February 18, 2018 | Maurice Lee

Readings: Genesis 9:8–17; Psalm 25; 1 Peter 3:18–22; Mark 1:9–15

God speaks — even if his voice isn’t a creature’s deceitful, easily forgotten chattering. God promises — even if his commitment isn’t a creature’s waffling, conditional “cross my heart.” God acts — even if his doing isn’t a creature’s heaving against gravity and tiredness. Yet God’s speaking and promising and acting are brought to our creaturely senses, they’re made visible and audible and tangible, by signs. “This is the sign of my covenant” — announces God in our first reading — “I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember my everlasting covenant.” The saving of eight people through the waters of the flood — says Peter in our second reading — was a “prefiguration,” a sign, of what God does in baptism. Jesus, baptized in the Jordan — narrates Mark in our Gospel reading — saw a dove, the sign of the invisible, omnipresent Spirit of God, descending on him. The water in the font, the bread and cup on the table, the book on the lectern, the cross on the balcony, even we, these bodies in these seats, gathered for the enacting of worship and obedience and service, are taken, appropriated, by God as signs of his speaking and promising and acting.

I mean, already, for us mere creatures, it’s not enough to be in earnest about a deal; we shake hands. It’s not enough to declare our love; we seal it with a kiss. It’s not enough to think celebratory thoughts about Christmas; we put up a tree. And, of course, it’s not enough for drivers to know they’re supposed to stop at an intersection; we impose the law with a piece of painted metal on a post. But, really, why would God — God who created and sustains the world and who has direct access to the depths of our hearts — want or need to use such things, such visual aids, to get across his meaning and to accomplish his purposes?

It would be straightforward, and traditional, to say that with signs like the rainbow, God is stooping to our level, that he’s doing what he’s doing in a way that’s helpful to us in our extreme limitation. John Calvin thought that this is basically what’s going on with the bread and wine of Communion, for example. He wrote:

God’s truth is of itself firm and sure enough, and it cannot receive better confirmation from any other source than from itself. But as our faith is slight and feeble unless it be propped on all sides and sustained by every means, it trembles, wavers, totters, and at last gives way. Here our merciful Lord, according to his infinite kindness, so tempers himself to our capacity that, since we are creatures who always creep on the ground, cleave to the flesh, and do not think about or even conceive of anything spiritual, he condescends to lead us to himself even by these earthly elements, and to set before us in the flesh a mirror of spiritual blessings. [1]

I think there’s something to that. Particularly in this season of Lent, and particularly in this season of news, we’re confronted — whether we like it or not, whether this is how we want to think about ourselves or not — by the realization of our frailty, our vulnerability, our powerlessness, our inability to uphold what’s good in the institutions we’ve designed and to protect the people we’ve been given to love. We’re confronted by how fanatically we try to hold on to what can’t last, and by how easily we give in to the sleaziest temptations, and by how quickly we’re distracted from what’s true and what’s beautiful by the possibility of immediate gratification or of getting ahead of our competitors. We’re confronted by the ways our own default attitudes exclude and marginalize those who aren’t like us, and by the ways we’re so desperately eager to be part of the with-it group, the inner ring, the “right side” of history, no matter what logic and tradition and the word of God might be saying. We’re confronted by Jesus’ strange question: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” [Luke 18:8]. We’re confronted by our sinfulness and our mortality — which, of course, are what we’d better be confronted by if we’re going to grasp, really appreciate, what forgiveness and resurrection mean.

So it’s not really that surprising that in order to get through at all to us, in order to get any kind of acknowledgment from us, the spiritual — I suppose we could call it the spiritual dimension, the solid reality that’s inaccessible to our senses and our measurements and our manipulations, like the way the 90% (or whatever) of the universe that’s dark matter is invisible to our most powerful telescopes — would need some sort of assistive technology, the equivalent of a set of training wheels because we can’t seem to learn how to stay in balance, or of the snooze that has to go off every eight minutes because we’re unable to get out of bed on our own. Even with those material aids, of course, we’re often enough clueless and forgetful and unreachable. But imagine what it would be like without the help. So I’m inclined to think Calvin has a point.

But at the same time, I get the feeling that there’s much more to the story. I was struck this week, in a new way, by our first reading. Did you notice the almost numbing repetition?

I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you. [9:10]
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. [9:12]
When the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. [9:15]
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. [9:16]
This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth. [9:17]

Does anything seem worth emphasizing, at least according to Genesis, about this covenant? Does it seem interesting that the God whom Christians honor as having chosen a specific people, Israel, to be his own, according to the witness of Israel itself, should be somehow bound — because binding is what a covenant does, a free, unilateral, non-negotiated, inescapable self-binding on God’s part — to the world that he created and everything in it, “for all future generations,” “everlastingly”? Does it seem curious that creatures other than human beings — as embedded in materiality as they are, as vanishingly small compared with the totality of what’s real as they might be — should somehow be included and taken up into God’s transcendent purposes? Does it seem worth noticing that the Israelite whom our Gospel reading follows to the River Jordan and into the wilderness and back to Galilee, Jesus the Messiah, is somehow prior to and greater than all creation, even as he gives himself to be seen, heard, touched, and that therefore it’s this one, Jesus — as Paul puts it — “by whom and for whom all things were created,” “in whom all things hold together,” and “through whom God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, visible and invisible, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace through the blood of the cross” [Colossians 1:16, 17, 20]?

Jesus — on whom the dove descended, to whom the voice spoke: “You are my beloved Son” — is God: God not holding his nose and reluctantly, temporarily using pieces of this rotting material world because that’s the only thing we’re capable of sensing and trusting until we’ve gotten to heaven and can let all that slimy stuff go, but God making good on the covenant he established with all his creatures for all generations, and allowing pieces of this created material world point to the world’s own renewal. Jesus is God: God not snatching his chosen away from this world, but God at work in this world in order to bring it all into his kingdom and under his rule. That’s why Peter, in our second reading, can say that baptism — baptism by washing, baptism by water — saves: not because it’s water, not because it’s washing, but because God’s word and will are alive, are acting in the water and the washing, acting in this world, acting here and now.

Or we could put it this way: in our baptism, in our getting wet with creation’s own water and in our hearing of God’s own word, Jesus’ baptism — his identifying with a holy people, his receiving of the news from heaven, “you belong to me; you bear my name; you are the object of my love,” his setting off on a path that would go through the wilderness and into the public and eventually to a cross outside the city and a grave whose destiny was to be emptied — becomes our story. Our real biography, the hidden pattern of our life, is now our being placed in the same community of believers, our being addressed by the same love of God, our being given the wisdom of the same Holy Spirit, our being called to the same obedience, and, therefore, to the same death and resurrection — not ours but the Lord’s. So our very selves become signs, living signs, of God’s speaking and promising and acting. Thanks be to God.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (tr. Ford Lewis Battles; Westminster John Knox, 1960), 4.14.3.