Richard Davenport
July 28, 2024 – Proper 12
Genesis 9:8-17
Once upon a time, and by that I mean not long ago at all, rainbows meant wonder and beauty. They were a part of this world and yet just a little bit otherworldly. Scientists can explain how they work and have been able to for quite some time, yet they still crop up in myths and legends, stories of fantasy and strange places. Leprechauns and pots of gold, the rainbow bridge of Norse myth, and so forth. Though you won’t find it in the book, the movie, The Wizard of Oz, has Dorothy dreams longingly for the world outside her little farm by singing, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
Needless to say, rainbows no longer carry that aura of wonder and majesty in our society. Now they mean something quite different. Depending on where you go, you almost can’t get away from them. You’ll see rainbows slathered all over the place and wonder is the last thing anyone thinks of. It’s just as well that the rainbows you see on flags and such have less colors than the rainbow God placed in the sky thousands of years ago. A six colored rainbow flag, where our Lord created a rainbow with a perfect 7 colored stripes. For those who look with eyes opened by Scripture, it only makes sense that those who twist creation could only hope for an imperfect rainbow.
Still, it is sad to see. The damage being done by those who cling to their imperfect rainbows is seen everywhere. The movement has run rampant all across the country and around the world. They attack everything that reminds them of God’s will over his creation and how he intended it to work. They think that they can remove all traces of God’s perfect design so that they can be the final arbiters of what is good and right.
It doesn’t work, but that doesn’t stop them from trying. God’s will reasserts itself in all sorts of ways, from physical problems they have when they try to reshape their bodies to their own desires, emotional problems from trying to form and foster unhealthy relationships, mental problems from trying to live a life and a lifestyle that was never intended for them, and obviously spiritual problems from setting themselves up as God.
You might not want anything to do with those who wave rainbow flags these days, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have similar problems. Looking back to Genesis, we see Noah looking at the aftermath. Everything that God had foretold over the last couple of chapters and the many intervening years had come to pass. Now Noah stands on the mountaintop. He looks around at the world with his family and the animals that have come out of the ark. Everything is fresh and new. It closely resembles the world as God had originally made it.
Then the rainbow appears, not as a result of anything Noah had done, but as a reminder of a promise. Not a reminder to Noah, at least not primarily, but a reminder to God. The rainbow reminds God of his promise not to wipe out the world with a flood. No matter how bad things get down here, God made a promise and he has to stick to it.
More than the pride, the deviant lifestyle choices, the rejection of authority, and the desire to be god, there is the twisting of God’s promise. By taking the rainbow and denigrating it, by waving their poor approximations of God’s perfection, they are trying to make God complicit in something he never agreed to and never promised.
It’s a recipe for disaster and it’s not the first time it’s happened. The Israelites of old took God’s promise to Abraham that he and his children would be God’s chosen, that the savior would come from his lineage and turned that into an excuse to ignore everyone and everything around them. It became a license to live however they wanted and to engage in all sorts of disreputable behavior, much like society does today.
Changing God’s promises is kind of the name of the game. Whether you twist his words to mean something else or whether you disregard the consequences, it all ends up causing the same damage. The same question, “Did God really say…?” is just as tempting for us today as it ever was.
God promises to provide for you, so figure you can afford to live large. Fine dining, fancy clothes, whatever looks good, after all, God will take care of you. When your spending brings everything crashing down, you turn to God and accuse him of letting you down and leaving you stranded. God promises to keep his flock safe. When a car crash or a stroke suddenly takes someone you love, you start to ask questions? Couldn’t God have stopped this? Didn’t he know this was going to happen? How can we trust him when he doesn’t make good on his promises to us? God promises to love you, but all of the relationships in your life bring nothing but pain and misery. A family that’s indifferent to your needs, an abusive relationship, kids who have left you behind, a boss who hates you, people who belittle you, who despise you, who use you for their own ends and then casts you away, all can present a skewed idea of what love is. Perhaps it’s the hand you’ve been dealt, but perhaps it’s a result of your own bad choices and hanging out with the wrong crowd. Either way, God should have known better and kept it from happening. If this is what God does for you, then maybe that’s really what love looks like, or maybe love just isn’t for you, or maybe God doesn’t actually love you after all.
The list goes on and on. The church will grow and prosper. I’ll prosper. The world will be at peace. My neighborhood will be at peace. My family will be at peace. I’ll find love, happiness, peace, contentment, joy, and whatever else you can think of. After all, God promised.
We rewrite God’s promises in all sorts of ways, all to suit our own ends. Then, when the desired results fail to materialize, we accuse God of not holding up his end of the bargain. “He promised to do…fill in the blank, and he didn’t. So I don’t need him.” God’s promises are then connected to all sorts of terrible behavior, whether by pagan unbelievers or those who claim to be his people. All of it distorts his word and alters his promise. All of it gives the impression God doesn’t do what he says, that he doesn’t follow through on his promises. All of it tells people he isn’t worth trusting, much less worshipping.
The power of God’s promise is one of the main things that separates him from everything else in the world. Everything else will let you down eventually. Everything else will fail. Many things will actively try to confuse you or lead you astray with their words.
God doesn’t work that way. God never works that way. God stakes his name and reputation on his word. If he doesn’t keep his word, then his word is worthless. If he doesn’t keep his word, then there is no guarantee you will ever escape your sins or that you will ever leave the tomb. That’s why, even when the promise God makes is huge and sweeping, he keeps it. He must keep it if he’s going to maintain his reputation.
Every promise God makes is for your benefit. Every promise is given out of love for you. Whether that’s to forgive your sins, to refrain from sending a flood, or to bring you back from the grave. All of those and more are given to you by a God who loves you enough to promise a savior, to promise his own Son, to send his Son to take your sins to the cross and die for them, to promise to rise again so that you too would live again and share eternity in his creation with him.
Even if we twist and warp God’s words, his promise still stands. No matter how sinful we are here, God will not wipe out the world with a flood. The rainbow, his rainbow, continues to remind him of his promise. While we may look around and wish God would bend just a little bit, wipe out those people over there using their false rainbows, or the greedy people who keep taking and taking and give nothing in return, or the inciters and rabble rousers who tear others down in secret instead of building one another up, or idolators and pagans out there who care nothing for God’s law, God’s promise holds for us as well. We put ourselves ahead of others. We claim the authority over ourselves and the world around us. We claim the right to change things to whims, a right and an authority that belongs to God alone. We deserve to be swept away as much as everyone else here. But we won’t, because God promised.
We look to God and his promises and see how necessary they are. Without his promise to withhold the flood, we would all be washed away. The baptismal waters that bring life would instead be death. Without his promise to send a savior, we would have nothing and no one to lift out of this sin-broken world. Without his promise to forgive on account of Christ’s sacrifice, we would be lost in our sins and condemned forever. Without his promise to raise us, just as Christ has been raised, we would have this life only to look forward to.
But God’s promises stand, no matter what happens here in this world. We trust him and his promises because he alone can make all of this happen and he alone keeps his word. We look to the rainbow and give thanks that God remembers his promises to us. We needed a savior, and God sent one. We confess our sins and we are forgiven. We die and we know that we will rise again, all because God stands by what he says, just as he always has and just as he always will.