Creekside Church Sermon of July 22, 2001 "Helping God Remember " Genesis 9:8-17	Rev. David Bibbee
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A growing number of cities and towns are passing ordinances prohibiting talking on a cell phone while driving. If you're going to use a cell phone in the car, you must pull it off the road and park it. It's a reasonable law since it has been shown that those who drive while on the phone are distracted and are six times more likely to be involved in a serious accident.

But in addition to cell phones, something else should be banned while driving…watching rainbows. Picture yourself on the highway driving in a storm. The wipers are on high as the rain pounds the windshield. Finally the rain lets up and the storm moves eastward. A slate gray sky is before you, and then behind you the sun pushes its way through a crevice in the clouds. It grows brighter and brighter. Then it appears…one of nature's spectacular displays…a rainbow. You try to stay in your lane while looking as much as possible at that rainbow. You lean over the steering wheel, craning your neck to see if it is a full or partial bow. People in the cars around you do the same, pointing to it so their passengers will see it, too.

Everyone knows something about how rainbows are created. The spectrum of color is formed when the sun's rays are refracted and reflected in rain, mist, or spray. I remember a winter morning when the sun was shining through a heavy snowfall and formed the only "snowbow" I have ever seen. But though we know the physical properties of the phenomenon, it doesn't dispel deeper feelings that are stirred when we see a rainbow spangled across the sky.

There should be a law requiring motorists to pull off the road the moment a rainbow appears. Motorcycles, bicycles and scooters and pedestrians on sidewalks should be required to stop, too -- not for safety's sake, but to allow us to do what we are naturally inclined to do…behold the beauty and consider the larger significance of things. We can't help but feel that somewhere over the rainbow there is reason for hope.

One October afternoon on a Wisconsin lake I gazed upon a rainbow so beautiful I nearly cried. It was a full double rainbow of the most intense color I have ever seen. It revealed that there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There is a fisherman. Where the water and rainbow met there was a fisherman in his boat, no doubt unaware of the light in which we were seeing him. We put the rods down and for the next twenty minutes we stood and stared. We took it as an omen of good fishing in the days to come. Something stirs in us at the sight of a rainbow…the feeling that this moment and this day is blessed; hope that the tempest of trouble we are in will pass. But why should we attach such a significance to rainbows?

Maybe we can answer this not just by "tracing the rainbow through the rain" as we just sang, but by tracing it back through history, through the New Testament, through the Old Testament to very near the beginning of creation when God made a profound promise to Noah. It was a promise with Noah and his clan, and not only them, but with all living things and the whole of creation. The story of Noah and the great flood is a tragic one, yet revealed in it is a precious picture of God and the lengths to which God will go to have us in relationship with Him.

To appreciate the importance of the passage before us, we go back to the very beginning when God was fashioning the world. After a week of work, God surveyed all he had made and said it was good…very good-not just parts of it, but everything. Yet good as it was, from the start, the man and woman God made had an amazing ability to muck things up. The Garden of Eden was theirs to enjoy. There was only one stipulation…there was just one little fruit tree with a sign on it that said, "Do not eat." Man and woman had only been around long enough to see a small slice of God's vast, magnificent garden, but they fouled things up. They tried to hide, but were evicted from the garden, and this tragedy was only the start of a string of tragedies. Later their son Cain murdered his brother Abel, and before you know it, the people that God had made to care for creation were wrecking havoc upon it.

Every year at Annual Conference a seminary friend gives me a birthday card. The card for my 48th was a classic. On the cover was a vintage 1950's nurse holding a medical chart and saying, "According to your physical, you have the body of an 18-year-old." Inside it said, "Please return it. You're getting it all wrinkled." It is what we have done with the world. In Genesis 1 all is well, but by chapter 6 God is driven to despair. Such a mess had been made of things that in just five short chapters, God changed his mind. God said, "I will wipe human beings from the face of the earth. People, mammals, amphibians, and birds…I'll blot them all out. I'm sorry I made them." The only solution was mass extinction. Nothing was blessed in the whole arrangement…except Noah.

Only Noah's clan and two of every living thing would be spared. Creatures great and small that competed and ate each other accepted a truce in order to live together under the roof of the ark. Every child has a picture of the scene. The ark door closed, the heavens opened, and the rains fell. Rivers swelled and overflowed their banks. Basement steps turned to waterfalls. The ark floated off its mooring as the flood covered rooftops, then steeples, then skyscrapers. Higher and higher it rose until the last bubble from the last exhale of the last living thing disappeared, and the tip of Mount Everest went under.

Above it all Noah and his zoo bobbed on the creation-consuming sea, the sole survivors. But the devastation of it all was too much, even for God to bear. He was sorry he had created all this life in the first place, but now, after the water receded God was sorry again. He told Noah, "I am establishing a covenant with you and every living thing. Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood. Never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth." To make the whole thing official, God painted a rainbow as a reminder.

In the Old Testament was the belief that the rainbow was an archery bow which God set aside after shooting arrows of lightening. In this passage, the rainbow God painted was the sign that God had set aside destruction as a way of dealing with the world. The rainbow was not a sign for Noah, but for God. The rainbow was a string around God's finger to remind him not to destroy creation again. Depending upon your perspective, this might not be a comforting thought. Why does God need to be reminded? What if God has it "up to here" again and forgets to look at the rainbow? The text assures us this should not be our concern because God made a promise that is binding to this day and beyond.

Actually, promise isn't a strong enough word for it. The Bible called it "covenant." When people enter covenants it is serious business. In weddings I say to the bride and groom that the covenant of marriage is not something to be taken lightly, but entered into with utmost seriousness. A life-long commitment is being made which is equally binding on both people.

God chose a different way of dealing with us. God has chosen to do it through relationship. God made a covenant with Abraham and later with Israel through Moses on Mount Sinai. At the very heart of the covenant was a pledge. "Obey my voice and I shall be your God and you shall be my people, and walk in all the ways I have commanded you that it may be well with you and I will be your God." God didn't make covenants with crabs and cranberries. We alone can be in relationship with God.

But the covenant God made with Noah was different. It wasn't conditional. It wasn't loaded with ifs. Noah wasn't presented with a laundry list of conditions saying, "Because I have done this, you must do that." Noah wasn't told to straighten up and watch his Ps and Qs. What's more there is no indication that people behaved differently after the flood than before. As Barbara Brown Taylor says, "God has struggled to remain faithful to the orneriest bunch of partners a deity ever had." In this covenant, the scales were tilted completely to God's side. "I promise I won't hurt the earth like this ever again. I'll place the rainbow where I can always see it." The covenant was unconditional.

Picture Noah and his family with the great flock of furred, feathered, and scaled creatures gathered at the foot of the ramp leading from out of the ark. Cooped up for weeks it was their first sight of sunlight and their first breath of fresh air. The people were seasick and had rickets. The elephant's ribs were showing. The eagles wondered if they still knew how to fly. The cruise that began with peril ended with God's promise to all creation that he wouldn't respond to our disobedience and rebellion and our love of self and things more than him with destruction.

In one respect, things haven't changed since God sealed his promise with the rainbow. It is still raining. Humans still foul up God's design for the world while God sticks by his plan to make things right. Despite all that is wrong with us, God's will for his creation is the same as it was for Jesus whom God sent to be our rainbow. "I have come that you may have life." God is not in the business of death, but the business of life.

This doesn't mean that all is well. Israelis and Palestinians haven't had their fill of hatred for each other. The Aids epidemic is still spreading. The moral fiber of society continues to disintegrate. The delicate environment that God has created is steadily disintegrating because we value economic prosperity and gluttonous consumerism over clean air and water. Hundreds of species that Noah saved from drowning are disappearing daily. We still sort people according to the color of their skin and the size of their bank accounts. The Klan burns crosses in Osceola. And churches split because one group doesn't like the other's taste in music and worship style.

All is not well, but it is not because God's will is war, or Aids, or cancer, or global warming, or riches for everyone, or white supremacy, or traditional over contemporary worship. All this is our doing. Sometimes I think it wouldn't take much persuasion for God to be sorry for having created us all over again. But God has tied that rainbow around his finger to remember to inflict no harm to anything he has made all the way from humus to humans.

God established a covenant with us. God entered a relationship with us even though we don't give much to him. And since he has continued his covenant with us, the least we can do is care for life because God cared for it. It is something to consider when you think ill of someone or say or do anything which would inflict harm upon another. It is something to consider when developers fill in wetlands and consume farmland to build another strip mall or industrial site. It's something to consider in a world of full of hurting, hungry, and spiritually malnourished people. As the rain falls and flood rises, our need is to throw out life preservers and pull people from the watery chaos to the community of Christ, the church.

There's no need to worry about God forgetting his covenant. I hope we will remember it. I hope we will remember that we have a part to play in caring for God's creation. If you're driving and are fortunate to see a rainbow, pull over, give this a thought. Better yet, give it expression with your life.

This message was inspiried by Barbara Bronw Taylor's sermon, "Refreshing God's Memory" published in her book, "Gospel Medicine".

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