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Mystic
Congregational Church, UCC Sermon
from June 5, 2005 If
a schlemiel is a person who goes
through life spilling soup on people and a schlemozzle
is a one it keeps getting spilled on, then Abraham was a schlemozzle.” So
writes Frederick Buechner about Abraham in his wonderful book Peculiar
Treasures (Harper and Row 1979). He
continues, “It all began when God told him to go to the land of Canaan where
he promised to make him the father of a great nation, and he went. The first thing that happened was that his brother-in-law Lot took over the rich bottomland and Abraham was left with the scrub-country around Dead Man’s Gulch. The second thing was that he found out that as the prospective father of a great nation that his wife couldn’t have babies. The third thing was that, when as a special present on his hundredth birthday, God arranged for his wife Sarah to have a son anyway, it wasn’t long before he told Abraham to go up into the hills and sacrifice him. It’s true that, at the last minute, God stepped in and said he’d only wanted to see if the old man’s money was where his mouth was, but from that day forward Abraham had a habit of breaking into tears at odd moments, and his relationship with his son Isaac was never all that close. In spite of everything, however, he never stopped
having faith that God was going keep his promise about making him the father of
a great nation. Night after night,
it was the dream he rode to sleep on—the glittering cities, the up-to-date
armies, and the curly-bearded kings. There was a group photograph he had taken not long
before he headed out. It was a
family bar mitzvah. They were all
there down to the last poor relation. They
weren’t a great nation yet by a long shot, but you’d never know it from the
way Abraham sits enthroned there in his velvet yarmulke with several
great-grandchildren on his lap and soup on his tie. Even through his thick lenses, you can read the look
of faith in his eye, and more than all the kosher meals he ever ate, it was that
look that God loved him for and had chosen him for in the first place.” The look of faith—it’s what Paul says was
“reckoned to him as righteousness” as he wrote about him thousands of years
later in the letter to the Romans. Faith
is hard to describe. It’s easy to
define, but harder somehow to describe. Simply
put, faith is belief in something like God.
But describing faith is a whole different matter.
Usually when we try, it comes out in a story.
We talk around it, give examples and illustrations.
Faith is as much a story as it is theology and doctrine.
Abraham’s faith is clearly described in this story where he takes that
first step into something completely unknown.
You can almost imagine the conversation over the
dinner table with friends and family when they make the announcement.
Now, you have to remember that Abraham and Sarah were not exactly spring
chickens here. Paul says they were
as good as dead, but I think
that’s a bit of an overstatement. Let’s just say they were somewhat past their prime. “Just wanted to let you all know that we are going
to be moving soon.” “Oh, that’s wonderful! Where are you going?” “I don’t know.” “Well, what direction are you headed in?” “I don’t know.” “When are you leaving?” “I’m not sure.” “How will you know where you’re going?” “We won’t.” “Are you going because you’re hoping you’ll
find better grazing for your cattle and your sheep?” “No.” “Then why?” “Because God said to.” It has a ring of wackiness to it, but not for the
reasons that come to our minds first. For
those of us who live our lives in a settled way—in homes that we’ve been in
for years, with jobs that we’ve worked at and retired from, being members of
the same church for five years or maybe fifty-five years—the idea of pulling
up stakes can be shocking enough. We’re
people who value stability. Abraham
and Sarah, however, were nomads. They regularly moved their herds for grazing, watering, and
protection. So, it’s not the
moving itself that is shocking; rather, it is moving in response to something as
vague and as powerful as a promise. In his stunning commentary on Genesis, Walter
Bruegemann writes, “The speech of God to this barren family is a call for a
dangerous departure from the presumed world of norms and security.
The command is terse and peremptory, asking Abraham and Sarah to go with
closed eyes. Such renunciation is
exceedingly difficult to speak of in our culture, which focuses on
self-indulgence. But notice, the
summons is not law or discipline but promise.
The narrative knows that such departure from securities is the only way
out of barrenness. The whole of
Abrahamic narrative is premised on this seeming contradiction: to stay in safety
is to remain barren; to leave in risk is to have hope.” The Hebrew suggest that the move to a new home
isn’t so much a place, a physical place, as it is a place inside of Abraham
where he has to discover just who he is and just what he believes.
Buechner picks up that idea when he says, “Home is a place inside
yourself that you spend your whole life looking for even if you’re not aware
that you’re searching.” Abraham’s first journey was within to a place of
faith where he could then step out into this journey of the unknown.
So the promise was well on its way to becoming true when Abraham and
Sarah took that first step. Believing
in the promise they set out on a physical journey, not knowing where they were
going, when (or if) they would get there, or even how they might know if
they’ve arrived. That first step
said it all. Abraham and Sarah had
faith and with that faith they put one foot in front of the other. But the text reminds us that it’s a faith that
unfolded in stages. It said that
Abrham and Sarah journeyed in stages to the Negeb.
My guess is that their faith did as well. We tend to think of faith as an either or—either you have
it or you don’t. I like to think
of it as verb rather than a noun, a process rather than a possession.
Buechner says, “It is an on-again-off-again,
sometimes-you-have-it-sometimes-you-don’t rather than a once-and-for-all kind
of thing. Faith is not being sure
where you’re going but going anyway, a journey without maps.”
Taking that first step with faith that helps us take
that first step even if we have no idea what the second step was going to be.
Even if once we’ve taken that first step, we doubt whether we’ve done
the right thing. Faith includes doubt. We
tend to think of them as mutually exclusive, but faith actually includes doubt.
Tillich said that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element
of faith. Putting one foot in front of the other is what it’s
all about. We take that first step
with faith such as we have and such as we hope for in the moment.
Faith, like the journey, unfolds one step at a time.
Sometimes the way is clear like a super highway and sometimes it’s a
faint path wind strewn with leaves and twigs.
And we put one foot in front of the other, as we are able to in the
moment. But lest we think that it’s all about us and
whatever kind of faith we can muster, let’s not forget that it happens in
response to the promise. Abraham
and Sarah didn’t pack up and head for the hills because they thought it was a
good idea, or because some crystal ball crackpot had a vision.
They headed out in response to a specific promise from God.
. The imperative for the journey is followed by the
promise presented in five first person statements. I will make of you. I
will bless you. I will magnify your
name. I will bless those who bless
you. I will curse those who curse
you. The future for Abraham and Sarah, and all of Israel,
who is called forth in the promise, is no accomplishment of their own.
It is God’s gift. Abraham and Sarah and we, by inheritance, live in a world
that is ordered by the gifts and promises of God.
Mull that one over for a while. We
live in a world that is ordered by the gifts and promises of God.
It is not our own, it is not our own doing; it is not our own possession.
It is entrusted to us by inheritance, for a time, for this leg of the
journey wherein we put one foot in front of the other until it is time for
someone else to take up the journey and discover the path. As children of modernity it seems a quaint notion.
We are so accustomed to thinking there is only us—our own hard work,
our own accomplishments, our own agenda, our own goals.
This text is a helpful reminder that we are not the sole architects of
our own lives or the world. We are
heirs to the promise and there can be no promise without a promise maker. The promise, interestingly enough, is that for which we
crave: well-being, security,
prosperity, and prominence. They
were not to be a product of Abraham and Sarah’s labor. They were gifts that came in the traveling.
They cannot be conjured or accomplished fully by us either.
They are gifts of the journey. It begins with the first step—a step that we take
in faith, a willingness to risk for the sake of the promise.
It’s what makes the journey sacred and not just a ramble through our
days. It’s not always about doing
something great or grand or splashy, but simply being faithful in the journey,
being present to the day, living as heirs to the promise, and putting one foot
in front of the other. Blessings to you in the traveling.
Amen. |