Pastor Detweiler’s sermon from Sunday, March 1, 2009:

“The rainbow helps us to remember God’s promise for our future”

Gen 9:8-17; Mark 1:9-15

In the spring of 1997 there were terrible floods along the Red River in Minnesota and the Dakotas. There had been lots of snow and it melted rapidly, inundating cities and towns along the way. Most in the news was Grand Forks, ND. Most of the downtown and many of the churches were flooded along with people’s homes.

Our congregation in Pennsylvania sent money to United Lutheran Church to assist with the rebuilding. Crews of volunteers from our area in the state drove 24 hours to spend a week or more working with the cleanup.

A couple years later I was at a conference in Minneapolis and seated next to someone who had been a pastor in Grand Forks at the time. I asked him about that time and soon discovered that it had been personally very painful for him. He said, “As the rebuilding began, an expert from Lutheran Disaster Relief came to speak to the pastors. He told us that within two years almost all of us would be gone – that is typical after a natural disaster. I didn’t believe him at the time, but within a few months I understood why. I lasted a year and half.”

Was it that the congregation could not pay because people were not around and not giving? “No. It was what the expert warned us about: when people’s lives are destroyed – when they lose everything – they look for someone to blame or to be a scapegoat for their troubles, and pastors and other community leaders are convenient targets.”

In that flood people lost their homes and the security they provide, and some lost their livelihoods. Unlike all but Noah’s family in today’s first lesson, the people in Grand Forks did not lose their lives.

The story of Noah is often taken as a wonderful children’s story of God’s caring for his people. But of course it is much more than that. It is also a story of judgment and destruction. In our baptism service, for example, it appears in a list of illustrations of God using water as a means of both judgment and salvation. We tend to focus on the God saving Noah and his family and forget about the destruction of the rest of humanity.

At the conclusion of the story of Noah we have God’s promise of the rainbow. God makes a covenant with Noah and his descendants and every living creature for all future generations. Never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood. The rainbow is the sign of that promise. I wonder what that promise meant to the people of Grand Forks more than 10 years ago or to the people of Iowa City last summer? And what does it mean to us?

The most difficult thing about the Christian faith is that it is about the future. It brings us hope through the future implications of a past event. Jesus was killed by those who were threatened by him, but God raised him from death. God promises a resurrection like that of Jesus to those who are joined to Jesus’ death in baptism. But that is a promise of a future event. What about the present?

That is where temptation comes near. When Jesus was tempted by Satan, each of the temptations was to place the present ahead of the future. When there is a flood or other natural disaster and your life seems to be falling apart most of us would be tempted to put the present first.

Every year we read about the temptations of Jesus on the first Sunday in Lent. In Matthew and Luke’s gospels, those temptations are described, and there are three of them. In Mark’s gospel, from which we are reading most Sundays this year, there are only three words about Jesus’ temptations: “tempted by Satan …” That is actually enough.

Temptation is more or less always the same: it is to put ourselves first, or to give up on the future for the sake of the present. That is how evil takes over our lives: it fixates us on the now and what we think or feel right now, and does not allow us to see that the future – God’s future for us in Christ – will be different and better because it is the one God holds out for us.

Temptation is always about trusting ourselves – what we think we can control – and not God. It is being god for ourselves. We need to watch and pray for God’s spirit to help us see beyond the brokenness of the present to the wholeness and healing God gives in Christ’s future.

Noah trusted God and could see beyond the present to a future that is represented by the rainbow’s promise. He built the ark in spite of ridicule and watched and prayed for God’s guidance as he prepared for the coming flood.

Two years ago at another conference I met the guy who had been pastor of United Lutheran in Grand Forks when our Pennsylvania congregation sent them a donation for rebuilding. He, too, left Grand Forks within a year of the flooding. He noted that they had just celebrated the 10^th anniversary of the flood, that the church had been rebuilt and the congregation and its people were doing well. They had recovered. There was a future that could not be seen by many at the time of the floods. God had something else in store for them.

The rainbow can help us remember God’s promises for our future. “Never again,” God said, “shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood …” Whenever we are tempted to be trapped in the now – the way things are right now – to give up on the future, the rainbow can remind us that God has something else in store for us. As God raised Jesus from death, so he will raise us and all the baptized to be with him. That promise can transform us now so we can see the future and look forward to it with hope.