First Sunday in Lent, Year B, February 18, 2018; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Genesis 9:8-17 I will remember my covenant.
1 Peter 3:18-22 An appeal to God for a good conscience.
Mark 1:9-15 The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.
O God of love, grant us the wisdom, the strength and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
We began our service for this first Sunday in Lent, as is our practice, with The Great Litany sung in solemn procession. The first liturgy published in English, The Great Litany is intended to be used during times of great distress or danger or devastation. I think what is going on in our nation right now qualifies, don’t you? Sixteenth century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker’s defended praying the Great Litany even when a particular community is not suffering. He wrote: “if we for ourselves had a privilege of immunity, doth not true Christian charity require that whatsoever any part of the world, yea, any one … elsewhere doth either suffer or fear, the same we account as our own burden? What one petition is there found in the whole Litany, whereof we shall ever be able to say at any time that no [one] living needeth the grace or benefit therein craved at God’s hands?” [1} The Great Litany serves to remind us that we belong to one another. We share one another’s joys and we bear each other’s burdens.
The Great Litany also serves to remind us of Love’s promise of mercy. The Love in us, Love with us, Love around us. Love is a biblical substitute for the word God, and Love is a great substitute for the word Lord. When we pray the Great Litany in solemn procession, the liturgical leaders of the day are surrounding the congregation of the day with prayers to Love, for Love. Since my family has grown to include a 10 day old baby, I’ve become reacquainted with the practical concept of swaddling for comfort and reassurance. It occurred to me that the solemn procession swaddles the congregation with care for all our our sufferings, for all our many conditions. Perhaps you’ve heard what the medieval Persian poet Saadi of Shiraz wrote: “The world is not a courtroom. There is no judge, no jury, no plaintiff. This is a caravan filled with eccentric beings telling wondrous stories about God.” The Great Litany in solemn procession is a caravan filled with eccentric beings who are here to tell wondrous stories about Love!
One of our wondrous stories about God is the biblical story of the Great Flood. It has roots that are at least 7,000 years old but it is one of the newer stories in the First Testament, coming from the period of exile in Babylon. The creation stories and the flood stories in the beginning of Genesis are all prequel, developed and written down after the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and as many as 500 years after the stories of Moses and the Exodus. The Babylonians had a Great Flood story in which a good god of dry land triumphed over an evil goddess of deluge and chaos. I like to go back Jack Miles’ article, The Drowning of the World, in which he writes that “When monotheistic Israel borrowed this story from polytheistic Babylon, it faced a difficult choice. It could cast the flood goddess as a natural disaster which …[God] could not stop, admitting an embarrassing limitation upon [God’s] power. Or it could cast [God] in both roles as the bringer equally of weal and woe. Israel made the second choice; and though the motivation was probably theological rather than literary, the result was a stupendous literary character, one combining immense physical power with absolutely terrifying moral ambivalence.” [2]
The Flood story in the Hebrew Bible was told and written down by people in captivity who developed a counter-cultural version of how to make sense of their lives, and what I imagine was their own terrifying moral ambivalence (which they projected on to God). Should they fight the oppression of the Babylonian empire or assimilate – that is, build houses, settle down and make the best of a bad situation? Should they drown in a flood of despair or build an ark as righteous survivors? This tension of moral ambivalence, which echoes throughout both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament, is our inheritance. It belongs to us.
In the story of God’s covenant with Abraham, the promise is specific to Abraham and his descendants. God’s covenant given to Moses, written in stone, and God’s covenant given to Jeremiah, written on the heart expanded to include all of the Israelites. But this covenant that God is offering to Noah is with and for all of creation. In the way the Bible is arranged, the covenant stories grow more particular. But if we look at the development of covenant stories chronologically, there’s much more give and take, and this is an incredibly expansive, universal covenant with all living beings – all flesh. It’s radically inclusive in its aspirations. And it’s hopeful. This story reveals a deep hope for world-wide reconciliation with the Divine. In the Babylonian flood legend that formed the basis for this story, a necklace of jewels was flung into the sky as a sparkling reminder of a promise to never again destroy. Here, a bow – a weapon – an instrument of violence, an instrument of the people’s oppression has been hung up and turned into a thing of beauty, a sign of the pledge of the universal loving kindness of the Holy One for all of creation.
I had to smile when I saw that the story of the rainbow would be our first lesson on the day that we are remembering the life and love of Marion Bullitt. Marion always prefaced sharing her considerable wisdom, talent, and time with Episcopalians, with: “I’m a Unitarian,” and then she gave so generously. In my first year at Emmanuel, Marion volunteered to come onto a newly formed pledge stewardship committee because she felt like it needed to be more robust. (She was right.) She designed a rainbow giving guide for this congregation with our wide range of incomes and commitments, that she called, “choose your generosity.” There were ROYGBV colors for pledge categories as a percent of income called, “friendship, participating, supporting, sustaining, benefactor, and angel.” It was so pretty. Marion was one who understood the deep meaning and power of a rainbow at Emmanuel Church! I realize that some of you didn’t know Marion personally. I want to assure you that if you look around you, there is evidence of her quiet, steady generosity all around, in every inch of this place! I encourage us all to aspire to that kind of open-handedness.
Another quality that Marion modeled for us was great moral clarity. That is a strong theme of First Peter, from which our Epistle lesson is taken as it addresses how to live as aliens in your own homeland. The letter addresses communities who were made up mainly of slaves and women who were Jesus followers, who had owners and husbands who were not Jesus followers. The letter gives instructions for how to trust in Love, how to stand firm in spite of the experience of alienation. [3] I’m sure the passage appointed by our lectionary was selected because of the reference to Noah, but I wish the reading had started with verse 8 instead of 18, so you could hear some context.
The lead-in to verse 18 is: “Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but on the contrary, repay with a blessing. It is for this that you were called—that you might inherit a blessing.” And then quoting Psalm 34, for “Those who desire life and desire to see good days, let them keep their tongues from evil and their lips from speaking deceit; let them turn away from evil and do good; let them seek peace and pursue it….Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence…for it is better to suffer for doing good, if it be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil.” Then the writer gives the example of Jesus suffering for doing good, behaving honorably when slandered and mistreated, responding with gentleness and reverence, trusting in the love of God. These instructions are not written in a prescriptive form, but in more of a descriptive way – reminding people, this is how we behave toward one another, like a parent saying to a child, “we don’t do that; we do this.” We don’t engage in violence; we practice non-violent resistence. We don’t engage in shame; we practice humility. It reminds me of another Saadi of Shiraz teaching: “Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.” That’s true even of suffering.
As we enter into the season of Lent, we are invited again to exercise disciplines of prayer, generosity, and moral clarity, to practice repositioning our hearts, aligning our selves to draw nearer and nearer to Love. The opening aria of our cantata today prays: “stir, touch my heart through your being so that I may practice compassion and goodness.” I encourage us all to follow Jesus into the wilderness between now and Easter, to get some space in our minds and in our bellies – to experience some hunger, some desire, yes, some neediness – so that we might notice the angels all around us who are hoping to offer their ministrations, and so that we may practice truer compassion and goodness, and inherit Love’s blessing.