February 23, 2025

Just a Reminder

After the great flood of Genesis, so the story goes, God struck a deal with Noah. Placing a rainbow in the sky, God promised that he would never again send a flood to destroy the earth, and whenever God looked at the rainbow – like a string tied around the divine finger – God would be reminded not to do such a terrible thing again. It’s an etiological tale devised partly to explain why there are such things as rainbows. We now know better. In fact, we have learned that, in a sense, a rainbow isn’t even a “thing.” A rainbow, as we understand it, isn’t actually a physical structure out in the sky somewhere. It really only exists inside our heads. Two separate people and a third with a camera will all see a rainbow, and the camera will record one on film. But they’re not all seeing one thing. Each one sees a different rainbow. It is an optical phenomenon created by the refraction of light from water molecules that is basically created on the retina of our eyes, or the film of a camera.
All of which gives the lie to Dorothy’s notion that “somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue”, since there is no somewhere that lies over a rainbow. And clearly the rainbow’s end is no place for a leprechaun to store his pot of gold, since the place doesn’t exist. But I like the idea of the rainbow as a reminder. When Dadgie and I were given the wonderful gift of trip to Hawaii many years ago, we discovered that one of the most characteristically lovely things about the place is the daily light show. Almost every evening there would be a brief shower followed by a rainbow. Now every time I see a rainbow I can’t help thinking about Hawaii and about the magical time we spent there. I don’t know if a rainbow serves as a divine reminder not to flood the planet, but it certainly can be a reminder of goodness, and worth, and beauty.
In his first epistle, Peter likens the event of the ancient flood to the waters of baptism. He writes, “. . . God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you . . . .” He’s using water as a symbol of the power to save. Admittedly, the analogy is stretched pretty thin in the case of the flood, since the story claims that every man, woman, child, and animal on the planet was destroyed by that water with the exception of those on the ark, but we’ll let that slide, because he makes a marvelous point about the water of baptism. He refers to the act of baptism as “an appeal to God for a good conscience.” I’m not one hundred percent sure what he means by that (and maybe it’s grist for a whole other sermon) but in the least I believe he’s suggesting that this symbolic washing of our bodies and the vows we take are a reminder that we do truly desire to live, and for our children to live, the kind of lives that Jesus taught, full of humble, self-giving grace and compassion.
Water is indeed a salvific reminder, whether it be the water of baptism or the water of a rainbow. All the water droplets refracting light onto our retinas spread out into reds and yellows and blues do indeed comprise a kind of saving act, because every time you or I looks into the sky after the rain and is reminded that at the heart of creation there is not murky darkness but brilliant light, not brutal ugliness but beauty and grace, we are saved just a little.
We need such reminders along the way if only because it’s easy to lose the light, the beauty, and the grace in a pile of grocery lists, meeting agendas, or dirty laundry. That’s the value of things like wedding rings, I believe. They’re always catching on something, pinching our fingers, or clicking against water glasses, reminding us that at the heart of a relationship is a blessed and elegant bond, a commitment made amidst the recognition that love is the supreme gift of life.
So the ancient storyteller of Genesis suggests that the rainbow is sort of God’s wedding ring. Every time God sees it in the sky he is reminded of his covenant and the vow that he took. Frederick Buechner writes that, “in one way, then, it gave Noah a nice warm feeling to see the rainbow up there, but in another way it gave him an uneasy twinge. If God needed the rainbow as a reminder, he thought, that could mean that, if someday God didn’t happen to look in the right direction or had something else on his mind, he might forget his promise and the heavy drops would start pattering down on the roof a second time.” Buechner’s fanciful slant on the story is a fine reminder. Whether the Almighty needs a rainbow wrapped around the divine finger or not, certainly you and I do. If our minds are absorbed or our attention is distracted it’s all too easy to forget that our very survival depends on the offering and receiving of grace and compassion, or, put another way, not to be so consumed by urgent conflicts that we lose track of truly important values.
The late anthropologist, professor, and writer, Loren Eiseley, recounted a powerful experience of being reminded of those values one day when he encountered a “star thrower” framed by a rainbow. He found himself in Costabel, walking along a beach in the very early morning as a storm seemed to be brewing all around. He passed a number of professional shellers, collecting starfish that had washed up from the ocean, preparing to boil them, dissolving the live creatures so the shells could be sold. Eiseley writes, “Around the next point there might be a refuge from the wind. The sun behind me, over the projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence. Somewhere toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing, as it seemed to me, within the rainbow, though unconscious of his position. He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand.
“Eventually he stooped and flung the object beyond the breaking surf. I labored toward him over a half-mile of uncertain footing. By the time I reached him the rainbow had receded ahead of us, but something of its color still ran hastily in many changing lights across his features. He was starting to kneel again.
“In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud.
“‘It’s still alive,’ I ventured.
“‘Yes,’ he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sank in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more.
“‘It may live,’ he said, ‘if the offshore pull is strong enough. . . .
“Do you collect?” Eiseley asked.
“Only like this,” the star thrower replied. “‘And only for the living.’ He stooped again, oblivious of my curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water.”
The man’s eyes seemed to invite Eiseley to join him, but the objective scientist demurred. He knew the act of trying to save these few starfish was folly, that “death is running more fleet than he along every seabeach in the world.” Eiseley writes, “I nodded and walked away, leaving him there upon the dune with that great rainbow ranging up the sky behind him.”
Much later, Eiseley returned to the beach to find this man futilely trying to give life in the midst of the storm. He writes, “Somewhere far up the coast wandered the star thrower beneath his rainbow. . . . The star thrower was mad, and his particular acts were a folly with which I had not chosen to associate myself. I was an observer and a scientist. Nonetheless, I had seen the rainbow attempting to attach itself to the earth.
“On a point of land, as though projecting into a dominion beyond us, I found the star thrower. In the sweet rain-swept morning, that great many-hued rainbow still lurked and wavered tentatively beyond him. Silently I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the waves. I spoke once briefly. ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Call me another thrower.’ Only then I allowed myself to think, He is not alone any longer. After us there will be others.
“We were part of the rainbow – an unexplained projection into the natural.”
Eiseley said he realized there was a larger drama being played out behind the scenes – that there was something cosmic and perhaps divine at work in them, and it was humanity as well as starfish that they were seeking to save. The circle of the rainbow was a “visible model” of the “perfect circle of compassion” and throwing the stars was a declaration of life being sowed in the midst of death and defeat. And maybe that’s the object as well of the One who resides “far outward on the rim of space” where genuine stars are “similarly seized and flung.”
Maybe rainbows are, after all, something more than photons of light spread out by their colors on the screens of our retinas. Maybe they are special places where heaven touches earth and both Divinity and humanity are reminded by their perfection and loveliness that there is something in our meager existence that is worth saving, and that, in the end, beauty, compassion, peace, and light are far more powerful than all the forces of rage and destruction.
None of this is new. In fact it’s as old as the gospel. It’s implicit in everything we’re about here, and it’s buried somewhere in just about every sermon you hear from this pulpit. I didn’t expect you to be surprised. It’s just a reminder.