1st Sunday in Lent
February 18, 2018
Genesis 9:8-17; Mark 1:9-15
This Lenten season the Old Testament
lesson for each Sunday is about a covenant between God and his people. Today we
read about the covenant with Noah. Next week will be with Abraham, then we’ll
spend two weeks with Moses, and end with a promise from Jeremiah of a new
covenant, foreshadowing the coming of Jesus. This week is probably the most
familiar story as it’s one that we tell our kids and we use the ark and rainbow
to decorate nurseries and Sunday school rooms. The rainbow on the altar is from
a kit I found leftover downstairs among our Sunday school supplies.
And yet, if
you think about it, it’s surprising that we’ve turned it into a children’s
story because the flood was about death and destruction. Everyone died, except the eight people and the pairs of animals on
the ark. And they died because they were evil and corrupt and violent. It says
that “the Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his
heart was deeply troubled.”[1] The
first two chapters of Genesis are about creation, then chapter 3 records the
fall when Adam and Eve ate the fruit God told them not to eat. Things got worse
from there and, while we’re not told details about their sins, by chapter 6, it
says, “Every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all
the time.” It probably would have made for a really good reality TV show.
Creation had fallen into such disharmony that God basically decided to start
over and use a flood to call us back into the harmony that God intended for us.[2]
However, it didn’t completely work. After
God tells Noah it’s safe for them to come off the ark, the very next thing God
says is, “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human
heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living
creatures, as I have done.”[3] In
Psalm 51, the psalm for Ash Wednesday, it says, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful
from the time my mother conceived me.” This is what is known as total depravity
and it’s described elsewhere in Scripture, too. The apostle Paul writes, “All
have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”[4]
And so, since humanity isn’t going to change, God decided to change. God made a
covenant and set the rainbow as a sign of that covenant. Yet he didn’t just set
a rainbow like we might put on a sticker; he hung it, like a banner. Symbolically,
“to hang up one's bow is to retire from battle. 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.”[5]
God’s not going to try that again, and to remind himself, he hangs up his bow
in the clouds.
This rainbow covenant is the first covenant
of many in the bible. Yet there are two unique things about this particular
covenant. First, even though God tells it to Noah, God makes it with every
living creature. Noah is simply a representative of all of the creatures, both
human and animal. And it’s not only a covenant with all the living creatures
that came off the ark, it’s “a covenant for all generations to come,” too.[6]
This is a covenant that’s not going to end. Just because the terms of the
covenant are met today doesn’t mean the covenant is over. This covenant has no
end date. Second, God requires things of himself, but not of us. The terms of
this covenant are about what God’s going to do. There are no stipulations for
us living creatures about what we have to do. God sets limits on himself and
sacrifices some of his divine freedom in order to save us. Sounds a bit like a
precursor to Jesus on the cross, doesn’t it? Since humanity so obviously isn’t
going to end the violence, God covenants to do so.[7]
Even the news again this past week shows how bent we seem on returning to the
chaos and nothingness out of which we came. Did you know the shooting at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida was the seventh school shooting
since January 1st? Seven, in seven weeks. Eighteen total incidents
involving guns on school grounds. Since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School five years ago, there
have been 239 school shootings, totaling 438 people shot and 138 killed. A
friend of mine commented that “If people are waiting for gun violence to hit
close to home with someone they know or even their own child before speaking
out or voting against politicians on the NRA payroll, the odds are in their
favor.”[8] As
in, it’s increasingly likely.
Beloved, this is a problem. And God’s not going to send a flood to wipe away
all the evil. He’s been there, done that, and it didn’t work. Instead, God made
a covenant with all living creatures for all generations. Instead of expecting
humanity to change, God decided to change.
The shooting at Sandy Hook happened
on a Friday and on Saturday I completely rewrote my sermon for Sunday. I preached
from the minor prophet Zephaniah, who wrote from exile to a people who are also
in exile.[9] My
first point drew from Zephaniah reminding the people that “the Lord your God is
in your midst.” Even in exile, even in grief, even in pain and mourning and
chaos, even in Lent, God is with us. This church knows about Lent. We’ve been
in Lent and we are slowly coming out of it, emerging like a butterfly out of a
cocoon. Bishop Ough, the President of the United Methodist Council of Bishops,
sent out a Lenten letter last week with the observation that our entire denomination
is in a season of Lent as we wait and pray and discern how our denomination is
going to move forward.[10]
Even in the wilderness, God is with us. God knows about the wilderness. Jesus
spent forty days and forty nights there. My second point was that God is in an
active relationship with us. That’s why God keeps doing all these covenants! God
wants to be in relationship with us, and not the kind where your only
communication is exchanging Christmas cards. God wants a healthy, active
relationship with open communication and time spent together and mutual love
and respect and a commitment to the relationship even when you get mad at each
other. It’s a covenant relationship. You’re in it for the long haul. Finally,
through Zephaniah God promises those in exile that he will gather you and bring
you home. You are not abandoned. You are not forgotten. You will not be forgotten. No matter where you go.
Psalm 139 says that even if I go down to Sheol, the depths of the earth, or the
far side of the sea, or anywhere else I go, God is always with me. Remember,
it’s a covenant relationship, and God is not going to break his word. God is
faithful even when we are not.
And you may be wondering, wait, am I
in a covenant with God? And the answer is yes. When you were baptized, a
covenant was made. Unlike the flood waters of destruction, the waters of
baptism are ones that save. They mark you as belonging to God. This covenant
says we belong to God. God claims us as part of his family, just as God claimed
Jesus at his baptism. We renew this covenant whenever someone is baptized,
confirmed, or joins the church, and we renew it every January as well. That was
the Sunday when I had the stones in a bowl of water up front. Just as God put
the rainbow as a reminder for him of the covenant, we often need reminding as
well. When my kids asked on Ash Wednesday why we all had crosses on our
foreheads, I told them it was to remind us that we belong to Jesus. And being 3
and 5, they again asked why. And I said it’s because sometimes we forget.
Sometimes we forget that we belong to Jesus. Sometimes we forget that God is
always with us. Sometimes we forget that we are not God and that we need God.
Lent is a good time to remember this because this season “gives us a
means to seek restoration by embracing our sin and mortality. Will we repent,
accept our finitude, and stop grasping for control, or will we continue the
violence?”[11] Or turn a blind eye to
the violence? Lent is a time to repent of our sin, even of our favorite sins.
It’s a time to accept that we are not God, we are not sovereign over our lives.
Lent is a reminder that none of us are perfect, none of us have it all
together. We don’t deserve anything;
all that we have, all our gifts and blessings, are undeserved grace. We are
completely dependent on God’s love and mercy and grace. We are dependent on God
seeking us out; we can’t find God on our own. We are dependent on God to not
utterly destroy us, but to have mercy on us instead. The next verse that Paul
wrote after “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” says, “and all
are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ
Jesus.” Thank God for Jesus. Thank God for the cross. Thank God for Good
Friday, that even on the darkest day, God is working to make all things right.
And he does it not through the violence of destruction but through the “violence
of love.” That phrase comes from Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador who was
martyred for speaking out against his government. He said, “The violence we
preach is not the violence of the sword,[the violence of the gun], the violence
of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that wills
to beat weapons into sickles for work.”[12] Let
us be a part of that movement. Let us be part of that work of God, the work of
making things right, bringing things back into harmony, the work of restoration.
Thanks be to God.
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