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Genesis 9:8-17; Mark 1:9-15                    When God Weeps                 E/GR               Mar 5/06

 

  1. If we could really open ourselves to Lent, we intentionally risk letting go of the old and receiving, the new.  That could seem like a really big risk.  Our scripture from Genesis is about a very big risk.  A risk that God took in opening up to love.  To really understand it let us back up to the beginning of Genesis.  The beginning of this amazing love story with humanity.  We?ve read there how God took absolute delight in creation.    At the end of each day, God surveyed the creation and said, "It is good." This phrase echoes over and over again like a refrain as the days of creation passed. When we get to the sixth day, God creates human beings. What does God say about that day?  "It is very good."   Very good.  God has found the possibility of relationship.

 

  1. Unfortunately almost immediately things begin to go sour. By the time we get to the story of Noah and the ark, God-who had seen humanity as the great hope of relationship - is terribly disappointed. God's beloved humanity, God's best hope of relationship.  Something gone terribly wrong.   What had been created to be open and flowing ? pure energy of love and sharing is being closed off.  Then in shame, because deep down they knew it?s not supposed to be like that, people began to hide from the Holy, from each other and from themselves.  And somehow they lost the truth ? the holy truth that God had created them for love.  God was prepared to love and accept and forgive.  But people took the worst they knew instead of the best and feared that God was threatening and punishing and vindictive.  They took the worst they knew and magnified it, instead of the best.  

 

  1. So when people began to try to make sense of a huge flood that had devastated more land than they could ever imagine, they told a story of God choosing to punish all creation.  Wipe it out.  Does that make sense with the God you know?  God who we learned a couple of weeks ago said I will not remember ? when you fail to love!  God who says of Jesus and of each of us, that?s my beloved child!  God who we?re told is like a father waiting in a field who runs to greet a child who terribly hurt him and throws a party and won?t be satisfied until the self-righteous elder son comes to celebrate new life as well.  Does that sound like One who would wipe out all of creation and creatures?  Not to me.  Though we could understand that it might to people who cut off the flow of Holy love.                

 

  1. But even by the end of today?s lesson from Genesis, people are beginning again to see who God really is.   They find God making a covenant with the people, the animals, the creation.  Never again such a flood.  Never again such a loss.  The storytellers are again recognizing the great love of God.  Love that makes a covenant, a promise of relationship with no demands in return.  And the rainbow, an undrawn bow, is the symbol.  Nothing ominous or threatening.  Only beauty and wonder.  The people recognize the great loss that God has endured.  The holy dream of people living in wholeness, love and creativity with each other and with God had disintegrated in the harsh light of day.  When we look further back in Genesis, we find what had gone so wrong.  Violence is characterizing their world.  They were hurting others and themselves.  When we block that flow of love and sharing, then we fear loss of what we have, and we begin to accumulate more things.  Substituting things for the yearning we have for love.  Then of course we must protect those things, especially from others who do not have enough themselves.  Violence.   Instead of opening up so all might have enough.  God?s hopeful plan seems lost.  Can you hear God weep?

 

 

  1. But God?s tears became the fertile ground of further creativity.  God will not be content to just close in and grieve for what is lost.  God finds another way.  This dream of what life could be continues to open further.  It seems people must make their own choices, and for a time they often close in and accumulate.  Then God notices the tendency for guilt when that happens and fears we?ll lose our self respect and further limit the relationship that is so important to God.  What to do?

 

  1. Betty Jo Bell tells a wonderful story about an experience working as a palliative care nurse that can help us understand what happens next. She tells how a husband carries his terminally-ill wife from the bed to the bathroom, in a beautiful, poetic way, as if the two are danc­ing in a magnificent ballroom.

 

Her slippered feet, just below her gown, are set atop her lover's shoes. In  perfect timing, he lifts her feet on his and draws her nearly weightless body up with his arms .... [He] only sees the beauty she must once have been. The dance is only one of many ways he finds to show his love and to let her keep her self-respect.  God has lifted us up and put our feet on holy feet.  And dances with us.  In order that we not get mired down in shame and guilt. 

 

7.      May this be our Lenten journey this year - this timeless rhythm of opening.  Opening to a Love so great it imagined Life for the creatures with meaning and laughter and love and acceptance ? a natural flowing from the Source to be fully alive.  A Love that then recognized this kind of life would not be easy - would be work in fact for us, thus a continual opening to our Source.  Our work, so to speak in ongoing creation.  And so that we wouldn?t be too hard on ourselves, as we did that work, Holy Love provided the way to prevent even shame and guilt in our dance of opening ? the music, the steps, even the gentle lifting up.

 

8.      Let?s come to the table where we are reminded of that incredible Holy Love.