Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.” So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”
(Genesis 9:8-17)
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Back in the early 1990's I was a student and I was serving my internship at a church in Fort Erie. My supervisor was a very experienced pastor who had also served as Personnel Minister for Hamilton Conference for several years before going back into parish ministry. He used to rail against Covenanting Services. You probably know what those are. When you call a new minister you have to have a covenanting service to mark the new relationship between them, the congregation and the Presbytery. So I've had a Covenanting Service here; Karen has had a Covenanting Service here. It's part of the process. But my supervisor despised them - or at least he despised the name. "Covenants involve God," he always used to say. "If you don't have God you don't have a covenant, so if it's the minister, the congregation and the presbytery then it's not a covenant - it's an agreement or a contract, but it's not a covenant, because covenants always involve God. They have to." I personally don't choose to get too worked up about the language - although I do agree that he had a point. Covenants (at least the ones we read about in the Bible) do involve God. If you don't have God involved, then you don't have a covenant - at least not in the Bible. That's a biblical pattern you see going back right to the beginning. Today we read about the very first covenant mentioned in the Bible - and it involved God. It was a covenant between God and humanity, but interestingly enough it really only speaks about God and God's obligations.
It comes at the very last part of the story of Noah and the Ark. That’s an ugly story. You may never have thought about it that way because we’ve tended to turn it into a story for little children with pictures of a boat and cute little animal heads popping up over the deck – but Noah and the Ark is an ugly story. It depicts a God who is so out of control with anger over the actions of the human race that God created that the result is a divinely appointed destruction of humanity through a great flood. The picture of God in the overall story is interesting. God is angry, God is vengeful, God is upset, God is disappointed. All of these things work together and lead God to do a terrible thing – which, ultimately, even God seems to recognize was a terrible thing – and so the end result is this covenant between God and humanity and actually every living creature on earth. “Never again,” God says. “I will never do that again. I will never allow myself to get so angry that I take such vengeance again.” And, interestingly, God sets the rainbow in the sky as a reminder – to God – of this covenant. It’s as if God knew that humans were going to continue to do things that would test God’s patience and that would tempt God to take terrible vengeance, so God needed a reminder: “Oh right. I said I’d never do that again.” Seeing the rainbow seems to be the divine equivalent of taking a deep breath or counting to 10. I noticed that just a few days ago The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to two and a half minutes to midnight – the closest it’s been since 1953 to a global catastrophe. We hope God continues to see the rainbow and remember the covenant!
But the most interesting thing about this covenant is that it puts no obligations on anyone other than God. God says “I’ll never do this again,” but asks for nothing in return. It’s as if God realized that this act of wholesale destruction was so ungodly that there could be nothing asked for in return – this was just something that God could not do and would not do again. But that does leave me wondering what God’s expectations of us are? Do we have an unstated part to the covenant? In return for God’s promise are there expectations on us? I would say that there clearly are. If nothing else I would say that our part of the covenant is to strive to live in a way that honours and reflects God – the God who in essence repented after an act of wanton destruction. If we are to learn anything from the story of this first covenant, perhaps it is that we too are going to be tempted to turn away from the rainbow covenant, which is at its heart a covenant of peace and love and reconciliation, and that when we do, we too are to repent of our actions and to strive to never repeat them. But there is more. There is what we call the new covenant – the covenant that Christians believe came into force with the coming of Jesus.
The new covenant revolves around two things: grace and love. God grants us grace and loves us without reservation. It’s a logical follow-up to that first covenant described in Genesis. We in turn are called to live by grace, to show grace to those around us and to overflow with love for all those we encounter. In the light of events in Quebec City and elsewhere over the past week, we might want to reflect on how best we can actually fulfil our part of the covenant. But there’s one more aspect to the covenant we have with God that we need to be aware of, and it’s highlighted for us today as we prepare to celebrate Holy Communion.
This is the honouring of the new covenant – the fulfilment of any and all covenants that God has made with humanity over the centuries. And this covenant is marked not just by love – but by agape, by sacrifice. It is in the bread and the wine that we see true sacrifice: Jesus giving of himself. I have some mixed feelings about the idea that Jesus died FOR human sin, because I have my doubts that God – who has no needs – actually needed a sacrifice in order to forgive; but I have no doubt that Jesus died BECAUSE of human sin. His death was the result of human evil, and in that way Jesus stands with all of us – and even with those who are the most vulnerable and the most at risk. But whether Jesus died for our sin or because of our sin, either way we are intimately connected with Jesus by this sacrament of sacrifice, and because of that connection we also are called to service and to sacrifice – not of our life, perhaps – but of our lives. We are called to give of ourselves – all that we have, all that we are, all that we will be – for the sake of those around us in the hope of making the world around us a better place.
This is the last of a short series of sermons on stewardship that I’ve offered. And I think it appropriately ends on a Communion Sunday when the focus is on sacrifice – because that’s what real stewardship is. It’s about our willingness to truly give of ourselves for others; it’s a symbolic way of saying that we will follow the way of Jesus – the way of the cross – the way of giving – the way of sacrifice. Surely, when you get right down to it – that’s our part of the covenant.
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