Bible reading: Genesis 9:8-17.

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”

Message.

They say that a week is a long time in politics. Well, let me take you back ten days, to Thursday of last week. That was the day when the Labour Party ditched its commitment to spend huge sums of money on environmental initiatives if it wins the next election.

I must go back to September 2021 to explain why I’m mentioning this. During Labour’s party conference that month Rachel Reeves declared that, if they won the next election, she would be Britain’s first “green chancellor”. She said that £28bn per year would be spent on battery manufacturing, hydrogen and offshore wind power, tree planting, flood defences and home insulation. Her announcement delighted environmentalists and raised a cheer among the Party faithfuls.

As time passed, the promise got watered down. Last June Reeves said that the economic climate had radically changed since Liz Truss’s mini-budget, and delayed plans for a green prosperity fund to start in the first year of a Labour government. By December some party members, knowing that their policy would mean higher Government borrowing and tax rises, were running scared as they believed that this would offer the Conservatives a way of attacking them during an election campaign. However others, including leading economists and business experts, were pushing back against any cuts to the plans, saying that amount being pledged was the “absolute minimum”.

Things then got muddled. On February 1^st the “Guardian” newspaper revealed that the policy was to be ditched. Rachel Reeves was asked on “Sky News” that day if she backed the target; she said that she did but refused to confirm any figure, Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow business secretary, said that the amount remained an ambition but it might not be attainable. On February 6^th Keir Starmer said on “Times Radio” that the pledge is “desperately needed” and Chris Bryant, the shadow culture minister said the next day. “We are not scaling back”.

But on Thursday of last week – the 7^th – Labour confirmed that they didn’t believe they would be able to meet their commitment, blaming the Conservatives for “crashing” the economy. I can’t actually work out how much they would commit to “making Britain green”, but one definite cut would be in home insulation. This was clearly a massive political U-turn and the right-wing press predictably went to town on it. More worryingly, it has further eroded people’s trust in politicians, who are elected in the basis of their promises to us. How do we react when a party leader says one thing on one day and complete reverses it on the next? Can we – indeed should we – trust anything they say?

Christians believe that God both makes and keeps promises. He says to Abraham, “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you”. He says to Joshua, fearful of taking on Moses’ leadership, “I As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you”. He says to David, looking forward to the time when his son Solomon will be king: “He will build a house for me, and I will establish his throne forever.  will be his father, and he will be my son. I will never take my love away from him”. He says to Isaiah, after a time of national trauma: “I will restore your leaders as in days of old, your rulers as at the beginning. Afterward you will be called the City of Righteousness, the Faithful City”. And, turning to Jesus, he not only says that he will be “delivered to the Gentiles [who] will mock, insult him and spit on him; flog him and kill him” but goes on to declare that, on the third day he will rise again. And, of course, almost Jesus’ final words to his disciples are, “I will be with you always, to the end of the age”. Perhaps the best catch-all promise is one in Hebrews, a quote from Deuteronomy: “Be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you’”.

Those are just a few of God’s great promises. I must be even-handed, though, and remind you that he also makes negative ones. For instance, before the Hebrews enter the Promised Land, he explains what will happen if they turn away from him: “I myself will lay waste the land … I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you”. The terrifying judgement scene in Matthew’s Gospel has Jesus saying to those who failed to feed the hungry, help the stranger or visit prisoners, “Depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”. Even the famous verse which says that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son” is soon followed by, “Whover does not believe stands condemned because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son”. These promises (and others) are not by any definition “nice” – you’d never find them in those boxes containing rolled-up scraps of paper printed with encouraging verses from the Bible, to be tweezered out and read if we are feeling “down”. But they are there and we can’t ignore them.

But we need to get back to Noah. And the reason I’ve spend so much time talking about God’s promises is that he makes one here to Noah – and, in fact, not just to Noah but the entire planet. You’ll know the context: Noah, his family and the animals have been saved from the Flood which, we are told, has covered the whole earth and killed every living creature (the fish presumably took care of themselves); but now, says God almost apologetically, that’s something I promise I will never do again. And he goes on to say, in a section of the passage we didn’t read, that day and night, also the seasons of the year, will continue for as long as the world exists. This is a huge promise as it’s not just being made to Noah but to the entire world. And, says God, I’ll place a rainbow in the sky: will remind not just you and all the creatures on earth of my promise but will serve as a reminder to me as well. For this promise, this covenant, is unbreakable and eternal.

Now that word “covenant” is an interesting one. It’s part of Christian language, especially when we eat and drink at Communion, yet it may not be a word we understand particularly well. I’m not going to go into any detail about it (apart from anything else, I’m no Old Testament scholar); but what is usually involved in a covenant are two sides coming together and making conditional promises. What do I mean by that is this: each person will say, “I promise to do such-and-such for you; however if you do this or that thing which goes against our terms and conditions, then the covenant is broken and the promises are null and void”. We’re all familiar with this kind of thing in, say, rental agreements where both tenant and landlord have responsibilities: the tenant agrees to pay the rent on time and not to smash the house up, while the landlord agrees to keep the property in good order. If the tenant doesn’t pay the rent trashes the house, they can be evicted; sadly, it’s difficult for a tenant to force their landlord to keep their side of the agreement. Nevertheless both sides have signed a contract.

I’ve already said that God made covenants with many people, both with individuals and the Hebrew nation; later on we have Jesus bringing in the “new covenant”, signed in his blood, no less. All of these are conditional: basically they all say, “I’ll bless you, so long as you keep to the straight and narrow. If you don’t, you’ll suffer the consequences”. They are in fact rather one-sided, as God initiates them and lays down his conditions. But the covenant with Noah is different. Here there are no conditions, just a simple promise: “No, there won’t be another flood; yes, I’ll sustain the world and everything on it for its entire lifespan – no ifs, no buts”. God is binding himself irrevocably (there’s a good word) to his promise.

Or is he? Does this promise of perpetual “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night” in fact contain what we might call “hidden conditions”? (I’m sure we’ve all happily ticked the “accept terms and conditions” box on documents without bothering to wade through pages of dense, small print). Well, I don’t think that the earth is likely to stop spinning any time soon, so I have no doubts about the “day and night” bit. However we might do well to reflect on the words of one writer who says, “Our world tempts us to believe that the cycle of seasons and the rising and setting of the sun is due entirely to the orbit of the planet, the tilting of its axis, and its revolution around that same axis. While all these things are true, we must never forget that it is God himself who works through these means to keep his promise to Noah. Every change of season and every sunrise and sunset is proof positive that the Lord never breaks his promises”. It’s not hard for modern Christians to think of God as the Creator but we may struggle with the notion that he also sustains it.

But what about those “hidden conditions”? Well, we know that God gave the stewardship of this earth to humans; we read in Genesis 2 of him telling Adam both to cultivate the land and care for it. We have also come to realise that our world is a finely-balanced eco-system; although it probably isn’t true that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Japan eventually leads to a hurricane in the Caribbean, we do now know that the things we humans do can have an enormous effect on our climate. These two thoughts make me feel that, while God’s side in the covenant he made with Noah is 100% secure, we have power to break it. As we didn’t have to add our signature to the contract, we may feel at liberty to do whatever we wish. But that has consequences.

You may have heard of “A Rocha”, the Christian conservation charity. Its Canadian branch has written this about our Bible passage: “The story of God’s covenant with Noah has more relevance in our time than it has ever had before. In a world torn apart by injustice, oppression, wars and environmental degradation, perhaps we are the first generation to read this story with such a sober understanding of the destruction with which it begins and such a sharp awareness of the vital importance of the promise of God with which it ends”.

“A Rocha” goes on to talk about Old Testament prophets who understood that living selfishly and independently from God brings about not only human but also ecological catastrophe. It also reminds us that we live at a crucial time in our earth’s existence, with up to a quarter of known animal and plant species facing extinction in the next fifty years. They conclude, “In this terrible present predicament, the Ark becomes a potent symbol of the human role in God’s rescue effort, and the rainbow shines as a precious promise of hope for the creation itself. If we are looking for answers to the current state of the planet, and in particular the catastrophic loss of biodiversity, we must understand the story of the Flood as more than a story about the human condition, although Noah and his family stand at its heart. In Genesis 9, where God promises a future and a hope, the promise is for the whole creation”. This ancient story still challenges us.

So what thoughts should we be taking away with us this morning? I think there are two main ones. The first is to realise that we do have a responsibility to care for our earth – after all, it’s the only one we’ve got! And although God says that he won’t ever again send a universal flood, nevertheless we are increasingly aware that many so-called “natural disasters” or “acts of God” are at least partly caused by human activity. We must repent – to God, to our planet, to our fellow-people – for our actions which have brought about calamity. And we need to be serious about changing our foolish and selfish ways.

But we can also be reassured that God is a faithful promise-keeper. I appreciate that we don’t always know which of his promises apply to us and which do not; I also realise that we may have genuine doubts about God’s ability to keep his promises. We live, however, in a world where human promises can be broken in a moment and don’t seem to be worth the paper they’re written on. So God’s are the ones we must cling to.

God made a covenant with Noah and sealed it with a rainbow. God made a covenant with Moses and sealed it with two stone tablets. Now he has given the world an even more powerful, yet simple, symbol which is the promise of new life and a new creation. That, of course, is the symbol of Jesus, who is God’s eternal “yes”.