blind and deaf Helen
Keller in her autobiography says the first word her
teacher, Annie Sullivan, was able to give her was WATER,
and she did it by standing Helen under a pump flowing
with water, and tapping out on her arm WATER to relate
the word to the delightful experience of water flowing
over her.
We can't live without water. But
too much water destroys everything in its path as the
million refugees in Mozambique learned in recent raging
floods in east Africa.
The Old Testament lesson makes a
passing reference to Noah and the flood, the flood being
also mentioned in today's epistle; and the water theme
recurs in God's promise that he would give a rainbow as
an eternal and universal sign of his care for humanity. A
rainbow, of course, is composed of millions of droplets
of water momentarily gathered so as to refract the sun's
rays into a spectrum of colors. Divine dazzle!
Let us try to bring together
into some meaningful analysis of these signs of God's
concern for us: water as in the flood of judgement, the
rainbow of promised providence, the baptism of Jesus, and
the need for repentance and reflection at this
Lent.
********
l) Genesis 9:8-l7 was written by
a priest in the temple in Jerusalem and it presents a
profoundly advanced theological idea that God wills to
help, guide and bless all peoples. This is pretty
progressive thinking for 2500 years ago when you consider
many religious people today think that God blesses only
their kind.
This priestly writer in the
temple has God saying to Noah and his sons that the
covenant established way back when the flood took place
would provide protection for every living creature. God
did not promise that there would never again be floods
and disasters caused by water, but he did promise that
never again would there be a flood of the primordial
strength of Noah's flood which arguably wiped out all
life except the eight persons on the ark and the animals
gathered there.
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 RAINBOW 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 Jews heard or read Genesis,
they had in mind a background understanding of God's
universal providence because the Jews commonly understood
that, further through Noah, God had declared his giving
of seven universal laws which he had planted in all human
hearts. These seven laws of the human heart conveyed God
guarantee of seven providential and saving moral
instincts. Six were defensive and one positive.
Altogether they are known as the Noahide
Covenant.
The Noahide Covenant holds that
God had willed humanity not to l) blasphemy 2) practice
idolatry 3) practice adultery 4) shed blood 5) steal and
rob, 6) eat flesh from living animals (which was a pagan
practice) and, positively, 7) all people were to
establish sensible and compassionate social laws. We
recognize in these tenets the moral building blocks of
all societies.
The stunning implication of the
Noahide Covenant, and of Genesis 9:8-l7 which reaffirms
it, is, according to one Jewish theologian, that "Judaism
does not deny salvation to those outside its fold, for,
according to Jewish law, all non-Jewish who observe the
Noahide laws will participate in salvation and in the
world to come." God's providence, in Jewish theology, is
effective even for those who are altogether outside the
circle of direct acquaintance with God! That should give
us Christians pause to reflect because of our tendency to
narrow the redeeming providence of God to only those who
have come to agree with certain doctrines and join in
certain fellowships which are the correct ones for
salvation.
The thought in Genesis 9 echoes
the original thought given by another of writer, whoever
composed Genesis l, that God brought all life into being
and blessed it and said "all is good."
The promise to Noah, like God's
initial creation, is wholly one-sided: God acts and God
promises and the very integrity of divinity guarantees
God's universal and eternal providence for all humanity
and all life. In these two covenants, that of creation
and the rainbow covenant of Noah, no human response is
required to effect God's offer.
These covenants assert the text
of the hymn, "Great is Thy Faithfulness:"
:
"Summer and winter, and
springtime and harvest,
Sun , moon and stars in their
course above.
Join with all nature in manifold
witness
To Thy great faithfulness, mercy
and love."
And the symbol of God's
overarching concern for everyone is the rainbow which all
peoples may see and enjoy.
2) The seven moral guidelines of
the Noahide Covenant are not stated as such in either the
Old nor New Testaments because they are assumed to be
known to the Jewish readers of both. We see this
assumption in today's quote from Genesis and we can find
it in Acts 15:28-29 where according to Luke, when the
early Jerusalem Council met to consider whether gentiles
should become Jewish as a part of entering the church,
the council essentially said, "No, but the gentiles
should observe a lifestyle that is very much like the one
advocated in the Noahide commandments: abstain from food
sacrificed to idols, from shedding human blood, from what
has been strangled, and from fornication."
******
3) Readers of the bible know
that God's covenanting tendency did not end either with
the unilateral covenant of divine creation, nor this
promise to Noah summarized as the Noahide Covenant. God
later entered with Abraham into the Abrahamic Covenant by
which God promised to provide offspring to Abraham and
bless his generations as a guide to all peoples; then
even later, God entered into a covenant with Moses giving
moral grounding in some detail to the Jewish
people.
These further convenants are
different because they were bi-lateral, not unilateral;
God required a response of faith from Abraham and a
response of obedience from Moses, and their offspring. In
the first two covenants God gave without requiring
anything in return.
I must suppose that God changed
His terms in the later covenants because of that
offsetting condition of our human nature, also noted
early on in Genesis, that while we are blessed by God
with all we need, we are not satisfied with our
situation.
We are unable to live in a
paradise in which no demands on made on us.
And, as it turned out, we were
unable to live in a moral relationship as the Mosaic
covenant required.
And so God gave one final
covenant, the new covenant, the new creation of humanity
in Jesus Christ. That is the ultimate act, gift and
blessing of God and, while our response is expected, our
response is possible only because if the divine
integrity.
Only God can give totally
selflessly and totally graciously on the cross
4) This brings us to Lent, the
necessity of Lent. While baptism by faith is now open to
all, and many of us have exercised that invitation from
God, we know that all is not well. We are still inclined
to sinfulness and we need the Lenten call to honest
self-evaluation, personal reform, and throwing our
spirits once more upon the love and mercy of
God.
The gospels of Matthew and Luke
give more detail about the temptation of Jesus, which is
the traditional first reading from the gospels on this
first Lent Sunday, than does Mark whose temptation
account is the shortest. This may be because Mark was
writing for a non-Jewish congregation which would not
have understood the Old Testament details which in Luke
and Matthew are addressed to Jewish
congregations.
Nonetheless, Mark does convey
some details that would have had symbolic power within
Jewish tradition. The mention of "40 days" recalls the 40
years the children of Israel spent wandering in another
wilderness in another time of testing (Deut 8:2) as well
as the forty days and nights of the great deluge through
which Noah was delivered.
Mark brings the baptism of Jesus
into significance at Lent in verse l4 and l5 where as
Jesus' public ministry begins, John the Baptist is
arrested, and Jesus announced, THE TIME IS FULFILLED, AND
THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS AT HAND; REPENT, AND BELIEVE IN THE
GOSPEL.
Mark makes more of the baptism
of Jesus as the key sign for our personal journey at
Lent. Mark wants to get back to the water!
5) It's useful to remember our
baptisms as we begin Lent. Baptism recalls the
forgiveness of primordial sin that God has given us; the
ever renewed willingness of God to receive us even in our
existential state of non-grace back into grace; the
renewing powers of baptism faith to refresh us so that
like a blind Helen Keller we feel tapped upon our bodies
again and again God's promise: YOU ARE MY BELOVED AS
JESUS IS MY BELOVED.
Lent is the season to do our
spiritual check-up, to reflect on our relationships, with
God and everyone, a time to grow in our fellowship - go
active in church groups,for heaven's sake - a time to get
back into routines of regular worship, daily prayer, and
to refamiliarize ourselves with those gracious words of
Christ which call us to come and follow him.
What is our baptismal covenant?
It is the promise that God opens up new worlds daily and
through the water of faith and grace God changes us
constantly for the better.
Remember these references:
through baptism we participate in Christ' death and
resurrection (Rom. 6:3-5; Col. 2:l2), God washes away our
sins (I Cor 6:11), God gives us a new birth (John 3:5),
God enlightens us by Christ (Eph 5:l4), God re-clothes us
in Christ (Gal 3:27), God renews us by the Spirit (Titus
3:5), God leads us on an exodus from bondage (I Cor
l0:l-2) and God liberates us into a new humanity in which
barriers of division, whether of sex or race or social
status, are overcome (Gal 3:27-28).
This is the greatest and
ultimate covenant. We who are already baptized, let us
use this Lent to renew our covenant with God. Those who
are not baptized, think about it. And, everyone, have a
happy Lent!
Pastor Gene
Preston
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