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The First Sunday in Lent Almighty God, the breeze of your love and grace is ever blowing; may we set our sails to capture that breeze, and may it inspire these words and those who hear them. Amen Some of my very earliest memories are of my grandmother. As I told the children who were here on Ash Wednesday, my grandmother was very special. She had red curly hair and blue eyes and she let us eat ice cream for breakfast and took us fishing and blackberry picking, and at night she told us stories about when she was a little girl. My grandmother also read us bible stories, and one of our favorites was the story of Noah and the flood. Of course, this is a great story for children, with the building of the great ark, and all the animals coming in two by two, and the rain coming down for forty days, ending with the rainbow as a sign of God’s promise not to flood the earth again. But this is also a story with deep theological import, a story that reveals much about the God who created us and loves us and is in relationship with us to this day. We think of God in exalted terms –almighty, everlasting, immortal, sovereign, lord—and we do so rightly because God is certainly all these things and more. This story of the flood, however, exposes a side of God we are less comfortable with: a God who becomes angry, a God who acts in judgment, a God who wreaks havoc with the world that same God breathed life into. But even as we see God act destructively in judgment, if we pay close attention, we also see a God who is merciful, a God who is committed to being in relation with humanity, a God who is willing to continue to work in new ways to maintain that relationship—even to the point of sending his son to become human. The back story is important for truly understanding what’s going on here: God has been observing humanity ever since Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, and God’s heart had been saddened by what he sees—envy, jealously, lust, murder, sinfulness of all sorts. God resolves to be done with the very humans and creatures he has made—but when it comes right down to it, God can’t quite do it. God can’t do it—can’t completely destroy humanity—because in one human family God sees the kind of righteousness, the goodness and purity that he had hope for in all humans. So God instructs Noah to build the ark and Noah brings into it his family along with creatures of the earth, and they survive the devastation. And after the rains stopped and the floods dried up and the doors to the ark were opened, God makes his promise: “I establish my covenant with you, that ... never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth,” and God sets the rainbow in the sky as a sign of that promise. Pay attention here, though, because this promise goes farther than our childhood bible stories might indicate. God says, “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 the earth…when the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between Me and you and all the flesh that is on the earth."1 Yes, the rainbow is a reminder to GOD of the covenant God has made with the people. The story of Noah and the flood, beginning with the notion that God suffers over human evil and culminating with the bow in the sky, makes a bold claim about the nature of God. This God who is almighty, everlasting, sovereign, and lord is also a God who is affected by our behavior, a God who suffers along with us, a God who is committed to remaining in relationship with all of creation, including humans, willful and wayward though they may be; this God is committed to the world, even when sin and evil continue. The commitment God has for the world is so great that God is willing to change and willing to try new things, so much so that after the flood God determines to work from within the world to redeem it, rather than to overpower the world from without. And to signify all this, God places the bow in the sky perhaps to reassure humans, but perhaps more importantly, to remind God of the covenant and of the way things will be. God’s commitment to us and to our salvation, of course, culminates in the coming of Jesus, God made flesh, the epitome of God’s desire to work within the world to redeem it. In our gospel today we hear the story of Jesus’ entry into public awareness, of his baptism at the hands of John, and of the way God affirms his identity as he emerges from the waters of baptism with the words, “You are my son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” We hear also how Jesus is driven into the wilderness to be both tempted by Satan and waited upon by angels, and how he emerges from the wilderness to begin his ministry, and his ultimate journey to Jerusalem and the cross that awaits him—all undertaken out of God’s commitment to us, the commitment reaffirmed in that rainbow. As we move into the season of Lent, as we begin this trek towards the cross with Jesus, we do well to be reminded of the deep and abiding nature of God’s commitment to us. Despite our sinful nature and our willful ways, God’s love and grace are there for us in abundant measure, epitomized and fleshed out in the person of Jesus. Through Jesus, God calls us into right relationship and offers us that greatest of all gifts, a place in God’s eternal kingdom. But, as God acknowledged in the time of Noah, it is up to us to respond. God does not coerce us; rather God invites us and beckons us and welcomes us and longs for our response. This holy season of Lent gives us a chance to pause, to take stock, and to consider our response to God’s invitation. Will we continue in our willful ways? Will we take God’s mercy for granted? Will we think only of ourselves and our own needs? Or will we commit to God just as God has committed to us? Will we turn our lives over to God and seek God’s will in all that we do? Will we open ourselves fully to the love and grace that God has in store for us? The choice is ours to make. Amen. |
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