March 12, 2000
This message delivered by Pastor
Gene Preston on Sunday, March 12.
"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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