GUEST POST | Set your rainbow upon the clouds

A sermon—by Andrew Forsthoefel—on what went down after The Flood.

This is a delight to share. One of my near and dears—the author and interfaith minister Andrew Forsthoefel—took to the helm at my church on Sunday and offered his reflection on the story about The Flood.

You know the one. That mythic patriarch, Noah, and his floating zootopia. The one that is decorating nursery walls the world over.

I invited Andrew to preach on whatever he wanted from Genesis chapters 6-9. I love that he picked the part at the end. The part you probably don’t remember being there in the story. The part that’s not decorating nursery walls the world over.

I hope you appreciate his insight and invitation as much as I did…

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Set your rainbow upon the clouds, by Andrew Forsthoefel

All right, first things first: that is not how I remember the story of Noah ending. With him passing out drunk, naked on the floor. I grew up in the Catholic church, but I’m an interfaith guy, so it’s been a while, and I thought the end of this story was the dove finds the olive branch and then something about a big rainbow with a happily ever after feeling to it. I mean, this is Noah, the kindly 600 year old grandfather, the man of integrity who God chose above all others to survive the flood. I thought we liked Noah.

But we’ve all been there, haven’t we? We’ve all made choices that didn’t come from our best selves and we ended up, you know, passed out naked on the floor. Literally or metaphorically. I’ve been there. Literally and metaphorically. There’s a critical crossroads in a moment like that, the question: Can we let ourselves be seen in our vulnerability? Can we see ourselves, accept ourselves, in our vulnerability? It’s vulnerability underneath it all, the vulnerability of going dark, of forgetting the beautiful rainbow of who we really are and then acting from that clouded place. And so we have Noah, drinking himself into a stupor, self-medicating maybe. Working something out, poor guy. It’s vulnerable. Tender. I can see the tender through the bender. I can bring my light to that.

But it gets darker. Noah curses his son. I’m not a Bible scholar, so I did some googling about this and apparently the traditional reading here is that Ham was mocking his father. All it says in the story, after Ham sees Noah naked and unconcious, is that “he told his two brothers.” That’s all it says. But I guess if you read the original text in a certain way you could interpret this as an intentional and devious act of humiliation on Ham’s part. Maybe that is how the story was intended to be told. Maybe not, maybe Ham just caught a glimpse of his dad in a vulnerable moment. I’m gonna go ahead and say it doesn’t actually matter because there is absolutely no circumstance in which it is appropriate for a father to curse his son, and to try and pit his sons against each other. That is dark. As a new dad, father of a son, I struggle to bring the rainbow light of my remembering to that one. I wanna go dark on that one, close the ark of my heart to that one. Refuse passage to that prideful, self-centered, egoic, fraudulent, harmful, disappointing, failure of a patriarch. We’re better off without you, old man. You’re not welcome here.

But that’s how darkness works. Makes you wanna go a little dark. And we do, we all go dark sometimes, even God, I think that’s just a part of this thing, which is why we need a rainbow, something to help us remember the sacred beauty when things start to get ugly.

Man, I thought this was a story about a bunch of animals on a boat.

Let’s do some animal stuff real quick. Because when I was a kid, this story was obviously the best Bible story of all. I mean, Jesus was cool and everything, but come on, Noah? The ark? The animals! There’s a big storm coming y’all, and we’re gonna have to get the whole family together to ride this one out. The whole family, all the way out to our flamingo cousins. Our elephant uncles. We’re getting the lions in on this, the cute little lemurs. I wanted to be on that boat.

I wasn’t so much cued into the whole death and destruction part of this story, the whole God murders everybody part. That was a…minor detail. Sure, everyone else is gonna drown, and that is too bad…but guys, it’s the first cruise ship of all time! We got VIP passes! Let’s do this thing.

Now, I do have some questions. Like, do we really have to bring all the animals? Could we leave the ticks, maybe? Or that big bullfrog in Shane and Air’s pond who ate all the little frogs this past month, do we really have to take him?

Yes, is what this story is telling us. The ticks got tickets, too. The bullfrog. We don’t get to pick and choose. They’re all coming. We’re gonna have to learn how to live with them. With each other. With ourselves.

We don’t get to pick and choose which parts of ourselves get to join us on the ark. Noah, he brought it all with him. We bring it all with us, wherever we go. That fear of not being enough that you carry around like an engorged tick, yeah that’s coming with you. The bullfrog of my selfishness, who’s always trying to eat the other guys, that one’s coming, too. The Noah of shocking parental failure. He’s here. We are each an ark, a menagerie of wild and beautiful and terrifying animals, our loneliness, our anger, our desire to be right, our desire to be loved, and every day is the flood. The challenge is to learn how to live with ourselves. Apocalyptic annihilation doesn’t work, clearly, God’s like, “Whoa, I’m never doing that again.” Blaming other people like your son doesn’t work, not a good look. Can we instead endeavor to just see ourselves, in all our violence, all our vulnerability, and allow ourselves to be seen?

This is tough. I don’t want to see Noah curse his son. I don’t want you to see me in my darkness. How do we do this? Maybe we don’t have to. Because there’s always God. God will love us through our darkness. God will hold space for us, right?

Not this time. The thing I actually love about this story, reading it now, is that we get to see a very human God here. God’s overwhelmed by the violence, the confusion, the intractable conflicts of humankind. Doesn’t know what else to do, ends up going all Hulk Smash on us, becomes the violent of us all. It’s a humbling moment for God.

When the flood is over, God looks around and makes a solemn vow, a covenant, to never, ever do this again. “Never again,” God says. “Never again. And I’m gonna make it so I never forget. So when things start to get dark again, when the stormclouds roll in, I’m gonna invent this thing called rainbow, a freaking rainbow, which is so extravagantly beautiful, so flamboyantly over-the-top gorgeous, that I can’t help but remember…my covenant, to not kill everybody, and to keep loving them instead, believing in them, being here for them until they learn to be here for themselves, here for each other. I have set my rainbow in the clouds and it will be the sign of my covenant between me and the earth.”

So, what’s your rainbow? Me? It’s my son these days. My beautiful boy. He is the one who makes it abundantly clear that there is only ever one thing to do, and that is: To love. To be with. To stay with. With him, it’s easy, even when it’s hard. With myself, not always easy to love. With the world, mostly not easy. But I have my covenant, to love. I will remember. And when I forget, because I will, because the storms keep coming, he will be there, my son, shining, and I will remember again.

So, make your covenant, whatever it might be, and set your rainbow upon the clouds.