The Very Rev. Dr. Robert Willis: The Most Beautiful Rainbow

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I can’t begin to put into words what pleasure it is to come to this holy place again after the long gap enforced by lockdown. And for Fletcher and for me, it is a tremendous pleasure to be the guests of Dean Randy, and Melissa again, and all of you as well. But perhaps I could also welcome so many of you online, many of you, part of our worldwide garden congregation, who were part of that happy accident engendered by Fletcher, who, when the Archbishop closed churches said, “Well, we can’t let this stop in in England after 1400 years. Go into the garden and I’ll bring a camera and maybe one or two of our congregation will like to join in with what we’re doing. And it could be, we dunno how long it will last”. That began a journey of 26 months. And without missing a day.  

I want to pay tribute to Fletcher because in that time, he learned to be a cameraman and learned to be a set designer and learned all sorts of ways of goading me to be much more brave in everything I was doing. And he wouldn’t let that go. But that’s what that kind of partnership is all about. And the gratitude one feels for the person who can do it for you is immense. So I would pay tribute to him this morning for that huge learning curve. And to those of you who are just going back to watch the 26 months all over again day by day, we say again, “We hope one day we can do some more when we’ve reached a stabilitas somewhere”.

One of the things that Fletcher was always insistent upon was that I take notice of beautiful things in the garden or in the world. So many times I’ve been shouted at saying, “Come and stand here at the great Georgian windows of the Deanery library”. And we were looking at a black sky, but in the middle of that black sky, the most beautiful rainbow. “We can’t see it here,” he’d say, “Let’s go up onto the roof”. “Oh, do we have to?”  “Let’s go onto the roof”. And so on and so forth. And when we got there, of course that enormous sight was made known to us, the rainbow against the black sky. So that I think both of us feel it very moving to be here on Pride Sunday and watch the colors of the rainbow come up leading the procession this morning. We used to learn them with the mnemonic. I can’t say the word. ROYGBIV.  That’s red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, to make the seven colors of the rainbow.

But in the scriptures, the rainbow, of course, is the most important symbol. Twice when people have visions of the throne of God, the exiled prophet Ezekiel, and the exiled John on the island of Patmos in the book of Revelation, when the eyes focus on the throne of God in all its brightness with myriads of angels, there in the middle, over the throne of God is the rainbow. And the rainbow is God’s promise to the earth. I use the term earth advisedly because the promise is not just to humanity, but everything in all its diversity which this earth contains. And that covenant is there in the sky every time we see that beautiful rainbow. God has made a covenant to protect and care for the earth.

Humanity has never responded.  But can do so individually, day by day, by the activity with one another, and making sure that our promise to God is as sure as his promise to us. Sometimes it’s very difficult to be yourself. And that rainbow banner coming up the aisle spoke of what it costs sometimes too. One thinks of the young life of Matthew Shepherd and the witness that that life now gives in the chapel of St. Joseph here happily in the crypt of this wonderful place of refuge and sanctuary for so many. And I hope some of you will feel moved to go down and, and give thanks for a life like Matthew, which ended in terrible torture as though the body and life had been thrown away in desperate circumstances. But now see, he’s part of that rainbow since Catherine of Sienna said, “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire”.

Well, sometimes it’s very difficult to be who God meant you to be. And you need those closest to you to say, “Look, this isn’t you. This isn’t you”. And you realize deep inside you that it isn’t.  Just be brave. And you realize then that with the help of those who are helping you in that way, you can be brave. We don’t know what was happening on that night for the hours that Matthew hung there, but his sacrifice, shall we say, was certainly not in vain. Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.

There’s a children’s story that at the end of the rainbow, if you can find it, there is a crock of gold. And if one takes the rainbow in its, what should we say, it’s parable state in the in the scriptures, then it’s all too true. For when God, by his light shows you the particularity of every human being and the particularity of you yourself, or me, myself, then you realize that this is something that can be an answer to God’s covenant. You have to say it takes both rain and sunshine to make a rainbow. It’s not just all sunshine, it’s black clouds and then the dimension of all God’s definite different colors representing his earth and our humanity.

It’s a lovely gospel that we’ve had read this morning, but it’s actually a really, really powerful one if you dig into it, because Jesus is breaking all kinds of laws and rules. And first of all, he is going into the bedroom of someone who has died and holding the hand of someone they had thought was dead. Unclean that made him in the Jewish law at that time, it meant nothing to him. He had come here to bring a deeper cleansing and a deeper life to all of us, so that we could do the same for each other in so many different ways and learn how to do it. Or once again, the woman coming up to touch him. She had an issue of blood. Unclean that would make him. He threw those laws to the winds. And in seeing who touched him, he said, “My daughter, go in peace. Your faith has made you well”. Not the money you paid to the doctors, perhaps not even touching Jesus physically, the faith that she had in him and God’s promises had made her well.

So as one goes to the chapel of St. Joseph where the memorial to Matthew is, one remembers perhaps another Joseph.  For this, modern translations make me annoyed, about coats with long sleeves. For Joseph in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the old Bible, which the Christians in Jesus’ time will have used, it talks about a coat of many colors.  And because of that coat of many colors, the diversity of Joseph’s ability to give representation to the dreams and visions that he had, his brothers grew envious, and spiteful, and then violent, and then murderous. It’s strange how the very best qualities evoked in humanity and the best creative activity, can in return, get a response of spiteful jealousy. And Joseph, they throw into a pit and leave him for dead, and then decide to sell him to Midianite traders and sent him into Egypt. But God was working through Joseph. God’s promises were being fulfilled through that coat of many colors which had been ripped off him and covered in sheep’s blood and taken to his father to make the father think that he had been killed.

All that evil was transformed into good. It takes both rain and black clouds and sunshine to make a rainbow. This day is a day when we celebrate diversity, but we celebrate too the encouragement that we are able to give to one another to be ourselves. And it’s June the 11th, which in the Christian calendar is St. Barnabas Day. Joseph Barnabas, one of the people in our calendar who gets apostolic status but was not an apostle. He was one of the first called to be a messenger of the gospel, but he is called also the Son of Encouragement. What a title. Would that we could all be sons and daughters and human beings giving encouragement. What encouragement did he give? When everyone else was frightened to death of Saul and casting him out as something evil and not to be allowed into the context of the Holy Church, Barnabas stretched forth his right hand and took Paul by the right hand and introduced him to the others as one who is now going to be a messenger of God’s purpose and promises.

And they worked together. Well, we can read the story as Luke sets it down, but Joseph Barnabas hadn’t ended there. For they had taken with him on the first missionary journey, Mark, John Mark, Barnabas’s nephew. And he’d grown afraid and gone back quite quickly. And when the second time came that Barnabas and Paul were going on a journey, Barnabas said, “Okay, let’s give Mark a second chance”. And Paul said, “Absolutely not. I’m not taking anyone with me that’s failed me before”.  And we’re told (this never happens in the church); the dispute was so sharp that they parted company and Barnabas took Mark with him to Cyprus, which was home ground, to let Mark just develop.

Thank goodness for we were blessed by Mark as well as Barnabas. How many stories we could tell about that. People giving encouragement to those who had been cast out before or were trying to be themselves and couldn’t quite make it. And so bravely someone stepped forward and said, “But that’s not you. This isn’t how you are”. And suddenly the veil drops in your own eyes and you realize that you have to step up to the mark and be brave. Well, here we are with the rainbow colors of Pride Sunday all around us giving thanks for the promise of God, the covenant he’s made to his earth. And the invitation to respond to that promise as a human race and care for the planet, and as individual Christians and care for one another and never vilify someone for what they are. For they may be agents of God’s purpose, not only to his world, but to you. And you may not realize it for years and years after. See, I would want to say from this pulpit, this beautiful Canterbury pulpit on Pride Sunday and St. Barnabas Day, I believe in rainbows and I also believe in the promises of God. Amen.