This month rainbows are everywhere. They’re in stores, on sports uniforms, and on the front doors of our church. Yes you read that last part right. When a craftsman carved a design into the doors of our church in the early 1980s he included not just a cross and a dove but a rainbow as well.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that rainbow and the story it comes from and in fact I think for Christian’s the rainbow and the story it references provides a beautifully grounding Scriptural paradigm as our culture celebrates pride month.
The Bible’s story of the rainbow occurs after Noah and his family emerge from the flood into a judged and renewed world. Through the rainbow God promised not to judge the world like that again (Genesis 9). An odd story to become the heart of the LGBTQ pride flag. But it’s a beautiful reminder:
1. God is a more beautiful Creator than we think
The rainbow and its beauty carry a simple truth: what God makes is beautiful. The rainbow is striking and vivid and powerful in nature because it carries with it the limitless creativity of the Creator.
Similarly, God’s design for all things carries his design and intention and beauty. We do not only hold fast to the Bible’s teaching on sexuality and gender because we believe it’s right, but because we believe that its rightness displays beauty. While there are tensions and challenges in following God’s design let us never lose sight of its beauty.
2. Sin is more serious than we think
We have a toddler version of Noah’s Ark but something in it is oddly missing: the reason for the flood in the first place. Often many will seem to say “What’s the harm in affirming people as they simply live their lives? Why can’t you simply go along?” To ask this fundamentally misunderstands the story of the flood and the story of the Bible.
We all rightly decry the effects of sin – hatred and war and murder and abuse. But we often minimize the seriousness of our individual sin. But the flood is a start reminder that sin completely corrupts God’s creation on every level and a good, loving, and just God cannot ignore it. He would not be good if he did.
3. God’s mercy is more beautiful than we think
The whole reason we have the story of Noah is that world history did not end at the flood. In his immense mercy God spares Noah and his family. Despite (as we’ll see later) Noah being flawed and sinful himself, God has mercy on humanity.
Mercy is when someone does not receive what they deserve. And rightly then we should see every step of every day as God’s mercy to us. The shining of the sun, the coming of the rain, the air in our lungs, are all mercy on this side of the Fall. Every good gift we enjoy from God is a gift of mercy.
4. Following God will look stranger than we think
In the story of Noah I often wonder what others must have thought as Noah constructed a massive seafaring vessel in the middle of the solid ground landscape. Scripture says that the people around Noah simply ignored him and continued in their sin, presuming life would continue on as before (Matthew 24:37-39). Noah’s entire life was turned upside down, his resources spent, and his priorities rearranged – all for a future he could not fully see before the rains came.
In the Western world today Christians often look strange, especially seen through the lens of the predominant views on gender and sexuality. But Noah reminds us that when you follow God, strangeness is built in. The way God calls us to live will often make no sense to the world around us, looking ahead to a future we can’t fully see. But it reminds us that, however strange, following the Lord is not madness but clarity.
5. Even “good” people are more flawed than they think
Perhaps you might think that selecting the most “righteous” of the people on earth would result in a new and perfect society – tragically it was not so. Noah the savior of humanity ends up drunk and naked and shamed in his tent in Genesis 9. One of the things God is helping us see in the story of Noah is that the problem with sin is not just “out there” among the worst of the worst, but “in here” among even those who seem righteous by comparison.
So when it comes to pride month no Christian should approach the month self-righteously, as if we are not sinners ourselves. Instead, we must remind ourselves that even those who seem “good” in the world are desperately flawed and carry sin in their own hearts.
Our only hope is that God would create a way to escape the flood of judgment. Our only hope is that just as those few were carried to safety through God’s provision of the ark, we to can be carried safely through the provision of the cross: “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18).
The good news is that the doors of the ark of salvation still stand open for sinners like us.
Let us rejoice then, and invite others in.