When Alice and I got married at Christ Church Cambridge, we had our reception in the parish hall, because not only are we two little church mice, but it only cost $75/hour to rent, which is about $15,000 cheaper than anything else for a wedding reception in Harvard Square. So we spent our whole budget on food and photography and a big guest list, and we put out some cocktail tables with nice tablecloths, and nobody could see the scuffed-up floor we were dancing on anyway.
It was the perfect plan. Except that our wedding was on July 11, and the parish hall was not air-conditioned, and we’d have a hundred-fifty-something guests. So when temperatures broke into the high 80s during the week before the ceremony, I found myself on the phone with the church’s architect, who was working on renovation plans for the parish house, trying to figure out exactly how many of the air conditioners we’d bought at Ocean State Job Lot we could plug into exactly which of the walls without overwhelming the church’s mid-20th-century electrical systems. It was a little crazy, but we identified the circuits, we figured out a plan, we drew up a diagram, and we were all set.
And so it was that the mother-son dance began that night, in a room that felt warm but not hot, full of friends and family and two delighted newlyweds and three large air conditioners. And as my mother and I began to dance, in a sweet moment we would forever cherish in our memories, all of a sudden: silence!, as the AC kicked back on, tripping a circuit breaker and cutting off all power to the DJ, who had set himself up, despite our careful planning, in the wrong corner of the room.
This happened two or three more times during the night before we figured it out. We unplugged that air conditioner, and while it did get a bit hot in the parish hall, it was still the most fun I’ve ever had at a wedding.
As much as a tripped circuit breaker or a blown fuse might be annoying to a homeowner or a room full of wedding guests, they’re incredibly important. An electrical circuit, after all, can only carry a certain amount of load. If you draw too much power, the actual wires in the circuit can begin to overheat to a dangerous point. So any reasonable system has fuses or circuit breakers built into it, something that will blow or trip and interrupt the circuit before the load stresses it too much and it becomes dangerous. Because, it turns out, your wedding is much more fun if you ruin the mother-son dance than it is if you burn down the church.
And that, according to the Book of Genesis, is why we have rainbows.
Think back to our Old Testament lesson from Genesis this morning. This passage comes at the very end of the story of the Flood, after God’s destroyed everything on earth except for Noah and his family and the ark full of animals.
God seems to regret the decision a bit, because almost immediately after Noah and his family touch dry land, he promises never to do it again. He calls this a covenant, which means a binding agreement or a treaty, but you’ll notice that it’s unconditional; it’s binding only on God. “I establish my covenant with you,” God says, “that never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Gen 9:11) This is good. But any of us who’ve made New Year’s resolutions or chosen Lenten disciplines know that they’re hard to stick to, and God does too; so God, with excellent self-knowledge, sets up a kind of automated reminder: “I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant…and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.” (Gen 9:13-15)
God doesn’t promise never to become angry with humanity again—God knows none of us can control our emotions like that—but God does set a sign. God sets God’s bow in the clouds. And so every time God brings a storm, and the winds rage, and the waters threaten to overcome the earth again, God sees the rainbow, and remembers the promise, and it’s like a circuit breaker for God’s anger, a sign that God’s rage is about to spill over into destruction, and it trips some circuit within God’s mind, and it defuses the situation, and God remembers not to destroy us again.
Now, this is not how rainstorms or rainbows work, according to modern meteorology. Indeed, there’s disagreement between the authors of different books of the Bible about God’s temper: our reading for Ash Wednesday from the Book of Joel, for example, claims that God is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.” (Joel 2:13) So if you’re uncertain about this notion of an angry God needing a reminder not to destroy us, as I think most of us are, you’re in good company. I’d invite you, though, for the next few minutes, to see God’s circuit-breaking rainbow as an image of what Lent can help us learn.
I grew up in a Congregational church, where we didn’t really give things up for Lent; that was something Catholics did. I know many of you, who grew up in the Catholic Church, probably have given things up (or been forced to give them up!): chocolate or soda, meat on Fridays, maybe alcohol when you were older. Depending on how much guilt and shame was pumped into this, you may be one of the many people who gives up Lent for Lent, especially this year. But I want to suggest a different way of looking at this “giving up,” one that was news to me when I heard about it and may be new to you.
Lenten fasts are not about fasting from something bad, about picking one of your vices and trying to give it up permanently. We should do that all the time, although if there’s some destructive pattern in your life that you need to give up, Lent, as a season of repentance, is a perfectly good time to start. Nor is Lent just about taking on a good thing, though that’s also a very admirable practice. Again, we should do good things all the time, although, again, Lent’s a perfectly good time to start something new and good. Fasting is something a little different—it’s not giving up a bad thing forever, or taking on a good thing; it’s giving up a good thing for a certain time. Fasting only exists in relationship to feasting, and that’s why Lenten fasts only run Monday through Saturday; every Sunday is a feast of the resurrection, a miniature Easter in the midst of Lent.
So why give up an innocent luxury like chocolate or reality TV for Lent? I don’t think it’s because pleasure or enjoyment are bad; they’re not. I don’t think it’s some way of making amends for our sins; that’s Jesus’ work on Good Friday, not ours in Lent. Nor is it a way of punishing ourselves through deprivation; that’s not necessary to receive the kind of unconditional love God offers us. I think the reason to give something us is to help us learn where to put our circuit breakers.
Let’s say that I give up something for Lent. I will be tempted, over and over again, to indulge. And it’s a useful exercise to try to understand just when that is. Say I’ve given up Facebook for Lent. It’s not the end of the world if I give in to that temptation for some mindless scrolling. That’s why we fast from relatively-innocent things! But if I give in again and again, I may start to notice some patterns. It’s easy for me, on a Friday morning at 11am, if I’ve got my sermon printed and I had a good night’s sleep, to resist virtually any kind of temptation. But when I am hungry, or angry, or lonely, or tired; when I am feeling unloved, or scared, or frustrated, my willpower is weak, and I just might lose my battle with temptation.
You’ll likely find that the same things that weaken your willpower to resist those small temptations of Lent are the ones that lead you to real sins: the same moments of hunger or boredom or exhaustion in which I might turn to the News Feed are the ones in which I might turn to gossip, or be snippy with my spouse, or any one of a number of much worse patterns of behavior. But studying those moments and learning from them is an opportunity to set your rainbow in the clouds, so to speak; to set reminders and guardrails, to install fuses and circuit breakers in your life that stop you from heading down that road, to set switches that flip when your circuits are overloaded and force you to power down for a moment.
I know that these days, that’s easier said than done. It’s hard to find ways to unwind or decompress when you can’t just go out meet a friend or go off on a retreat. It’s hard to flip the breaker on a fight with your spouse when you’ve been stuck at home together for eleven months. It’s even harder to break out of the circuit of loneliness or worry when you’ve been stuck alone all year.
But it’s the most important thing any of us can do. It’s hard to learn the signs that you’re overloaded, and even harder to wire the right circuit breakers into your life. But it’s nowhere near as hard as realizing you’ve burned your house down all around you.
God has learned to do this pretty well, it seems. After all, we’ve all seen storms. We’ve all seen rainbows. But God has never again destroyed all life on earth with a flood. So may we learn, this Lent, with whatever little temptations we try to resist, how to take care of ourselves so that we can resist the big ones; and may God, to paraphrase the psalm, “guide [us who are] humble in doing right, and teach his way to [we who are] lowly,” (Psalm 25:8) so that we may have the grace to grow into the shape of God’s patient and forgiving love. Amen.