Almighty God, guide us to seek your Truth: come whence it may, cost what it will, lead where it might. Amen.
These days of Lent, which are marked by prayer, fasting, and penitence, are intended to prepare us for the joys of Easter morning. Early on, the Church realized that you don’t just show up to Church one morning to celebrate Easter, but rather Easter is something that has to be prepared for. The rationale for this season of Lent isn’t that we are sadists or masochists who like considering our impending deaths or moral failings. Rather, by considering these weighty topics, we are all the readier to receive with joy the grace of Easter, that celebration of Christ’s victory over death and sin. Towards this end, the goal in my preaching this Lent is to prepare us for Easter by considering the topic of grace.
Each week, the prayers and readings will show us glimpses of God’s grace, and so by pointing to that grace each week, we will be ready to receive the fullest revelation of God’s grace as it is seen at the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus. To start, we can understand grace as the unearned gift of God’s mercy. Grace is always something given, never something earned. Grace requires nothing of us, though it may well inspire something in us. Grace is God’s favor, loving help, and compassion towards for us. Grace is an unlimited and uncountable resource, meaning there is always enough for everyone and no one has more or less grace than anyone else. Grace is given by God, not by us, so we do not get to control it or decide to whom God imparts grace.
The message of grace is not a new one in the Church, but it is one that we still struggle with because grace goes against every aspect of our world. We live in a meritocracy, where you reap what you sow and where everything is transactional, this-for-that. You want a successful life, study hard in school and make connections. We see someone driving a Rolls Royce and we wonder, “I wonder what they did to deserve that?” That might be how the world works, but in the Kingdom of God, that’s called idolatry. Things like a strong work ethic, a sense of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, and lying in the bed that you’ve made are all are part of our social construct. The air that we live and breathe is works righteous, the idea that you earn your own favor.
But that is all antithetical to the message of the Gospel, of unearned grace. In the reading from Mark this morning, we hear the message “The Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” This Kingdom of God is in conflict with the kingdoms of the world. So, all the more, if we are to receive the grace of Easter, we need to spend this time in Lent readjusting to the radical idea of grace.
A place where grace is clearly on display is in this morning’s text from Genesis. It’s the end of an extremely well-known story, that of Noah’s Ark. We often give children toys of the ark and pairs of animals, sometimes we decorate their nurseries with images from that story. And really, that’s rather odd. This is a story about God’s wrath and the near total destruction of Creation. Sweet dreams. If, though, we can get past the children’s Bible version of this story, what we’ll encounter is a deep and rich story about the grace of God.
Today, we only heard the end of the story, after the rains have subsided and the flood waters have receded, God makes a covenant with Noah. Grace, because it is unearned, is often surprising. And this covenant has a huge surprise in it. It’s not surprising that God was regretting having created the world and decided to annihilate Creation. One of the myths out there is that of human progress. We’re no better today than we were in the days of Noah. We deserve to be annihilated as much as the people who drowned in the Flood. Don’t believe me? Just look at the story of human history – genocide, slavery, exploitation, near constant wars, school shootings, environmental degradation, prejudice, nuclear proliferation, poverty, selfishness, lying, idolatry, cheating, stealing. At the end of Creation, God says Creation is “very good,” and just a few chapters later God is saying “Well, that didn’t turn out how I had hoped.”
Of course, humanity isn’t all bad – by the grace of God, we’ve built orphanages, food pantries, and hospitals. We’ve created magnificent pieces of art, literature, and architecture. We’ve cured diseases, have people living in orbit, and can share ideas instantly through the internet. But there is no amount of human achievement that makes it okay for a child to go to bed hungry, or okay for a woman to be harassed, or okay to spend more on a military than education or healthcare. We are mired in sin.
One of the central attributes of God is that God is just. Throughout Scripture, we read that God is a God of justice. And justice requires judgment. Humanity, in the days of Noah and ever since, has caused injustice. Human activity is in conflict with God’s justice. So it’s not at all surprising that God’s wrath is provoked at the grave injustices of humanity.
Nor is it surprising that God relents from destroying all of Creation. Instead, through the family of Noah, God chooses to save Creation from total destruction. Another central attribute of God is that God is merciful. There are numerous passages throughout the Old and New Testaments that speak of God’s compassion, patience, forbearance, and mercy. We often say that Creation is the product of God’s outpouring of love, and as we all know, you do not annihilate something that you love. So it is not surprising that though the Flood is warranted, that God shows mercy.
What we see in this narrative is the tension between God’s justice and God’s mercy. Both are central to God’s being, but they are in conflict with each other. Justice demands one thing, mercy demands another. The resolution between justice and mercy is God’s grace, which is what we see in this covenant made between God and all of Creation after the Flood. And this is where the surprise comes in. This covenant is God’s radical redefining of divine character.
Notice what God says in this covenant, “I 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. This is the sign of the covenant: I have set my bow in the cloud. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I 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.” This is truly radical. The God who created and sustains all of Creation, who has unlimited reign and power, for the sake of the Creation, self imposes a limit. God says, “No, I will never do that.” God surrenders the power to ever destroy Creation, even if that is deserved or demanded by God’s justice.
And not only that, by entering into a Covenant with Creation, God is bound to the fate of Creation. Forevermore, God is invested in Creation and the fate of Creation is the fate of God. For the infinite and perfect God to be bound to the finite and flawed Creation makes God vulnerable and exposed because God has given up total control in favor of divine grace. For our sake, God takes on limits by entering into a relationship with us. And this isn’t some superficial relationship, but a genuine relationship of mutuality. This is the surprise of God’s grace.
The symbol of this covenantal relationship is a bow in the sky, a rainbow. The bow, of course, is the symbol of the weapon of destruction. God hangs it in the sky, unstrung and pointed away from the earth. God has rejected violence and in hanging the bow, God says “Violence is not the solution.” I still believe that God speaks to us through Scripture, and I don’t think it’s an accident that the Sunday after 17 students were slaughtered in another school shooting this is the reading we get. Enough is enough. If God can put up his weapon, maybe it’s time that we at least have a conversation about that in our nation.
One theologian has called this covenant a “revolution in the heart of God.” The relationship with Creation is reformed, not on the basis of our actions or beliefs, but on the basis of God’s unqualified grace. Notice, humanity hasn’t repented for the evil it had done. Keep reading in Genesis and you’ll see that Noah and his children very quickly revert to their sinful ways. What holds back God’s righteous judgment isn’t our sinless living, but God’s grace. And this is what is surprising, that for the sake of Creation, God changed, God choses to limit divine power, God choses grace in the struggle between mercy and justice.
Of course, we see this most fully in the Incarnation of the Son in Jesus. In Philippians, St. Paul expresses this by saying “Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death- even death on a cross.” The Cross is that symbol which points towards grace. It is the ultimate symbol of divine vulnerability, self-giving, self-limitation, and love for Creation. This is the surprising grace of God, that God comes to us on our terms for our benefit.
Grace, of course, is what we’re in need of after this past week. In choosing grace, God knows pain and suffering, and is with us as we are frustrated, scared, and mournful in a society that worships at the altar of violence. We pray for the grace of God to be with the victims and their families in Parkland; and we also pray that we might be given the grace to enter more fully into the covenant that God has given us – a covenant of rejecting violence and of changing our ways in light of God’s love for all of Creation.
God’s desire for us is a unified, harmonious, and peaceful Creation. Because of sin, things are out of balance. Through the covenants, which are God’s form of self-giving, things are brought into balance again. It is not our work to adjust the scales, but rather to participate in the balancing that God has already done. We can thrive in the balance that God has given us through the covenants. Just as God self-limits and looks to the interest of others before ego, the grace of God allows us to do the same. Grace frees us from keeping score, from trying to earn our worth and defending it from others, from trying to overcome sin with our own flawed sense of righteousness, from wondering if we are loved. The bow and the Cross – signs of God’s surprising and undeserved self-emptying, self-limiting, self-giving grace towards us. Thanks be to God!
