Readings and Sermon
Genesis 12:1-9 |
When God Chooses You |
June 5, 2005 |
Gospel reading (MP3) |
Sermon (MP3) |
Sermon text (PDF) |
The scene is not at all an unfamiliar one. The world is in disorder. Confusion and chaos reign. People and communities find it increasingly difficult to communicate with one another and they compound the problem by doing what people so often do when they have trouble communicating-they withdraw from one another even more. There is no common language, and not only do people not speak the same words but they speak from vastly different and quite often competitive cultures. Voices rise as tensions escalate. More moderate and conciliatory voices are drowned out by the shouts of angry and more aggressive ones. The embers of hate in the human heart are fanned and further fueled by charges and counter-charges and by small acts of aggression followed by yet larger ones. Stones are tossed; spears are thrown; armies are massed. Parents mourn the deaths of their sons and daughters on the field of battle. Children are orphaned. Communities are destroyed. And in the end both the conqueror and the conquered know that in the ultimate sense nothing really has been settled. It will happen again, is happening already, somewhere.
Such is the backdrop against which our reading from Genesis is sketched. The human community is fragmented and at odds with itself and its Creator. There is little reason for hope. The obstacles to healing, to unity, to wholeness seem entirely insurmountable. In my imagination, God steps back from the work of creation to gain a broader perspective. There is sadness in God's eyes as the Creator takes in the broad expanse of the spinning globe, but love's determination also shines in them. And having considered it all, God resolves not to give up on the people of his creation. Rather than allowing them to suffer the consequences of their own choices, God resolves to seek their healing and their restoration to right relationships with himself and with each other. At this point, the focus of the biblical narrative narrows abruptly from a universal vision to settle upon a single man. With Abram begins the story of God's saving work in human life and history. "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land I will show you," the Lord commanded Abram. "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so you will be a blessing . . . and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." Once again, the vision broadens to encompass the whole creation. With Abram God begins anew and seeks to share the blessing with all people in all times and in all places.
The promise was extraordinary, but so was its cost. In order to embrace the promise, Abram had to let go of life as he knew it. He had to relinquish all that was familiar, settled, and secure; all that made him the person he was, and that all on the strength of a promise. There were no guarantees, no proof that any of it would ever really come to be. Abram could well have left Haran behind and never found or possessed a land of his own. Sarai's barrenness and advanced age and his own advanced age could easily have precluded the fulfillment of the promise of many descendants. And rather than being a blessing to others, Abram might well have come to curse the day he ever believed God and left his home in Haran, for as promises may be made, they also may be broken. But Abram believed God, trusted God, and acted accordingly.
St. Paul declares: "hoping against hope, Abraham believed that he would become 'the father of many nations.' He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead . . . or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. No distrust ever made him waver concerning the promise of God . . . being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised." Abram believed God and obeyed God's command not because God offered him the best deal, not because of any overwhelming evidence that things would work out just as Abram wanted, but because he trusted the one who made the promise. Jesus said: "I have come that you may have life and have it more abundantly." As with Abram, God continues to take the initiative in restoring our lives and our relationships to their created intention. The promises of God rest squarely upon the grace of God. Before we loved God, God loved us and sent his Son to enter into the confusion and chaos of our world, to share our lives, to suffer beside us and for us, to conquer the power of sin that separates us from God, from one another, and from our best selves, and to open to us the way of eternal life. The Christian gospel does not begin by telling us what we must do, but by declaring what God has already done for us and by inviting us to embrace it and be embraced by it. But it is not the act of believing or trusting that saves us, that sets us on the road to recovery, but grace, God's free gift in Jesus Christ. There is nothing we can do or have to do to save ourselves; that is done by God. Faith is the means through which that grace is embraced.
Faith, though, is more than trust alone. It is trust translated into obedience. Abram believed God and he packed up lock, stock, and barrel and headed out into the unknown in obedience to God's command. For us, like Abram, to embrace the promise involves relinquishing one way of life to take up another. Martin Marty writes: "Salvation is 'being right with God,' becoming healthy and whole through the action of God in Jesus Christ. A new person comes to be where the old corrupt one had been. Salvation means being brought from the status of alien, the lost outsider, to adoption as a member of the family of God. Salvation means moving by God's initiative from being bound and blind to being free and seeing. Salvation stands for a move from saying no, rejecting the call of God, to accepting that call, saying yes. It means seeing one's life made open to more calls by God and more gifts of grace." (p. 11, The Word) To be saved is not to arrive at a point of destination, but to embark upon a journey, a journey of growth and change that lasts a lifetime. For the most part it is a joy, but there are also times when faithfulness in the journey will turn your life upside-down and inside-out, and that's not the kind of gospel that people generally want to hear or that preachers generally want to proclaim. The gospel of success, the gospel of immediate gratification, or the gospel of low expectation is much more appealing.
The Lord summoned Abram saying "go from your country, from your kindred, and from your father's house to the land I will show you." Jesus summons us saying "if any would come after me, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For those who save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake and the gospel will find it." Embracing the gift of the promise can be costly. Indeed, faithfulness will lead you to places you never dreamed you would go to serve in ways you never expected to serve and to bear burdens you never would have chosen to take up. You will find yourself loving people or trying to love people whom it is easier to despise or at least ignore. You will find yourself speaking the truth when telling a lie would be easier and making choices that work against your own self-interest but for the good of others. And there will be times when it just doesn't pay off. You do what is right and it blows up in your face. Things happen that shouldn't happen to anyone and, you would think, certainly shouldn't happen to one who has committed his or her life to the Lord, but they happen. And then to add insult to injury sometimes when you go to claim the promise for yourself, it just isn't there. The peace that passes all understanding passes right by you. The grace that is supposed to be sufficient for all your needs comes up short. And the one who promised "I will be with you always, even to the close of the age," seems nowhere to be found. I don't understand that anymore than you. What I do know, though, is that the God who called us forth onto this journey is the same one who when he called Abram summoned him to embark on a journey towards "the land I will show you." The God of promise walks with us. The God of promise leads us. The hardships, the difficulties, and the struggles we encounter along the way become for us as people of faith the crucible upon which our faith is deepened, our love is broadened, and the image of Christ is refined within us. What God has begun in us in Jesus Christ God will bring to completion both in our lives and in the life of all creation. Genesis tells us that Abram and his entourage "went on by stages," and in truth that is the only way this journey can be made-one step at a time, trusting where we cannot see or understand, knowing that the one who called us forth will not abandon us, but will fulfill the promise.
The world backdrop against which this sermon is preached is not much different from the one that provided the backdrop for the reading from Genesis. The world is yet in chaos. The evidence of the fragmentation of the human family is all around us. Wars rage. Acts of violence claim the lives of the innocent. You would have to be completely deaf, dumb, and blind not to be aware of it. And when you take it all in, the probability of the promises of God finding fulfillment seem quite unlikely. The evidence just doesn't support it. But we walk by faith and not by sight, don't we.
We are not entirely without evidence to show that God is faithful to his promises. Indeed, the evidence is close at hand. It is found in your life and mine-in the values that shape our lives, the priorities that order our lives, the service that marks our lives, the love that fills our lives. And it is found in our common life-in the unity that marks our diversity, in our welcome to the stranger, in our love for one another, and in our shared witness to God's redemptive and reconciling love in our mission to the world. God is at work in Jesus Christ to make all things new, beginning in our time and with you and me. Holding to the promise, go forth to live as the evidence of God's redeeming and re-creating love.
J. Dudley Weaver, Jr.
First Presbyterian Church
Portland, Oregon
