First Congregational Church in Auburn UCC, February 18, 2024
Genesis 9:8–17:
Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark.,* I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” God said, “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: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and 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, and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. 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.” God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.”
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
One year, when I was a student at Andover Newton, then located on a hill in Newton, MA, we had a snow storm. Well, we had snow storms most years I lived on campus, but this one was unusual. In my memory, it came in April, much later than we had any right to expect. In fact, the lilacs were in full leaf when the snow came.
As often happens, it was that nasty wet heavy snow, the kind that destroys backs when you shovel, the kind that is already half melted into water before it hits the ground, the kind that – last week – turned into ice in the night after the snow.
You can imagine what happened. The leaves on the shrubs and trees held that heavy snow until they couldn’t. And when they couldn’t carry the weight, couldn’t bend, they broke. Our huge, lovely lilacs … all broken branches on the ground. Now, lilac being lilac, they came back, but I doubt that even now they’re quite as spectacular as they had been.
They couldn’t bend far enough to bear the burden.
Chris Mereschuk, the author of today’s meditation, reminds us that that rainbow was the sign of a covenant between God and all humanity. Now, covenants are a special kind of agreement, not a contract, enforceable at law, but more of a mutual agreement with God. When a group of people covenant to be a church, they create a church by the covenant. When two human beings marry, they create a family by covenant. And one of the things to understand about covenants is that they are flexible, they are made with the ability to bend to the changes of life.
Bending, then, changing direction, is part and parcel of our life together. Bending, understanding that the ways we’ve been going, the paths we have travelled for so long, no longer meet the needs of our world, is essential if we are not to break apart by those needs.
When I was a kid, when I went to visit my grandparents in the summer, we’d all go to church together every week. And we always, always sat in the same place. You do that, right? Always the same place… sometime after my grandmother died, the church remodeled, took out all the pews and re-organized the space. New paint color, new carpet, new pews, new layout. And one of the major reasons for the change was the recognition that they needed to have a central aisle for weddings. The old-fashioned, two-side-aisle layout, no longer worked.
Well, maybe it was just all the mothers of brides on the committee who wanted that change, but they made the changes, and the literal fabric of the church bent in a new direction. And it is true that if your young bride has to go to another church to have a central aisle, she’s less likely to bring her family back to the home church…
My aunt was on the redecorating committee… she told me they argued about everything, including that center aisle, but came together to make the church work for a new generation. They did not let disagreement keep them from doing what they believed would work best.
Now, I’d love to talk about fixed pews and the virtues of other seating options, but that’s not what this sermon is about. I want us to keep focused on the importance of being willing to bend, because it’s bending to the changes in our world that is on my heart today.
It’s not been that long ago that when a woman came to church, she wore a nice dress, heels and gloves. No woman wore slacks to church, right? The world has changed. And we have bent with the change.
It’s not been that long ago that if we had a child who had cognitive issues or maybe cerebral palsy that the world said the best thing was for them to automatically go to custodial care. I’m not just talking about severe limitations or dangerous behavioral problems, but everyone. Today, our world’s acceptance has changed. We have bent with the change.
Now, bending is not easy. Often it means letting go of the set-in-stone habits of the ages, turning away from what we’d learned as children was the right way to be. It’s hard, but it’s also good.
Sometimes the changes we bend to are just things like colors or clothes, maybe they’re challenging, but on an every-day level. But the more important things we need to bend to meet are often much more difficult. They challenge the assumptions of our lifetimes.
One of the most challenging opportunities we face today is understanding how, for so long, we firmly closed our eyes to the way Black people experienced life in our country and how different it is than how white people experience life. Just yesterday, I was reading a report that grew out of a study to see where we use our cellphones. Cellphone locations can be tracked anonymously by using the weather apps or map apps like Google Maps. It turns out that while tracking how long we wait in line to vote, it became clear that the “wait times were longer in African American neighborhoods than in other places.”[1] Maybe that seems like a little thing, but everything that makes it harder to vote discourages people from voting, and we have begun to learn to ask why it should take longer to vote in African American neighborhoods than in white ones and who benefits by keeping Black people from voting.
In our world, more and more every day, we are opening our eyes to realities that are way different than the reality in which we’d assumed that all of us live. We’re coming to understand that what we believed about the justice of our world, was at best incomplete, that the ways justice fell short of our ideals was and is embedded in our expectations of right and wrong.
There are other things we need to bend to, other new paths to follow, but, for today, this is what I want you to remember.
God is always with us. From time to time, in order to keep up with God, we need to allow ourselves to bend to new ways, different understandings of our world. Some bendings are to pick up new good things, some are to bend away from old, even evil things. Every bending is intended to free us and our world to a deeper understanding of God’s love.
Some of those changes may seem simple, others will seem impossible… but with God nothing is impossible. This Lent, open your minds, your eyes, your hearts, to our world, and to the ways we are called to bend to serve it.
Amen.
© 2024, Virginia H. Child
[1] https://religionnews.com/2024/02/16/how-many-mormons-are-actually-in-church-every-week-in-the-us/?fbclid=IwAR2A5EsiHji2Eu04AcC6cUi58JtPHnxar3rLuMyCxPHify8CQIv8b4HvX3g
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 