Very late last night, as I was driving home from house church at Sheridan Lake, I saw something I have never seen before and reckon will never see again.
It was an odd night for late November. Usually by this time of the year in the Cariboo-Chilcotin region of B.C., we have snowstorms and icy winds. But last night the broad Cariboo horizon was warm, still and mostly clear. Here and there, off in the distance, were small rain skirmishes. The moon was bright and full, shining at the same time as the mini-rainstorms skittered around the horizon. It was a strange, brooding and eerie sky.
I love to watch the night sky and so I was letting my eyes drift from road to horizon and back again as I drove. And then my eyes fell on something that caused me to pull over to the side of the road and stare. Adjacent to one of the distant rain squalls was a rainbow arching almost across the sky. It was the same as a daytime rainbow. It had all the same colours except that instead of looking as though it were painted in bright acrylic on a white canvas, it was more like it was painted in very soft watercolours on a blue-black blotter. It was fully there but so soft that you almost had to look at it out of the corner of your eye to see it.
I sat and stared, not believing what my eyes beheld. I heard myself say, “Well I'll be! A night rainbow.” I shook my head and rubbed my road-weary eyes, but I couldn't make it disappear. I shut down the truck, turned out the headlights and got out on the side of the road. I stood there amazed. It was the strangest thing I had ever seen in the night sky, something I had never even heard of before. Eventually, I climbed back into my truck and proceeded home to my bed. By the time I negotiated the gravel road to our house, the rainbow was no longer visible. I crawled into bed beside Linda and after she awoke, I told her about my night rainbow. I don't think she believed me.
This morning, the image of the night rainbow is still on my mind. To be quite frank, I am not sure what to do with it and so I am sitting at the computer keyboard seeing if I can work it out. For me, the things that I see in creation never are just naturally occurring phenomenon. I take Scripture literally and for me what I see in creation is as the psalmist says: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.” (Ps.19.1-2)
And so this morning I ask myself, What did God say to me in the night sky on my way home? What part of His Word did he proclaim to me with that strange night rainbow? As I think about it, the one place that a rainbow figures in Scripture is in the Noah story, in Genesis. When I read it now, something startling stands out to me. I have always known the rainbow to be a peace sign from God to humanity. God hangs up His war bow in the sky, so to speak. But when I read the story just now, I see that the divine covenant of peace includes every living thing on Earth: “The rainbow shall be in the cloud and I will look on it to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” (Gen.9.16) To me, this suddenly seems huge.
As a person whose first vocation was in the environmental sciences, I have many friends from my former career who continually challenge me. On the one hand they accuse my Christian faith of being the underpinning of what has happened with regard to environmental degradation, blaming it on the Christian biblical understanding of subduing the earth. On the other hand, they preach a shrill doom-and-gloom apocalyptic message concerning the environment and the future.
I have been able to offer a solid biblical interpretation concerning the subduing of the earth that is helpful. However, I have never been able to come up with a suitable response to the doom-and-gloom apocalyptic message. I find environmental apocalyptic preachers to be about as helpful as Christian apocalyptic preachers. Hopelessness paralyses me. One version of the end times is about as crippling as the other. As a person genuinely concerned about the environment, how can I work to care for it, if there is no hope?
As I think about all of the doom-and-gloom environmental preaching and the paralysis it spawns, last night's rainbow becomes a stark proclamation of the Word of God. No matter how dark the skies seem with regards to creation in these present times, God's unchangeable covenant of shalom for all creation in Genesis 9 still holds true. With regards to creation, there is divine promise and divine hope. The Creator wins. This present darkness, these stormy times and those who perpetuate the destruction of the environment can never overcome creation. God's covenant rainbow glows in the darkness and the present darkness cannot overcome it. Rainbows do appear in the night and hope is the ground from which real and meaningful environmental care can sprout.
