What are you building?
A sermon for the second Sunday after Pentecost
May 29, 2005
North Shore Baptist Church, Chicago, IL
I have three stories I wan to share with you thins morning. I come from a story-telling family, and the rule is you don’t tell just one. So, I wan to talk about Noah, Pope John Paul II and the story of a man who built his house on sand.
First, I want to talk about Noah. This is perhaps the first Bible story I ever learned. I grew up with one of those brown illustrated children’s Bibles in the house. Do some of you know the kind? It’s a heavy book, and right on the cover are all the animals, this scene from Genesis. I loved to look at the animals. The giraffe especially enthralled me. I was six, and the giraffe seemed impossible to me.
The story about Noah was my favorite. I used to read and reread that story. I loved it. I loved it not because of some morbid fascination with floods (That was later, when I was 13…I was weird at 13.), but because God saved Noah and the giraffe…that beautiful giraffe. As a child, I simply thought that there were a bunch of bad people that were trying to hurt Noah and all the animals. God wanted to save them, so God did. God was good to do so. God was good. My theology was not all that nuanced, but at least I was hopeful as a child.
As I grew older, however, I developed several different opinions about this story. I learned several different ways of engaging it. I found myself wondering why God would destroy so much. I wondered why God would have gotten so angry. There have been moments when I have been overcome by frustrations and questions about the hatred and violence of God.
It seems so cruel and unnecessary. Why would God do such a thing? I have read commentary after commentary over the years trying to find some reason for God’s hatred and cruelty. It is overwhelming. To be honest, I get angry just thinking about it.
As usual, I find I miss the point of the story in the first place.
As I prepared for this sermon, I listened to Bill Cosby’s version. His telling of the story of Noah is creative and fun. His humor is all over it. He marvels at Noah’s age. This is a 600-year-old man. You know he’s not in the prime of his life, folks. He’s in his workshop minding his own business, going about his life as any 600 year old guy does and then…
*ding* “NOAH!”
The conversation is hilarious.
Noah is in disbelief. “Am I on Candid Camera?”
Noah doesn’t know what a cubit is…for that matter, neither does God.
Heck, he doesn’t even know what an ark is!
Noah suggests that maybe he’s a little old for this kind of thing and God should get someone else. He’s particularly worried about who will clean up after all those animals. Noah even suggests an alternative plan, that God simply let it rain long enough to let the sewers back up.
The story is playful, silly and perfect, and we are encouraged to use our imaginations in the hearing of it.
Maybe this is a story designed to tell children. Now, I have not built some systematic interpretation around this idea, but I find it worth imagining what it would be like sharing this story with a child the first time. Trish and I don’t have kids, so those of you who know better need to bear with me here…
I am there beside my child as I’m tucking her into bed. She demands a story. So, I start telling the story of Noah and the ark from memory. And because I am telling it from memory, things are a little out of order. And I say, “So God asked Noah to build a big boat. He gave him the measurements and everything. You see God, was going to flood the world and wanted to save Noah.”
Knowing me, because I am so hung up on the greater moral issues at stake, I would forget to mention the animals soon enough and my child would ask “But what about the animals?! You can’t forget the animals!”
“Right, right God asked Noah to collect the animals two by two, one male and one female”
“Daddy?”
“Yes, honey.”
“Why does God need one male and one female?”
“Well, you see…”
Things quickly go far a field. Sometimes, the concerns of a child are different.
This is why I am reminding myself of how I used to hear this story…how the six year old me, that great interpreter of scripture, thought about this story.
Evil is so powerful and frightening. Can these stories be good for children to hear? I find if I fixate on the horrifying evil, the nightmare images, then it is difficult to imagine that they are. But the stories are not asking that I fixate on the evil.
Yet there is always hope . Everything had gone horribly, horribly wrong…and yet God remembered Noah. God remembered not just Noah. He remembered all of creation. That is how I thought of the story when I was a child.
This story is a story of salvation. God saves humanity and all of creation. In response, Noah builds an altar to God. Noah’s response is worship. Noah’s response is to honor God for what God has done to save him, his family and all creation from itself.
Now, let me tell you about Pope John Paul II.
A couple of months ago, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Father Mike Flager from St Sabina’s Catholic Church. We were at a conference at the University of Chicago. Father Flager had been asked to address the conference about issues of social brokenness and how we might be agents of healing. The conference was the same week that the Pope’s funeral mass was being televised…and the Father was not particularly thrilled about how everything was going. He had met the Pope on many occasions. He imagined the Pope would be disappointed
- too much fanfare
- it pointed to the Pope
- it needed to point to Christ
- In Flager’s opinion, the Pope spent his life pointing beyond himself to Christ.
- The world is in need of salvation and only Christ can bring that salvation. The Pope cannot and Flager suggested very strongly that the Pope understood this clearly.
- Flager was frustrated.
- The remainder of his talk to us was about salvation and how all we are to do needs to point to God’s salvation and our need of it.
- Flager would make a good Baptist.
Now, let’s look at the story in Matthew.
- Tell the story. Scripture.
- the end of the Sermon on the Mount – the button “and they were asounded at his teaching” is the button for the whole sermon…not just this one parable.
- the sermon begin with the beatitudes and ends with this story about how one is to build…
- What is the foundation and what are we building?
The story of the children of North Shore Baptist Church is rich and wonderful and worthy of being told. What we have built is worth telling people about. It is worth telling people about not because of what stands, but because of what this place stands upon.
The foundation of this congregation is salvation in Christ. That salvation is the salvation of each individual in this congregation, this neighborhood, this city, this country…the salvation we can proclaim is offered by God through his son Jesus. It is not enough that we cry “Lord! Lord!” or that we prophesy or teach or do good things. All of that is meaningless unless it stands upon the promise of salvation in Christ Jesus.
The story that North Shore shares is a story for God’s children.
- imagination
- creativity
- expresses hope and redemption
- it is future-oriented
- it points to Jesus in praise of the God that saved Noah, in praise of the God that redeems the world through the work of God’s people, that stands on the promises of Christ who is the salvation of creation itself.
These stories are the same story, brothers and sisters. They are our story. They are the story of a loving God. They are the foundation of who we are. What are we building as we look to the future?
I don’t know. I cannot foretell the future. I do believe, however, that if we build it upon the promises of these stories, that it will weather the storms of life and bring God’s children to salvation and hope.
Amen.
I loved the stories from the Bible as a kid.
Nobody had to tell me to read the Bible.
I dove in.
Later in college, in my Modern Novel class,
our Jewish teacher, told us that anyone who
is majoring in English should know the Bible.
Basically every masterpiece of Literature has
some reference to it.
Anyway,
I remember when I was a child that the news said
that there was going to be a flood in Roanoke County. I was terrified. I thought that
God was going to destroy the world again.
I prayed hard all night that God would spare us.
I was much relieved to see the sun the next day
and that we were all still alive.
It seems traumatic for a kid. However, after that stormy night, whenever I got afraid
I remembered that nothing happened. There was
no flood. I began to trust God in my circumstances.
Maybe it was a twisted way to learn to trust God, but that was one of the ways how I learned to trust God.
Or maybe I'm just showing that I wasn't a very bright kid! Giggle.