Sunday February 18th, 2024 Worship

For those of you that have wondered why I’m such a big Iowa Hawkeye basketball fan, it’s not just because of Caitlin Clark’s record-breaking college career, but it also connects me to my time serving primarily as a pediatric chaplain at the University of Iowa Hospital. I was there for eleven weeks as a part of my Clinical Pastoral Education program, which was a great experience for learning more about ourselves and how to provide the best pastoral care possible. During those few months, I lived with a Seminary classmate and his family so that we could commute together each morning to the hospital. I distinctly remember walking out to the car way too early on our first morning to see a rainbow. It felt like a good sign as we began an emotionally exhausting eleven weeks. Like God’s promise to a probably weary Noah.
We hear in the reading from Genesis about how the rainbow came to be a sign of God’s covenant that God would never again destroy the world by flood after Noah and his family spend forty days and forty nights in the Ark with all of the animals. On a side note, as a Minnesotan, we often heard a lot of jokes about how Noah could have conveniently forgotten to bring the mosquito with! In all seriousness though, what I particularly love about this covenant is the expansive nature of it. God says, ‘Here is the sign of the covenant between me and you and every living creature for ageless generations… When I bring clouds over the earth, my bow will appear in the clouds. Then I will remember the covenant that is between me and you and every kind of living creature, and never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all flesh” (Genesis 9: 12-15). This is a covenant that goes beyond just God and humans, but includes all creatures of God.
I’ve been thinking about this in relation to our Gospel today, because not only do we have the connection via the number forty, but I also see Jesus’ proclamation as a continuation of this covenant that God made with Noah, his family, and the creatures of ageless generations. When Jesus proclaims that “the reign of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15a), it is intended to be Good News for the well-being of all creation. Jesus calls the people to hear this, but also to “Change your hearts and your minds, and believe this Good News!” (Mark 1: 15b) It becomes an invitation for people to be a part of this kindom of God, to work toward the flourishing of all creation. This reign of God isn’t meant for human oppression simply to change hands or for the domination of the earth to continue, but to participate in the already and not yet of what this kindom could look like when all creation is given what it needs to not only survive, but to thrive. In many ways, it becomes relational, just like I believe the covenant in Genesis is a relational covenant.
The covenant that God made with Noah is of course about God’s promise not to destroy the earth completely with a flood again, but it also doesn’t mean that Noah, or us, are given a free pass to do whatever we want without thinking about the consequences of our actions. If anything, I think that living on an ark and caring for a bunch of animals would teach Noah quite a bit about how all of creation is interdependent and how our actions affect the people and nature that surround us.
While I know that the obvious choice here would be to focus on the baptismal nature of this reading and the covenantal promises that God makes to us in our baptisms too, for me at the beginning of this Lenten season, it feels more like a call to really think about and be intentional around these relationships in our life. We already briefly mentioned on Ash Wednesday how the act of praying, giving alms, and fasting are meant to turn us away from our desires and instead help us to focus on God and on our neighbor’s needs more intentionally. We talked about too how the whole point isn’t that we shouldn’t fast or pray or give alms, but that we should be doing them to deepen those relationships instead of simply to show others how spiritually amazing we are. For me, it draws me back to this sense that the covenant is a two-way relationship and that it isn’t just about the promises that God makes to us, but the promises that we make to God and one another too. And, I don’t mean promises about being perfect or always getting it right or even never having doubts, but a promise to keep wrestling, to keep caring for one another, to continue growing and practicing what it means to be good stewards of everything that God has created.
Pastor Gary mentioned on Wednesday in his sermon that Ash Wednesday is my favorite liturgical holiday. I know it seems really morbid, but I also think that as Lutherans we haven’t always been the best at creating the space for the whole spectrum of human emotions, including grief and anguish. I love Ash Wednesday because it reminds me, as a recovering perfectionist, that I am not God, nor was I created to be God. But, that I was created by God, beautifully and wonderfully made from seemingly ordinary dust, just as we all were. We are dust and we will return to dust, but we are also so much more than that.
So, when I saw the rainbow on my way to the hospital that first morning, I knew that the promise wasn’t that there would be an absence of death. After all, we were just reminded on Wednesday that we are all created from dust and will ultimately return to the dust someday. The promise to me that day was that even in the midst of the pain, grief, and death that God would be present. That the Holy Spirit would intercede when words could not even begin to express the emotions of parents sitting in the hospital with their child who was either incredibly sick or dying. I knew that the promise wouldn’t be for easy days over those eleven weeks. But, the promise was that each and every life was created by God and beloved by God, and that death wouldn’t be taken lightly. We often say even now as chaplains that the day we stop being impacted by death is the day we know we no longer should be a chaplain. This is how I see the kindom of God working in our world already, when we can show up alongside each other, as beloved dust creatures, working together for the sake of the world. It is this active work of the kindom that we are being invited into during this Lenten journey; an invitation to open ourselves up to the world around us and to let it impact us in ways we may not even know. But, trusting that God is right there in the midst of all of that with us. May we be reminded of that the next time we look out and see a rainbow in the sky.