Every Step of the Way

This is the message given in the United Methodist churches of the Wheatland Parish Sunday, July 13, 2014.  The Bible verses are Genesis 8:6-20.

            In our sermon series about Noah, we talked last week about how depressing it must have been for Noah while he was on the ark.  Nothing to do but take care of the animals and wait for the rain to stop.  Then nothing to do but take care of the animals and wait for the water to go down.  Day after day, week after week, month after month, nothing to do but take care of the animals and wait.

            We did not talk about what Noah might have been doing while he was waiting.  You think he might have been praying?  I sure do.  For one thing, we’re told that Noah was a righteous man who walked faithfully with God, so praying sounds like something he’d probably have done.  There’s more to it than that, though.  

I think Noah was praying because that’s the sort of thing we human beings tend to do when things are not going well for us.  We pray.  We pray a lot.  We pray, God, where are you?  Why are you not doing something to help me?  You must see what I’m going through here.  You must know what’s going on.  Why don’t you do something about it?  What are you waiting for?  And the longer our bad situation lasts, the more desperate our prayers get.  We pray more often.  We pray longer.  We keep asking God what’s going on.  We keep asking why God is not acting.

And then, finally, God does act.  God acts, and our situation finally changes.  We get out of our situation and into a new one.  As we said last week, life can begin again.

And when that happens, what do we do?  Well, we get on with our lives.  And that’s okay--in fact, to an extent it’s a good thing, it’s what we need to do--but too often, what do we leave behind?  God.  We stop praying.  The bad situation is over, so we feel like we don’t need to pray any more.  We were so desperate for God to do something, but then after God does it, we just kind of go, “Oh, okay, good.  About time.”  And we move forward, leaving God behind us.

That’s not what Noah did.  Look at what Genesis says.  The water finally recedes.  God tells Noah he can come out of the ark.  He does, along with his family and all the animals and birds and everything.  And then, we’re told, “Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it.”  

In other words, as soon as Noah got everyone off the ark, the first thing he did was give thanks to God.  Noah did not leave God behind.  Noah kept God with him.  Noah’s life was going to begin again, and Noah wanted to make sure God would be part of this new life he was going to have.

Now, God had a response to Noah’s thanks, and we’re going to talk about that next week.  I don’t want to talk about it today because God’s response in not the point, at least not today.  We don’t thank God so God will give us a specific response.  Noah did not know what God’s response would be to the offering he gave.  I mean, I’m sure Noah thought and hoped God would be pleased, but he did not know what, specifically God would do in response to him.

In fact, Noah did not know that God would do anything in response.  God was certainly not obligated to.  We don’t thank God because we want God to do something in return.  We thank God because it’s the right thing to do.

And we know that.  I suspect pretty much everyone here would agree with that.  But still, a lot of time, that’s knowledge does not sink in.  I think there are a lot of times we pray in an attempt to try to manipulate God.  We think that if we pray in a certain way, if we use certain words, if we pray at certain times, we can get God to do things for us.  

We’d never say it that way, of course.  And we know better.  We know that’s not really how it works, that we cannot manipulate God in this way.  And we probably don’t even realize that’s what we’re trying to do sometimes.  But we still do it.  And I do it, too.

The thing is that, too often, we think of God as being like us.  That’s not entirely our fault.  After all, human beings are our only real frame of reference.  God is so far beyond us that we cannot even really imagine what God is like.  But we have to imagine God somehow, so we imagine God as similar to ourselves, as similar to human beings, just to give ourselves a way to wrap our minds around who God is.

The disciples had the same problem.  They had Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, right there with them.  And they knew that.  They knew who Jesus was, or at least they said they did.  But still, he looked like a human being, and he walked like a human being, and he sounded like a human being, so they’d always make the mistake of thinking of him as a human being.  A really good human being, a really smart human being, Teacher, Rabbi, and all that, but still, a human being.

That’s why whenever Jesus did a miracle, the disciples would be standing there with their mouths hanging open.  They’d be going “Good grief, who is this?  How’d he do that?”  Because even though they claimed to know who Jesus was, they just could not understand or deal with the reality of it.  And it would happen every single time.  Jesus would drive out demons or calm a storm or something, and the disciples would say, “What the what?  What just happened here?  Who is this guy anyway?”  They thought they knew better, they thought they knew who Jesus was, but they still could not wrap their minds around the fact that this really was Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, standing there in front of them.

And because we tend to imagine that God is similar to human beings, similar to ourselves, we sometimes tend to treat God that way, too.  We claim to know who Jesus is, but we cannot really understand or deal with the reality of it.  Instead, we start expecting God to react to us the way we’d expect a human being to react to us.  We think, well, if I do this, God will do that.  If I do something good for God, God will do something good for me.  If I thank God when God does something nice for me, that’ll make God feel good and God is more likely to do more nice things for me.

Again, a lot of times we’re probably not even aware that we’re doing this.  And it’s not that doing it makes us horrible, evil people or anything.  It makes us human, that’s all.  And God understands that we’re human.

But at the same time, God asks us to be more than human.  God asks us to go beyond ourselves.  God asks us to go beyond our natural human instincts.  The Apostle Paul said that we are to be “imitators of God”.  In other words, we’re not supposed to try to make God be more like us.  We’re supposed to try to make ourselves be more like God.

One of the ways we do that is to make sure God is always a part of our lives.  And that brings us back to Noah.  When Noah got himself and everybody else off the ark, the first thing Noah did was thank God.  That was not because Noah wanted God to do something for him.  It was because Noah knew the only way he had survived the flood, and the only way he would survive the new life he was going to start, was if God was with him every step of the way.  He was not asking for anything in particular.  All he wanted, all he hoped for, was what the disciples had when Jesus was with them.  Noah wanted Emmanuel.  He wanted God with him.  God had been with him in all the long days and weeks and months on the ark.  But Noah knew he still needed God to be with him in the days and weeks and months to come.

And so do we.  Maybe some of us feel like we’re still on the ark, waiting for things to get better and wondering if they will.  Maybe some of us feel like we’ve survived the storm, and we’re ready to start our new life.  Maybe some of us feel like we’re just getting on the ark, like the storm is just about to hit, and wondering how or if we’re going to get through it.

No matter where we are, we still need God.  We need God every step of the way.  We need God when we’re just getting on the ark, when the storm is just about to hit.  We need God while we’re on the ark, waiting for things to get better.  And after things do get better, after we’ve survived the storm and are ready to move on to our new life, we still need God.  We need God to be with us each and every step of the way.

The first thing Noah did after he got off the ark was thank God.  When we survive the storms of our lives, the first thing we need to do is thank God, too.  Not because we expect God to do something in return.  Because we need God with us every step of the way.