by Danielle Shroyer
Old Testament Reading: Genesis 9:8-17
For Sunday, Feb. 26, 2012: Year B—Lent 1
I’ll be honest. I’ve always found it a bit odd when nurseries are decorated with a story about God flooding the whole earth and wiping almost everything out. Surely this is not the best first story on which to pin a new child’s future.
But then there is this bit at the end about the rainbow, and the promise, and the covenant. Who doesn’t love a good ending? The Lectionary knows this, apparently, because only the story of the promise makes the cut. The flood story is conveniently left out, so I’ll take a pass on trying to explain what THAT was all about. Let’s move along to the happy ending, shall we?
A Whopper of a Promise
Narratively speaking, when a few chapters back God says that God is sorry to have made everything, you get the sense that the world’s biggest tragedy is in the works. Honestly—have any more depressing and frightening words ever been spoken? It requires some serious storytelling acrobatics to get out of the bottomless pit of despair. (Well, that and a whole lot of water, apparently. Acrobatics and aquatics. Apocalyptic aqua-batics. Whatever, you get the point.)
In Genesis 9, boy does God deliver a whopping all's well that ends well. God is going to establish a covenant, and this one will last for the ages. "Never again," says God. "I won’t do that ever again."
And just to calm the collective nerves of the world, God’s even going to give a visible sign that will come around from time to time, like a cosmic baby blanket. God will set a bow in the clouds, so that when it starts raining and all the earth starts getting the shakes, thinking about that one time when God was sorry God had ever made all of us and considered doing away with it all, we can look at those colors and breathe a sigh of relief, because God has promised that all this flood business is behind us.
The Covenant is For Us, Though, Right?
Look, on the one hand, I want to give all of humanity a pass on this one, because it’s only natural to feel a bit prone to our ego side after such an ordeal. If you barely survived total annihilation, it’s only natural to want to assert yourself.
But the truth of the matter is, all nine of these verses hammer out the same promise, over and over again, and it has to do with us, yes, but it also has to do with the whole rest of the created world. This covenant is for Noah and his family and all the descendants after him, to be sure, but it's also for the birds and the animals and the crawly creatures and the whole wide world.
Go ahead and grab a pencil and underline all the times you see “every living creature.” Then notice how twice, God doesn’t mention humanity at all, but rolls us into much broader categories. A covenant between me and all flesh that is on the earth. A covenant between me and the earth.
If God Makes Amends with the Animals...
You may find this to be inconsequential. And I may begin, in the next few moments, to sound like I’m running for the office of PETA President. But I think it bears mentioning, after being pelted with verse after verse of God’s covenant promise with every living creature on the earth, that God is making good not only with humanity, but with all of the created order. If the giraffes start to get the shakes when they see rain coming, the rainbow is a sign that is meant to calm them, too. I feel this is only fair, seeing as how God was angry at human wickedness and the majority of the animal population was annihilated in the crosshairs.
What I’m trying to say is this: God is making amends with humans, because God really hopes hitting that “Reset” button is going to take. But perhaps Genesis 9 is ever so slightly tipped toward being about God’s amends with every living creature, who even now continue to pay the price for human vainglory and wickedness.
The Hardest Question
Perhaps the sermon here isn’t about rainbows painted on the walls of some nursery or school with vague notions of God’s promises. Perhaps it’s about us being aware of our need to hit the reset button from time to time (which is what Lent is about, isn’t it?). Perhaps it’s about making room for the rest of creation in our holy monologues about God’s love and provision.
The next time we see a rainbow stretching across the sky, will we not only think of ourselves?
