Sunday, July 28, 2024, Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
“Living Under the Rainbow”
Psalm 29:1-11; Genesis 9:8-17; Ephesians 3:14-21; Mark 6:45-56
Service of Prayer and Preaching, p. 260
Hymns: #537 “Beautiful Savior”; #803 “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”; #790 “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty”; #805 “Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow”; #801 “How Great Thou Art”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
What do you think of when you look at a rainbow? For some of us, the rainbow is a sign that the storm is over and the danger is past, as the sun pokes through and a splash of color crosses the dark clouds. For some, though, the rainbow has become a symbol of being free to be “whatever you want to be,” whether God or other people like it or not. “Let us break our chains and throw off our fetters,” the 2nd Psalm says. But what does the rainbow really mean in the story of Noah?
The old song dreams about “somewhere over the rainbow.” That’s a pretty idea, and a beautiful sentiment. And someday we are going to get there, if we hang on to our faith. Someday we’ll get there, beyond the stars, to where heaven lies, to the place where God lives. But today we’re still here. Not “over the rainbow” yet, but still living under it; underneath God’s sky, looking up while God looks down, still going through all the stormy things that life on earth puts us through.
Isn’t it interesting that God would use a rainbow as a symbol of His love and care for us? Did you know that rainbows are round? From our perspective, from down here on earth, we see an arc or a bow, because that’s all we can see, because the earth is round and the horizon bends, and we can only see a part of it at a time. Looking down from heaven above, though, a rainbow is a perfect circle, with no beginning and no end.
(Try making a rainbow with a garden hose on a sunny day).
In the myth about leprechauns, the little people aren’t benevolent or nice; they’re deceitful, malicious, cruel, evil little creatures, who love to entice men with the promise of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - when there is no “end of the rainbow,” and therefore no gold. But the little folk, so the Irish legend goes, will have you ruining yourself and wasting your life while you chase the rainbow around in circles to no purpose, searching for gold you’ll never find. Even those old myths and fables and legends can have a moral to them.
In the account of the Great Flood in the Book of Genesis (which is no myth, but terribly, frighteningly true), God determined it was necessary to bring judgment upon a world gone terribly wrong. If you take the numbers and years and genealogies in Genesis literally (which I do, because I have to reason not to), only 1656 years had passed from the time Adam and Eve fell into sin, to the time of Noah’s flood.
The world before the flood had become a terrible place, because of sin. Cain had murdered his brother Abel, and opened the floodgates of violence, death, and blood on the earth. People were living to great ages back then, living to be 700, 800, or even 900 years old, and only becoming more evil as their years went on. “Every inclination of their hearts is evil from their earliest youth,” God said about them. And they produced children for many of those years - lots of children - who only grew up to be more evil than their parents. It was a world ruined by sin, a world where people had become proud and arrogant and full of themselves, a world where people had forgotten God; until there was only one faithful family left on earth, Noah and his wife and sons. Noah, the Bible says, was “a preacher of righteousness,” who faithfully warned the people about the wrath of God that was coming, while his neighbors all mocked and laughed at him for building that giant boat.
Then the day finally came when Noah and his family, and all the creatures God had him gather, went into the ark; and “God shut the door behind them,” the flood account says. And then God ripped His good creation to pieces. It was more than a flood; it was an epic disaster, an earth-shaking, violent, volcanic cataclysm. God “tore open the fountains of the deep,” Genesis says, and brought down all the waters from the sky. God rearranged the topography of the earth, ripped the land masses apart and moved them out of their places. He raised the low places up and brought the high places down, until the whole earth was covered with water, not a living thing on the planet left alive - except for Noah and his family, being tossed around on the raging waters in that merciful boat.
I won’t get into why God would see fit to do such a thing, and whether on not it was just or right. God is good, always, and His purposes are always holy. All we can say is that God did what He did because it was necessary, and because it had to be done. Imagine what the world would be like today if God had let the evil go on.
After the flood, when the earth was dry again, and Noah and his family and all those animals had stepped off the ark - the only living creatures left alive in the world - God gave them a commandment to “go forth and multiply” and refill the earth. Noah built an altar to the Lord, there on the newly dry ground, and made a sacrifice of some of the clean animals God had had him set aside for the purpose. And the Genesis account says that God smelled the pleasing aroma of the sacrifice, and said in His heart, "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease."
And then, to seal the deal and confirm His promise, God said to Noah and his sons, in our reading from Genesis 9: "I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you - the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you - every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth."
A covenant, in the Hebrew language, is a Berith. The word literally means “to walk between the pieces.” One ancient way to seal an agreement between people was to cut a sacrificial animal in pieces; and then the parties to the agreement would walk between the pieces, walk through the blood together, mingling the blood with their footprints. A Berith covenant is a sacrifice sealed by blood.
When God declares a covenant, it’s an agreement on His part to keep His promises, and an agreement on our part to be obedient to Him and keep the promises we make in return. Holy Baptism, Confirmation, wedding vows, and Holy Communion, are all “walking between the pieces” with the Lord. What God promised here is that there would never be another “extinction event,” no “end of mankind as we know it,” like happens in all those apocalyptic, dystopian books and movies. His promise was to guard and protect us forever, and to save us utterly and completely, even though we continue to sin. (Read a bit further on in Genesis and you’ll you see what Noah did soon after the flood!) And that promise was sealed forever by the blood of Jesus, His only Son, shed on the cross for the sake of our sin. It’s the blood of Christ all His Covenant promises point us to. Later, in Genesis 15, God Himself would “walk between the pieces” to seal His promise to Abraham, that one day one of his own descendants would be the Savior of the world.
Then, said God to Noah and his sons in Genesis, "This is the sign of the covenant I am making between Me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come.” God’s end of the Covenant – and this is such wonderful grace – applies not just to Noah and his family, and to the creatures with him, it also applies to all the people and creatures that would come to be created in the years to come, including you and me. It’s a universal and eternal Covenant, a promise to every human being. Jesus died for everyone. (We call that the Universal Atonement). While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Salvation is offered to everyone, and available to everyone who’ll believe God for His promise.
And the promise, the Berith, the covenant, comes accompanied by a clear and obvious and unmistakable sign. “I have set my rainbow in the clouds,” God says, “and it will be the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth.” While we wait to be taken “over the rainbow” (and what a great day that’s going to be), we get to live here “under the rainbow” – under the protection of God’s love and mercy and marvelous grace. Whenever the clouds come – and they will – whenever the storms and wind and troubles and all the awful stuff a sinful world can throw at us threaten to drown us and pull us under - “I will remember,” God says. I will remember you. I will not forget you. Never will I leave you or forsake you. I will be with you always, to the very end of the age.
God put the rainbow in the clouds for us to remember our end of the Covenant, for sure, so we could look up when the storms are over and remember our Savior and continue to trust and believe in Him. But He put the rainbow there to remember His own part of the bargain, too. I will see it, God says, from Heaven looking down, and I will remember you
So, we’re the disciples in the boat, in the dark, in the middle of the night, fighting the wind and wet and cold, and afraid we’re going to die, while Jesus prays for us from some place where we can’t see Him. And we’re the disciples watching Jesus doing impossible things (walking on the sea, for goodness sake!), and not quite being able to believe what our own eyes are telling us. “Littlefaiths,” Jesus calls us. Eeek! It’s a ghost! (No, it’s only Jesus!) Raging storm, contrary wind, some new disaster looking us in the face - and Jesus says, “Take courage! I AM! Don’t be afraid!”
I know the Gospel story doesn’t say so, but I like to think that as Jesus and disciples were coming into shore, with the storm clouds moving away and the sun coming up behind them, there just might have been a big, beautiful rainbow stretched out across the sky; that just sounds like something Jesus would do.
And when Jesus stepped out onto dry ground, and all those helpless, hopeless, hurting people saw that He’d come, and started running to Him and bringing all their sick ones to Him, He kept the rainbow promise God had made all those years ago: “And wherever He went--into villages, towns or countryside--they placed the sick in the marketplaces. They begged Him to let them touch even the edge of His cloak, and all who touched Him were healed.”
I’ve heard people get mad about all the rainbow flags, and about how the rainbow, which ought to be a symbol of grace, is being so misused. We need to “take our rainbow back,” I’ve heard it said. But you know, that isn’t something we have to do - because the rainbow belongs to God. It’s His, it always has been, and it always will be. He established the Covenant, He made the promise, and He gave us the sign of the rainbow as an irrevocable gift that no one can cancel or take away.
We don’t need to take the rainbow back; we just need to redeem it. What I mean by that is that we need to renew our own understanding of it, and help the world around us understand what it really means. It’s the same way we can redeem Christmas from reindeer and elves by telling the true story of Jesus’ birth; and the same way we can redeem Easter from bunnies and eggs by telling the story of Jesus’ death and Resurrection; and the same way we can redeem All Hallow’s Eve from Halloween goblins and witches and such by putting our focus on All Saints Day on Sunday morning, and not on the goings on of the evening before. I’ve seen crosses hanging in places they shouldn’t be, and hanging from necks they have no business being on. But even then, there’s our opportunity to “redeem the time”, and point to the cross, and talk about what the cross really means.
So whenever you see a rainbow, whether it’s in the sky after a storm, or on a flag or in some awful parade, there’s your chance to redeem it and tell the real story! What a conversation starter, what a glorious opening, what an open door, to tell someone about the love of God and the love of Christ, and about the rainbow of hope and grace God has covered us with, and given us to live under.
Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your rainbows. We thank You for Your grace in the storms we’ve been through, and for being there for us when we need You. Lord, Your rainbow is sign of Your Covenant and Your promise, a divine and holy blessing, a sign of Your everlasting love for us. Help us, Lord, whenever Your rainbow of mercy is seen, to tell someone we know or someone we meet about our Savior. This we ask in Jesus’ name; Amen.