Washed
Genesis 9:8-17; Mark 1:9-15

March 1, 2009


Water, water everywhere, but nothing to drink. The beginning of Lent is symbolized by ashes, the burnt out dreams of power and pleasure, yet the scriptures for today begin with our heroes still wet from a flood and a baptism. Noah and Jesus begin where we do with rainbows and wild beasts keeping them company.

Four days down on our Lenten wilderness fast, although today we are allowed to eat and will eat at the Lord’s Table. Miles to go before we sleep and awaken on Easter morning. More than that, there is the haunting question regarding what is the ultimate purpose of Lent and then Easter? With a world around us that isn’t getting particularly better, financially to say the least, violently to say the worst, does it do us any good to slog through Lent’s wilderness one more time?

The epic of Noah begins way back in Genesis 6 when God comes to realizes that the human world is not in good shape at all. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humanity was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” (Gen 6:5). Does this refer to the news in yesterday’s newspaper or just to the divine assessment in 10,000 B.C.? You know the story, God decided to start over from scratch and selecting the last good man left, Noah - with his family, one must add - washed the earth with the great flood. And don’t forget the animals. Two by two or seven pairs, there was a lot more attention paid to the selection of the animals than for the human beings. One would imagine that such a universal flood would do the trick and accomplish the purpose.

Even God winced at the destruction and after it was over, God made a mental note, “I will never again curse the ground because of humanity, for the imagination of humanity’s heart is evil from its youth...” Didn’t God just say that before the Flood as well? Sure, you can pick apart the details and the timing of this story, but the Flood didn’t do its job. It did not wipe out the evil imaginations of humanity’s heart, so this is an event in God’s heart. God has changed, and while knowing that people just keep going back to evil thoughts and activities, vows not to go this route again. There’s that rainbow: “When the rainbow is in the clouds, I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all of living creation.” It’s not meant for you and me to look at, it’s when God looks at the rainbow that it matters.

Daniel Migliore, whose book on Christian theology, Faith Seeks Understanding, a number of us read a few years back, tells of his experience teaching a vacation Bible school in an inner city ghetto when he was younger. The story was Noah and the Flood and the kids were caught up in it. “Where have you seen a rainbow?” he asked. “In the street!” in unison they replied. That was an incorrect answer. He asked again, and sure enough rainbows are in the street. Even in our downtown thoroughfares small rainbows emerge out of the rain and gasoline soaked asphalt, a true sign of our covenant with the earth. At first depressed by this thought, Migliore realized that the wonderful rainbows arching across the sky take us away from all our earthly woes, but God’s rainbow is right down there on street level with all that’s wrong, evil imaginations of money and power and pollution. Emmanuel was one of Jesus’ names - God with us. That’s hope!

Now Jesus was washed in the River Jordan, cleansed of all sin according to the formula, heavens opening and doves flying, but then immediately was whisked away to the wilderness, the place where people did not belong. The wilderness was where Israel wandered for forty years, not knowing where they were going, but Jesus was going to reverse that forty-something pattern.

The wilderness was also a place where wild beasts roam. Whatever happened to those two by two animals of Noah’s ark? Jesus was “with the wild beasts.” Temptations came from Satan in the midst of this unholy wilderness, hunger and thirst and the unrelenting sun - which doesn’t sound too bad today, tempt me! - this was not a silent contemplative retreat away from the urban pall and sprawl.

We are washed, whoever among us is baptized, but that does not ever declare us immune from the sin and temptations of this world to work that evil imagination always around and in us. Any week’s news is sobering regarding that use of that imagination, the Bangladesh Rifles, for this week. Our Lenten pilgrimage is not another kind of a flood intended to wash away all evil, but to experience God’s grace in our wildernesses, to bring the Good News to those who only see a rainbow in the chemicals of our streets, and to remember that God’s grace happens in the worst of our temptations and imaginations. “And the angels ministered to Jesus,” Mark concludes, and likewise let us gather around the Table where we shall share one of those angelic meals.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan