Zoomer's sermon of 24 June 2018: "Forty Some-Odd"

(KJV) Genesis 7:12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

My friends, the Word of the Lord.

Hope that Scripture wasn't too drawn-out and complicated for you! Sometimes you set out to write on a topic and discover you've bit off more than you can chew. I was going to list all the Bible stories that last for forty days -- or forty years. I was going to go into great depth about Noah and the Ark; Moses and the Children of Israel in the wilderness for forty years, and how their journey was spiritual as well as geographical; Jesus spending forty days in the wilderness and being tempted by Satan. I was going to extrapolate on them, compare them, discover the common denominator, and present the result to you as a revelation.

Well, it would have to be a book. Or a series of sermons. Because forty is in there a LOT!

When the Bible says forty, does it mean exactly forty? Well, sometimes the answer to a Bible question is "It depends on who you ask." Sometimes forty means "many." According to some scholars, Moses is said to have spent 40 years in the wilderness because that's about how long it would take for the original generation to die off and a new one to come up. It's probably "about" 40 years. Or maybe just "years!"

One of my 'guilty pleasures' is watching historical documentaries. The reasons are threefold: It's as close to a time machine as I'll ever get. I can witness events that happened before I even got here. I can listen to voices that fell silent long ago. History helps me to understand the present, and makes me realize that our idealized past wasn't all that ideal. [We have ugly, mud-slinging Presidential campaigns. So did Jefferson and Adams.] And best of all, we already know how history resolves itself. The North wins the Civil War. Lindbergh's plane makes it all the way to France. Glenn Miller's plane doesn't. The Allies defeat the Axis. Truman defeats Dewey. There's not much nail-biting involved.

Of course, any era segues into something else, and we always wind up in the present. We don't know how current events are going to play out...

Time is a funny thing. It can be arbitrary or precise. They hit us over the head with the importance of punctuality in school. If you weren't in your seat when the bell rang, you were TARDY! Your punishment was Detention! You had to stay there an hour later than you planned. Starting time was carved in marble. Time of departure was a variable. [Or at least that's the way it was in MY day, by cracky!]

Seemingly random approximations seem to dictate our own comings and goings. Always have. That's why we say things like "noonish."

Like the old joke about the sheriff in a small town who saw a stranger and decided to run him in for vagrancy:

Hey, stranger. Do you work?
Now and then.
Where?
Here and there.
What do you do?
This and that.
Well, you're goin' to jail.
When will I get out?
Sooner or later!

Anybody here ever had a doctor's appointment? Any of you show up at the right time, only to find yourself cooling your heels in the waiting room for a long time? Of course! We expect it! I'm not trying to denigrate doctors. They've saved my life at least three times. And they don't know who's gonna walk in with what or how much time they'll take up. So I always take a book. If I'm working on a sermon, I take a study Bible and pore over the footnotes. Otherwise, I'm inching my way through the Life of Ty Cobb. They tell you when to be there, but not when you'll be free to leave.

That's pretty much what God did to Noah. He told Noah when the rain would start, and how long it would go on, but He didn't say anything about how long he would have to stay in the ark. God didn't tell him how long it would take for the water to go down and for the ground to dry. [That's all spelled out in Chapter 8.]

Noah was in the ark for a year. He didn't have a book, either.

Our own crises are like that. God promises they'll pass, but He doesn't say when.

Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. God found him righteous. But what God gave Noah wasn't so much a kindness as it was a huge, unpleasant task. Noah's salvation was punishment. A year of hard work, discomfort, and frustration.

First, he had to build the ark to God's specifications [which are recorded in Genesis 6:13-16, if you want to read them]. The measurements are in Cubits, which is about the length of your forearm OR the distance from tip of your middle finger to bottom of your elbow. It is to be built out of gopher wood. How big was it? Oh, about the length of one-and-a-half football fields, and about four stories tall. It had three decks, and the decks had rooms. That's a lot of gopher wood!

I saw a film many years ago called In Search of Noah's Ark, wherein a model ship was built as per Biblical specs and placed in an aquarium. Guess what? It floated!

The Bible doesn't spell out the nature of life on that boat. It doesn't have to. Eight people, four couples. Wives, husbands and inlaws in each other's faces. It would've been like the Diary of Anne Frank in a floating farm. Noisy, smelly, sliding around, shoveling food, shoveling farm bi-products. Tension. Anxiety. In some versions of the story, Noah didn't sleep a wink the whole time he was in the ark.

There's a big difference between reading about it or watching it years after the fact and actually being in the middle of it as it unfolds. We can read the story of Noah with no anxiety or nail-biting because we know how it ends. Noah et al didn't. Neither did anybody not aboard the ark.

We all have periods of discomfort, grief, monumental tasks, infirmity, uncertainty. Times of trial, or testing, or searching, or waiting. We don't know how long it will last. Forty days? Forty years? A long time? A little while?

WE all have epiphanies -- realizations of truth or knowledge -- as we go through life. Scripture that manifests its meaning through our own experiences. Lessons learned.

The lesson we can learn from this old, old story is that God will not abandon us. [He promised not to flood the whole world again.] Just because our forty years feels like hard work and punishment, that doesn’t preclude it from being the work of God's grace in our lives. Things will get better. In His time. Amen.