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Good Morning. How many colours in the rainbow? If you thought the answer was a straightforward seven, it's not always quite that simple. The official rainbow banner for the 2019 Manchester Pride Festival has been unveiled this week, and, following some other world cities, it adds two extra stripes - black and brown – to visibly include diversity of race. Over the last thirty years the rainbow has become a powerful symbol for diversity and inclusion. It was propelled to prominence by South Africa's adopting the imagery of a "rainbow nation", for its new post-apartheid identity. The Manchester banner, and the reaction it has provoked, reflects concerns that those committed to sexual inclusivity are not always at the forefront when it comes to race equality, and vice versa. For the new South Africa, the rainbow was indeed a symbol of diversity, but it was much more than that. To a people steeped in Christian worship, imagery and tradition, it brought to the fore the story of Noah. As the flood waters receded, and he, his family, and the whole diversity of the animal creation, emerged from the Ark, the rainbow was God's promise to them. This was to be the sign of hope. For both Noah and the citizens of South Africa, hope would be essential to the task of forging a new people. They needed assurance that their new world would not suffer a repetition of the fate of the past. Every time a rainbow appeared in the sky it was to be a reminder of a hope. Without hope the temptation to give up on a hard and demanding course might drown them. The power of the rainbow as a sign of hope first inspired me as a young vicar in South Yorkshire. A short while before I arrived in my new parish, a young girl had sadly died at the end of a long illness. I was told again and again of the pictures of rainbows that she had repeatedly drawn through the last months of her life. They had been her sign of hope. When, shortly afterwards, we set up a charitable company, to tackle the challenges of poverty and need in our town, her rainbow became our hope too. We incorporated it into our logo, and our name. Its message of hopeful diversity became our purpose. Over the next few years, we retrained people who had lost their jobs, started a credit union to combat high interest lending, dug gardens, provided lifts to appointments, and worked with ten young unemployed adults, who built their own homes. Hope goes far deeper than optimism. It inspires action in the very teeth of adversity, when we need to strike out into the unknown and the outcome of events is unpredictable. From Pretoria to Pride, from parish life to parliament, maybe we all need to look at rainbows more often.