Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening.
We’ve all made promises at one time or another in our lives. Some promises are significant ones, promises to be faithful until we are parted by death; promises to bring our children to church, which we make at their baptisms; promises to return safely. And some promises are less significant, promises of special treats for a child if they behave or clean their room (those are probably more like bribes than promises). And some promises are simply hopeful words wrapped in the person of someone we trust. “Everything will be alright, I promise.”
In this run up to the November election we might do well to recall numerous promises from presidential candidates, promises to keep us out of or end wars, promises to lower taxes, promises to return us to a golden time of prosperity.
Of course, the truth is that we are all only human and sometimes circumstances in life or decisions we make mean that those promises are broken.
During this season of Lent, we will hear in our readings from the Old Testament of the promises God made to God’s people. These promises are not called promises, they are covenants, which imply correctly, that they are much more significant than promises that come simply from the mouth of one person to the ears of another. Covenants are complicated matters and therefore more a subject for teaching rather than preaching. But, for our purposes, it is important to know that a covenant is an agreement of relationship between two unequal parties.
Our reading from Genesis today contains the very familiar story of the covenant God made with Noah and his family, with all descendants who would follow, that is, with all of humanity, and with all creatures. God has covenanted, promised, that God will never again destroy the earth by flood.
We have a great tendency in the church to make the story of the flood into a lovelier version of itself. One might even say we water it down! We call it the story of Noah’s Ark and we create plays and pageants around it. It becomes a beloved Sunday School story. We even create entire themes of nurseries and children’s clothing around it. And in so doing, we wash away both the essential elements of the story itself and the significance of the covenant that follows.
Almost immediately after God created humanity, we began to live in sin. The entirety of the book of Genesis leading up to the story of Noah and the flood is a story of human sin. Sin against creation and against one another…there is anger, murder, abuse, neglect and finally, we read that God’s very heart was grieved. That God was filled with regret, regret that God ever created humanity. “God is pained by the brokenness of creation. God sends the flood, then, not as an act of revenge, but out of grief over the rending of right human relationship with God.”[1]
Of course, what we know from the story is that the destruction is not total. God saves Noah and Noah’s family, and even parts of the earth re-generate enough to yield shoots of green when the waters subside. The water, in essence, washes Creation so that it may begin again. After all, God being God, could have started over. Formed an entirely new Creation, but God chose to give all of creation a new beginning, a new chance to live into what God has created us to be.
And so, we come to our reading from Genesis today. The waters have subsided and God has chosen to enter into a covenant with all of Creation. And God does all of the promise making. God does not require anything of Creation, anything of humanity. God does not say, if you straighten up and fly right, I’ll never again send a flood. God knows and understands that the human heart has been forever changed, irrepairably damaged by sin. God knows that we will, indeed, sin again and again. And in spite of this, in spite of us, God covenants with us, promises to us, that this will never again happen.
God’s covenants are vitally important to the identity of God’s people. It is crucial to our understanding of God that we understand God’s promises. For the Hebrew people, for our Jewish sisters and brothers, these covenants are foundational for their faith. For us, as Christians, they point the way to another covenant. They mark the path to a new understanding of God’s covenant with us.
Every week we hear these words as we prepare to come to the table. “Again after supper Jesus took the cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying ‘This cup is the new covenant, given for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sin’.” Jesus, was, of course referring to himself. We understand that by the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the former covenants are no longer necessary. The Incarnation, the very presence of Jesus, means that our salvation is secured, through him.
In our Gospel reading from Mark today, Jesus is in the wilderness. He has been baptized by John, and rather than being renewed and refreshed and re-generated for ministry, he is driven into the wilderness by the spirit, where he is tempted by Satan, lives with the animals, and is waited on by angels.
This is not the response we expected from one just named God’s Beloved. We might expect that he would be prepared, energized, and equipped for all that would lie ahead. Instead, he is in the wilderness, to struggle, to pray, to deeply discern what it means to be the Beloved and to embark on this ministry.
I wonder how often we are willing to enter into wilderness times; how often we are able to dwell in times of solitude, perhaps even times of isolation and temptation, in order to more fully understand what it means for us to be called God’s beloved children through the waters of baptism? What does it mean to remove ourselves from the pattern of our lives, from our normal daily routines, as a way of entering into the wilderness? This is a portion of what we seek during this Lenten season. We disrupt our own normality by giving up a practice or a portion and thereby enter into a place of some wilderness, a place less filled with what we have placed there. The absence of those things or places or practices allows us to know more fully what it means to be disciples of the new covenant. And it allows us, perhaps, a deeper understanding of the covenants God entered into throughout history.
When we think of the covenant God made after the flood, we almost always remember the sign that God placed in the clouds, the bow. And the image of that bow, or rainbow, as we see it, is one that generally evokes a warm and fuzzy feeling. But the bow that God hung in the clouds, is the bow of battle. In ancient times, gods were depicted with bow and arrow. And this bow we see as the reminder of God’s covenant is the bow of a warrior retiring from battle. To hang up one’s bow, in antiquity, meant that the warrior was retiring, that the warrior was no longer engaging in warfare. “That bow in the clouds is the sign of God’s promise that whatever else God does to seek our restoration, destruction is off the table.”[2]
The covenant is that God will search us out, will seek to reach us in every other way, in spite of the ways we continue to live apart from God. God will reach out to us in our wilderness. God will seek us out and call us to repent and return in our sinfulness. God will empower us and equip us to resist what tempts us. God will send angels, both earthly and otherwise, to wait on us, as reminders of God’s provision for us. And as sign of promise and covenant, God has hung up the bow, no longer in battle, but as sign of God’s great love for us and for all of creation. Even in the wilderness of Lent, perhaps most especially in the wilderness of Lent, this is the good news for this and every day.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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