The First Sunday in Lent

February 18, 2024

Stuart Higginbotham

The Covenant

God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you.

When our daughter was around four or five, her Grammy, Lisa’s mother, asked her what she wanted for Christmas. Evelyn was very clear in her answer: a rainbow. I remember honestly not giving it much thought, because children ask for strange things all the time: unicorns, ponies, and such. We weren’t able to go back to Arkansas at Christmas, because, well, clergy are busy, so she mailed a package to us that included a rainbow–well, a rainbow maker, a small device that shone a light through a prism and mirror and projected a large rainbow across the ceiling in her darkened bedroom. Evelyn was absolutely thrilled when she woke up to a room filled with a rainbow, and I, once more, was in awe of this sign of Grammy’s dedication and deep love for her granddaughter. 

In today’s reading from Genesis, we see this incredible image of a rainbow portrayed as a sign of God’s promise for Noah–and for all of creation. Nothing is outside the bounds of this covenant; indeed, this covenant has no bounds. God’s covenant is universal in its scope and endless in its blessing, and the rainbow is the sign for it, this great spectrum of color that arches across the whole sky, holding all within its embrace. 

After an event like the flood, it would take a sign of such magnitude to mark the promise of God’s blessing. The flood narrative is such a pivotal moment in the Bible’s early legendary stories, this moment that is mysterious in its cause and confusing in what it says about a God who would choose to do this to the creation previously deemed “good, very good.” 

We remember, of course, that the flood story in Genesis is not unique to the Bible as we know it. It is not meant to be an historical account; rather it is meant to teach a crucial lesson. There are other flood narratives in ancient cultures other than the Hebrew, and indeed we see how the Hebrew people drew on these earlier epic tales to weave complex lessons into their own sacred stories. Questions like “How do we understand our own growth as human beings and the consequences of our actions” and “How do we understand God’s response to the choices we make in creation” are just as pertinent now as they were millenia ago. 

The three to four millennia-old flood story in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh described a man chosen by the gods to build a boat to save a select group of people from a flood that would wash over the whole earth. The Sumerian flood story, which itself is about 3,500 years old, and the Epic of Atra-Hasis, which is around 4,000 years old, both speak of a great flood that is a consequence of human action within creation. 

There is no doubt that there existed in the consciousness of the people throughout ancient Mesopotamia and the Near East an image of a great flood which was a divine response, in some way, to the activity of human beings. When the writers of the Book of Genesis wrote the story of Noah, they ended their particular interpretation with this beautiful image of the rainbow and the promise that God made, anew, to all creation. I establish my covenant with you, God says. 

Pay attention to how this story is placed on the First Sunday in Lent. This tells us something important about how we are called to read it and integrate it into our Lenten practice. It teaches us two important things, at least: one, that there are consequences to human action within creation. It is a complex story, to be sure, and it raises questions about God’s decision to destroy what God had deemed good. Faithful Jews, Muslims, and Christians have been challenged by this dynamic for centuries, and at a minimum it teaches us to pay attention to God’s active presence in the world. Perhaps Jesus picked up on this dynamic reality later in the Gospel of John when he said “The Spirit blows where it will.” We cannot put God into a box, and we do not get to define how God acts.

Perhaps there is a deep lesson for us today in how there are consequences for our actions. We live in a culture where we like to think there are no consequences, that we are “free” to do whatever we want to do–provided we have the resources to do so. I love how, in the Babylonian and Sumerian tellings, the gods just felt like the humans were too loud. They bothered their atmosphere, so something needed to happen. In the Hebrew interpretation, something had gone off course, and human beings had begun using their ability to choose not in a way that was aligned with God’s plan but in a way that was self-centered and sinful. 

So, there is this piece of the story that we pay attention to for sure, but perhaps in Lent what is actually most challenging is that the blessing God gives at the end of the story here is for all creation. For us who live in a zero-sum culture that pits people against one another in a tiresome game of “who is in and who is out,” the reality of God’s covenant extending, as God says to Noah, to you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you challenges any understanding of tribes or clubs or select groups having a monopoly on God’s blessing.

The truth of such a radical embrace that this story points to is picked up in that great poem by the Sufi Muslim Jalal al-Din Rumi, of course:

Beyond

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas,

language,

even the phrase “each other”

doesn’t make any sense.

Even though rainbows are made of refracted light and have no substance in themselves, the reality of their spaciousness is a fantastic Lenten meditation on how all is held within the blessing of God’s own life. As they stretch across the sky, they become powerful metaphors that challenge us to become aware of the self-centered boundaries we impose. As we pause and pay attention to our impulse to establish a boundary, perhaps we see how that impulse is driven by our need to control and exert power, which is, itself, so often fueled by fear and a misguided perspective of scarcity. We think, “there can only be so much blessing from God, and so I need to do what I can to get it, and once I believe I have it, then I start to believe that I actually understand it and even control it.”

But we do not control grace. God’s grace is not something that we can doll out to those we deem worthy. We cannot contain it. We can only stand before it, in utter awe of God’s movement in the world, of the life-giving Spirit we Christians see in Jesus Christ whose arms themselves stretch out like the rainbow to embrace all. And when we find ourselves in our own darkened rooms and see the light pour out before our eyes, and we hear, yet again, God’s promise saying, This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth, the only response is gratitude.