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Sermon - Abraham's Journey - 17th February 2008
St Alban’s Epping 7:00am, 8.00 am & 10:00am
Readings: Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; Matthew 17:1-9
One of the principal pieces of advice that I give to wedding couples at their marriage is usually expressed something like this:
“Today you begin a journey that nobody has ever made. Your marriage is unique. While you have known each other for a long time, you are entering into territory that is unmapped. While others have set out on similar “magical mystery tours”, yours is different. The advice of others in your situation is helpful, however those relationships have traversed different lands. Such marriages have been through different topography and climatic conditions. Their experience is useful only in so much as it deals with past experiences. Remember that those experiences are based upon marriages that are different to the one you are entering here today.”
Similarly, each of us is called by God to enter into lands that no one else has travelled to become the person we were created to be. There are no maps to your life or my life. Each is unique. As Christians we move forward in faith knowing that God goes with us. We use for assistance the experiences other travellers but their experience is only helpful in so much as they have travelled similar but not identical journeys. They can be companions on the way but we are the person who has to live our life as it confronts us.
This morning we read of Abraham, or Abram, as he was then known, being called by God to step out into unknown territory. He’s asked to leave everything behind and go to a new place, unknown to him and begin a new life with God. For a person whose identity was grounded in land, ancestry and family, this was a risky endeavour. Yet he leaves country, family and his father’s house to go to a new land with the promise that he will found a great nation.
Was Abraham faithful or just plain stupid? It depends on who is making the judgment. With hindsight, we see Abraham as a man of deep faith and trust in God. To his contemporaries, however, he must have appeared crazy. He was prepared to leave the security of a settled, urban life in Ur for the danger of a nomadic future spent wandering across inhospitable Middle Eastern deserts looking for a new home. He even took his family with him on this wild adventure.
Faith requires us to make decisions using evidence that others cannot see. God's call on our lives so often demands that we throw caution to the wind and, like Abraham, set out to who knows where? God did not even tell Abraham where to go. God simply said leave this country and "go to the land that I will show you."
In our journey of faith we often act as though we are rock climbing, keeping firm hold with one hand (and two feet!) while we reach tentatively for the next handhold. God, however, calls us to abseil, kicking off with both feet and free falling from the top of a cliff, trusting that the rope will hold. Others looking on, who cannot see the rope, will exclaim at our foolishness.
Paul, in Romans, recalls Abraham as our ancestor and as one “who without works trusts him”. There is, in Paul’s mind, a great reward for those who trust in God without evidence, or in the face of doubt. Trust comes out of a relationship that grows and flourishes amidst hardship and suffering. Abraham is not rewarded for being good, but for being faithful, trusting that God knows what God is doing, and God knows how to use him as an agent for the plan of salvation. For Paul that is enough.
Experiences like these of Abram are faced by people every day, including job loss, sickness, being a victim of crime, losing loved ones and other everyday experiences. All these events confront us with the question: Can we trust in a God who allows these things to happen? No easy answers here. There is, however, the journey of Lent to teach us about trust. If we make the journey that ends at the foot of the cross on Good Friday with Jesus’ cry of despair, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” then we are ready to discover that God always keeps promises, whether we trust God or not.
Abraham and Paul had to trust not in family values, or the tried and true habits of their ancestors, but in new ways of thinking and living revealed to them in their new relationship with this God. They broke with their experiences of the past, and moved into an unmapped future to become new “people of the Promise,” for new life. New birth, new life, new creation: these images of entering into a new relationship imply that God’s promise for new life entails God’s gift of a fresh start, freed from the restrictions of our past lives in order to enter a new relationship with God through the power of the Holy Spirit.
This is the point at which, finally, the promises of God touch our own lives, especially in Lent. Despite our popular pieties, Lent is a time for engaging our new life in Christ more deeply, risking new levels of trust. The purpose of Lent is not to dwell on suffering, or to spend 40 days bewailing our manifold sins and wickedness for the sake of feeling our pain or self-gratification. Lent is about engaging in the ongoing process of renewal, regeneration, and new birth, it is about encouraging us to trust, and to risk, going forth and being sent out with the promise of new life.
Lent may require us to break with the usual understanding of Christian piety and religiosity as we do this, just as Abram and Sarai had to break with their past, and Saul the Pharisee with his. We do well to pause during Lent and consider that the promises of God bear not only upon the future of our individual lives in relationship to him, but also upon the future of our church as a whole. To respond to the promise for new life, given to those who hear, trust and follow this God, means we have to be ready to redraw and rename the places on the journey. When the ancient makers of the Book of Genesis told the story of Abram and Sarai, they were at the same time inscribing new place names, creating a new social geography, on the territories of their migrations in company with this God. At this point in the twenty-first century, God may well be inviting us to rethink how we do church in light of the social landscape of the times we live in. When Saul the Pharisee became Paul the Apostle as we know him, he brought new words, images, and new community structures into being, “calling into existence things which do not exist,” by trustfully following Jesus into new life. Lent is for listening to that call in our own lives. In the words of an old hymn, “new occasions teach new duties, and time makes ancient good uncouth.” Lent is for careful thinking about how to step into the as yet unmapped future for our parish, church and ourselves, seeking to deepen our relationship to God and trust the picture of new life in Christ and for identifying the breaks with the past that we need to make in order to respond to the promises of God.
The empty tomb at Easter is the powerful affirmation, but it does not make sense unless we first make that Lenten journey with Abraham and Jesus. Make the journey of Lent. Come to the special liturgies all of them, as many as you can and you will experience a growing trust in God through the ministry and passion of our Saviour. As Abraham discovered, trust comes from a growing relationship with God. We can experience that same relationship in our Lenten journey with Jesus.
Once to every man and nation, The English Hymnal No.563
This sermon created using material by The Reverend Ben E Hilmer and the Reverend Angels V Askew at www.dfms.org/worship-that-works. And Paula Gooder at www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=resources.sermon_prep.