Sermon: You are not leaving, you are arriving

Sometimes it takes

a great sky

to find that

first, bright

and indescribable

wedge of freedom

in your own heart.

Second Sunday in Lent, February 28, 2010

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Ps 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35

O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy –

O God, whose willingness always to meet each one of us with understanding, patience, forgiveness and love is magnificently incomprehensible –

be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways.

Be lovingly understanding to all of us who so regularly lose our way, our spirit-filled, God-given vocation to live into our true inheritance.

And it’s easy to lose that way, isn’t it?   Abram seems to have, and he is worrying.  And that worrying is making him anxious. He thought he had known what was expected, but God doesn’t seem to be following through and giving him the necessary support.  Abram and Sarai had packed their bags, left Ur of the Chaldeans on God’s command.  Abram’s sense of abandonment, and subsequent fear have led him to doubt, to question.  And we thought that just happened to us.  “Come on, God, I just need a little bit of help here…”.

There are times in our lives when our way seems perfectly clear.  In my own life, I think back to those nine months of being pregnant with Eleanor.  I loved that time: it was so wonderful in so many ways, so full of hope and joy.  It was also a time of great simplicity of purpose: my job was to nurture this growing baby through those nine months.  A more immediate example, even though a fraction of the enormity, would be the train ride I took this past week from San Jose to Seattle on Amtrak’s Coast Starlight.  I delighted in the simplicity of the journey:  you get on, and you get off when you reach your destination. What bliss!

Life is generally much trickier: so many decisions, only so much energy, only so much time, only so much concentration.  It’s easy to go astray: to miss the mark: to find ourselves in a place where it seems easier to doubt, to feel anxious, to feel afraid.   We’ve got off the train at the wrong station. There’s no-one there to meet us.  The station is old and unkempt.  The only sound we can hear is the emptiness of the wind blowing through the broken windows.

God says, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield.”  And what does God do? God brings Abram outside into the clear night, and tells him: “Look toward heaven and count the stars – if you can”.

And sometimes that is what it takes, isn’t it?   Our worries and fears can lead us into very small, dark constricted places where it’s so very hard to imagine anything life giving, where it seems impossible to ‘hold fast the unchangeable truth of God’s Word’.   And yet, as in the words of one my favorite poets, David Whyte:

Sometimes it takes

a great sky

to find that

first, bright

and indescribable

wedge of freedom

in your own heart.

Wedge of freedom? Freedom from what, perhaps to what, or even between what?  Freedom from anxiety? From incapacitating fear?  That fear which closes us down.  Maybe it’s a wedge between that proverbial rock and a hard place?  A wedge of hope?  Hope seen in the inexhaustible immensity and brightness of a clear night sky?

And yet, it is not enough for Abram, the Abram who hasn’t yet grown into the fullness and promise of the Abraham that he will become.  Abram wants some proof that all will be as God says.  And God obliges, first asking Abram to prepare some sacrificial offerings. The sun goes down, a deep sleep falls on Abram, as does a ‘deep and terrifying darkness’.  Then the transformative power of God is demonstrated in the movement of a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passing between the carcasses.  Out of the death, the terror and the darkness, new hope is born: a new covenant is made between God and Abram. A covenant that reaches way beyond Abram into the far distances of the future.

Bring us again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast

the unchangeable truth of your Word

Help us, O Lord, to recognize your presence in the world around us.  Help us to hear your voice in our darkness.  Help us to see you in the mysteries that surround us.

You are our light and our salvation.  You are the strength of our lives:

of whom then should we be afraid?

A group of Pharisees, curiously the group that Jesus has so regularly attacked, come to Jesus to warn him.  They think that he should be rather more afraid of Herod than he is appearing to be.  They tell him that Herod wants to kill him.  But Jesus seems uninterested.  His response being essentially, don’t mess with me, I’m busy, I know what the schedule is, I know the itinerary, and when I’m ready to go to Jerusalem, I’ll be there.  And therein lies the difference between the Abram we encounter in the Genesis story, and Jesus.  Jesus knows the truth of God’s word: the truth written in his DNA.  Maybe he knew it once and for all on the transformative occasion of his baptism.   His baptism that was the catalyst for his three short years of ministry.

We are all familiar with the metaphor of the journey of our lives.  Few of us live our lives with the certainty that we see in Jesus.  There have always been examples of driven lives through history: men and women pursuing particular missions, passionately and heroically. Few of us achieve anything like that single-mindedness and elevation of purpose.  We might envy that clarity of vision, but our own journey, while perhaps messier,  is of no less value.

It seems to me that what God is asking each one of us is to find God’s word written in each one us, and live into the sacred immensity of that possibility:  a sacred immensity far bigger than we can possibly imagine.   To deny that truth, is to choose the way of fear, death and destruction.   To seek that truth is the way of life, and light, and salvation.  And every step that we take along the path towards that truth is a step of gain rather than a step of loss.  We are not leaving…we are arriving.

I conclude with one of David Whyte’s poems: he calls it ‘The Journey’.  I think you will hear echoes of both Abram’s story and our own in ways that might be nourishing on this Second Sunday of Lent.

Above the mountains

the geese turn into

the light again

painting their

black silhouettes

on an open sky.

Sometimes everything

has to be

enscribed across

the heavens

so you can find

the one line

already written

inside you.

Sometimes it takes

a great sky

to find that

first, bright

and indescribable

wedge of freedom

in your own heart.

Sometimes with

the bones of the black

sticks left when the fire

has gone out

someone has written

something new

in the ashes

of your life.

You are not leaving.

Even as the light

fades quickly.

You are arriving.