March 9, 2003 - First Sunday of Lent
1 Peter 3:18-22
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Mark 1:9-15
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“The Way of Covenant and Kingdom”

What is it about rainbows?  Have you ever noticed how people respond to rainbows following a storm?  Even though they’ve seen rainbows hundreds of times they still go out and point, as if it is something brand new and different.  People see a rainbow in the sky and a grin sneaks out on even the most curmudgeonly face.  Rainbows speak to us of hope, of promise, and of the possibility of new beginning.  Why?  Well, at least for those of us in Western cultures it is because of the story of Noah, the ark, and the great flood.

When the flood, and flood stories abound in the literature of various cultures, is finished there is a rainbow.  At least there is in the Genesis account, and in the placing of the bow God says to Noah, “I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth . . . and the waters will never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.  When my 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.” [Genesis 9]  It’s a very different view of the rainbow than would have been held in ninth century Assyria.  There the rainbow was considered the god Asher’s weapon, and the lightning bolts were his arrows.  Now the bow is transformed into the sign of a compassionate God’s willingness to be faithful – even when we are not.  The rainbow, like God’s faithfulness, is a constant reminder of an invitation to relationship and to the renewal of life and hope itself.  The rainbow, then, becomes one of those archetypal symbols of our culture.  We see a rainbow and we think ‘hope.’

Could that be why Dorothy, stuck in the doldrums of the dustbowl and the Depression, sang about “somewhere over the rainbow”?  Do you think that the promise is so much a part of us that even Kermit the Frog, I mean he is a living creature of sorts, isn’t he?, could sing about a “Rainbow Connection”

Why are there so many songs about rainbows
And what's on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,
And rainbows have nothing to hide.
So we've been told and some choose to believe it
I know they're wrong, wait and see.
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers and me.

... Have you been half asleep? And have you heard voices?
I've heard them calling my name.
... Is this the sweet sound that calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one and the same
I've heard it too many times to ignore it
It's something that I'm s'posed to be...
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers, and me.

Kermit’s plaintive refrain, “Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me,” has actually come true.  At least, it has for the lovers and the dreamers and the ‘me-s’ who have understood the promise God made to Noah and has renewed again and again to those who keeping looking for the One behind the rainbow.  The rainbow connection is the way of the covenant and kingdom.

For the early church the flood became a type for baptism.  What they saw in the waters of the flood was the prefigurement, as Peter put it, of baptism.  As Noah and family were saved from the water, we are saved through it and brought symbolically from death to life.  Noah and his family left the ark to populate and to enjoy a new world, one cleansed by the flood, and now renewed.  In the mind of those first Christians baptism did the same thing.  One went into the waters and left behind the old person and the old ways of thinking, of being, and of doing, and emerged into a new world as a transformed person.  That “proclamation of liberty” Christ made is the hope and the goal of Christian faith.  The possibility of transformation, of real substantive change in attitude and behavior, still rests at the core of authentic Christian faith.

Through the flood God seeks to restore the balance, the harmony between all of the parts of God’s created world.  The creatures, two-by-two, on the ark become sort of a ‘floating garden of Eden’ and provide, along with faithful Noah and his family, the source for the world’s new life.  In the ark we catch a glimpse of how we are to live in our world, respecting and living with all the various creatures God has made.  The covenant God made with Adam, “be fruitful and multiply,” is renewed with Noah and his sons.  That covenant, as Peter hints in his first letter, continues to be renewed with each one of us who enter into covenant relationship with God through baptism.  Thus, our baptismal promises are more than just ritual obligations.  They are a constant reminder to each of us that we are to seek to live in harmony not only with God and with one another, but with all of created reality.

To the early Congregationalists the sacraments are signs, or seals, of this covenantal relationship.  The Sacraments, then, are living reminders, ‘visible Gospels,’ of the faithfulness of God’s promise made with us in the covenant.  They are also opportunities for us to renew and deepen our commitment to God in the covenant relationship.  William Ames, one of the most outstanding Congregational theologians, said that, “The primary end of a Sacrament is to seale the covenant, and that not on God’s part onely, but consequently on ours, that is, not onely the grace of God, and promises are sealed to us, but also our thankfulnesse and obedience to God.” [Marrow of Theology, p. 165]

Baptism, then, is a seal of the covenant, a pledge and a sign of God’s covenant favor that invites us to relationship and promises us salvation.  It is more than simply a symbolic act, however, because it is, as one Puritan theologian put it, “a reall passing over of ourselves to God.”  This is what Robert Harris preached to his people, “Baptisme was the seale of the Covenant given on God’s part and taken on your part.” [The New Covenant in Von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought, p. 179]

The nineteenth century British Congregational theologian, Robert William Dale, explained Baptism in this way:

In baptism, Christ gives us the assurance that He loves us with an infinite love, and will do His part towards saving us from sin, and bringing us to eternal glory.

Baptism does not create a new relationship between Christ and the baptized person; it affirms a relationship that already exists.  A child was not a Jew because he was circumcised; he was circumcised because he was a Jew.  By birth he belonged to the elect race, and circumcision was the “sign” or “seal” of covenant between Jehovah and the child as a descendant of Abraham; by birth we belong to the race for which Christ died and over which Christ reigns, and baptism is the “sign” or “seal” of our personal relationship to him. [Manual of Congregational Principles, p. 126]

One of the things Dale says elsewhere is that the deepest significance of baptism doesn’t lie in its expression of faith or feeling on the part of an adult being baptized, or of the faith or feelings of a child’s parents.  Rather, what it expresses is God’s love toward us and the authority and the grace of Christ to express that love.  Our participation in baptism, then, is like our participation in the Lord’s Supper, we’re here as recipients of a gift.  The efficacy, or the ability of the sacraments to do what they say, doesn’t depend on us, but on God and on God’s grace.  Dale reminds us, in other words, that we don’t give meaning to the sacraments, rather they give meaning to us by reminding us not only who we are, but Whose we are.  Commenting on the passage from Peter Dale wrote:

After referring to the ark, “wherein few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water,” Peter adds, “which [i.e. water] also after a true likeness doth now save you, even baptism, not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the interrogation of a good conscience toward God.”  The visible rite has no power; but it stands for the Gospel of the infinite love of God, and, where it is answered by the appeal, the prayer of an honest heart, the water of baptism, like the water of the flood, separates the old world, with its sin, from the new with its rainbow of promise and the assurance of God’s benediction. [Manual, p. 138]

That assurance of God’s benediction is why, in the mind of the early church, Jesus received baptism at John’s hands.  He didn’t need it, but he stands for more than just a single person because through the Incarnation he takes on humanity itself.  Thus, he is baptized for us and to remind us that God desires to know us, to love us, and to relate to us.  Thus, the way of the covenant is the way of the kingdom.  Jesus comes up from the water, immediately, in the urgent manner so typical of Mark’s Gospel, goes off into the wilderness and then returns.  And what does Jesus return to do?  To proclaim that the kingdom, the reign of God, has been brought near and how has it been brought near?  In the person of the One who is speaking.

I came across a story this week that will perhaps illustrate what I’m trying to say.  A young father had taken his daughter on a cruise, a “getaway” because his wife and another daughter had recently died.  Turning to one another to help relieve the pain, they huddled together.  Seated on her father’s lap on a deck chair, the little girl asked the important question, “Daddy, does God love us as much as Mommy did?”

At first the father did not know how to respond – the profundity of the question simply left him speechless.  He knew, though, that he couldn’t sidestep the question.  Pointing out across the water to the most distant horizon, he said, “Honey, God’s love reaches father than you can see in that direction.”  Turning around, he said, “And God’s love reaches farther than you can see in that direction too.”  Then the father looked up at the sky and said, “And God’s love is higher than the sky, too.”  Finally, he pointed down at the ocean and said, “And it’s deeper than the ocean as well.”

Right at that moment the little girl said something that said it all.  “Oh just think, Daddy.  We’re right here in the middle of it all.”

The way of the covenant and kingdom is the way into the middle of it all – right into the middle of God’s love for us and the love we’re to share in return.  A trickle of water becomes a flood that washes us right into the middle of God’s love.  That flood then propels us, as it did Jesus, out into the wilderness that we’ve made our world into and bids us to water it and restore it to lush, wondrous beauty through God’s loving presence in you and in me.

The way of the covenant and kingdom is the way of renewed and constantly renewing relationship – first with God, then with one another, and then with all of the created world.  The way of the covenant is the way of the kingdom and Jesus’ proclamation still holds, “the reign of God has come near, repent – change your direction, change your attitude – and believe the Good News.”  Our Lenten journey, then, is one where we begin to take seriously what we’ve promised through our baptism.  We don’t have to go to Oz to “fly over the rainbow,” because the rainbow connection was made for us by the God who reaches out to us, to the lovers, the dreamers, and, yes, even me.  Thank God.