Take Up Your Cross Begins with Promise

 Sermon Genesis 9:8-17 February 20, 2021 First Sunday in Lent yrB

Take Up Your Cross Begins with Promise

This season of Lent our focus is on the cross we carry. We all know that our time of Lent is a time of reflection. It is a time we begin on Ash Wednesday and say- “we put ashes on our head: to remind us of all those around the world who are mourning and suffering; to remind us that we have sinned and need repentance and must cling to the promises and love of Christ; to remind us that we all die; to remind us of Christ’s suffering and death and resurrection; and to remind us that we are still claimed, named, called, loved, children of God.” This season we will take up our cross because we need to not only figuratively remember God, but we need to literally do the labor and the discipline to remember all that God has done for us. God himself became limited and chose to enter our humanity, to become weak, and to die to save us.

So, are we willing in this Lent to choose to take up our cross and walk with it for these many weeks, these 40 days, and become vulnerable before God and others? We can if we remember whose we are. Our taking up the cross begins this week with promise. The weeks to come we will take up our cross and follow, obey, believe, and be light. We begin this week with promise.

Lent Banner for NMPC

Promises, promises, it’s all we hear anymore from politicians, community leaders, anyone in the public realm, and we are just tired of empty promises. When we hear our children say to us, or we say to them, “I promise” are we even capable anymore of being true to that promise? A promise these days seems so fickle. No one makes a deal on a handshake, or the word of another. The ability to trust seems an ancient pastime. Yet, trust, faith and promises are the very foundation of our faith. And the truth of why they are the foundation of our faith is that we have been a human race of sin, deception, destruction, and disappointment to the very God of our creation.

These first eleven chapters of Genesis are important chapters well known throughout the ancient texts of the beginning of the earth. Every culture in the Mesopotamian delta had and has stories of the beginning of humanity, the fall of humanity, and the great flood that hit the reset button for humanity. Why does this matter? Because it lets us know there was an understanding across all tribes, religions, and developing groups of a sense of the importance of telling the story of the beginning relationships of humans to each other and gods or God.

The story of the flood is taught in Sunday school. It is great biblical literature taught to all children and remembered into adulthood. We remember being taught that it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. We remember being taught that Noah built the ark out of gopher wood. We remember that Noah took in animals two by two. We remember that the waters eventually receded, and Noah landed on dry land and built an altar to thank God. We remember that God said he would never curse the ground or destroy the people again. We remember God placed a rainbow in the sky as a reminder of that promise. What we may not remember is the gift of God’s grace to us through this powerful story.

We have a God who we know created all that is. God created out chaos and nothingness a world of wonder and beauty. We recognize the depth and breadth and height of God’s grace as this moment plays out before Noah. God speaks to Noah after all the destruction is over. God accepts the sacrifice that Noah offers. God renews the responsibility to Noah to be fruitful and multiply and to care for the earth and allows for the sacrifice of animals for food.

And then God looks all around what is.

God witnesses the consequences of the judgment of sin.

God witnesses all that has been lost.  God sacrifices judgment for grace.

God places a limit on God’s own power of judgement.

God looks at Noah and the earth and the creatures of the earth and says, “enough is enough.”

God makes a promise to never, ever, ever, curse the ground again. God makes a promise to never, ever, ever, destroy creation again. In this promise God has set the limits on himself and allows his grace to rule.

Who does that?

Who limits their ability to punish?

Who limits their authority?

Who sets themselves in a position to be vulnerable to the mistakes of others?  

God does.                                                                                     

God loves beyond boundaries.

God loves beyond God’s own self.

God sent his Son into a world to become vulnerable to the point of death.

 Who does that?

DO we?

Are we able to offer ourselves in a promise to another that puts them first no matter what? Are we willing to love and forgive and to live the promise of forever with another? 

It’s those kinds of questions we ask ourselves when we witness what God has done with Noah.

But God goes one step further in this story.

God puts a reminder in the sky for God to not mess up the promise.

Photo credit Pastorale Farm, Rebekah Rodgers

You see God put all the colors in a beautiful giant bow that every creature can see, every human can see, everything that moves and breathes can see the rainbow. God put it there to make sure that God would remember the promise. God put it there because there is no mistake that this promise God has made touches everyone’s life from the past to the present to the future. God will be held accountable to every living creature, past, present, and future. The rainbow is forever!

When God puts the rainbow in the sky as a sign everything has a hope for the future.

All assurance is given that there is a tomorrow to plan for and to rejoice in.

Even amid the continuing chaos God’s promise of the rainbow reminds all that the earth will continue. God will never destroy it again.

So, when pandemics reign and death is at every corner, when sadness and grief is as deep as the ocean, God shines the rainbow and we know there will be another day to live for that will bring sunshine. In the bulb there is a flower. It enters the ground to die, so in spring it can return with the brightness of life. As Sib Towner described it, “ God enters into an everlasting covenant with alligators as well as human beings and guarantees their place within the providential order.”

The joy of the promise of God is that it is universal and eternal. It has a universal effect in the way the outreaching (horizontal bar) of the cross is to all people, to all creation. It has an eternal effect in the way the cross (the vertical bar) is God’s descent to bring heaven to earth and our eternal relationship through the threshold of life to death and resurrection.  

It may be a challenge to take up our cross.

It may be something we are not really willing to do.

It may be fear filled.

It may be all those things.

It may make us uncomfortable.

 

It will make us vulnerable.

It will make us aware.

It will make us open.

It will make us available.

It will make us present.

 

In this Lent we have the opportunity to experience grace as never before.

Embrace the promise of God.

Trust the promise of God for you today.

Trust the God who believes in second chances.

 

Remember as you take up your cross it begins with promise.

Look to the rainbow and rejoice.

Amen.

Resources: W. Sibley Towner Genesis Commentary; Feasting on the Word YrB David Lose

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