Below is a transcript of an 18 November 2024 address delivered at St John’s Church, Waterloo, by Dr Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, as part of Operation Noah’s 20 Year Anniversary Service. Dr Williams’s address is reprinted below with his permission. You can also watch the address here.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
At the end of the story of Noah’s flood, we’re told about God setting his bow in the clouds: the rainbow, a sign of promise. From now on the world will be stable; there will no more be a catastrophe that wipes out the human race.
That promise of God is a promise that when we look at the world we inhabit, we look at a world that is a sign of faithfulness. As time passes, things change, and yet we live in a world that we can understand, that we can depend on, a world that provides us with regular nourishment: The rain comes down and the crops grow up.
In our readings this evening, that theme of covenant promise has been very much to the fore.
In our very first reading we heard: “In that day, I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky, and the creatures that move along the ground; bow and sword and battle I will abolish from the land so that all may lie down in safety.”
We are to live – when God’s purposes are revealed and fulfilled – in an environment that we can trust, and when we look around us, what we see is a sign of a trustworthy God.
So far, so good we might say.
But the covenant asks of us a faithfulness of response.
It seems that the rest of creation doesn’t have quite the same problems we do with the faithfulness of response. Creation knows its business; creation around us is a stable environment. Time passes, things change and yet this world goes on giving, nourishing itself, nourishing us as part of itself. And we, it seems, have the unique gift within creation of betrayal. We are the ones gifted with the possibility of breaking covenant. The world that is around us doesn’t break covenant in that way. The world around us doesn’t collapse in competition, aggression and acquisition. It takes human genius to achieve that.
It seems to me that when Christians display and explore their concern about the environment in general, and the climate crisis in particular, what they have to look at is this question of covenant: why is it that we can’t keep our promises? Why is it that we can’t respond to God’s faithfulness with a faithfulness of our own? God is faithful to all that God has made. God is faithful in a very distinctive way to the human creation God has made: God espouses us, God marries us.
And yet we have this gift of betrayal: we can and we do walk away.
But what God asks of us is actually to be just like the rest of creation, to be a sign of God’s own promise keeping. One of the challenges to deal with as a Church is to be a trustworthy human community. In the light of all we know about our Church and about ourselves, that can sound like a hollow aspiration at times, and yet that’s the calling. To be a faithful Church is not just to be loyal to a remote ideal – to be a faithful Church is to be a Church that can be trusted, a Church whose commitment is reliable.
And that dependability of the Church as a promise-keeping community is the particular word or challenge we have to put to our world, our human world. Can humanity itself become a promise keeping community?
You know we sometimes talk very glibly about being a ‘rainbow community’ or a ‘rainbow Church’, and that doesn’t just mean colourful and diverse: because the ‘rainbow’, remember, is the sign of the promise, the sign of divine faithfulness. And if we are to be a ‘rainbow Church’ and a ‘rainbow people’, then among other things that surely means we have to work at being trustworthy. We have to work at honouring the promise God has made to us and that we have made to God. The promise that God calls us to make to one another and to the Creation in which we are set.
Covenant. What keeps us from committing to covenant? The strange thing is that covenant sometimes feels like letting go of power. It’s been said often enough these days that people don’t like joining things – they prefer to be patrons rather than members, they like to dip in and out, they like to take on what doesn’t upset their control, so people don’t subscribe; they purchase, they don’t commit.
That may or may not be true about the country we live in, if we think about it; to me it has an air of plausibility. But in that environment we are called to a certain kind of relinquishment of power because when we promise, we give away power. We say, “tomorrow, and the day after, I agree not to be free to change my mind. I agree to be there for you, for God, and for God’s world. I agree in such a depth that it’s as if I shall not be able to change my mind. That’s what I promise”. And that can feel pretty threatening.
It’s nice to think we can always change our mind and step back and do something different. But God has committed God’s Self to the world without any escape clause, and God wants us to commit to one another and to God’s world, without any escape clause. And so we’re enjoined to let go.
Our reading from Leviticus about the Jubilee was a reading about letting go: every so often, step back from thinking that you own the world you’re in, remember it’s God’s, unclinch, let go, let be. And that’s a sign of covenant. A sign of letting go of our urge to possess and control, and squeeze to death the world we’re in. A sign of willingness to let God’s faithful presence come through and live and change everything.
For twenty years, Operation Noah has been urging us to be in that sense a ‘rainbow Church’. A Church that is a sign of promise-keeping and stability, a sign of commitment to the world in which we’re placed.
It’s challenged the Church to risk its security for the sake of that vision. It’s challenged each one of us. The Church, like each one of us, has responded, let’s say, unevenly, so far. The work remains, to put it mildly. And yet Operation Noah has continued to hold the collective feet of the Church to the fire. In this case to a fire of faithful love, which is the heart of God.
Our prayer tonight must be that in the years to come, we continue holding the feet of the Church and our own feet to that fire. We continue to challenge ourselves, and the Church, and the human family to be a covenant community, a promise-keeping reality. We pray above all that in learning to keep our covenant, our promise with the world we’re in, in the name of the God who covenants with the world, we pray that the strength to do that will be given us day after day to such an extent that we may indeed witness something of the promise that we heard about in the prophecy of Hosea: “I will make a covenant for them, with the beasts of the field, the birds of the sky, I will betroth you in righteousness and compassion, I will betroth you in faithfulness and you will acknowledge the Lord”.
We will acknowledge, and perhaps the world will acknowledge, that behind all change and chance stands the promise-keeping God, the God who cannot do other than be faithful and who asks of us the same profound stability and the same deep freedom that arises from that.