Proper
4a: God’s rainbow covenant
It
seems that my generation has always lived with crisis. Growing up amidst the Cuban Missile crisis
and the cold war, we were raised in fear. In 1962, during the third week of
October, the daily news was filled with the possibility of a showdown between America and the Soviet Union. I was eleven years old, and in the afternoon,
after homework, we would watch the happy and untroubled Leave it to Beaver on black and white television and then on the
evening news we would hear about the potential of nuclear holocaust. Something didn’t make sense. I can remember crying in my pillow and
wondering whether anyone would wake up the next day. I can remember praying to
God that we did not destroy ourselves. We did wake up, we did go on with school,
homework and chores around the house, but the games we played were
different. They were seasoned by the
threat of total annihilation. At school we had silly lessons in how to duck and
cover and we read Government pamphlets radioactivity and later about twilight
at noon called nuclear winter. Something didn’t make sense. The
Cuban missile crisis passed and eventually even the cold war passed. In 1985, the Soviet Union collapsed and within two years the steep rise in
temperatures around the globe, were so alarming that scientists all around the
world expressed concern. . Soon we discovered that we were living with another threat:
global warming and the possibility that our pollution and waste products if not
checked could make the earth uninhabitable.
We still live with the fear that the world could come to an end and this
is not imaginary. It is a crisis as
threatening as nuclear holocaust, as threatening as what might have happened in
the Cuban missile crisis.
This
morning, the reading from Genesis, tells us the story of a different world
coming to an end, Noah’s world. Forget
the scientific questions about where all the water came from and where did all
the water go. This is a story about the
world coming to an end. Let’s face it
the world is always coming to an end for someone. Once upon a time there was so much violence,
corruption, and death on the earth that God couldn’t take it anymore. Sound
familiar? Once upon a time the
relationship between human nature and the world of nature was so broken that
not even God could fix it. Sound familiar? Once upon a time, God saw that human
hearts were so irresistibly drawn toward evil, God decided to put a stop to it. All life on Earth had to be destroyed, all
life except for Noah’s family and with him the male and female of every
species. Genesis tells us that, “the waters
swelled on the earth for one hundred fifty days.” God left only one lifeboat. The only life boat was
Noah’s Ark. When the water
subsided and Noah sent out a dove, it returned with an olive branch from dry
land. Noah’s life boat landed on dry
land and Noah’s family and every creature on earth emerged and started
repopulating the earth. God made a promise for Noah and forever, that
he would never destroy the earth again, and he gave the rainbow as a sign of
this first Covenant with the human race.
There
are so many profound truths that we can learn from Noah and his Ark. In our own time, in the crisis of Global warming,
the truth that we are to learn from Noah and his Ark is simple and stark. To avoid destruction, we must change our
lives and we must build an Ark
for the survival of all creatures. For
us the Ark is not a boat made of wood and nails. The ark is the earth itself. We can only survive this crisis, if we treat
the whole earth as our life raft. Like
Noah, we are not experts who already know something about ship building. Like
Noah, God calls us anyway. We must begin the building of the Earth into an Ark. We can’t solve global warming by military and
economic warfare. We can only solve
Global Warming by co-operation and dedication.
Individually and collectively, we must consciously permeate every aspect
of our lives with the effort to preserve life on this planet: all this, so that
might fulfill the promise of the Rainbow Covenant.
We
as individuals and we as citizens of our nation must realize that we are in
this boat with every other individual and every other nation on the earth. We are all in the boat, this Ark, together.
And we are Christians. As
Christians, we are called by God’s love, to protect and preserve God’s creation
and to fulfill the promise that God gave to Noah, the promise of the rainbow
Covenant. In this Eucharist today, we will remember that this fragile earth is
our island home. Let us live that
prayer, and permeate every aspect of our lives with the effort to preserve our
island home. Amen.