![Picture](/uploads/5/3/1/4/53145165/published/4338027250-158c201ffa-o-medium.jpg?1519146072)
Peter JB Carman
First Sunday in Lent
February 18, 2017
Genesis 9:8-17; Mark 1:9-15
I.
How and what we consider the wild places is NOT something everyone agrees on.
Nowadays we like to go to the beach for a swim (although maybe not in February in the northeast). In former times people thought of the shore as a dangerous and unpredictable place….
Some of us see the wilderness as a primal romantic place of beauty and untouched creation. Others see it as untamed resources in need of wresting from the earth. The presuppositions we bring shape our experience. But bad assumptions can lead to disastrous consequences. Don’t feed the bears. And don’t assume that tearing the earth open and pumping chemicals into the ground will have no consequences.
Myths of the wilderness have been part of our inheritance as human beings, probably since the time when most lived in the wilderness. Some have sung the praises of God’s unspoiled creation. Others have preferred to tell scary stories of how dangerous animals and spirits threaten to overcome us in the wild. Let’s go back to two ancient stories about wilderness again. For it turns out that how we deal with the wilderness says a whole lot about us, and how we deal with each other.
Mark’s gospel tells us simply that Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days at the beginning of his ministry. And there he was ministered to by angels, and he was with the wild beasts! He went there driven by the Holy Spirit, just after his baptism.
And then there is the even older bible story we remember from Sunday School: the story of Noah. Noah watched God return the whole of creation to a watery chaos, and took part in saving all animal kind, from the natural consequences of human greed and evil…
After Noah and his family and all the animals they had given passage to finally arrived in safety, God gave this word, not only to Noah and his wife and all their descendants, but also to every living creature, domestic and wild, who had come out of the ark.
“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 that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds. And it shall be a sign of the covenant between the earth and me….
When 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….
This is the sign of the covenant that is between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”
Noah heard God’s promise, a covenant not just with people, with all of creation! God made a promise not to destroy the integrity of the earth or its inhabitants. And its inhabitants are not only the funny looking two-legged characters, but also the characters with four legs, and six and eight, and the ones with no legs at all, who swim or slither or inch their way along. In the covenant, God not only promised not to destroy, but also promised to to be in a relationship, to be in a caring relationship, with every creature whom God had made.
II.
When Europeans came to North America, from Britain and the Netherlands and Spain and France, they wove stories about the vast wilderness around them. They created various myths: one we know well was that this was a new world, a vast empty promised land waiting for the white settlers.
Actually, whole peoples dwelt in that land, but the stories were so sweet, and the desire so strong, that newcomers justified invasion as their destiny, to possess and tame the savage wild, even as, they speculated, Adam and Eve tamed and ruled the earth by God’s command…. They rewrote the stories of the Children of Israel entering Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey, as though they were the children of Israel. They appointed themselves God’s chosen people. And they gave themselves permission to begin destroying the very creation they were called to nurture. Destruction became the justified means to whatever ends they saw fit.
Those who were here before the European and British explorers arrived had a different view of the good earth in which they dwelt and the creatures with whom they shared it. Ownership and mastery were not the lens through which they regarded the earth. Nor it turns out, is that the only voice in the bible.
The rainbow sign is a sign of peace and not hostility, of the renewal of creation, not the justification of weapons of destruction. And the Jesus who goes into the desert to be with the wild animals has a very different agenda than today’s masters of war.
All appearances to the contrary and Northern European ancestors notwithstanding, Christian faith, rightly understood, has never bought into the notion that human beings ought to fear, and have the duty to subjugate, God’s creatures and earth. When we return to the ancient texts of Christianity and Judaism, it turns out that they have been read selectively, warped and twisted to fit the ideology of armed conquest. And there have been strong dissenting voices to such a view of the wild things, of creation and of wilderness, even in European Christendom.
Francis of Assisi, for example, was a gentle Italian saint who, long before this nation was even an idea, wrote some words we often sing as a hymn: “All creatures of our God and King,” says the hymn, based on poetry written almost eight hundred years ago, “lift up your voice and with us sing…O Brother wind, air clouds and rain, by which all creatures ye sustain…Dear mother earth who day by day unfoldest blessings on our way.” For Francis, even death was a sister! No fear here, just overwhelming love, pervading every rock and every creature. No dominating mastery here, but kinship with the good earth, the sky and all that dwell therein.
III.
We live in a time, when humans seem to be forgetting yet again the sacred covenant between God and every creature, between the Maker and creation itself. It is the covenant written in the sky, symbolized in a rainbow sign.
When we forget the covenant, the sacred deal with creation, then things become distorted. Then we allow self-serving leaders to put profit and power in the place of mutual care and community. Then weapons of mass destruction are given free reign. The poor are neglected, the elderly shunted aside, children ignored. The mountains become mountaintop mines; forests become wastelands. In our towns, in our schools, in our political decision-making we become further and further removed from reality. Sound familiar?
Amid the human-made chaos which is these times, somehow, we need to find our focus, reclaim our identity as children of a rainbow promise. It is hard to do that when the world comes at us with news of senseless violence and systematic stupidity. But we need to do it. Some things won’t wait: the students in high schools aren’t willing to wait on prayers and soothing words to address the systemic issues of gun violence. At the same time, many of us need to find a way to get out of constant reaction mode and reclaim the covenant, start claiming an alternative vision to the way business is so often conducted. We need to find a way to tell—and to live—a different story, than the solve-it-with-guns story: need to reclaim the rainbow sign, the covenant promise of a God, tired of destruction.
That is serious work. And we may not need to be alone in the woods with no food for forty days, or even to go into the desert, to get close to God, or see clearly. We may not have that luxury. But, like Jesus, each of us needs to remember, we need to be grounded again and again in the covenant that God has, with every human being and with all of creation.
We are in danger of obliterating the wilderness. And meanwhile, if events of the past week are any marker, we are also in danger of destroying ourselves.
Lent, this strange season of renewal in which we find ourselves, Lent is a time to remember the rainbow sign. If we can get clear about how God has chosen to relate to the whole earth, then perhaps we just might get a little clearer how to relate to one another, how to relate to God.
We need to remember the covenant! God has not appointed one group of powerful people to subjugate this earth or its occupants. Remember the rainbow covenant that God made was with all of creation, not with us, or our friends or our people alone.
“God gave Noah the rainbow sign…” You can walk two thousand miles, or bend down on your knees in the dirt of your back yard, or just look up after any ordinary rainstorm. You can even look at snow in the sunlight. And there you’ll find it. The rainbow sign, the evidence of a love affair between God and every living thing. We have a desperate need to see the bow in the sky, to remember that covenant, to go someplace where the angels minister, someplace where things come clear, temptations and calling, fragility and grace.
Graphic: Ermakova, Natalia. Noah's Ark Icon, St Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, Amsterdam, Netherlands, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56487 [retrieved February 20, 2018]. Original source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/4338027250/ - Jim Forest.
First Sunday in Lent
February 18, 2017
Genesis 9:8-17; Mark 1:9-15
I.
How and what we consider the wild places is NOT something everyone agrees on.
Nowadays we like to go to the beach for a swim (although maybe not in February in the northeast). In former times people thought of the shore as a dangerous and unpredictable place….
Some of us see the wilderness as a primal romantic place of beauty and untouched creation. Others see it as untamed resources in need of wresting from the earth. The presuppositions we bring shape our experience. But bad assumptions can lead to disastrous consequences. Don’t feed the bears. And don’t assume that tearing the earth open and pumping chemicals into the ground will have no consequences.
Myths of the wilderness have been part of our inheritance as human beings, probably since the time when most lived in the wilderness. Some have sung the praises of God’s unspoiled creation. Others have preferred to tell scary stories of how dangerous animals and spirits threaten to overcome us in the wild. Let’s go back to two ancient stories about wilderness again. For it turns out that how we deal with the wilderness says a whole lot about us, and how we deal with each other.
Mark’s gospel tells us simply that Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days at the beginning of his ministry. And there he was ministered to by angels, and he was with the wild beasts! He went there driven by the Holy Spirit, just after his baptism.
And then there is the even older bible story we remember from Sunday School: the story of Noah. Noah watched God return the whole of creation to a watery chaos, and took part in saving all animal kind, from the natural consequences of human greed and evil…
After Noah and his family and all the animals they had given passage to finally arrived in safety, God gave this word, not only to Noah and his wife and all their descendants, but also to every living creature, domestic and wild, who had come out of the ark.
“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 that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds. And it shall be a sign of the covenant between the earth and me….
When 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….
This is the sign of the covenant that is between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”
Noah heard God’s promise, a covenant not just with people, with all of creation! God made a promise not to destroy the integrity of the earth or its inhabitants. And its inhabitants are not only the funny looking two-legged characters, but also the characters with four legs, and six and eight, and the ones with no legs at all, who swim or slither or inch their way along. In the covenant, God not only promised not to destroy, but also promised to to be in a relationship, to be in a caring relationship, with every creature whom God had made.
II.
When Europeans came to North America, from Britain and the Netherlands and Spain and France, they wove stories about the vast wilderness around them. They created various myths: one we know well was that this was a new world, a vast empty promised land waiting for the white settlers.
Actually, whole peoples dwelt in that land, but the stories were so sweet, and the desire so strong, that newcomers justified invasion as their destiny, to possess and tame the savage wild, even as, they speculated, Adam and Eve tamed and ruled the earth by God’s command…. They rewrote the stories of the Children of Israel entering Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey, as though they were the children of Israel. They appointed themselves God’s chosen people. And they gave themselves permission to begin destroying the very creation they were called to nurture. Destruction became the justified means to whatever ends they saw fit.
Those who were here before the European and British explorers arrived had a different view of the good earth in which they dwelt and the creatures with whom they shared it. Ownership and mastery were not the lens through which they regarded the earth. Nor it turns out, is that the only voice in the bible.
The rainbow sign is a sign of peace and not hostility, of the renewal of creation, not the justification of weapons of destruction. And the Jesus who goes into the desert to be with the wild animals has a very different agenda than today’s masters of war.
All appearances to the contrary and Northern European ancestors notwithstanding, Christian faith, rightly understood, has never bought into the notion that human beings ought to fear, and have the duty to subjugate, God’s creatures and earth. When we return to the ancient texts of Christianity and Judaism, it turns out that they have been read selectively, warped and twisted to fit the ideology of armed conquest. And there have been strong dissenting voices to such a view of the wild things, of creation and of wilderness, even in European Christendom.
Francis of Assisi, for example, was a gentle Italian saint who, long before this nation was even an idea, wrote some words we often sing as a hymn: “All creatures of our God and King,” says the hymn, based on poetry written almost eight hundred years ago, “lift up your voice and with us sing…O Brother wind, air clouds and rain, by which all creatures ye sustain…Dear mother earth who day by day unfoldest blessings on our way.” For Francis, even death was a sister! No fear here, just overwhelming love, pervading every rock and every creature. No dominating mastery here, but kinship with the good earth, the sky and all that dwell therein.
III.
We live in a time, when humans seem to be forgetting yet again the sacred covenant between God and every creature, between the Maker and creation itself. It is the covenant written in the sky, symbolized in a rainbow sign.
When we forget the covenant, the sacred deal with creation, then things become distorted. Then we allow self-serving leaders to put profit and power in the place of mutual care and community. Then weapons of mass destruction are given free reign. The poor are neglected, the elderly shunted aside, children ignored. The mountains become mountaintop mines; forests become wastelands. In our towns, in our schools, in our political decision-making we become further and further removed from reality. Sound familiar?
Amid the human-made chaos which is these times, somehow, we need to find our focus, reclaim our identity as children of a rainbow promise. It is hard to do that when the world comes at us with news of senseless violence and systematic stupidity. But we need to do it. Some things won’t wait: the students in high schools aren’t willing to wait on prayers and soothing words to address the systemic issues of gun violence. At the same time, many of us need to find a way to get out of constant reaction mode and reclaim the covenant, start claiming an alternative vision to the way business is so often conducted. We need to find a way to tell—and to live—a different story, than the solve-it-with-guns story: need to reclaim the rainbow sign, the covenant promise of a God, tired of destruction.
That is serious work. And we may not need to be alone in the woods with no food for forty days, or even to go into the desert, to get close to God, or see clearly. We may not have that luxury. But, like Jesus, each of us needs to remember, we need to be grounded again and again in the covenant that God has, with every human being and with all of creation.
We are in danger of obliterating the wilderness. And meanwhile, if events of the past week are any marker, we are also in danger of destroying ourselves.
Lent, this strange season of renewal in which we find ourselves, Lent is a time to remember the rainbow sign. If we can get clear about how God has chosen to relate to the whole earth, then perhaps we just might get a little clearer how to relate to one another, how to relate to God.
We need to remember the covenant! God has not appointed one group of powerful people to subjugate this earth or its occupants. Remember the rainbow covenant that God made was with all of creation, not with us, or our friends or our people alone.
“God gave Noah the rainbow sign…” You can walk two thousand miles, or bend down on your knees in the dirt of your back yard, or just look up after any ordinary rainstorm. You can even look at snow in the sunlight. And there you’ll find it. The rainbow sign, the evidence of a love affair between God and every living thing. We have a desperate need to see the bow in the sky, to remember that covenant, to go someplace where the angels minister, someplace where things come clear, temptations and calling, fragility and grace.
Graphic: Ermakova, Natalia. Noah's Ark Icon, St Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, Amsterdam, Netherlands, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56487 [retrieved February 20, 2018]. Original source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/4338027250/ - Jim Forest.