Every homeowner has their own strategy for dealing with unsolicited visitors. Ours, it turns out, is a rainbow flag.

Recently, I watched three people walk confidently up our driveway carrying pamphlets. Their purpose was obvious before they reached the porch. They were there to share their faith.

Then they saw the rainbow.

Without saying a word, they stopped, turned around, and walked back down the driveway. The knock never came.

I have to admit, my first reaction was relief. I don’t particularly enjoy unsolicited visitors of any kind. Whether someone is selling pest control, solar panels, magazine subscriptions or salvation, I find the whole experience awkward. There is something strangely intrusive about arriving uninvited at someone else’s front door to persuade them that they need what you have brought.

Faith has never seemed to me like something that flourishes under those conditions.

The deepest moments of faith in my own life have almost always emerged through friendship, honest questions, shared meals, quiet suffering and acts of compassion. Faith grows much more like a garden than a sales pitch.

So yes, I smiled a little as I watched our rainbow flag quietly do the work of ending the conversation before it had begun.

But the longer I thought about it, the more my relief gave way to something else. Compassion. Because that little rainbow hanging beside our door has a much older story than the culture wars often allow us to remember.

Long before it became a symbol of LGBTQ+ pride, Scripture tells us that God placed the rainbow in the sky after the flood. It was not given as a warning. It was not a badge dividing the righteous from the unrighteous. It was a promise. A reassurance. A declaration that violence would not have the last word. That creation itself remained worthy of love.

That promise, according to Genesis, was not made only with Noah. It was made with every living creature. Every generation that would follow. Every person who would someday stand beneath its colors.

I sometimes wonder whether the rainbow’s biblical meaning never disappeared at all.

Perhaps there was divinely intuited wisdom in choosing the rainbow as the symbol of pride for the gender-expansive community. Perhaps people who had spent generations being told they were outside God’s love reached instinctively for the very sign Scripture gives us of God’s enduring covenant with all creation.

If so, the rainbow has not changed its message. It is still saying what it has always said. Do not be afraid. The storm will not have the final word. God has not abandoned the world. All shall be well.

It strikes me as deeply ironic that a symbol God offered to calm human fear has become, for some people, an object of fear itself.

Those three visitors probably never intended to teach me anything. Yet in turning away, they revealed something quietly heartbreaking. Fear often announces itself long before anger does. It causes us to retreat before we’ve listened. To make assumptions before we’ve met another human being. To imagine danger where there may only be difference.

Their fear did not make me angry. It made me wonder what kind of burden they must carry if a rainbow — a symbol of God’s own covenant — could persuade them that this was not a safe door to knock upon. And that realization changed the entire encounter.

One of the many small disciplines of spiritual life is learning to recognize another person’s fear not as an invitation to fight, but as an invitation to love more deeply.

Compassion does not require us to agree with another person’s beliefs. It does ask us to recognize that fear itself is a form of suffering.

Anyone whose faith teaches them to avoid another human being because of the sight of a rainbow has been handed a faith that is still unfinished. Unfinished faith deserves patient conversation more than ridicule.

If those three visitors ever return, I hope they’ll knock. Not because I want to be converted. But because I believe both of us might leave the conversation having discovered something larger than we expected.

The rainbow will still be there, moving gently in the breeze. Not as a threat. Not as a political statement. But as a reminder of one of the oldest promises in Scripture — that after every devastation comes the possibility of peace.

Perhaps that is the promise we all still need. Perhaps the rainbow has been trying to reassure us all along.

Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister of the First Church of Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.