St Luke’s, Havelock North – The
9th Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 1st, 2008 – Sermon
“And God said to Noah, make an ark.”
I think it’s fair to say that there’s absolutely
nothing simple about today’s readings. With two of them jumping around between
three different chapters and the Gospel touching on some very difficult issues
as to who will and won’t get to heaven these are, to say the least, some rather
complex bits of scripture, and in more ways than one.
How many of us remember the flood story from
Sunday School? Yes, it’s a perennial favourite,
although we don’t usually call it ‘the flood story’ do we, we usually talk
about ‘Noah’s
So here’s my question – would you do it? If God
told you that he was going to wipe out everyone and everything except you and
maybe your family and two of every species that you were going to save in the
ark God wanted you to build, would you do it?
If we were singing hymns at this service this
morning I might have chosen ‘Trust and Obey’.
Actually, I probably wouldn’t have because I don’t much like that hymn, but if
your answer to my question was ‘yes’ you might like the line in it that says ‘what he says we
will do, where he sends we will go; never fear, only trust and obey’.
‘Never fear, only trust and obey.’ Is it that
simple, really? I don’t think so. Let’s face it, we’ve all grown up in a world
that has seen untold horrors perpetrated by people claiming they were just
following orders and I think for the most part we’re pretty wary of anything
that looks like blind obedience. That wariness doesn’t often extend to biblical
situations of course. We’re still happy to extol the virtues of Abraham when he
almost sacrifices his son and Noah when he goes along with a plan that, if we
take it literally, resulted in at the very least hundreds of millions of deaths
and a devastation that makes global warming look like mild sunburn. Blind obedience
has led to such tragedies as the Crusades, 9/11 and the bombing of abortion
clinics, two out of three of which were the work of so-called Christians.
But I come back to my question – if you were
Noah and God came to you and said, ‘make an ark’ would you do it? It’s not very
trusting, I know, and it might well mean that my name gets left out of the next
version of the Bible, but I’m going to ask the question that Noah never asks,
why?
I’m going to ask why because fundamentally
what’s being suggested in the flood story doesn’t stack up as from God to me.
Ironically, while I wouldn’t normally want to suggest you take your religious
instruction from Hollywood movies, I think the version of the
Now that, to me, sounds more like why God might
say ‘build an ark’, why? Because what I hear when I listen to God through ears
shaped by the gospels is that above all else, God is love. What I hear through
the scriptures taken together is that while bad things do happen, they don’t
happen because of God. What I hear is that while people may cry and die, it’s
not because God is killing them, but because sometimes horrible, unfair things
happen but we don’t go through any of them alone. What I hear is feed my sheep.
So that’s why I’m not planning on building any
arks. That’s why I believe people like Jim Jones and David Koresh
got it wrong. They honestly believed they were obeying God, I have very few
doubts about that, but what they missed or ignored or perverted or whatever was
the overriding rule of thumb which we heard in today’s reading from Matthew.
‘Everyone
then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who
built his house on rock.’ Everyone who hears these words of
mine and acts on them.
I
should be honest and admit, yes, this verse does have a very specific meaning
in a very specific context and we risk doing some serious disservice to the
scriptures when we start ripping words out of their contexts. In this case
Jesus is wrapping up the three chapter long series of
teachings that Matthew lumps together in what we commonly call the Sermon on
the Mount. So when we hear ‘everyone then who hears these words’ we should be
aware that in this context it’s referring to these specific words, that is
chapters five, six and seven of Matthew’s gospel. That said, though, I believe
the wider principle remains. Everything we do, everything we base our faith on,
everything we want to claim as Christian needs to be judged in the light of
what we hear from Jesus, and if we’re familiar with what Jesus says then we
also know that need not mean from Jesus personally. ‘Whenever you did it for
the least of these, you did it for me.’ God speaks through often surprising and
unlikely sources, but however it is God speaks, and through whomever or
whatever person or event or experience, our task, our sacred duty, is to
listen.
In
the monastic tradition we often find obedience described as listening. This
isn’t the kind of listening that we might do to the radio while we drive or the
television while we prepare dinner. This isn’t the kind of listening we do when
someone’s talking to us – or preaching a sermon – and we’re nodding sagely
while we’re mentally deciding what to have for lunch. This is the kind of
listening that St Benedict described as being done with ‘the ears of the
heart’. This is the kind of listening that strains to
do so with every fibre of our being at every moment
of the day. This is the kind of listening that demands patience and practice
and constant perseverance. And having listened, having ‘heard the word through
whatever channel it might have come,’ to quote Esther de Waal, ‘I stop and take
it seriously and then do something about it.’ Listening then doing, hearing
then acting, that’s what true obedience involves and there’s absolutely nothing
blind about it.
So
where does that leave us with Noah? Well, of course the writers of Genesis
didn’t have the gospels to listen to, and this is the book of Genesis anyway.
This is the Book of Beginnings which isn’t meant primarily to be a guidebook
for future living, but rather an explanation book as to where things, ideas,
concepts came from. Just as the myth of
So
would we build an ark? Well, I wouldn’t believe it if someone told me God was
going to wipe out the Earth, but it sounds much more likely if the request is,
‘preserve my creation’. Care for the Earth, give life a chance, perhaps we more
than any other people in history are in a position to listen to those words and
having listened, act.
May God give us ears to
hear, hands to hold and hearts to bring the two together. Amen.