I was hesitant to post this sermon online because in the course of putting it together, I wasn’t careful about keeping track of which quotation came from which source. But I’ve been asked to share it so here it is! The sources are all at the end, if you need to track something down .
This Genesis lesson is one of the odder bits of the Hebrew Bible. And it’s odd even if you’re reading Genesis chapter by chapter, not just in a random chunk in the Sunday lectionary. If you’ve studied mythology in school or college, you know that the many peoples have stories that explain why the stars are scattered across the sky, why caves will return an echo, and so on. This is the clearest example of anything of the sort in the Hebrew Bible: God putting God’s bow in the sky to remind God not to flood the world again. And it’s unusual. Much of the Old Testament tradition is pretty cautious about describing God as being very much like a human being – and certainly having anything as mundane as a bow, a human weapon, is a surprise. (Though it is nice that God’s bow is so colorful!)
This passage is the end of the Flood narrative: the story of Noah and his family taking a pair of every type of animal on a giant boat, an ark, to survive a worldwide flood. Some of you, in school or college, may have learned that there are other ancient flood stories from this part of the world (and elsewhere). It makes sense; a thousand-year flood happens about every thousand years, and those events are catastrophic enough to be enshrined in story – stories that make meaning out of terror and survival, and offer a perspective on the human relationship with the powers that oversee the world.
There’s a lot to say about the flood story in Genesis, and I’m not going to say it today! But I do want to say that the flood story of Hebrew Scripture isn’t just echoing or copying the other flood myths of the ancient Near East in some simplistic way. It is recasting the story of some primeval disaster in a way that says something distinctive about this people’s understanding of God and humanity.
Likewise this bit about God’s bow in the sky: It feels like something borrowed from the sacred stories of some other people, who like to envision their god in full battle dress. Yet still this short passage says something distinctive and important. And part of what it’s saying is that the relationship between God and God’s people, of whom Noah is a forerunner, is not a two-way relationship. It’s a three-cornered relationship that binds together God, humanity, and creation.
One name for this idea is the Triangular Covenant … and getting Christians today to see this in the Biblical text, and take it on board in our own worldviews, is the life work of Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis. Davis isn’t unique in this perspective, but she has been advocating for it, clearly and compellingly, for a couple of decades now.
And her advocacy is necessary, because this perspective is significantly different from the ways our culture and many of our churches have taught us to think. Broadly speaking, we think of humans as different from, and dominant over, nature. Even if we do not think that with our conscious minds, the way we collectively objectify and commodify land and living things reveal the deeper truth. And we tend to think of God as distant and abstract – not down in the dirt with the worms and roots and beetles and mycelia. Davis says, “No generation has lived as far from the way that the Bible would understand the existence of everything on earth as we do.”
To bring us back to a Biblical understanding of humanity’s relationship with creation – which is also an ecological, sustainable, hopeful understanding of humanity’s relationship with creation – Davis starts from this foundational assumption of the Biblical worldview: There is a triangular relationship among God, humanity, and creation.
There are variations in how the relationship is described. Here in Genesis, it’s a covenant – a mutual promise, with benefits and consequences – between, in God’s words, “me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations.” In the book of the prophet Hosea, we see similar language: “I will make for you a covenant… with the wild animals, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground…” (Hosea 2:18)
In many places, though, it’s not just animals but the whole created order that is in covenant relationship – often named simply as “the land.” Sometimes that means the particular land that God’s people understand God to have given them. But elsewhere it clearly means the land in general – Creation in general. Mountains and valleys, rivers and oceans, trees and all green growing things, sky, seasons and weather, birds and fish and wild and domesticated animals.
This triangular relationship means – among other things – that we both flourish together, and suffer together. When Davis first got curious about how Scripture talks about Creation, several decades ago, she thought she would find just a few passages. Instead, “the Bible’s concern for an ethic of sustainability popped up everywhere she looked.” And the overwhelming message was clear: “Human communities cannot thrive apart from the health of nonhuman communities — land, water, animals and plants.” https://canadianmennonite.org/articles/ellen-davis-unearths-agrarian-view-bible
There are many Biblical texts that point to this deep truth. Davis quotes the book of the prophet Joel as an example: “The vine withers, the fig tree droops. Pomegranate, palm, and apple—all the trees of the field are dried up; surely, joy withers away among the people.” (Joel 1:10-12) When the crops and fruit trees wither, the people wither. Joy withers.
From the Bible’s perspective, these withering seasons have a message for us. The fundamental character of this three-cornered covenantal relationship is that when any one relationship is neglected or violated, the whole relational structure is affected.
Humans have a vocation towards Creation. We are called by God to be caring and respectful stewards of the natural world and our non-human neighbors. Davis says, “We are answerable to God for how we use the physical order to meet our physical needs.” We often fail and fall short. This grieves and angers God. Our disordered relationship with Creation affects our relationship with God.
Likewise, in the Hebrew Bible, when humans turn away from God and God’s ways – for example, by perpetrating or tolerating injustice, not being merciful towards the poor, and so on – the alienation in that relationship is reflected in the land itself. Davis writes, “The suffering of the earth itself may be the chief index of the brokenness in our relationship with God.”
In the prophetic texts of the Bible, Davis argues, natural disasters like earthquakes and droughts are often understood as clues that something is amiss – as calls to collective self-examination and course correction. “The Earth and its non-human inhabitants [can] serve as divinely appointed witnesses to and agents of judgment.”
This is a different message than we might hear from conservative Christian leaders who cast such events as punishment for a nation that’s gotten too lax about the Ten Commandments. Davis suggests instead that “natural” disasters – an increasingly muddy category, in an era of climate crisis – bear witness to disrupted covenantal relationships and the need for repentance and repair.
Because the God of the Bible, the God we follow, always wants reconciliation and restoration. The Hebrew Bible is chock-full of ecological language and imagery. Some tells of present or potential devastation, like the withered trees of Joel. Some tells of flourishing and hope – streams in the desert, flowers in the wilderness. Today’s Gospel gestures to those texts and images, so quickly that you might have missed it: “Jesus was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”
He was with the wild beasts. I love how Mark tells the story of the temptations of Jesus, here at the beginning of his public ministry. It’s so short, yet there’s so much here to ponder. Let’s focus on those wild beasts for a moment! The image of Jesus in the wilderness, accompanied by the wild creatures of that place, might remind us of Eden – that powerful and evocative vision of a beginning-time before all the ruptures of human progress and civilization, when humans and creatures and plants all lived in harmony and shared delight. The Book of Job is a richly ecological text; there’s a passage in chapter 5 when one of Job’s friends describes the ideal state of being reconciled with God: “[You] shall not fear the wild animals of the earth. For you shall be in league with the stones of the field, and the wild animals shall be at peace with you.” (Job 5:22-23)
Jesus – already named as the Son of God – leaves human space for wild space, is attended by angels and befriended by animals – jackals and lizards, vultures and hyraxes, ostriches, ibexes, leopards, and the other creatures of the Judean desert. This moment, this brief but rich description, offers a glimpse of the triangular covenant in its wholeness: human, divine, natural, all in one place, at peace.
The Triangular Covenant arises in our readings today, but it’s also a timely topic for Lent. The word Lent itself is related to the lengthening of days in this season – we practice Lent in the weeks when winter begins to ebb towards spring. On Ash Wednesday, we acknowledge that we are one with the dirt, the soil of the earth. In the litany we use on Ash Wednesday and other Sundays of the season we confess our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, our waste and pollution of God’s creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us.
In the Great Litany on the first Sunday in Lent, we pray to be delivered from lightning and tempest, from earthquake, fire, and flood, from plague, pestilence, and famine, and from dying suddenly and unprepared. Meanwhile we struggle to make sense of disordered seasons, of an El Niño winter exacerbated by climate change; flooding in California; a February tornado just south of Madison. Dozens of cities from the Midwest to the Northeast are about to log one of the warmest winters on record. We are called in so many ways to reflection, repentance, repair.
I first encountered the Triangular Covenant in Ellen Davis’ Old Testament class at Duke in 2005. Since then, her sense of the need to reintegrate ecological awareness into our understanding of Scripture has only grown in urgency. In a 2013 interview she explained, “I’ve sort of taken a vow that every time I lecture or preach, when there isn’t a specific topic that I have to talk about, I talk about climate change and the Bible, and I do it because my experience is that the more we talk about it in community, the more possibilities we find to do something in response to it.” She says people need to feel they can engage with the problem *through* their faith. And it is powerful, I think, to know that the Bible speaks some deep wisdom and truth to one of the greatest challenges of our time.
A lot of us live with climate anxiety and climate grief as daily companions. I don’t think we need more guilt or fear. Overwhelm and paralysis are already big problems. We need to feel our grief and our anger, move through them, and let them move through us. We also don’t need more tasks, more busyness. There are meaningful things we can do, changes we can make, ideas we can share. I love all that! It matters. But – and – I think there’s something deeper.
We hear a lot, as Lent begins, about repentance. I think most of us hear that word as meaning: Being sorry for doing bad things, and trying to do fewer bad things – or at least different bad things – going forward. But the Greek word behind it is metanoia, and I think it’s a much more interesting word. It means a change of mind, a transformation of knowing. I like to translate it as “a change of mind and heart that bears fruit in a changed life.”
There is a call to metanoia in recognizing the truth of the Triangular Covenant. The metanoia of integrating this triangular relationship into our understandings of faith, self, world. I’m challenging myself, this Lent, to work on thinking of my relationship with place, with earth, with non-human neighbors, with ecological systems, as utterly integral to my life of prayer and the practice of my faith. To thinking of the natural world as not something I look at out at but something to which I belong.
That is a big shift. I don’t know how to do it but I’m going to try to start with something simple and concrete: Spending a little time outside, with intention and attention, every day. Every day.
I’d like to conclude by sharing two poems. Both of them deal, in different ways, with the triangular covenant. One is angry and one is… not exactly reassuring, but a gentler call to remember that we belong to the world.
I think my hope for myself this season, and for you too, is that we can find ourselves in the ambiguity, the tension, between love and anger, hope and despair, peace and urgency, as we walk the way of Lent as God’s people in and of the world.
Some of you probably know the first one. Mary Oliver, Wild Geese –
The second poem is called Inventing Sin, by George Ella Lyon.
Some sources:
https://archive.org/details/podcast_payton-lectures-2013-spring_the-covenant-triangle_1000153922109
Interview with Ellen Davis:
https://enterthebible.org/audio/4-14-is-there-hope-for-creation
A church talk by Ellen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ducopvj_zyw
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2012/07/ellen-davis-a-hebrew-bible-scholar-you-should-know/
https://canadianmennonite.org/articles/ellen-davis-unearths-agrarian-view-bible