March 1, 2009
Grace Church
Rev. Robert E. Hensley

Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15

      Let us pray.  Faithful God, we thank you that you have given us your promise, and we know that you will never go back on it. We can count on you to be there for us in any difficulty and in every joy. You have brought us through the storms of adversity and given us the perspective to enjoy the goods of the earth as gifts from you, not as items we deserve. In your Son’s name we pray.  Amen. 
 

      Around 2,600 years ago, an old man of about 80 years of age walked toward the western border of China and came to what is now Tibet. When he reached the pass through which he would leave China, Lao Tzu was detained by the border guards. He could not leave, he was told, until he had put in writing what he believed.  
 

      According to legend, Lao Tzu sat down and stroked 5,000 Chinese characters which became the Tao Te Ching (The Way and Its Power). Tzu himself became known as the father of Taoism (Tao is pronounced dow). The ancient Chinese philosophy has been popularly reduced to the notion that to be happy in life, one must “go with the flow,” or follow the Way.  
 

      Around 600 years later, Jesus, the Son of God, visited us, and – as we remember on this first Sunday of Lent – showed us the Way, and declared himself to be the “way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).  
 

      It is important to remember this since we have been mired in the worst post-dotcom, economic slump since the Great Depression.  The stock market has tanked, banks are failing, and stock portfolios, once fat and happy, are now thin and sour. And in this recent downturn, we have seen once again how much we tie the Dow Jones average to Tao/Jesus average – the measure of our inner peace and happiness. We have confused – to recall a phrase — the Dow Jones with the Tao of Lao Tzu. 
 

      Of course we are not Taoists. Lao Tzu had some undeniably interesting, sometimes quirky, observations about life. Yet the point is significant: Jesus calls us as followers of The Way to renounce the importance of the material, in favor of the eternal significance of the spiritual. “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal,” he said (Matthew 6:20 NIV). And where accountants do not cook the books, he might well have added.  
 

      The rainbow that God hung in the sky following the great flood is a reminder of this very principle: If you want to see rainbows in your life, you will see them, not through the lens of materialism, but through the prism of radical gratitude. 
 

      Once while in Hawaii on a family vacation, a woman saw 15 rainbows in one week. She said to her daughter as they were leaving, “Don’t you wish we could have seen just one more?” The daughter responded with 17-year-old vigor and idealism: “Hello! Aren’t you being just a bit greedy, Mom? Don’t you think that 15 are enough?” 
 

      The woman was ashamed, and rightly so. Indeed, what was she talking about? Did she want permanent rainbows? If so, she could have bought some greeting cards or plastic decorations. There are plenty of phony rainbows everywhere. Why did she think that good had to be permanent? Why couldn’t she enjoy the beauty of the impermanent, the transient? 
 

      Maybe it was some sort of greed and ingratitude in the ancient antediluvian economy that soured God on the human creatures that God had created. “I am grieved that I have made them,” God is reported to have said (Genesis 6:7 NIV). 
 

      This text portrays God as being so exasperated with the human condition that God regrets getting involved in the entire process. The question is: How bad do you have to be to move a God of love and compassion to the point where God not only is sorry that God created you, but wants to eradicate your entire species from the face of the earth and from the collective memory of the universe? 
 

      It must have been really bad. 
 

      But “Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord” (Genesis 6:8 NIV). So Noah took to the ark to flee both the wrath of God and the wickedness of mortals. And as the story goes, 40 days and nights later, God hung a rainbow in the sky as a covenant with us and as a reminder to God, never to so judge the world again.  
 

      Lucky for us.  
 

      Yet even with the rainbow hanging in the heavens, we still want more. Just like our belief that the stock market owes us something more, God still doesn’t do enough for us. And while it is wrong to be greedy for the wrong things, we should remember that it’s no better to be greedy for good things, for blessings. Fifteen rainbows are more than enough. Yet in our worship, I sometimes get the feeling that we think God is not doing enough for us. “What have you done for me lately, God?”  We are all stuck in the materialism of thinking that the Dow of Jones is the Tao of Lao Tzu, or that blessings are the “way, and the truth, and the life,” that as disciples of Jesus Christ, our path should be strewn with rose petals, and that we can’t get enough blessings. Give me more, more, more, and more!

      If we keep thinking like that, we will not only lose the rainbow, God will send us the bread of pain and the waters of tribulation. 
 

      When Noah walked up the ramp and into the ark, scooting the goats and pigs ahead of him, he was leaving the world as he had come to know it. The world would never be the same. It had radically changed.  
 

      Many of us have lost the world as we know it. And there are many who have lost that world more than once. We have lost a husband and moved into the world of widowhood. Or we have lost our retirement and moved from the world of security into the world of insecurity. We may have lost a child. We may have lost someone in Oklahoma City or the Pentagon or at the World Trade Center. We wake up the day after these large events and the world is different. We will never again be the same. As women who have been raped often say, “All I want back is yesterday.” 
 

      Wanting yesterday. What about wanting today? What about wanting this rainbow now, rather than that rainbow later? What about resisting the temptation to make your highest stocks the norm for the rest of your life? Yes, the late ’90s and the middle years of this decade were fabulous. Many of us looked at pensions and portfolios that were quite dazzling.  Does a moment in 2006 become the norm for the rest of life? Can we really not remember that we are mortal, that life changes, that we are more than our losses? 
 

      The Dow Jones average is not the “way, the truth, and the life.” It is just an “average,” a moment in time, fiercely statistical and quite impressive and very interesting but nothing like something truly important. God gave us one rainbow. God gave us and continues to give us enormous gifts. Gratitude, not grab, is the proper response as we begin our Lenten journey. 
 

      Gratitude is the love and appreciation of what is, in the now, rather than the vicious dissatisfaction about what is not. In her book Radical Gratitude, Mary Jo Leddy says that “radical gratitude” recognizes what we have, rather than what we don’t.  The glass is always half-full. In that recognition we awaken to another way of being, another kind of economy, the great economy of grace in which each person is of infinite value and worth. We stop measuring and comparing everything to everything else. We place our feet on the path of love and life. We take our feet off the cul de sac of covetousness and permanent dissatisfaction. 
 

      The truly amazing part of the story of Noah and the Flood is that God allowed the world to be destroyed. But Noah fills up the boat with a future.  
 

      It is possible that we, too, may lose our world. But we must fill our boat with a future, with gratitude, and keep our eyes on the rainbow.

      The same God who came back with a rainbow after the storm came forth with Jesus, a human version of the rainbow whose purpose was to call us to the joy of grateful discipleship. The psalmist had it right: “So teach us to number our days that we learn wisdom.” The people who survived flight 1549’s landing in the East River say that the major insight they took away was to treasure every day and every breath. A man with esophagus cancer reflects: “My cancer is a gift. It has shown me how precious now is. I didn’t know before.”  
 

      Will it take catastrophe or cancer to wake us up? Or will we learn to manage with Noah’s wit? Will we let a little count for a lot – and forget the worlds we may have lost on behalf of the worlds we have? We are always more than our losses.  
 

      The rainbow guarantees the future as it guarantees our redemption. Just one rainbow will do. We do not need any more than what we already have. 
 

      When we learn to love what we have, we will have boarded the ark.  Amen.