GENESIS 12:l1-8
PSALM 33:12-22
ROMANS 4:1-5,13-17
JOHN 3:1-17
Sermon – 2/24/02
Who? What?
Where? When? How?
These are the questions reporters are taught to ask when they are
covering or researching a story – and they are the questions most adults
consider when they are pondering a Major Life Change. What is the change, who will be involved or
affected, where will we be living/working/going to school, when
will this be settled, how will it actually happen? Moving, getting a job, changing jobs, retiring,
getting married, having kids, sending kids to college – with these and many
other major life changes, people ought to ponder the impact, especially
if many people are dependent on them.
Not
Abraham.
“Who?”
Some Voice he’d never heard before. “What?” The voice said “Go from your country and
your kindred and your father’s house to a land that I will show you: I will
make of you a great nation, and I will bless you.” “Where?” “To a land that
I will show you.” Hmm. “When?”
“Now.” “I mean, when will all this be a done deal?” (Silence) Hmm.
“Uh, if it’s not too much trouble, how is this going to happen?”
(Silence)
Abraham
was not exactly an unemployed 21 year-old guy living at home who could one day
decide to drive to Fort Lauderdale in his pick-up just because.
“Abraham
moving” meant an entire small village moving.
Him, his wife, his nephew, his slaves and assorted hangers-on, and all
Abraham’s “walking around money” – most of which was, in fact, walking around:
several hundred head of sheep, goats and miscellaneous other animals all of
which needed to be watered, pastured, protected from wild animals and kept
track of, even when they weren’t getting milked, sheared, slaughtered or giving
birth.
Besides
which, Abraham had spent his entire, now considerable, life living near major
river systems – the Tigris/Euphrates and their tributaries, and he had
previously moved upstream the length of modern-day Iraq from near what is now
the Kuwaiti border north-west into modern Syria. The very vague indications he was getting about “the land that I
will show you” said “south”, away from the security of the rivers to a high
elevation, arid land he had never been to before, nor had anyone he knew. Nor did he have brochures from Canaan’s
Chamber of Commerce detailing the best pasturelands or an AAA triptik with the
preferred route marked in yellow highlighter.
In
short, he was by any rational measure woefully unprepared for what seemed
likely to be a foolish, unnecessary and disastrous move. Except that God – who had never spoken to
anyone else in living memory – told him “Go”.
So
we can picture 75 year-old Abraham with a Nike “swoosh” on his Kafiyeh emblazoned with the words:
“God’s will: just do it.”
Even
so, it wasn’t that simple. In last week’s
reading from Genesis 3 we were pondering The Human Problem: God created a
beautiful and bountiful world, installed human beings as the crown of creation,
and gave us freedom – which we promptly used to “blow off” God and do our own
thing, with disastrous results. In the
stories that follow, also describing the psychological and moral childhood of
the human race as a whole in “the time before time”, human rebellion against
God leads to disaster upon disaster, such that by the end of Genesis 11, human
beings are divided against each other, divided by many languages, and united
only by their ignorance of the One True God who made them...the One who has a
plan.
The
mist lifts as we transition to Chapter 12 and we are in a place we can find on
a map, observing behaviors we can date anthropologically with some assurance to
c.1800-2000 B.C., and watching a man, and his wife who are Chapter One
in God’s plan to begin the redemption of
the world. But first, they have to
overcome some old habits of thought, represented in this skit by Sarah, who so
far has not even heard the divine voice.
Abraham: “We break camp tomorrow.”
Sarah: “We what? But we just
got here! The pastureland
is great, there’s plenty of water, even the servants have stopped bickering for the first time in weeks. Besides, I’m all unpacked.”
Abraham: “We break camp tomorrow. The Lord said to me, ‘Go from your own country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you...”
Sarah: (looks around for
another speaker) “Uh, excuse me, if you don’t mind my asking, who exactly is
the Lord and where is he? I
don’t see anybody.”
Abraham: The Lord is God.
Sarah: Oh, I get it. Some god spoke to you and now you want to
uproot all of us and go off god knows where –
Abraham: Exactly.
Sarah: ... god knows where
because of some Voice. Now, come on, we
both went to the same Sunday School and we both know that in Mesopotamia there
are dozens of gods that we can both think of off the tops of our heads,
some of them none too friendly, who just might want to play a practical joke on
you and me for their own amusement. So
the point is, which god spoke to you, because I hear that most of the
time you can just Fed-Ex them a burnt offering and that makes them happy and
takes them off your case and we can go about our own business. So you see we don’t have to go
running just because some god I’ve never heard of before said to, and –
Abraham: I want to go. This is real. This is no joke. This is
the real God. And it’s important: the
Lord said that he will make of me a great nation and in me all the families of
the earth will be blessed.
Sarah: Well ain’t that
rich? Darling, did you remember to put
your Kafiyeh on before you went out
in the sun today? Maybe you should lie
down and take a little rest.
Voices. Make of you a great
nation. Not much of a great nation with
only two citizens – you and me, right?
Sure won’t be anymore coming along.
Abraham: Actually, I think that’s
part of the package.
Sarah: Now, you have
been out in the sun too long. You know
perfectly well it’s been years since that was possible. Give it up, honey!
Abraham: With God nothing shall
be impossible.
Sarah: I suppose not, but
WHY? Answer me that. If this really was The Most High God
or whatever you call him who spoke to you – though everybody knows that the
gods only talk to the big city big shots like Kings and the High Priest in Babylon
and not to people like you and me – WHY should this god CARE about you? Who do you think you are,
Hammurabi? Why should god care about you?
Abraham: I don’t know.
Sarah: Now that’s the first
intelligent thing you’ve said in this whole conversation.
Abraham: But God does
care. I just – know it. I guess I have to take it on faith –
no one I know of has every heard from or spoken to The Lord, there is no
community of believers in the Lord, there’s no Book which tells of the Lord’s
great doings and faithfulness over thousands of years (and I couldn’t read it
if there was). There’s just me, and the
Presence that I felt, and the Purpose behind the Presence, and the – love. They never told us back in Mesopotamia that
those gods would do something for human beings just out of love. This one will. This is something new.
Sure, I don’t get it either. But
it’s exciting. It’s an adventure. I can’t wait to start and see how it all
turns out.
Sarah: Never marry a shepherd,
they told me; they’ll always be wanting to move. Marry a potter, they told me, he’ll never move further than you
can lug his clay. Oh, well. I can do the laundry at the next
campsite. What shall we bring?
Abraham: Everything.
Sarah: Where are we going?
Abraham: God only knows.
Sarah: And – when will we be
back?
Abraham: I don’t think we’ll ever
be back.
“So Abraham went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan.”
This is the original faith journey. It was the beginning of “the road back” for
all of humanity. It is a wondrous
story: just as Adam and Eve had everything they needed and had no reason to disobey
God except the pure thrill of disobedience, Abraham had no rational
reason to obey God – except the pure thrill of obedience. “Let’s obey God and see what happens”
seemed to be his motto. And from that
bold leap into the unknown came all the monotheistic religions of the
world: for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike revere Abraham as the original
man of faith. Extreme faith was not a
sport too radical for the Olympics, it was at first a man – and then a woman,
Sarah, and all those who dared to have faith boldly when cold, rational
calculation told them otherwise.
Abraham and Sarah went on a journey of
hundreds of miles in faith through a country they knew they didn’t know, in
faith that God would guide and provide.
We, the people of St. Barnabas, are about
to go on a journey of a few hundred feet to a building we think we can know but
to a series of experiences, challenges and opportunities for us as a community
of faith which only God knows. We
started in this journey five years ago as a leap of faith when cold, rational
calculation might have said this is not affordable or manageable for us. As we journeyed in faith, blessings came.
The journey will not be over the day we cut
the ribbon and worship in the new worship space for the first time. The journey will at that time just “turn a
corner” and begin to offer us a view of new opportunities and challenges which
God has brought us to. What will we
bring with us into the future.
Everything. Where are we going? God only knows. And I can’t wait to get there.
(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard