Sermon Audio will be posted on Tuesday, March 3. 

Sermon Text:

Preface in response to breaking news about US/Israel attack on Iran: 

I have to confess that I seriously considered scrapping my sermon for today. But I decided against it. Because I refuse to let the principalities and powers of this world keep us from engaging the themes of change, blessing, and trust that transcend any crisis or diversion of the day. Because if we do that, we risk losing our connection to the One who challenges us above all, even as we lament the brokenness of the world, to love God and to love our neighbor. That is our call, and our focus. We need to remember that Caesar may fail us, but God will not. So let us take a moment to breathe, and to pray in silence for peace, and for all of God’s children in harm’s way.

In the name of God, the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love-Sharer, Amen.

Changed Landscape

Last Tuesday morning dawned bright and clear after a storm that made the Blizzard of ’78 look like a dusting. We awakened to a changed landscape. Trees looked three feet shorter because the ground was seemingly three feet higher. Cars were mere humps; roads and driveways were erased by nature’s Wite-Out. Landmarks were softened, rendered unrecognizable. Our pets with their full bladders were flummoxed until we shoveled or swept space for them to relieve themselves, but even then, where were the smells? With all of the familiar sniffs hidden beneath a three-foot thick blanket, pups were confused and disoriented. It was a changed landscape for all creatures, not just the ones with two legs. 

But we figured it out. Using brooms, shovels, and snowblowers we carved new paths and made our way as far as we could manage on our own. But we still needed to rely on things we couldn’t control. When would the snowplows come by our street? When would the travel/parking ban end? When would the grocery store restock once we were able to get there? When, oh when, will this snow finally melt??

In a changed landscape you can only do so much. Beyond that, all you can do is trust in things you cannot control and put one foot in front of the other. Trust, move forward; lather, rinse, repeat.

“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. “

“Go,” said God. 

“…and Abram went…”

…into a changed landscape. Knowing well what he was leaving behind—his roots of country, kindred, and home—but with no idea of what lay ahead. 

This short passage from the twelfth chapter of Genesis constitutes a hinge moment between everything that happened from chapters one through eleven (known as the Primeval History) and what happens afterward (the history of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs.) Beginning with what Fr. Mark last week called, “The Incident of the Woman, the Serpent, and the Apple, in the Garden,” God’s plans for a loving, obedient relationship with humanity went off the rails over and over again. We read stories of Cain’s murder of his brother Abel; of the wickedness and violence that caused God to send a flood to destroy virtually everything on Earth; and of the hubris of those who built the Tower of Babel because they wanted to be like God. All of these stories document God’s frustration with humanity, who was free to make choices, yet more often than not making the wrong ones. 

So, near the end of Chapter 11 of Genesis we see the germination of a new strategy, a narrower focus. We meet Abram, his wife, Sarai, and their family, who travel from the land of Ur in Mesopotamia, intending to reach the land of Canaan, but only getting as far as Haran when the head of the family, Terah (Sarai’s father) dies. Rather than continuing to Canaan, Abram and Sarai and part of the family settle in Haran for several years. 

Which is where we join the story:

God tells Abram to “Go”.

“I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you… in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Abram is old. Sarai is barren. They are not the ideal couple to be chosen as the vehicle for God’s blessing of all of the families of the world. 

How like God to do something like that.

God chooses Abram and Sarai, of all people, to be a blessing for all the families of the earth, not just a chosen few. 

Notice how God begins with the most unlikely ones.

And there’s more.

What God asks of Abram is no small thing. God asks him, not just to Go, but to let go. In the words of commenter Cameron Howard, 

“God calls Abram to shift his identity from rootedness in his land, family, and household, to being one who is acted upon by God [emphasis mine.] 

“Abram,” says God, “Release your roots and trust me. Be rooted in me.”

That’s a lot to ask. 

And Abram does it. 

We don’t know what Sarai had to say about it. We don’t know what their servants and slaves, or what Abram’s nephew, Lot, thought about it. They just packed up, put one foot in front of the other, and went. Into a new landscape.

History, biblical and otherwise, is filled with wanderers, migrants, outsiders. People who pull up or tear up their roots for any of a number of reasons–not all of them pleasant–and go. I don’t think there is a one of us who can’t point to a wanderer somewhere in our family’s story, which makes it all the more tragic that we see our migrant neighbors being treated so cruelly in our own time, and not just in this country. Abram’s story is the human story; we are all wanderers or descended from wanderers. It’s in our DNA. To hold too tightly to earthly markers of identity, like territory or caste, is to deny who we are fundamentally called to be. 

Maybe that is God’s blessing. That we are primarily rooted in God.

“Go”, God said.

And Abram went, as it turns out completing the family’s interrupted journey to Canaan. But Abram didn’t know that at the time. All he knew was this: 

“I will show you.”

So much is wrapped up in those four words. The challenge to change, to leave our comfort zone. The call to let go. The fear of the unknown. The insidious whisper of inadequacy. The foreignness of Trust. 

Trust. That’s the big one.

It is for me. Every single day. 

In what some have called a dis-enchanted world we may feel silly putting our trust in something we cannot physically sense. But as Christians we believe in the Incarnation, and what is the Incarnation if not God’s concrete presence with us in Jesus? What could be a better sign of God’s faithfulness and trustworthiness? God is with us through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of the unlikeliest of kings, a holy wanderer; the one who calls us to reestablish our roots in peace-making, justice, healing, compassion, and love.

Jesus shows us.

All of our anxiety, about change, about our inadequacy, about fear of the unknown, is wrapped up in the challenge to trust and to say yes to God’s call to become more rooted–more centered–in God rather than in what is transient and corruptible, and to put one foot in front of the other into an unfamiliar landscape. Maybe that’s part of what Jesus meant when he told Nicodemus he must be born again.

“I will show you.”

Lent is a time of self-examination, a time of holy listening for God’s call to us. A time of looking inward for new growth as well as pruning away what is no longer lifegiving. Abram and Sarai’s story is a story for all of us—a story of letting go, but more importantly of new beginning.

On this snow-landscaped Lent morning when Spring feels so distant, I leave you with my favorite blessing by John O’Donohue:

In out-of-the-way places of the heart, 

Where your thoughts never think to wander, 

This beginning has been quietly forming, 

Waiting until you were ready to emerge. 

For a long time it has watched your desire, 

Feeling the emptiness growing inside you, 

Noticing how you willed yourself on, 

Still unable to leave what you had outgrown. 

It watched you play with the seduction of safety 

And the gray promises that sameness whispered, 

Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent, 

Wondered would you always live like this. 

Then the delight, when your courage kindled, 

And out you stepped onto new ground, 

Your eyes young again with energy and dream, 

A path of plenitude opening before you. 

Though your destination is not yet clear 

You can trust the promise of this opening; 

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning 

That is at one with your life’s desire. 

Awaken your spirit to adventure; 

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk; 

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm, 

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.