Roy G. Biv.

Before I start this discussion, I want you to know that I talked about this topic with a physicist.  If you disagree with any of my statements, you need to know that you either a) disagree with physics, or b) I got it wrong.  Either of those two things are possible, perhaps likely.

Now, let's talk about rainbows for a second.  Not the Julie Andrews version, not the Kermit the Frog version, but the actual rainbows you see and encounter on a daily basis.  You all know by now the lore about rainbows, yes?  The lore that says that there's a pot of gold at the end of it?  Yes, you know that leprechauns, those crafty devils, they hide their pots of gold at the ends of rainbows.  As a child, I was told the same legends that everyone else was, that if you could find the end of the rainbow, you would find the pot of gold that the leprechaun wanted to hold onto.  Sounds good in theory, but of course, the facts of the matter drag it down significantly.

There is no end of the rainbow.  I'm sorry to tell you this.  The end of the rainbow doesn't exist.  It doesn't exist, because the rainbow is round. It may not look like it when you look up at it in the sky, but trust me, and trust physics, what you see as a rainbow is actually a rain-circle.  Completely round. If you've been up in a plane or on a high building, and have seen a rainbow, you will have seen it as a circle. Believe it or not, though, that's just one reason that you can't find the end of the rainbow.  First of all, there is no end, and secondly, the rainbow moves with you.

I know, I know, there are stories of people flying over rainbows, of people seeing be being next to the place where the rainbow ends, but it's not true.  You can't get to a rainbow.  It depends on the angle of your eyes and the water falling through the sky.

Why do I mention all this? Because the rainbow is a far better show of a covenant than you'd possibly think.  Oh sure, on the surface, it's a nice origin story for rainbows, but it's bigger and deeper than that, and to get to that, we have to ask ourselves what a rainbow actually is.

So what is a rainbow?  It's an almost illusion.  That is, it's a real thing, that doesn't exist.  If that sounsd elusive, then buckle up, because we're just getting started.  For the rainbow, though it looks real, you can't grab it, and wrap your hand around it. It's ephemeral, and that's important for how God, and God's promises work.  Think about the rainbow that you see up in the sky.  Think about how you look up, and see it there.  Now think about all the smaller rainbows that you see in your life.  Think about the rainbows that you see with your sprinkler, at the splash pad, behind speed boats, anywhere that there is light and water droplets.  If you move around, you will see the rainbow in different places.  And if you move and see the rainbow in a different place, you will know that the people who are with you will all be seeing the rainbow in a different place from you.  Do you know why?  Because the rainbow depends on your angle of view.

This is why it is such a good reminder of God's promises.  It's such a good reminder of them because of the way the rainbow works.  The magnificence of the rainbow is that everybody who looks up at it will see their own individual rainbow. The rainbow you see is both the same as, and at the same time different from everyone else's.  The principles are the same, the colours will always be the same, but the rainbow you see, based on where you are standing, will be only for you.  Everyone else will be seeing a different one.

This applies to the promises made in the scriptures, and the aspects of the worship services, by showing us how God is experienced.  The Bible, it's only one book.  Everyone gets the same Bible.  If you join a church, and get a wonderful presentation Bible, the cover may be different, but the contents will be the same as everyone else's.  If you go to church, you will be part of the same

worship service that everyone else present will be.  If you listen to a sermon, everyone around you will be hearing the same words.  If you encounter Christ, you will be encountering the same Christ as everyone else, the same yesterday, today, and forever.  If you are baptized, it will be with the same words and water as everyone else, and Holy Communion works the same way.  All these things are identical, in the words, in the physical elements, in everything.  So what makes them unique?

When Jesus speaks to his disciples about Holy Communion, he tells them that the bread is his body, and the wine is his blood, given 'for you.'  It's the same as the promise, the covenant, made through the rainbow, where God tells Noah that he is making that covenant with everyone.  And sure enough, as we all look at the rainbows, we realize that we each see our own rainbow, reminding us that the covenant was made with each and every one of us.

And there's something else that helps with this being the means to remind us of the covenant.  As Christians, we count on the faithfulness of God's promises.  The Christian belief was never an exchange between us and God.  It was never as though we bring something to the table, God brings something to the table, and then we make an exchange.  No no, the way it works is that God makes a promise, and is trustworthy and true, and keeps his promises to us.  And the rainbow is a fantastic marker of that.  It's a fantastic marker, because it is regular, it is predictiable, and it is constant.  God's promise to his people to never again flood the earth, is marked by a rainbow, which is a permanent thing.  There have to be raibows, because that's how light and water when refraction happens.  You know what else depends on those same properties?  Your eyes, your vision, everything about their interplay depends on the same forces and laws that show you rainbows.  That' the way light and fluids work. The reason this is such a great marker for God's promises is that he can't just stop rainbows cold.  Stopping them cold would essentially require an unworking, or a reworking, of the way matter and light interact.

And this is how his promises work.  Once he's made them, he doesn't go back on them.  He holds fast to those promises, and does not back down.  The appearance of the rainbow doesn't happen as long as you say the right words or do the right things.  The rainbow appears when there is rain, sun, and you to witness it.  You don't make it appear, but you have a vital part to play, since if there is nobody around to witness the rainbow, it doesn't exist.

When God speaks to his people, when he gives his body and blood to eat and to drink, when he pours out his love in holy baptism, when his words are spoken in his Holy Church, these things need to have people as a vital part to play.  Given and shed for you.  I baptize you.  I forgive you all your sins.  In the service, in the scriptures, you realize very quickly that none of this happens in a vacuum.  God's words are for his people.  And the words may always be the same, but they are all individually for us.  There's only one Bible, and yet it speaks to us all individually.  There's only one Christ, and yet we all encounter him individually.  One Lord, one Faith, one Church, and yet all the believers are spoken to individually.  Just like how there is one refraction, one ROY G BIV, and yet we all see our own, personal rainbow, just like everyone else's, yet only for you.

Just like the rainbow.

PJ.

Little Orphan Us

Adoption.  The word ought to bring forth a flood of emotions, to be sure. It's a wonderful gift that people can give, opening their home and their family to a stranger, to an outsider, someone who wasn't born there and raising them as a child in that household with all the rights and responsibilities that naturally born children would have.  But adoption is also a bit of a scary process, and one in which you're not exactly sure what you're going to end up with. Now, to be fair, you're not sure what you're going to end up with when you conceive as a couple either, but you at least have some idea, given that the child is half of both of the parents.  And at this point, we have to go back to movie trailers again.  I know, for the second time in a row.

This is the trailer for a movie called problem child, which I saw in the theatre when it first came out.  In 1990.  And the plot of this movie is that the older child that is adopted is the spawn of satan, and is dreadful to the nuns in the orphanage, and to his adoptive parents, and, gosh, everyone.  As the mother superior says 'good little boys get good homes, bad little boys get something else.' The tendency is to want to adopt younger children, right from when they are neonates, but if you were to adopt an older child, you'd want to adopt one that was sugar and spice and everything nice.  You most assuredly wouldn't adopt one like Junior from problem child, whom his adoptive parents had to be tricked into bringing home.  And yes, once they discovered what kind of child he was, they tried to return him.

Who would choose Junior?  Nobody would choose Junior.  You could be tricked into taking him, deceived into it, but nobody would take him on purpose, knowing anything about him.  And this is something that comes up a few times through the scriptures, the notion of adoption.  Adoption and inheritance.  We think about ourselves as being adopted into God's family as infants, as precious babies who are just lovely and sweet.  But we weren't.  We were rebellious, dangerous, and wicked.  Incorrigible.  We were rotten, rotten to the core, and disastrous, and our adoptive parents knew it, were well aware of it.  Why would they take us in to begin with, what was the purpose?

What's great is that the Bible talks about families because we know about families.  We all know about families because we all grew up in them.  And the best family story that we know about from the Bible is the story of Hosea, Hosea who took a wife and had some children.  Nice story, right?  Well, not quite.  Hosea's story was one about a man who was asked by God to take a wife, but a wife of adultery.  He was asked to take a wife of prostitution, a wife who was going to be unfaithful to him, and whose children might not be his.  And Hosea was asked to raise these children who may or may not be his, and to be faithful to his unfaithful wife, and to have that wear on him and grind him down over years and years.

Unfaithfulness is prettty much the universal exit hatch for relationships, the one thing that nobody's supposed to put up with.  If you get  advice from anyone about when it's time to get out of a relationship, unfaithfulness will pretty much always be the time to get out and run.  And when you look at the story of Hosea, you want to grab him and scream at him 'Don't marry this woman!  She's going to cheat on you and use you up!'  Yes. Yes she is. And that's the point.  Just like in Ephesians, where we have been predestined for adoption, knowin that we are rebellious problem children, people who are up to no good, who will wreck things and use things up.  We're not going to be good and sweet, we never were.  We're going to smash things, we're going to bust the place up, be rude and disrespectful, we're going to be rotten.  And God is well aware of this.  But he's going to adopt us anyway.  He's going to adopt us and make us sharers in the inheritance that the natural born children get.

All in all, as usual, we expect things from God that we wouldn't do for each other.  Funny, isn't it?  We expect God to forgive, though we are stingy with forgiveness for each other.  We expect God to love, but we are reserved with our love for each other.  We expect God's care, but we won't care for one another.  We most assuredly expect God to respond to our needs, but we won't change things to fit his commands.  In other words, we're unwilling to do the things God wants us to do, while expecting him to meet our needs constantly.

If you will, the Gospel reading from  Sunday is part of this whole thing.  Think of Herod's promise to his daughter, promising her anything that she would want should she happen to dance for his party.  She danced, and then was allowed to choose whatever she wanted.  And so, on the prompting of her mother, Herod's daughter asked for the head of John the Baptist on the platter.  And Herod gave it to her.

This ludicrous request was honored by Herod.  Herod had John killed, and his head delivered to his daughter on a platter.  Horrible.  It's like the blessing given by Isaac to Jacob, like the inheritance given to the prodigal son, like Jephthah's vow in the book of Judges, like the marriage given to Gomer by Hosea, where we as readers ask 'why don't you stand up for yourself, and walk out?  Why don't you just take your self respect, and go?' Good question, right?  But the level of commitment that is shown by any of these people, it's something that we can't even understand.  We think about all our relationships, including our one with Jesus, as what we can get out of it.  What's in it for us?  Not about the commitments we make, and our requirements to see it through no matter what.  It's about wanting to quit when things get bad.

And so when you see this moment where John the Baptist is slain, where Herod's promises are met, think about what God has promised for you.  Think about what God has promised for you, think about what he has offered to you as his child, a stubborn, rebellious child.  All his promises are to his detriment.  Whatever he offers to you, he follows through with not because you were good, but because of his love for you, and his comitment.  The Holy Scriptures tell us about this constantly, the services of God's house reinforce this, that we bring nothing but our sins, and we end up receiving the grace merited by Christ.

Why would a parent choose a rebellious adoptive child?  Why would a man choose to stay with a wife of infidelity?  Why would Herod choose to offer a sacrifice on behalf of his daughter?  Because of their commitment to their vows, not because of anything the other party offered.  We are of inestimable value to Christ our Lord because of his love for us, because of his commitment to us as his rebellious adoptive children.  And ultimately, it comes down to him saying to his disciples

'In my father's house, there are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?'

He prepares a place for us.  If it wasn't so, he would not have told us that it was.  This all falls on commitment, and it's God's commitment to us.  The stories that we hear in the scriptures, where people promise things that they would rather not deliver, well, that's sort of the best image of the promise that God gives to us through Christ.  Even though it costs him everything, everything that there is, family, friends, health, freedom, the clothes from his back and even his own life, he follows through on the promise that he made to us, that a savior would come, and free us from our sins.

So yeah, back to Problem Child.  Problem child is the story of a kid that, if the parents knew how dreadful he was, then they never would have adopted him.  True, true.  But the deal with our adoption into Christ is that God knows exactly what he is getting, and decides to bring us to himself anyway.  Or if that's too abstract for you, think about fruit.  Which you were doing anyway.

When you go to superstore, you have your pick of fruit.  Nice firm plums, and softer, mushier plums.  And then the local Superstore special, where the plums are spoiled beyond repair, and in a bag with a pink triangle sticker on it.  Almost like used fruit.  Now, when you're picking plums up, you're probably going to pick the nice, firm, beautiful plums, yes?  You're going to squeeze them, feel them, and prepare to pop them into your plastic bag.  As you're scanning over the plums, you'll find plums with rough skin, a little on the older side, a bit too soft, a bit too juicy, and you do what the rest of us do, which is to leave them there, and to scan over for firmer plums.

And so does everyone else.

If you were to take one of those plums home, it wouldn't be because you wanted that particular plum, nor would it be because you cared to have that plum at that moment, but because those are the plums that need to be eaten.  The other ones are good the firm plums are fine, and will be chosen and eaten by other people.  The soft ones are the ones that need to be chosen because they need to be eaten. You were chosen not because you were good, but because you were the one who most needed to be chosen.

#humblebrag

As I mentioned on Sunday morning, whenever people ask me if I've seen any good movies lately, I have to reply that I have not.  I have two young children, so if we see a movie, it'll be a kid's movie.  And kids' movies are rarely good movies.  There are exceptions, true, but the vast majority of them tend to tell the same story, with the same message.  And that message ain't great.  The message that you'll come across with the vast majority of films for children is that you should be yourself.

Take Brave, as an example.  I saw this film with my eldest in the movie theatre when it came out, and the message, the take away, was that you should be true to yourself, that the world just needs to be able to handle you, in all of your awesomeness.  That's the issue, not that you need to change, but that you need to be true to yourself.

If that was true, then why is the world so busted up?  What is the issue?  If we're all so great, and realizing ourselves was what was standing in the way, then now that we've all realized ourselves, why have we not gotten any better?  Why has this world not improved by leaps and bounds?

Well, simply enough, Paul seemed to have something worked out, that he is not as good as he ought to be.  And nor are you.  But it goes deeper than that, of course, which is that you are not only not as good as you ought to be, but you're not as good as you believe other people should be.  This is so incredibly key, and yet we seem to overlook it all the time.  You have in mind the way people ought to behave, and then you don't do those things.  You rationalize it away, of course, and dismiss it.  But in every way, it's like the last few lines of the trailer for the movie Frost / Nixon (a presumably good movie that I didn't see, because I have young children).  Nixon saying 'I'm saying if a president does it, it's not illegal.'  We look at that line, and are a bit shocked, shocked by the ability of Nixon to say and believe that as a president, he can do what he likes, and it's not illegal because he does it.  And that's exactly where we are too, understanding morality as we do.  Not that it's okay for us to do stuff, but stuff becomes okay because it's us doing it. Strangely, though we work through this on our own ,we remain surprised when other people feel the same way.

It's a bit of a bonkers world, one in which everyone is the same, but we all rush to tell the same lie, because it makes us all feel better.  It's the same lie that all of us tell ourselves, tell each other, tell the world, because it comforts us all - that we are the exception, and everyone else is the rule.

You can believe this for a long time, to be sure, until something happens.  Until you get a thorn in your flesh.  And this is what happened to Paul, who really did believe that he had cause for boasting, as well he might.  Paul's words changed the world, formed the doctrine for church bodies, gave a framework for the belief of billions, and his words are memorized, recited, and believed all over the world.  Very few people enjoy that kind of distinction, really almost none.  And yet, here is Paul, with all the reason in the world to boast, to call attention to himself and his achievements, who could summon attention to his activity, and his excellence, and yet here he is talking about boasting only in his weakness.  The usual internet term for this is the humblebrag, in which you mention something great about yourself in the guise of humility, but it has zero humility attached to it, or perhaps fishing for compliments, but here, it isn't.  It isn't, because Paul mentions, and confesses, his thorn in his flesh.  His weakness.  His illness.  His sickness.  Paul is here to confess that he has some problems that need to be addressed, and these problems make him humble.  What is his thorn?  Perhaps only Paul knows.  He knows, and he's not sharing exactly what it is.  It could be a temptation, it could be an illness, it could be a proclivity for a certain type of sin, it could be anything, but whatever it is, it keeps him humble.

There's a good chance that you need a thorn in your side too.  There's a good chance that you need something poking you every once in a while, to remind you that you are a frail child of dust.  You need this reminder because you're tempted to forget.  That temptation is there in your mind all the time, and you probably tend to want to follow the path that leads to you feeling better without having to be better.  It's a problem that affects all sorts of people from you all the way to the clergy, none of whom want to grapple with their own imperfection, and almost all of whom will lead a double life, whitewashed on the outside, and death and spiders on the inside.

But to paraphrase Hardy, if there's a path to the better, it begins with a full look at the worst.  When Jesus speaks to us in the New Testament, as he does, he says 'be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.' - And he means it! Jesus does have in mind for you to be perfect, that's what he lived and died for, is for all your sins to be forgiven, and for you to be presented to God as whole and blameless.  That's the plan, it's the idea, and for that to happen, your sins, the real ones, must be confessed, which you're not going to do if you believe that you're perfect.  So God has likely sent to you a thorn for your flesh, an irritant, a sickness, an illness that will remind you that you're not as good as you think you are, or as good as you believe other people should be.  You may not want this thorn, you may feel as though you were better without it, but you weren't.  You were ignorant, and you were likely a liar.

The thorn has been placed there to humble you, and you may not want to be humbled.  But you need to be.  You need to be reminded, on a regular basis, that you're not as perfect as you'd like to be.  You already know everyone else is far from perfect, and it's useful to be reminded of the fact that you yourself still have a long way to go.  It will remind you of that, and it will also point you towards the only source for your salvation, the one who had no sin, who is in fact perfect, and promises to take away your sin.  The thorn in your side should point you to Christ, for when it illustrates your weaknesses, it should remind you of the presence of Christ, who forgives sins, and cleanses us from unrighteousness.  Then you can say, as Paul does, that when you are weak, then you are strong.