On Ash Wednesday, we began our "Lenten Love" preaching series. Each week we will focus on a different aspect of God's love and explore how it might speak to our relationships with others. On Ash Wednesday, we reflected on God's love as a circle that surrounds us from birth to death and beyond. This morning, we explored God's love that comes to us in the covenant God extends to us.
An interesting point in the text that I did not preach about, but would be an interesting preaching point is found in vs. 14: when God sees the rainbow, God will remember the covenant. We think of the rainbow as a sign for us, but it also serves as a reminder to God that God has chosen to enter into covenant relationship with us.
“Lenten Love: Covenant” March 3, 2024; Genesis 9: 9-17; SAPC, Denton; Richard B. Culp
9“As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, 10and 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. 11I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
12God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: 13I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, 15I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” 17God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”
Introduction: Lenten love
Each week, a different aspect of love.
Reflections on God’s love for us;
the love we have for each other.
God’s love, of course, is the foundation for the love we share with each other.
And, of course, puzzle pieces - here in worship and at home, if you want.
We began on Ash Wednesday with love as a circle, reminded how God finds us at every point on the circle and God surrounds us with love.
This week, we reflect on God’s love that we discover in God’s covenant with us.
move 1: Covenant is a promise.
a. Noah and the Ark is often told as a fun story.
1. Wonderful story to tell the kids.
2. Animals - two by two.
3. Lots of imagery that can be drawn.
4. And, of course, who does not like a rainbow.
b. This story is more than a fun story to tell.
1. it is a dramatic, powerful story of the flood that reveals God’s judgment,
death,
and near destruction of all creation.
.
2. as the story unfolds, all of creation is at risk.
3. Will God literally drown out all the sinfulness in the world?
and in doing so drown out all creation.
4. Do not miss the connection between the raging waters fo the flood and the dark, watery chaos that existed before God called the world into being.
5. is this the return to life before creation.
c. At this critical decision point for all creation, God chooses to make a promise and follow the path of love.
- the text makes it clear that God is doing this.
God says, “I will establish…”
the covenant “I make”
I have set my bow
Even the future promise that “I will remember”
It is an all-encompassing promise.
- not just with Noah and his family, but all creation.
4. Not just in this moment, but the promise is for future generations as well.
d. with the young disciples, I likened it to a pinky promise.
- I sort of like that image - bound together physically as a sign of covenant.
2. But I learned this week that a pinky promise has a dark history.
3. some tie it to the Japanese mafia tradition of a pinky promise - if you break the promise, you get your pinky cut off! Consider the pinky promise.
This seemingly innocuous children’s pact has a dark past: It’s said to have been used by the Japanese mafia, who would cut off the pinky finger of the person who broke their word.
What are the odds that someone breaks that sort of pinky pact? I’m betting pretty low. (https://www.nirandfar.com/pinky-promise/)
4. God’s covenant is not driven by the threat of retribution or judgment, but by God’s desire to love and be in relationship with us and all of creation.
God makes covenant with us.
Move 2: Covenant reveals God’s willingness to self-limit.
a. God does not have to enter into covenant with us
1. God is sovereign.
2. God is judge.
3. God does not need humanity.
4. God is the one who has all the power.
b. Still, God chooses to make covenant to not destroy the world.
- To be in relationship with us, instead of ending the relationship due to our sinfulness.
2. God has every reason,
every right,
and, of course, the ability to destroy.
3. But God chooses the path of covenant and love.
c. Choices we make in our own relationships.
- We sometimes find ourselves in relationships where we have the opportunity,
we have the capability
we are even justified in breaking a relationship.
2. But, to be in covenant relationship with others may mean we self-limit our own actions.
3. We may choose to stay in the relationship and work through issues and brokenness because of the hope and promise that we find in covenant relationships.
Move 3: Covenant love also reveals God’s desire to cleanse us.
a. Noah story
1. By the time of Noah, we have multiple stories of broken relationships.
2. Adam and Eve with God.
Adam and Eve with each other!
3. Abel and Cain
4. human history is full of broken relationships.
b. As we begin Lent, we read this story from Genesis and the story of Jesus being tempted in the desert as a reminder both of the covenant God has with us, and also the need to reshape our lives.
- Jesus turned away from temptations that would distort his relationship with God and with us, which reminds us of our need to be transformed so that we too might turn away from those things that lead to broken relationships.
2. Part of being in covenant with God and with others involves growing together and helping each other claim that new that waits for us.
c. I am not suggesting that when people say they love us as a prelude to emotional abuse as they point out all our failings as part of sharing their love.
1. But, covenant relationships invite us to engage with people who can help us grow because their desire is not to destroy us,
or punish us,
but to love us through our sinfulness and brokenness.
2. And, of course, we might reflect on how we provide that covenantal love to others.
move 3: Covenant to love extends to all places.
a. God’s promise is not for one person or one segment of creation, but for all.
b. Professor Emeritus of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary Daniel Migliore tells the story of something that happened one summer when he was helping to run a Vacation Bible School program for a bunch of inner-city children in a run-down part of a large New Jersey city.
As part of the program, Migliore taught the kids one day the story of Noah and the Flood. Since it was a VBS program, Migliore at one point did the typical Sunday school-like thing of asking the children a very basic question: “Now, boys and girls, where do you see rainbows?” Immediately several children piped up, “In the street!”
Thinking they had misunderstood his question, Migliore asked one more time, “No, where do you see rainbows?” “In the street!” the children persisted.
Upon further inquiry, Migliore learned the truth: most of those children had grown up in a burnt-over urban environment of stone, steel, concrete, and dilapidated high-rise tenement buildings. The truth was that most of those kids had never seen a wide enough swath of sky to see a real rainbow stretch from horizon to horizon. What they had seen plenty of, though, were those rainbows of color that pop up when some oil gets slicked into a muddy puddle in the streets and alleyways of their world. The only rainbow most of those kids had ever witnessed were these greasy ones—rainbows that, if anything, served as a kind of metaphor for the sad and truncated and dirty world they were forced to inhabit.
The realization made Migliore sad initially but upon reflection he realized a deeper truth: if the rainbow is a sign of God’s covenant faithfulness, of his fierce determination never again to abandon this creation despite its ongoing fallen nature, where better for those kids to see it than smack in the middle of all that from which they needed deliverance in the first place? It’s not in the azure skies of our joyful days that we need to see the rainbow but right in the midst of all that pains us, breaks us, wounds us. That’s where we need the hope and the reminder that evil does not have the last word. Only God has the last word, and his word is that salvation will come and has come. Never again will he leave us. Thanks be to God!
b. That’s where God’s love speaks the loudest – in the back alleys of our lives.
1. In the pain of our failures, God’s covenant love finds us.
2. In the midst of our sinfulness, God’s covenant love reaches out to us.
3. In the dark places that we hide from others, God’s covenant love finds us with a word of grace.
4. As God’s people we are sent to those places to share God’s love.
God’s covenant knows no bounds in God’s desire to love
Conclusion: It was a Sunday afternoon on the soccer fields.
there had been rain off and on, but the field was playable.
Cloudy skies; a typical, windy, somewhat stormy spring day in OH.
I was refereeing a game of 12-year-olds. parents lined the west side of the field.
At one point in the game, the sun broke out.
I looked up and there was - not just one big rainbow, but a double rainbow.
the second starting from inside the first one. both so clearly displayed in the sky.
the ball went out of bounds.
I blew the whistle.
As everyone looked at me, I told the players: “You need to look over there. you don’t get to see a double rainbow very often.
they looked over their parents' heads into the sky.
I then told the parents: to turn around and look at the sky. A double rainbow.
They did the same.
then they all looked back at me like I was some crazy person.
Apparently, the rainbows did not mean much to them.
But the rainbow means something to us.
It reminds us that God has chosen to be in covenant with us - a promise for all creation.
Amen.
