Preparers of the Way: Noah
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, December 4, 2011
If we are really honest all of us like to be thought of as “cool” and if not “cool” certainly in touch with all the events of the world and the happenings around us. There is nothing nicer than being in vogue, and when the de rigueur passes in front of you, you can identify it as something that you understand and want to follow. Preachers are no different. We all like to be thought of as cool. I mean, we are not; we are hopelessly uncool, but we like to think that we are cool.
We like to think that we are knowledgeable, up-to-date, on the cutting edge, full of knowledge of what is going on in the world around us. Well, if that is the case, you can imagine my anxiety this morning when I realized that the person I am going to be talking about for the next few minutes comes right out of the Ark! Hardly, what you would call contemporary by any standards: Our theme this morning is on the character of Noah.
You might be thinking, “Why is it that I want to speak on Noah when Noah is so old and so past it?” To my great surprise, I went on the Internet this week and found out that rather than being behind the times by a few thousand years, in fact I am ahead of the times! An announcement has just been made that Darren Aronofsky, the great movie producer is going to make a movie titled Noah next year. Michael Fassbender has decided that he wants to be the leading actor, and play Noah. How cool is that? I am not thousands of years behind! I am thousands of years ahead of Hollywood that they should be thinking about Noah! This is a cool sermon, trust me.
Noah is an incredible character. You might be saying, “Noah, that's marvellous, but why in Advent would you want to speak about Noah? Why dredge up someone from thousands of years ago when we are getting ready for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ?” There are a number of reasons. One of them is that Jesus himself actually likened the time in which Noah came to the time of the coming of The Son of Man, his own time. He did that in Matthew 24:37.
Maybe it is because in our text this morning from the Book of Peter II. Peter himself refers to Noah. There in this very difficult text, Peter is writing about a time of a falling away under false teachers, where the early Church was questioning its grounds and its morality and its standards of justice and ethics. Peter is saying, “Look, if God was able to save through Noah who was a righteous man, maybe Noah should be our example.” Peter held up Noah as a righteous person and as an example of how we should live. Both in the Gospels and in one of the Epistles, Noah is mentioned.
The more that I look at the character of Noah the more I realize that in this Noah figure there is an archetype of the coming of the Son of God in Jesus Christ. When you look at the Noah story, there are themes and ideas that cause us to think long and hard about the meaning of the coming of the Son of God, for we read that Noah was a righteous man who walked with God.
In the whole of the Noah and the flood story, from Genesis 6 and following, there is this incredible story of Noah, who was a preacher in his time. We all know the story. It is an ancient story. Stories of the flood appear in the Gilgamesh of Babylonian epic. There are stories about the floods in Mesopotamia and the destruction that they brought, but there is something unique about the Noah story within the Jewish Bible.
The story is that Noah warned humanity that if they didn't listen to God, they would be destroyed. They made fun of Noah for building an ark in a time of dryness. Of course, we all know the story: A flood came, and the animals and the family that had come on to the ark were saved, while others perished. Those that hadn't listened to God faced destruction; but Noah, a righteous person, who walked with God, had listened to him.
Noah is referred to by some theologians as a preacher, not in the conventional sense of preaching to a congregation like I am today, or in many public settings, but that he was a preacher by virtue of his example and his righteousness. We all know that preachers can be very dull and very boring and very dry. Sometimes, preachers completely miss the point altogether and are irrelevant. Sometimes, preachers preach bad sermons. Lord knows, this could be one of them.
Have you ever thought for a moment not so much the sermons that preachers and clergy and people in formal religious setting from rabbis on give, but what about the sermons that you give? What about the message that you bring? You see, Noah wasn't a conventional preacher. The priesthood - the rabbis, the teachers - came after the time of Noah. Noah was an ordinary person, who out of his righteousness and walk with God did an extraordinary thing.
It seems to me this applies to each and every one of us, particularly those who claim to be a person of faith, who seek to be disciples and followers of Christ and followers of God. Think about it! How many poor sermons have you preached in your life? Wasn't it a dreadful sermon that you gave when you decided that you would give your child everything - provide them with all the material and educational benefits in life, but didn't give them any spiritual resources or proclaim to them any meaningful faith?
Wasn't it a dreadful sermon when you rose to a position of affluence and power, when you were in a position of authority, and you did not give thought to people who were scraping along at the bottom of the social ladder and struggling to survive? I am sure this doesn't apply to any of you here, but when with your friends you entered into some kind of drunken state and said, “As long as it doesn't hurt anyone it is okay” as if that somehow is a standard of righteousness and example? Or, perhaps when you became very religious, hyper-religious and felt that your faith could be kept only to yourself and never to care for the poor and the needy and the outcast, but only be concerned with your own religious future, is that not a terrible sermon that you gave?
We all do it. We all give bad sermons. But it seems to me that despite that we need to look at an example of how our life can be a good sermon, and how we can rise above the bad, dry bones sermons that each of us give in our daily lives. We really are witnesses, we really are examples. What we say and do and how we treat others does in fact convey a great deal about what we believe and what we hold dear in our hearts. This is why Noah is so wonderful, because Noah is an archetype not only of the coming of the Son of Man, but of you and me.
He was a righteous man. But even in his righteousness, he struggled. He was a righteous man and his resources though were really strong. We are told in the Book of Genesis that his resources to be a preacher and to set an example were that he walked with God, and by walking with God, he didn't just treat faith as some sort of dry, dull affair, but a living and vibrant relationship with God every day. Lord knows, Noah needed that with all the opposition that he faced.
We hear that he was the person who listened to God. On more than one occasion, the writer of Genesis tells us that Noah heard from God, and God spoke to Noah. God spoke to him through his conscience. God spoke to him through his actions. God speaks through his Word. If we want our lives to be meaningful sermons, we have to listen to God, not put God on a shelf, not let God be an idea, but to have a living and a vibrant and a communicating relationship with God. Then, our lives and our sermons can take on a whole new dimension.
We are told that he was an upright man. Now, it is fascinating, if you read The Book of Genesis, there is a sense in which he falls from grace. He is found naked in his tent and his sons make fun of him: clearly he must have drunk too much wine. He was spread out and he was not himself and had lost his way. He wasn't a perfect person. At no point was he called “perfect” except he had a singular desire in his life to serve God. Even in his imperfections, and we all have them and we all fall short in some way or another in our lives, still God used him. The resource that Noah had was faith.
Look at his congregation that he preached to. What a motley crew humanity was at the time of Noah! Here were people who were materialistic and only interested in consuming goods for themselves. They were: violent, struggling, plunging humanity into violence against each other. Here was a group of people being represented as having no sense of what the truth was, and having no desire to follow in it. In fact, they were so carried away with themselves that when Noah came along and warned them out of love that bad things would happen, they made fun of him rather than listen to him.
There is a moment in the writings of a very well known economist, who has been the subject of great debate over the last few years as to whether or not his way can help us out of the economic morass the world is in, he wrote these rather cynical words: “If we are to succeed, we call good bad and bad good.” I realize he was trying to change the way things were being done economically. The problem was that it became an ideal that we call the good bad and the bad good. The problem is that when that happens, there is chaos, just as there was in the time of Noah. The people had lost their way. They had called good bad and bad good and had lost their way.
Noah's congregation was far worse than the congregations that your sermons go to every day: The people with whom you interact every day. Still Noah, in the midst of all this, wanted above all else for God's way to be known and understood.
What was the theme of his message? The theme of his message was true and timeless. He believed that righteousness comes from faith. Right living and a right relationship with God and a right relationship with our neighbour comes through our faith, and our faith puts right the wrong relationships and builds on the good, reminding us what God's will and purpose is for our lives. This was no weak, sentimental sense of righteousness. Noah is tough and he is hard to listen to, because he informs us that there are consequences to our actions, we reap what we sow.
As you all know I love poetry. During the summer, I love to sit back and read the greats. One of my all time favourites is Lord Byron. Byron, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage has this wonderful line, and he carries this out in his own personal life when he referred to it at a later date. Byron wrote this:
The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree that I planted
They have torn me and I bleed
I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed
Powerful words! Byron understood that the tree he planted was now, through its thorns, tearing at him and causing him to bleed. He knew what he had sown, he eventually reaped. That is true for all time.
If we sow the seeds of environmental destruction, we will reap the whirlwind of a broken world. If we sow the seeds of immorality, we will reap the whirlwind of chaos. If we sow the seeds of injustice and bigotry, we will in fact reap the effects of violence on earth. If we sow the seeds of greed and disparity, we will reap the effects of instability. My friends, what Noah is saying is simply the truth and the truth is, and this is a theme of his, that in the midst of what we reap and what we sow, we must be careful.
There is one last thing about Noah. Believe-you-me, it encourages me like nothing else, and that is the outcome of his preaching: Noah was a failure. Not one convert to his sermon! No one joined him on the ark except his family and the animals. He was a resplendent failure in every sense of the word. His words did not have the impact that he would have wanted. Throughout the ages, sermons are given, and the responses are not there. When he gave speeches, people just laughed at him and mocked him and made fun of him.
There is of course a pattern in this and that is that those who have given sermons of righteousness and truth throughout the ages have been rejected and been laughed at and have been put down. There was, for example, a young British lad who was physically rather small, and did not perform very well on the sports field of his private school, and who had a speech impediment that people made fun of him when he had to give public speeches in front of his school. When he decided to sign up for the military, he was told, “What we need is a real man - not what you are.” Finally, when he became a Member of Parliament in Britain, when he gave his inaugural speech, everyone who was there got up and left, except the Speaker. It kind of makes me appreciate the fact that you stay until the end of my sermons! Yet, when the dark days of Nazism arose, it was his voice and his speeches in parliament that transformed the nation.
He is not alone. Noah would have said to Winston Churchill, “I know just how you feel.” Noah was unsuccessful, and yet, when the world was at the point of being completely obliterated, it was Noah's righteous faith that saved the day. Oh, this may be a fanciful story, it may be woven into literature and art, but it is a powerful message of all time.
It is not whether we are successful in our sermons that we give in our lives; it is not that others march into line and follow our example; it is not that we fill our churches and have cultural ascendancy; it is not that we are all-powerful and everyone will listen to the Word of God; it is not that our example as good people will always lead to success. It doesn't work that way. It never has, and it never will!
The barometer of the success of a good sermon and a righteous life is only found in one thing, and one thing only, and that is: Has it been faithful to God? For Noah, the affirmation is an overwhelming “Yes!” For you and your sermon and your life may it be an overwhelming “Yes!” and may this sermon not be as bad as I think it is. Amen.