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“Along the Way: Leaders/Guides,” Rev. Melissa St. Clair, 2/22/15

“Along the Way: Leaders/Guides”

A sermon preached at

Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

Fort Collins, CO

by the Rev. Melissa St. Clair

February 22, 2015

Our ash-smudged foreheads led us into the season Lent this week.  Back in January, our HeartMinistry team leaders gathered around a table with prune stew and stewed over some ideas that might be our guide throughout this 40 day season.  They came up with the theme Along the Way – recognizing that life and faith is a journey.  We’ll explore that notion together during the next 5 Wednesdays over a simple supper of bread and soup, followed by a brief program.  It’s going to be awesome.  You won’t want to miss it.

But today is Sunday.  And today, like we will for the next six Sundays, we’re exploring whom we meet along the way – everyone from leaders to companions to encouragers to wonderers to doubters to crowds.  Not only do we encounter these people along the way throughout our journey of life and faith, we are these people to others, at any given point.

This morning, we go to the beginning, to the first book of the First Testament to read of the time God promised to always remember.

READ GENESIS 9:8-17

There was certainly no 24-hours news cycle when Noah was building his ark.  No predictions or projections or prognostications of flood-pocalypse to be found on any channel.  We have to wonder though, what the neighbors were thinking when Noah started this little project in his garage.

Was Noah the guy that ran out and bought the huge snow blower when they started calling for the big one – even though it never seemed to snow more than 3-6 inches at a time?  You know, the one whose neighbors then sneak off to the store for an extra gallon of milk and loaf of bread just in case he knows something they don’t know.

Did anyone offer to help Noah in hopes of punching their ticket for the cruise, in case things did go bad? 

Did his wife roll her eyes when Noah skipped dinner for the nth night in a row to go back out to the garage to tinker just a little bit more on his boat?

Harriet Tubman.  Conrad Hilton.  Colin Powell.  What do they have in common with Noah?  To the best of my knowledge, none of them built gigantic boats.  They did each accomplish pretty amazing things throughout their lives.  And they each attribute their successful leadership to their intuition.[1]

We could argue that it wasn’t really intuition that guided Noah.  God was pretty darn direct and specific about what God wanted Noah to do – right down to basically delivering a blueprint for the ark.  And yet to a world, literally, the world as it existed at that time, who had turned away from God, it could’ve easily appeared that Noah’s seemingly-harebrained idea came from a place that defied any sort of evidence or reason.  And Noah did it anyway.

It would be easy enough to NOT really consider Noah a leader.  After all, he just did what God told him to do.  It doesn’t seem like there was a whole lot of discernment involved.

Maybe I’m the only one who ever feels this way, but sometimes I think about how easy it must’ve been for prophets and leaders in the ancient world to know what they were supposed to do – regardless of how hard the things they were supposed to do were.  I mean, between the burning bushes and ark blueprints and big fish and the Lord thus saying this and that, it seems like God was exceptionally direct and clear in those days.

And, pardon the pun, but Noah didn’t even have to get any of God’s people on board.  Well, except for his own family which can be a big enough challenge in its own right.

And yet I would contend that Noah demonstrated some qualities that we look for in leaders.

• Noah was faithful. We read in Genesis 6 this simple – and telling – pronouncement: Noah walked with God. (Genesis 6:9) Frederick Buchner writes, “Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession. It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all.” There was no guarantee that Noah sticking with God would spare him pain and suffering. While he did survive the flood, he also had to go through the storm.

• Noah was obedient to God: It appears twice in the Noah narrative: Noah did this; he did all God commanded him. (Genesis 6:22; 7:5) Buechner also writes, “If you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.”[2] Obedience to God sometimes takes us to places we don’t want to go – or, at the very least, to places we would’ve never considered going on our own.

•  Noah was willing to take a risk: Noah was 600 years old when the floodwaters rose. “Faith,” Buechner says, “is not being sure where you’re going, but going anyway. A journey without maps.” We live in a society that works so hard to minimize anything unknown. We have GPSes and smart phones and Google and Wikipedia. We pursue degree after degree. Rarely do we take the road less travelled. Unless we have a map, of course. Noah had no way of knowing what he was getting into when God came to him and said, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth” (Gen. 6:13). He started building anyway.
•  Noah stuck with the vision. He built the ark when the neighbors must’ve thought he was crazy. And he brought in all the animals God requested. Even once he saw that rainbow hung in the sky – assurance that there would be no more destruction quite like what he and his family endured – how could Noah ever forget? How could Noah forget what Buechner describes as the “first time.”  

Buechner writes, “Little by little the waters had risen, first just spreading in over the kitchen linoleum and trickling down the cellar stairs, but eventually floating newspapers and family photographs off tables and peeling wallpaper off walls until people were driven to the rooftops, where they sat wrapped in blankets with their transistor radios on their laps looking up for a break in the clouds and reassuring each other that this must be the clearing shower at last.”

How Noah surely must’ve remembered “the animals he’d had to leave behind—the old sow with her flaxen lashes squealing on top of a hen house as the ripples lapped at her trotters, the elephants awash up to their hips, a marmalade cat with one ragged ear clinging to a TV aerial as a pair of parakeets in a wicker cage floated by over what had once been the elementary school gym.”

How Noah must’ve remembered “the endless days in the ark—the miserable food, the seasickness, the smells.”

How Noah must’ve remembered “when the downpour finally stopped, and he sent birds out to see if they could find any dry land anywhere, watching them fly away until they were no bigger than flyspecks on a windowpane.”

How Noah must’ve remembered “the feeling in his stomach when they finally flew back having found no place to roost.”[3]

Through it all, Noah stuck to the plan. He didn’t jump ship.

Who has been a Noah on your journey?  Who has been faithful, obedient to God, willing to take a risk, sticking with a vision, even when it wasn’t popular or understood?  Even when it was painful or difficult?

It’s not for nothing that Buechner calls Noah an expert in hoping against hope.

By now you may have thought of someone else who bears striking resemblance to this description – the one whose footsteps we follow in throughout this Lenten season, all the way to the cross.

[1] Heard on the Today show, aired the week of Feb. 16, 2015.

[2] Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace (New York: Harper, 1970), 25.

[3] Retrieved from http://www.frederickbuechner.com/content/noah.