The Long Journey Home
June 08, 2008
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Genesis 12:1-9; Genesis 15:1-6
From today through mid-August, we’ll be reading the book of Genesis, although I can’t vouch for the choices of people who preach when I’m out of town. For the rest of June, we’ll be hearing about Abraham and his son Isaac, in July we’ll be reflecting on the stories of Isaac’s son, Jacob; and then in August, Jacob’s son Joseph. These are family stories, with all the hopes, squabbles, assumptions, disappointments, estrangement and forgiveness, traditions and new beginnings that characterize all families. And this is THE ancestral family for three of the major world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam all trace their beginnings to Abraham. It is also the archetypical story of the faith journey that many of us travel. And it’s an important story, so even though the lectionary covers a lot of it, we’re going to include some of the important missing pieces, as we did this morning by adding a second reading, also from Genesis. If you want to get a good overview of the summer, go ahead and read Genesis from chapter 12 to the end – in my Bible that’s about 50 pages. If you want to start smaller with an overview of the Abraham story, at least read Genesis 12-23, more like 16 pages. It will give you a good sense of the zigs and zags of Abraham and Sarah, and the faithfulness of God.
Today’s sermon is titled The Long Journey Home, although it is, indeed, about Faith and Covenant. But much of Abraham’s journey, and indeed, much of the faith journey for anyone is a long journey home full of the challenge in such a paradox– so it seemed a more appropriate title.
As I consider the story of Abraham…and his heirs.... I am reminded of the old saying about the function of preaching, that its purpose is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Abraham’s story has some of that same double tension – on the one hand, God promises Abraham a home, on the other hand, he has to leave his home to have it. On the one hand, God promises Abraham an heir, on the other hand, Abraham and Sarah are near already well beyond child-bearing age when their story begins.
And, by the way, as you may have already observed, when their story begins, they are not named Abraham and Sarah…they are named Abram and Sarai. It is not uncommon in the Bible for someone’s name to be changed when their life is changed –these name changes are at the heart of what God’s invitation to newness involves: embracing new possibilities while letting go of the way we have seen ourselves. God’s promises bring blessing and challenge – the afflicted are comforted, the comfortable are afflicted. And more notable, both dimensions occur for many of us, including Abram: the invitation to embrace God’s blessing involves both hope and challenge. As we shall see again and again played out in the history of Israel, and the life of Jesus and the early Church, the hope that God offers comes as a break with the past. Even when circumstances remain the same, embracing God’s promises often requires a change of mind, a different understanding of the world and of ourselves. All too often in the Bible, it seems that when humans want things to stay the same, God’s response is to bless people with change.
So in the first reading, Abram is offered the promise of a homeland and an heir, with the inherent challenge that he must leave the land he has grown to think of as home. So he and Sarai, and some of their extended family, along with much of their household belongings and staff, hit the road. As most of us have grown to experience, leaving one home to establish another can be a most wrenching change. Even when it only involves moving across town, such transplants involve root shock – like when you have a momentary thought about home, and realize that for an instant, you can’t remember what your living room looks like. When you move farther, of course, there are all the newnesses of establishing new patterns in a new community. That can take years, but the first few months involve most of the changes. I remember after we had been living here a few months, so that most of the time it felt like home, but for the first time I needed to take in dry cleaning and realized I hadn’t a clue where one was. This, and other occasional needs like it – who do you call for appliance repair, where do you special order a cake, and so on – can remind you for months that you’re not really settled yet.
Two weeks ago, we celebrated the 13 high school graduates in our congregation, and as they leave home next fall, not only will their lives be new and different, but their experience of their home will change, and the folks left behind will experience changes far beyond who takes the dog out for the last walk of the night. Leaving home for college is, in some ways, very similar to what Abram and Sarai experience: they have a wonderful new future, and a new sense of themselves, but they are leaving the home they have known. There is hope and excitement, but some nervousness and many questions. And maybe it’s only the parents who are experiencing these questions: will I miss my child? How do I parent someone who is more in charge of their own life? Will they be OK? Will I be OK? Some of the same questions come in facing retirement – the story of Abram and Sarai is a powerful reminder that it is not only the young among us who face new frontiers.
And in the case of Abram and Sarai, God’s promises find a receptive home. Covenant is what God offers – a promise of God’s own faithfulness, an announcement of God’s presence with and among them not only in the present but in the future. The promise of an heir is not only the announcement of what God will give to Abram and Sarai, but God’s promise to be faithfully present to their descendents as well. Covenant is what God gives…and faith is, then and now, a response to God’s initiative.
In today’s readings, we see faith lived out in two important ways, and it may be that the order is important. The first is that Abram and Sarai acted in faith. They chose to respond to God with action. They packed up their belongings and their household servants and they moved. God announces the blessing, and in the very next verse, there is a response: Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your 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, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.
God announced the blessing, Abram went.
The second response comes in the reading from Genesis 15: they believed.
So often in our modern culture, we see belief as the central issue. We wrestle with belief, we question, we wonder, we read and think – and there is nothing wrong with that. But a significant dimension of what God is seeking in response from us is action, and sometimes our actions shape our hearts. We think it happens the other way, and sometimes it does – we tend to act on what we believe. But God asks of us often that we act in trust, and then those actions end up shaping our hearts and minds. This is certainly true in the response of love – Jesus demands that we love our enemies and pray for those who hurt us. Jesus is not asking for warm feelings, he is expecting loving actions. And when we choose to respond in trust, we often find our hearts reshaped around those loving responses.
This is why covenantal instead of contractual relationships (as I described last week) are the faithful way to live – we choose our response to people out of our own values rather than out of our current feelings (which might have come in response to someone else’s actions). When we choose our actions, and live out of our own values, our feelings are often shaped by our actions instead of by someone else’s actions. So we guide and shape our lives, and even our feelings, based on our own faithful choices rather than relinquishing control to others.
Belief can come subsequent to action, and sometimes can be born of action. The 12-step groups have a saying “Fake it ‘til you make it.” Act in trust that there is a higher power, act as if you believe in God and in yourself. And eventually the confidence may come. Fake it ‘til you make it. We can choose faith, even when we haven’t found our way to belief.
In the second reading, from Chapter 15, we see the belief response: [God] brought him outside and said, "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them." Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
Can you imagine this? Abram is outside, looking at the stars – and there is no urban light pollution , Abram is seeing the full array of the stars – and Abram realizes that the maker of the stars is the maker of the promise, and he believes. Many of us have had powerful faith experiences when we are experiencing the natural world of God’s creation.
Some of us may have had powerful experiences of coming to belief, such as Abram had in this moment. But that’s not the only way to faith. Not everyone sees the stars all at once…some see them one by one over a lifetime. And even those who have had a powerful experience at one time, find that experience confirmed, developed, and even changed over time. We see more stars.
Some of you may have seen the story of Pentecostal bishop Carlton Pearson, pastor of Tulsa's Higher Dimensions Family Church, who was a prominent evangelical preacher in the Church of God in Christ. He was leading a megachurch with an average weekly attendance of about 6,000, and as he said, he had even helped to shape the megachurch movement. He had been mentored by Oral Roberts. But he had a religious experience in which he came to understand God not as one who was sorting out the world into believers and the damned, but one who lovingly embraced all people. And as Carlton Pearson began to grow in his trust of this new understanding, he grew to feel that he had to preach out of it as well – and he lost everything except his family. Church members and evangelical colleagues labeled him a heretic. His experience of faith asked a lot of him. It required him to choose – whether to trust God, and his experience of God, or whether to rely on the understanding he had always had. Sometimes the journey of faith is through letting go of old certainties.
And as he trusted the new vision of God as inclusively loving all people, he found himself experiencing comfort and opportunities that he might have shunned before. A lesbian pastor invited him to her church, whose members were mostly gay people or abused women, many of whom were AIDS patients, and when he came worship there, she washed his feet, and he was able to experience community with folks who understood the kind of rejection he had experienced. His increase in faith led to a more open, inclusive practice of faith.
Like Abram before him, Bishop Pearson chose to trust the new understanding that God provided him, even when it required him to give up everything that gave him security before. To quote Walter Brueggemann’s commentary on Genesis: “The threat and the possibility articulated in the narrative of Abraham and Sarah put a crisis before humanity. It is the crisis of deciding to live either for the promise, and so disengaging from the present barren way of things, or to live against the promise, holding on grimly to the present ordering of life.” And often we are called to decide before the fullness of the promise, or the barrenness of the alternative, are made clear, so that the challenges are the stars, while the promise comes in response.
Perhaps some of the choices we are facing culturally are like this: we are being challenged to live without depending on cheap fossil fuel. The costs of such a shift are very evident to us – less easy travel, higher food costs, using our air conditioning less, walking, biking or sharing rides more. But perhaps such shifts will lead us to a less hurried lifestyle, and one that develops closer ties in our immediate community as we shop for locally grown food at the farmers’ market, or see our neighbors when we are walking. Some folks have seen a whole sky full of stars on this issue, others are seeing the stars one by one as gas and food prices rise. It may be that we need to choose the actions of trust before we experience the conviction that these choices can provide a fuller life, even as it seems slower and more locally experienced.
Or perhaps we are experiencing the challenges of a personal crisis, and we have to step out in faith before the trust is there – we pray without belief. Or we choose a change without the confidence that we can live it. Or we reach out in reconciliation without the sense that we are strong enough to handle the potential rejection. We start the journey without the map. And sometimes God affirms these choices, while other times God sees us through the challenges of failure, and we grow in trust that way. The path of faith is not always clear. One journey is not like another. But often the journey to belief is through actions of trust – it was that way for Abram, and it is often that way for us. It can be a long journey, through newness and letting go of what we may have hoped would stay the same, but the journey of trust leads home. Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Genesis 12:1-9; Genesis 15:1-6
From today through mid-August, we’ll be reading the book of Genesis, although I can’t vouch for the choices of people who preach when I’m out of town. For the rest of June, we’ll be hearing about Abraham and his son Isaac, in July we’ll be reflecting on the stories of Isaac’s son, Jacob; and then in August, Jacob’s son Joseph. These are family stories, with all the hopes, squabbles, assumptions, disappointments, estrangement and forgiveness, traditions and new beginnings that characterize all families. And this is THE ancestral family for three of the major world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam all trace their beginnings to Abraham. It is also the archetypical story of the faith journey that many of us travel. And it’s an important story, so even though the lectionary covers a lot of it, we’re going to include some of the important missing pieces, as we did this morning by adding a second reading, also from Genesis. If you want to get a good overview of the summer, go ahead and read Genesis from chapter 12 to the end – in my Bible that’s about 50 pages. If you want to start smaller with an overview of the Abraham story, at least read Genesis 12-23, more like 16 pages. It will give you a good sense of the zigs and zags of Abraham and Sarah, and the faithfulness of God.
Today’s sermon is titled The Long Journey Home, although it is, indeed, about Faith and Covenant. But much of Abraham’s journey, and indeed, much of the faith journey for anyone is a long journey home full of the challenge in such a paradox– so it seemed a more appropriate title.
As I consider the story of Abraham…and his heirs.... I am reminded of the old saying about the function of preaching, that its purpose is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Abraham’s story has some of that same double tension – on the one hand, God promises Abraham a home, on the other hand, he has to leave his home to have it. On the one hand, God promises Abraham an heir, on the other hand, Abraham and Sarah are near already well beyond child-bearing age when their story begins.
And, by the way, as you may have already observed, when their story begins, they are not named Abraham and Sarah…they are named Abram and Sarai. It is not uncommon in the Bible for someone’s name to be changed when their life is changed –these name changes are at the heart of what God’s invitation to newness involves: embracing new possibilities while letting go of the way we have seen ourselves. God’s promises bring blessing and challenge – the afflicted are comforted, the comfortable are afflicted. And more notable, both dimensions occur for many of us, including Abram: the invitation to embrace God’s blessing involves both hope and challenge. As we shall see again and again played out in the history of Israel, and the life of Jesus and the early Church, the hope that God offers comes as a break with the past. Even when circumstances remain the same, embracing God’s promises often requires a change of mind, a different understanding of the world and of ourselves. All too often in the Bible, it seems that when humans want things to stay the same, God’s response is to bless people with change.
So in the first reading, Abram is offered the promise of a homeland and an heir, with the inherent challenge that he must leave the land he has grown to think of as home. So he and Sarai, and some of their extended family, along with much of their household belongings and staff, hit the road. As most of us have grown to experience, leaving one home to establish another can be a most wrenching change. Even when it only involves moving across town, such transplants involve root shock – like when you have a momentary thought about home, and realize that for an instant, you can’t remember what your living room looks like. When you move farther, of course, there are all the newnesses of establishing new patterns in a new community. That can take years, but the first few months involve most of the changes. I remember after we had been living here a few months, so that most of the time it felt like home, but for the first time I needed to take in dry cleaning and realized I hadn’t a clue where one was. This, and other occasional needs like it – who do you call for appliance repair, where do you special order a cake, and so on – can remind you for months that you’re not really settled yet.
Two weeks ago, we celebrated the 13 high school graduates in our congregation, and as they leave home next fall, not only will their lives be new and different, but their experience of their home will change, and the folks left behind will experience changes far beyond who takes the dog out for the last walk of the night. Leaving home for college is, in some ways, very similar to what Abram and Sarai experience: they have a wonderful new future, and a new sense of themselves, but they are leaving the home they have known. There is hope and excitement, but some nervousness and many questions. And maybe it’s only the parents who are experiencing these questions: will I miss my child? How do I parent someone who is more in charge of their own life? Will they be OK? Will I be OK? Some of the same questions come in facing retirement – the story of Abram and Sarai is a powerful reminder that it is not only the young among us who face new frontiers.
And in the case of Abram and Sarai, God’s promises find a receptive home. Covenant is what God offers – a promise of God’s own faithfulness, an announcement of God’s presence with and among them not only in the present but in the future. The promise of an heir is not only the announcement of what God will give to Abram and Sarai, but God’s promise to be faithfully present to their descendents as well. Covenant is what God gives…and faith is, then and now, a response to God’s initiative.
In today’s readings, we see faith lived out in two important ways, and it may be that the order is important. The first is that Abram and Sarai acted in faith. They chose to respond to God with action. They packed up their belongings and their household servants and they moved. God announces the blessing, and in the very next verse, there is a response: Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your 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, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.
God announced the blessing, Abram went.
The second response comes in the reading from Genesis 15: they believed.
So often in our modern culture, we see belief as the central issue. We wrestle with belief, we question, we wonder, we read and think – and there is nothing wrong with that. But a significant dimension of what God is seeking in response from us is action, and sometimes our actions shape our hearts. We think it happens the other way, and sometimes it does – we tend to act on what we believe. But God asks of us often that we act in trust, and then those actions end up shaping our hearts and minds. This is certainly true in the response of love – Jesus demands that we love our enemies and pray for those who hurt us. Jesus is not asking for warm feelings, he is expecting loving actions. And when we choose to respond in trust, we often find our hearts reshaped around those loving responses.
This is why covenantal instead of contractual relationships (as I described last week) are the faithful way to live – we choose our response to people out of our own values rather than out of our current feelings (which might have come in response to someone else’s actions). When we choose our actions, and live out of our own values, our feelings are often shaped by our actions instead of by someone else’s actions. So we guide and shape our lives, and even our feelings, based on our own faithful choices rather than relinquishing control to others.
Belief can come subsequent to action, and sometimes can be born of action. The 12-step groups have a saying “Fake it ‘til you make it.” Act in trust that there is a higher power, act as if you believe in God and in yourself. And eventually the confidence may come. Fake it ‘til you make it. We can choose faith, even when we haven’t found our way to belief.
In the second reading, from Chapter 15, we see the belief response: [God] brought him outside and said, "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them." Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
Can you imagine this? Abram is outside, looking at the stars – and there is no urban light pollution , Abram is seeing the full array of the stars – and Abram realizes that the maker of the stars is the maker of the promise, and he believes. Many of us have had powerful faith experiences when we are experiencing the natural world of God’s creation.
Some of us may have had powerful experiences of coming to belief, such as Abram had in this moment. But that’s not the only way to faith. Not everyone sees the stars all at once…some see them one by one over a lifetime. And even those who have had a powerful experience at one time, find that experience confirmed, developed, and even changed over time. We see more stars.
Some of you may have seen the story of Pentecostal bishop Carlton Pearson, pastor of Tulsa's Higher Dimensions Family Church, who was a prominent evangelical preacher in the Church of God in Christ. He was leading a megachurch with an average weekly attendance of about 6,000, and as he said, he had even helped to shape the megachurch movement. He had been mentored by Oral Roberts. But he had a religious experience in which he came to understand God not as one who was sorting out the world into believers and the damned, but one who lovingly embraced all people. And as Carlton Pearson began to grow in his trust of this new understanding, he grew to feel that he had to preach out of it as well – and he lost everything except his family. Church members and evangelical colleagues labeled him a heretic. His experience of faith asked a lot of him. It required him to choose – whether to trust God, and his experience of God, or whether to rely on the understanding he had always had. Sometimes the journey of faith is through letting go of old certainties.
And as he trusted the new vision of God as inclusively loving all people, he found himself experiencing comfort and opportunities that he might have shunned before. A lesbian pastor invited him to her church, whose members were mostly gay people or abused women, many of whom were AIDS patients, and when he came worship there, she washed his feet, and he was able to experience community with folks who understood the kind of rejection he had experienced. His increase in faith led to a more open, inclusive practice of faith.
Like Abram before him, Bishop Pearson chose to trust the new understanding that God provided him, even when it required him to give up everything that gave him security before. To quote Walter Brueggemann’s commentary on Genesis: “The threat and the possibility articulated in the narrative of Abraham and Sarah put a crisis before humanity. It is the crisis of deciding to live either for the promise, and so disengaging from the present barren way of things, or to live against the promise, holding on grimly to the present ordering of life.” And often we are called to decide before the fullness of the promise, or the barrenness of the alternative, are made clear, so that the challenges are the stars, while the promise comes in response.
Perhaps some of the choices we are facing culturally are like this: we are being challenged to live without depending on cheap fossil fuel. The costs of such a shift are very evident to us – less easy travel, higher food costs, using our air conditioning less, walking, biking or sharing rides more. But perhaps such shifts will lead us to a less hurried lifestyle, and one that develops closer ties in our immediate community as we shop for locally grown food at the farmers’ market, or see our neighbors when we are walking. Some folks have seen a whole sky full of stars on this issue, others are seeing the stars one by one as gas and food prices rise. It may be that we need to choose the actions of trust before we experience the conviction that these choices can provide a fuller life, even as it seems slower and more locally experienced.
Or perhaps we are experiencing the challenges of a personal crisis, and we have to step out in faith before the trust is there – we pray without belief. Or we choose a change without the confidence that we can live it. Or we reach out in reconciliation without the sense that we are strong enough to handle the potential rejection. We start the journey without the map. And sometimes God affirms these choices, while other times God sees us through the challenges of failure, and we grow in trust that way. The path of faith is not always clear. One journey is not like another. But often the journey to belief is through actions of trust – it was that way for Abram, and it is often that way for us. It can be a long journey, through newness and letting go of what we may have hoped would stay the same, but the journey of trust leads home. Amen.