Sermon for 2003 March 9, Parish Communion, St Mary Magdalen, Sheet

Bible readings: Genesis 9:8-17, 1 Peter 3:18-22, Mark 1:9-15

Did you notice the common theme of our three readings? Water. Our Old Testament reading was set at the end of the great flood and describes the covenant that God established with Noah to say that never again would there be a flood to destroy the earth. Our New Testament reading links that flood with the water of baptism, and our Gospel reading tells us very concisely of the baptism of Jesus and his time in the desert, where there would have been very little water indeed. For today is the first Sunday in Lent, a period of forty days where we remember especially this time in Jesus’ life and the temptations he faced.

But first, back to that flood. What a powerful story that is. Not so much a story, it seems more like some kind of collective memory, because the tradition of a great flood is almost universal. In our tradition it is God’s drastic solution to our human disobedience – and what God does is something we humans can understand, because we have all experienced the wish to get rid of everything that’s gone wrong and start again. That urge has fuelled everything from the French Revolution to the Life Laundry programme. But the Flood was no joke, which is why the covenant that God established afterwards, that we read about, is so reassuring and strong. The Flood was big but so is the covenant. Made not just with Noah and his family, but with all his descendants, every living creature, and not just for now but for all time, for every generation. In fact the Bible describes it as a covenant between God and the earth.

And the sign of that covenant was the rainbow. And that’s literally one of the most colourful images in all the Bible stories, isn’t it? The Ark, with every kind of animal and eight brightly-robed people streaming from it down the mountain, with the beautiful colours of the rainbow arching over it all. It’s a wonderful picture of God’s relationship with people and the earth, no wonder we have everything from rainbow coalitions to the Rainbow Warrior. But in this season of Lent we need to go deeper. We need to challenge those who stop at the endearing picture of the rainbow, as if that was enough.

It’s not enough, but I can’t let this moment pass without a little science lesson. It’s all to do with not being outdone by Gary [Stanley], who last week explained the theory of coherent light and lasers in the Family Service! So I just wanted to digress a little to explain how rainbows work. This picture was painted by my five-year-old son Joel:

The Sun’s rays come down here, they’re parallel, and they shine on the raindrops. Here’s one of the droplets, and what happens is that the rays enter the droplet at an angle, so the droplet bends the ray (refraction), which then bounces off the back of the raindrop (reflection), comes out again at an angle and bends a bit more. Now different colours of light are bent a different amount, so only one colour will come out at exactly the right angle to go into the person’s eye, say red. If you trace a line with that angle in the sky, you'll get an arc - the shape of the rainbow. Green light is bent a bit more so it’s the raindrops over here that will end send green light to the eye - a slightly smaller arc. Blue light more still. Now a few things stem from this which add to the picture of the rainbow as a sign of God’s covenant. First, obviously, it needs light and water, which naturally symbolize God and the earth. Second, what you actually see when you look at the rainbow is the rain, the water. Millions of drops of rain building up the picture, each providing its own colour. And lastly, a rainbow has nothing to do with perfection. It needs to be raining, and the weather is never perfect. You can’t see a rainbow in the sky from here in the middle of a summer’s day. Just to end the scientific interlude, the atheist Richard Dawkins criticised Keats for saying that Isaac Newton destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by explaining how white light is broken up into colours. Well I think on this occasion Dawkins is right and Keats is wrong – to understand something like the rainbow just adds to its beauty and to its power as a symbol. It can mean even more to us than it did to Noah.

Well, the rainbow symbolized a real-world promise, that God would never again send a flood to destroy all life. But the drastic solution wasn’t drastic enough. Sin and evil regained a hold on people, despite the steamy atmosphere of hope when the sun came out and dried up all the rain. That nasty evil Incy Wincy Spider climbed up the spout again. Sin and evil, what unfashionable ideas! Yet just as society tries to pretend that there’s no such thing, we see the evidence all around us. A society that is getting more violent, more greedy, more rapacious of the earth’s resources, more selfish, more unfaithful. However drastic that flood was, something more drastic was needed. But the flood was already literally a global solution, so what could be more drastic? Well, paradoxically, a change in human hearts is more difficult still. What is needed is somehow for the spirit of each individual person to suffer a flood, to go through that kind of experience, and to emerge blinking in the sunlight. Well, as St Peter reminded us, that is what baptism is – a sign that everything wrong in our lives is drowned in the flood and that we are saved and renewed. It’s quite telling, the way Peter puts it, that Noah and his family were saved through water. You’d think the water would have been the problem, but it was also what saved them. A bit of a paradox, summed up by the Goon show line "Cast adrift in an open boat, with only the sea to keep us afloat". The flood was terribly destructive but it is also what carried the ark. So it is with this spiritual flood, it has the power to wash away everything that stands between us and God but also to lift us up over all those things.

And with this much more powerful new flood comes a new covenant. This time, the symbol, instead of the rainbow, is the cross of Jesus. He himself is the drastic solution. He himself was baptised as we are and faced the temptations we face, temptations to power, greed, disobedience. He faced them for real. He did no wrong in being tempted and nor do we. But his baptism and the message of the Holy Spirit as he came out of the water was what reassured him that those temptations did not have to take hold, and they can reassure us too. This episode was the start of his journey to the cross, and we make that journey too. Just to go back to the rainbow for a moment, there’s so much repetition in that Genesis reading that you can easily miss this bit where God says, Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth. It was a sign just as much for God as for us. And now see what happens when you replace the rainbow with the cross. God could be saying, "When I see the cross, I will remember the new covenant I have made with you, Peter, Andrew, Jackie, Lynne, everyone. When I see the cross, I will remember the drastic solution, the love that was poured out like water so that you could live."

Heavenly Father, thank you for the beauty and power of these two symbols of this season of springtime and Lent. Thank you for the rainbow and the promise that lies at its foot, your promise to look after your world. And thank you for the cross and the love that hangs from its arms, the love of your Son Jesus Christ for each of us. Help us to embrace your promise and dwell in your love. Amen.

© Mike Knee, 2003