The Rainbow | Genesis 8:13-9:12

*Preached at Grace North Church March 2, 2003.*

Because California Baptist College was a CHRISTIAN college, certain courses in religion were required. This is not surprising, and most of us went quite willingly to our Intro to Old Testament and Intro to New Testament classes. After all, we were all striving to be exactly like Jesus, and scripture study was part of daily life. We had all had our INTRO to the Old and New Testaments before we could walk upright, but none of us resented the classes, and we usually made good use of our time in them.

That was not true of all students, however. We had several Muslim students at Cal Baptist, who were not at all happy with the requirement to study the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Our attitude at the time was "beggars can't be choosers," for Cal Baptist was not what one would call a discriminating college. Anyone with a fistful of cash was admitted, and many students from predominately Muslim countries took advantage of this to get business degrees from an American school.

In some ways it was a marriage made in heaven: the Muslim students got their American business degree, and Cal Baptist got their money and the opportunity to proselytize these heathen scholars for four years.

And so it was that when I stepped into my summer Intro to Old Testament class, I discovered that fully a third of my classmates were Muslim. Probably they were ganging up on the summer version of this course in the hopes of a shorter, if more intensive, torment, and would soon be over. What actually resulted was one of the most UNUSUAL classes I have ever attended.

The trouble started with our study of Noah. Everyone seemed bored and listless in the desert heat of summer, as my professor droned on about a story we had heard all our lives. There was nothing new, here. The people of the earth were wicked, God decides to destroy them and start over, he tells Noah to build an ark; two-by-two the animals board it and the rains fell forty days and forty nights. Then Noah releases the birds, and decides it's safe to emerge. He lights a sacrifice and God sends the rainbow as a promise that it will never happen again. Then Noah finds some grapes, makes wine, gets plastered, and falls down drunk with his robe up around his ears, embarrassing himself in front of his family.

"Blasphemy!" shouted one of the Muslim students. We all jerked awake. What was he saying? "That is blasphemy! Allah will strike you for such talk!"

The professor pointed out that he was simply reiterating the text we were all supposed to have read last night. Obviously, someone had had something better to do, because they had certainly been caught by surprise. "This book lies!" He said, holding up the Bible. The preacher boys gasped and the girls shielded their perfect hair from the lightening bolt sure to strike any moment.

"Uh, well, what do you mean?" Asked the professor, trying to be diplomatic.

"Noah was a prophet of Allah! He was perfect. His lips would never touch wine. He was NOT a drunkard!"

We appeared to be at an impasses. The Bible verses the Koran. "Well," the professor said, getting a grip on himself. "In this class we are studying the Old Testament. We're very interested in how these stories appear differently in the Koran, but our focus is on the biblical text. For the rest of the class period the Muslim students fumed and said not a word.

This little drama played itself out again and again, each time we encountered a significant person of faith. Abraham lied about Sarah being his sister. "Lies!" they cried. David was a murderer and an adulterer. "Blasphemy!" they shouted. And on and on until the class, thankfully, ended.

The class was more than a reflection on intercultural awareness, it was, for me, an important meditation on the lure, the attraction we have towards this notion of perfection.
Now, Islam is not the culprit, here. Our religions frequently exhibit this tendency towards irreproducible piety and perfection. Islam proclaims its profits to be sinless and urges its adherents to live similar lives of perfection. When Christianity came along, it announced that Jesus was likewise sinless. This led to a variety of theologians from Pelegius to John Wesley proclaiming that just as Jesus lived a perfect life of holiness, so are we called to do the same. This seems to be a particularly English heresy, by the way, although Thomas a Kempis pedals pretty hard towards this goal in his Catholic classic THE IMITATION OF CHRIST.

You have heard me preach before on the tyranny of perfection, and you're about to get another dose. When I was a child I heard that a preacher only has two, maybe three sermons in him and all the rest are simply variations on a theme. There is wisdom in this, so I'll try not to repeat myself TOO much. Suffice to say, though, that this notion of perfection is, in my opinion, one of the most odious fictions humankind has ever burdened itself with.

The reality is that perfection exists nowhere in creation. It only has a foothold in the imaginations of human beings. Our imagination is the only place perfection even exists. It exists only as an abstract concept which no man, no creature, no object, no work of art, and in fact, no deity can attain. It is a fictitious standard, and to hold ourselves and each other up to it is a pointless exercise in ego-mutilation. And any religion--be it Christianity, Zoroastrianism, or the Theosophical Society--which demands such perfection is cruel.

I thank God I don't follow such a religion any more. When I was 19 I sank into a deep depression because of my inability to live a life sufficiently pleasing to God, and nearly took my own life as a result. I am grateful that my parents intervened and got proper psychiatric help for me. M y psychiatrist was a Catholic who had no qualms about being a sinner and no pretensions towards perfection. He was the right mentor at the right time, and today I am proud to say that I am a happily maladjusted perpetual screw-up.

Hardly a day goes by without the generation of some kind of cringe material. It seems I am forever letting people down or hurting their feelings. I'm thinking of having my left leg hinged backwards so that my foot can swing into my mouth with greater ease and less discomfort.

And I say this to you without apology. Certainly I have apologized to most of you at one time or another in my career here, some of you many times. I am genuinely sorry for my mistakes, but I no longer hate myself for them. For I no longer strive for perfection. I am not a masochist, nor do I veil masochism in piety. Instead, I am imperfect, human, a screw-up, and damned proud of it. Because if I were perfect, I would not be ME. And I am just arrogant enough to assume that who I am is valuable, and that the world would be a poorer place without me.

This is not hubris. I think the world would be a poorer place without you in it, too. And not because YOU'RE so great-but, in fact, because you're NOT so great. It is because you are YOU, with all of your faults and frailties that you are unique, and therefore precious.

Allow me to explain. In about 350 BCE, Aristotle attempted to explain, as many had before and after him, what makes the rainbow appear. Now there had been mythological explanations for centuries, among them our reading about Noah and his menagerie that we read today, or the great rainbow bridge that provided the road between Asgaard and the earth. But Aristotle was a scientist and a philosopher, and wanted to explain exactly HOW it worked, not necessarily WHY it was there. His theory, put forth in his De Meteorolocia, was that the clouds redirected the sunlight, and the rainbow emerged.

He was of course, very close to the truth. The clouds are made of water, of course, and water does redirect the sunlight in a way. But Aristotle did not make the distinction between reflection and refraction, and this distinction is a very important one indeed. The moon REFLECTS the sun, and that reflection is normal, white light. And as any of you who have been in the woods on a cloudless, full-moon kind of night can attest, such reflection can be very bright indeed. But in a rainbow, light passes through water and is REFRACTED, distorted, stretched, and the result is not white light, but COLOR. The water does not perfectly reflect the sunlight, it bends and diffuses it, and in doing so creates a think of incredible beauty that inspires awe in all who behold it.

My friends, God does not ask us to be perfect reflections of divinity. We are not called to reflect God, but to REFRACT God-we are supposed to distort God's image, to put our own stamp on it, to add our uniqueness and individuality to the image of God others see in us. We are not supposed to be the moon, we are not supposed to perfectly reflect divinity. And when we stop beating ourselves up because we are not the moon, and allow God to shine through us, WITH all our impurities, failures, imperfections, and aggravating personalities, something amazing happens: we COLOR God. And we don't get a pure ray of light at the other end, we get something much much more beautiful-we get a rainbow.

The promise of the rainbow in our reading today is clear: God will no longer punish non-conformity, but will preserve and cherish uniqueness. Why should God change his mind? Perhaps because God is not perfect, either, and is learning as God grows in tandem with created beings. In the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead, God makes mistakes, feels remorse, repents, changes his ways, affirms his love for creation, and then does it all over again in a perpetual spiral of growth and moral development. Perhaps, if there is a note of history in Noah's story, God felt shame at his act of mass murder. Perhaps the forty days of rain were a complicated mixture of wrath and shame. Perhaps God, too, contains multitudes. And perhaps his act of wrath so horrified him that a change of heart occurred in him, and he vowed to Noah that he would never do such a horrible thing ever again.

And as a sign of this promise, God creates the rainbow. Not a reflection of the sun, but a refraction, a distortion that results in diversity and beauty. For this God does not possess perfection, nor does he ask perfection of us. This God makes mistakes and assumes we will do the same. This God craves nothing in the universe so much as creativity and diversity, and encourages us in every creative endeavor.

Now, I am sure that there are many Muslims who would have a problem with THAT theology. But I know an awful lot of Christians who would gag at the notion as well. But you've got to hand it to those Jews, who resisted the temptation to turn their heroes of faith into icons of purity. In fact, the Jews resisted the temptation to project perfection onto their deity. The Hebrew God is a messy guy, very emotional, fickle, sometimes almost borderline, and through it all, amazingly HUMAN.

And if even God isn't perfect, why should you be? This, then, is the great gift of the rainbow: it shows us that when divinity passes through us, we do not reflect its light perfectly, instead, it passes through us at different speeds, as we all allow divinity to shin through us with different levels of cooperation and various degrees of opacity, creating a spectrum of colors, a cacophony of voices, a menagerie of experiences. For we do not so much reflect divinity as we refract it, we distort it, and in doing so, great beauty results. Let us pray.

God of every peoples, of every tribe and nation, none of us reflect thee perfectly, and in fact, thou hast never asked such perfection of us. Help us to forgive ourselves, even as thou hast already forgiven us, and help us to embrace our inner weirdos, and to cherish the eccentricity and uniqueness that makes us, US. For we ask this in the name of one who ignored his mother, lost his temper, and was scared to do what was asked of him, and in doing so, showed us what a blessed thing it is to be truly human, even Jesus Christ. Amen.