Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, Canvas Sunday, February 23, 2003
You probably remember the basic story about Noah and the Ark. It occurs in the first book of the Hebrew scriptures, in Genesis, not too long after the story of Adam and Eve. As is often true in the archetypal old stories, things in Noah's world are pretty black and white: everyone in Noah's family was good, and everyone else all around them was terribly bad.
God calls down to Noah from on high to tell him about the plan to destroy the earth and its miserable experiment, the human race. Far from wrathful, God is actually portrayed here as despondent at his failed creation: "The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart…" You can almost see him wringing his hands in despair as he paces to and fro the celestial realm. Anyway, God can see that Noah and his family are worth salvaging from the failed experiment; and because of their goodness they get to be the ones to preserve the rest of the life of the earth.
So God told Noah to build an Ark and even laid out all the details: he should use cypress wood, he should build it 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide by 30 cubits tall, and so on. Then he told Noah to bring his family aboard, and to also bring on board, two by two, a matched pair of every living thing: the birds of the air, the animals, every creeping thing. Noah did as he was told. The rains came down for forty days and forty nights, flooding the earth completely while the little island that was the Ark, holding all the life there was left on the planet, floated like a bubble on the destruction.
Finally, after what the biblical story tells us was one hundred fifty days of flood-waters, Noah sent out a bird to scout for signs of hope, a raven; but it returned to him without anything. Seven days later he sent out a dove, and she too returned to him with nothing. After seven more days he again sent her out, and this time she returned to him with a little sprig of fresh olive leaves in her beak, the sign that the waters were receding. Eventually the ark landed and everyone got off to go about the business of repopulating the earth; and God sent the rainbow as a sign that such destruction would never happen again.
It's an old, old story, and we never hear it these days except as a myth or as a child's fairy-tale. But what is it that's true in the story of the flood and Noah's Ark -- true even for a congregation of skeptical Unitarian Universalists in 2003? It seems to me there are three things worth paying attention to in this ancient story, three things that hold some truth for us, albeit not of the literal variety.
The first one has to do with the voice that Noah heard, calling him to do something completely out of whack with what he would normally choose to do with his life. I can remember from childhood the wonderful Bill Cosby comedy riff on this story, where God's voice comes down from on high…"NOAH…,"and Cosby's Noah sounds pretty much the way any of us might sound: "Who is this really?", and later on, as he reluctantly receives his orders, "Well, uh, okay….but, um, what's a 'cubit'?" The routine is funny because it shows up the absurdity of the whole situation: who could take such a voice, such an order, seriously?
The thing is, there is a sort of parallel in our lives that we do take seriously. The call doesn't come to us as a great, booming voice ordering us to build an ark. It comes as something much quieter, something subtle and easy to dismiss or ignore. But here in this religious community, we honor this notion that some among us might hear a call. In the way we honor diversity among us, and in our willingness to hear the truths from a wide variety of sources, we admit out loud that the voice of truth might sometimes come in an unusual or unexpected package.
Our own UU prophet Henry David Thoreau called it 'marching to a different drummer'. It is one of the things we hold most highly, most nearly sacred: the ability to listen, the right to listen, to the different drum when we hear it sounding. Most of us won't get a summons from that different drummer that calls us to a radical change of life. Most of the time it will call us to simply bear more faithfulness toward the ordinary, vital tasks of our lives: to listen to our children better, to stretch in our volunteer labors more generously, to stand up for justice even when we feel frightened or discouraged. Most of us will never hear an inner voice telling us to do something quite as crazy-looking as building a huge boat miles from any waterway.
But it's important to remember something about that summons that came to Noah. Although his neighbors laughed at him and thought he was a fool, in the context of his story, what he did wasn't crazy at all. It was in fact the only sensible thing to do, and by doing it Noah saved the whole world.
Once or twice a lifetime we just might feel ourselves beckoned toward a course of action that seems to those around us absolutely wigged out. I remember that one of the volunteers I came to know in Nicaragua was a retired clerk and grandmother who, at the age of 63 and without yet knowing a word of Spanish, closed up her house and moved to Nicaragua to work as a volunteer for over a year, trying to end a war. The now-famous Granny D, when she was already well into her 90's, decided to walk all the way across the United States to call attention to the crumbling of democracy due to the influence of money.
People have always heard these callings, and those around them have always seen it as crazy, at least at first. That's where the importance of this kind of community comes in. We need a place that honors the notion of marching to a different drummer.
This is the first element in the story of Noah's Ark that has something true to teach us, even today. We are all Noahs. All of us will hear the different drummer from time to time, the different calling in our lives. We can help each other hold onto the trust and courage we need in order to commit ourselves to an unusual, but right, pathway.
The second lesson I find comes from the image of the Ark itself. We've all seen pictures of it over the years, in children's books and in cartoons of all sorts. It lends itself especially to the comical images because of the ludicrous cargo the Ark had to bear. Fleas and orangutans, kangaroos and lions, buffalos and cats and chickens and prairie dogs, spiders and eagles and giraffes and snakes, all hopping or slithering or flapping or shuffling up the gangplank, two by two.
An equally comic but more significant image is of all those animals actually surviving together for so long in such a close and stuffy -- okay, let's be honest, smelly place. All those critters with their strange and individual habits and needs and preferences, their incompatibilities and quirks, their bellows and belches and complaints. They needed to stay afloat, despite all of that. They needed each other.
The archetypal Ark is just a small version of the Ark we know we all ride on together already, this fragile little bubble of life floating through the enormous silences of space. We can't build any extension to it; we can't replace it with a newer model; we can't throw anyone overboard without suffering the consequences ourselves. On this little jewel of an Ark, we've got to figure out how to stay afloat together.
One of the ways we figure it out, it seems to me, is on the smaller circles we form, chosen communities like this congregation. Maybe they're the lifeboats, within the Ark. They are the places where we do have choice. We can switch the boat of our religious community as often as we like. But whatever boat we settle on, we have to learn how to sail with our fellow passengers. We have to figure out how to shape our happiness and our security out of an assortment of fellow travelers who will sometimes seem mismatched, whose irritating habits and idiosyncrasies sometimes get to us. And yet we know -- when we are wise -- that the solitary row-boat isn't much use when the storms come up.
We know also that if we stick it out long enough in a particular community, something wonderful happens. Not only are we able to accept, even treasure the peculiarities of our fellow travelers, but we one day realize that in their graciousness, they have managed to accept our peculiarities as well.
It reminds me a little of the way the sea or a river takes up sharp rocks, even something as honed and dangerous as a glass shard. Through tossing it over and over again with all the other sharp-edged stones, they come out smooth and polished and lovely. I think that's how our communities are also, at their best: places where our sharp edges are sometimes put to good use; where they can be made gentle, where by bumping up against each other we are shaped and changed for the better.
So the second lesson I find in the old story of Noah is that there is something of infinite worth that grows in secret when we are faithful to community. All of us are stronger, safer and probably more interesting people because of our willingness to sail together: the strong ox and stubborn donkey, the busy bees and sleepy sloths, the chattering sparrows and the silent, efficient panthers: all of us.
The third lesson I draw from Noah's Ark comes from the end of the story when Noah, all the passengers and probably the very wood of the Ark itself were weary to death of seeing nothing but the rolling sea on all sides, day after day after day. And without any reason to think there could be a change; without any land in sight at all yet, Noah sent out the birds of his hope, over and over again until one of them came back with a beak-full of new leaves. Author Frederick Beuchner calls that twig, "a little sprig of hope held up against the end of the world." In the face of the great flood -- truly the end of the world, the end of Noah's world -- sending out the bird to search for hope is the supreme act of courage and faith.
Again, we are all Noahs. We all live in danger of inundation; we all live with the certain knowledge of the end of the world -- our own worlds, that is -- because we know that we and all those we love will someday die. We live through times when, like Noah, we've done everything right: we've built the Ark, kept faith with the vision, even put up lovingly with the chaos and compromise of the Ark community …and yet all around us we see nothing but the empty waves going out and out forever. And we begin to despair.
At its very best, the community we form here together is a community of hope. At the heart of our collective lives is the support and nurture we give one another. It's the courage to try one more time and send out the dove of our hope. We are here to keep each other eyeing the horizon instead of curling up into little balls of despair somewhere in the hold of the boat. That's the third lesson of Noah's Ark and the flood: even in the face of the destruction of our worlds, there is a spark of stubborn hope in the human spirit. If we're building our community right, we nurture that spark here
These three true things I find in the story of Noah's Ark seem especially relevant to this particular Sunday, when we launch our Canvass campaign. Those of us involved in planning the process always hope that two things will happen when it's time to raise money for our faith community. We hope that you, the members and friends of USNH, will think seriously about what this peculiar, beloved community means to you. And we hope that when you concentrate your attention in this way on what you value, you'll translate your commitment into a truly generous, even visionary, pledge.
Pledging is not an optional activity, any more than honing wood and making it water-tight are optional if you want a boat to float. It is essential. It is also part of our religious commitment, because it has to do with paying attention to our lives and to where the energy of our lives will be channeled.
Money is part of who we are. Money is our own labor, sweat and sometimes tears, the hours of our work day, translated into a sometimes crass, often misused physical thing. Money is energy, put into a form we can use as we choose. The Canvass is our chance to consider what that tool, that energy of money can do when it is pooled together here in the place where our values and commitments take on shape and power.
It's an unusual time in this congregation, as it has been for the last year or two and will be for a few more. We've got a big change underway right on the other side of this wall as our new sanctuary goes up, and in just a few weeks the wall will be broken out and we'll see the rest of the construction unfold right before our eyes. But that new space is only the shell, the outer casing, for more far-reaching changes that will be underway on the inside. Our leap of faith two years ago was to stretch ourselves to make room, understanding that our mission involves not only those lucky enough to be here already but those others who have not yet found us. Those unknown others, those strangers who need this lifeboat as badly as we do, are going to start arriving among us before long. Until they do, and until their own commitment is kindled and they come to love and own this place as we do, we still have some stretching to do to keep this beloved vessel sailing strong.
You're being asked for something truly outrageous this year. You're being asked to increase your pledge by 33%. If you can't do it -- if you absolutely can't do it -- you're being asked to stretch as far as you possibly can toward it. If you didn't pledge at all last year, you're being challenged on that choice. We are all being asked not to give a token amount, a random amount, but a substantial enough pledge that our values start to show. That's what religious commitment is about: our values ought to show in what we give.
So here's my prayer as we launch our Canvass this year, with thanks to the inspiration offered by a story over three millennia old:
May we go on building this Ark of ours with love and creativity,
and make of it a place where we can listen for our calling.
May we treasure the strange menagerie traveling along with us, and bless the patience with which others bear our quirks.
May we ride out the storms that face us with courage and good will.
May we help each other hold out hope, even when it goes against the odds.
May we remember that with clear vision and gentle hearts,
no matter what deluge we face,
every day calls us to the work of renewing the world. AMEN.