The great migration

Genesis 12:1-4a
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17
Psalm 121

The story of our faith community begins when God speaks to a man named Abram.  He tells him to leave behind everything he knows, and to set out on a journey.  God does not tell Abram where he going, only to go to a place that God will show him. And he tells Abram that he is sending him for a purpose.  “It is my purpose,” says God, “but you will experience it as a blessing.  And not only will you be blessed, but you yourself will become a blessing, a blessing to all the families of the earth.”

The story says that Abram answered the call, and set out on the journey, and his son-in-law, Lot, went with him.  So right from the beginning this was not a solitary, heroic quest; it was a family migration.  And that is the way it has been ever since.  The Jewish family traces its ancestry back, through all the centuries of dispersion and exile, and returning home, of captivity in Egypt and Exodus, of pastoral nomadism desert wandering, to Abram (later called Abraham).  They trace their lineage through Isaac, the son of Abraham’s wife Sarah, but the Muslim family also claims Abraham as their ancestor, in a bloodline that began with Ishmael, the son of Sarah’s handmaid, Hagar.  In the same way the genealogies of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Luke trace the family tree of Christ back to Abraham.

But in his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul says that this biological descent is not what makes Abram our ancestor.  We may be Jews, or we may be Gentiles, says Paul, but we are members of the family of Abram either way, because we share his faith in God.  When we hear the word that calls us to leave behind our old gods, our old ways, we set out on a great journey, toward the promised destination of all human wandering.  And our right of inheritance in that homeland is not grounded in our genetics, but in the grace of God who creates all things new.  When we set out in faith to make the migration, we are reborn into a new family--a family of blessedness, that blesses all the families of the world. 

Some of you heard the story I’m about to tell on Ash Wednesday, but I come back to it today because some of you weren’t there, and because it is about the point of departure on a journey of faith.  When I was a boy, about nine years old, my school friend Mark invited me to church with his family.  The church I usually attended with my parents was a large, beautiful, architecturally-significant structure in a park-like setting, in the finest neighborhood in town, but on this Sunday I rode with my friend’s family to a non-descript cinderblock structure on the wrong side of the tracks.  The preacher was a younger man in shirt-sleeves with slicked-back hair who paced around on the stage speaking extemporaneously into a microphone he held in his hand. 

And I don’t remember anything he said, but I do remember that while he was speaking I suddenly understood that my life was intended for me by an all-knowing, loving, and compassionate wisdom.  In a brief but unforgettable encounter, this wisdom communicated itself to me, so that I knew that nothing about my life was random or meaningless or wrong, and that I had no reason to be anxious or ashamed or fearful about the future, because the same presence I was feeling in that moment was behind everything in the world, and would never abandon me, because it was eternal.

As quickly as this moment had come, it was over, and as my ordinary consciousness reasserted itself my first thought was about Jesus.  I was, after all, in a church, and there was a guy up there talking about Jesus, so immediately I wondered, “what does Jesus have to do with what I just experienced?”   And what came to me was that Jesus was the journey ahead.  He was given to me as the key, if you will, to making that moment the enduring truth of my life, to integrating it into my ongoing every day experience.  And I would have the rest of my life to learn who he is and how he works.

As I say, this entire experience happened very rapidly, maybe in just a couple of minutes, and while it was happening my friend Mark saw tears streaming down my cheeks and that I was powerfully moved, and he decided that in that moment I had been “born again.”   From that point forward he took it upon himself to educate me in the rights and responsibilities pertaining to my new status.  And I think poor Mark found it confusing that I showed so little enthusiasm for his doctrine, and no inclination to return with him to his church.   But the thing is, what he had to say to me about God and Jesus and salvation never seemed remotely connected to the loving wisdom I had encountered on that day.

I guess you could say my friend Mark was a little like Nicodemus, the Pharisee we meet in today’s reading from the Gospel of John.  He can see the outward signs of the presence of God, the tears streaming down the cheeks, the deeds of power and transformation.  But something is missing from his understanding.  Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night, in the darkness of his ignorance of who Jesus really is, but he tells Jesus what he already knows: “We know you are a teacher who has come from God.”  But if there is implied in that statement, a desire for something not yet known—a deep and searching question—we never hear it.  You get the impression that Nicodemus may be interested in what Jesus has to say, but he is basically struggling to fit it all into his existing conceptual and doctrinal framework.   And it’s not fitting very well.

Because Jesus wants Nicodemus to go on a journey.  In the verses that follow, the Gospel of John takes us on a whirlwind tour from the superficial signs of God’s presence to the inner workings of God’s purpose in Christ.  It is a kind of crash course in the great gospel themes of the journey of salvation, from baptismal rebirth in water and spirit, to seeing and entering the kingdom of God; from the new freedom of the Spirit, to believing the testimony about heavenly things; from the incarnation and ascension of the Son of Man to the strange medicine of the cross that gives final liberation from the captivity of death and evil.  This rushing current of religious imagination brings us at last into the very heart of God, to the loving wisdom that sent his only Son into the world, that the world might be saved through him.

  

People sometimes speak of the season of Lent as a journey.  It is a time to remember that our life in faith is a long searching, and that we still have a long way to go.  It is a time to jettison the extra cargo, to pack light, so we can cover some ground.  And the destination of this journey is not an end, but a point of departure.  The season has its origins in the ancient church, in the final weeks of preparation for baptism at Easter.  In those days baptism was not an individual thing.  At the center of the church’s Easter celebration, it was a remembrance and participation in the moment when the family of Abraham, and every person in it, and the whole created world, was reborn. 

And even if you had been baptized already, maybe long before, every year there was a part of you that went down with the neophyte into the dark waters of Christ’s descent into death and hell.  Every year there was a part of you that came up out of the water, newborn, and was anointed with the oil of the spirit and clothed with the white garment of Christ’s resurrection.  And I think that the veterans began to join in the neophytes fast of Lent because they also wanted to be ready.  They wanted to be open so that when the family gathered to enact again the drama of God’s love for the world, they were open to receive the gift of the only Son.  They wanted to set out on the great migration again from the beginning, a little closer to the goal.     

Don't be afraid

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

One of the requirements for my ordination to the priesthood was that I spend the summer after my first year in seminary doing hands-on pastoral work in some kind of institutional setting, like a prison or a hospital.  I found a placement in Spiritual Care Services at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco.  The first couple of days were spent in orientation meetings with the supervisor and three other new interns.   We learned about the structure of the program, and which departments we’d been assigned to, and where they were, and met some of the staff..  We had trainings about infection control, and safety protocols.  And then the inevitable moment, that I’d been dreading since I first applied for the program, came, the morning when we left our little Spiritual Care Services office and went off to the various waiting rooms and treatment rooms where we had been assigned, to start making contact with patients and their families. 

Going up to strangers to offer them something they probably won’t want has never been my strong suit.  When they had those fundraisers for the high school band where we were supposed to go door-to-door to sell chocolate turtles or Christmas candles I would be one of those who would guiltily turn in five dollars and an order form with only the first line filled in, with my parents’ name and address.  So the prospect of walking into a room of men waiting for radiation treatment for prostate cancer and saying “Hi, I’m Daniel with Spiritual Care Services—how’s everybody doing this morning?”—well, didn’t exactly fill me joy.  The truth is, I was terrified.    But there I was, walking through the main lobby of the hospital, heading to the elevator for the first stop of what I knew was going to be a long day, and an even longer summer, of dealing with my fear.

And it came to me at that moment that I was only going to make things harder for myself if I pretended that I was not afraid, or if I thought those fears were going to go away.  I was just going to have to accept that fear would be companion that morning, and all summer long.  There, walking along beside me, would my old friend Fear, and I would do best to acknowledge him and to try to keep him calm and go on doing what I had to do as best I could.     

In the 15^th Chapter of Genesis, the word of the Lord comes to Abram in a vision, "Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great."

How often do these words recur in the Bible—“do not be afraid”?  When you hear them, brace yourself.  Someone’s life is about to be turned upside down.  It seems that whenever God decides to do something really big, something that changes forever the way that people see things and think about the world, something that sets the course of history off in a new and different direction, God first finds a human partner.  God finds someone like Abram, or like Moses, someone like Isaiah or Jeremiah, or Mary.  God chooses a partner and comes to them as a voice or in a vision, or through a messenger like Gabriel.  And the first thing God says is, “don’t be afraid.”

So, why is this always the first thing that God says to the one he has chosen— “Don’t be afraid?”   

Well, the obvious reason is that hearing the word of God, or having a vision of God’s glory, or receiving a visitation from God’s messenger, is scary.  God says “don’t be afraid” because she can see that the person that she’s speaking to is terrified, and needs some reassurance.   But maybe there’s another reason.  Maybe when people hear the word of God for the first time, it shifts their consciousness into a bigger perspective.  Maybe the encounter with God expands their awareness so they suddenly realize that they have been living their whole lives in fear.   Fear has been their usual state, and they didn’t even know it until God came to them and showed them that the things they were afraid of were actually pretty insignificant compared to the things that God was doing, through them, and for them, and through them for the world.

Lent is a season when Christians have traditionally fasted and simplified their lives and denied themselves certain pleasures and creature comforts.  But despite what people sometimes think, the purpose of this discipline is not to punish ourselves for our being greedy and self-indulgent.  No, we change our habits and let go of comforts because our habits and comforts cover up our fears and anxieties.  We have organized our lives to maintain the illusion that we are in control of our fears, but our fears have ended up controlling us.  We have filled our days with distractions so that we can avoid feeling our fear, but we have ended up feeling numb and empty instead.  In Lent, we choose to face our fears, and feel and know how they have imprisoned us. 

Today’s Gospel lesson shows us Jesus as one who has compassion for those who live in fear, even as he disregards the mounting danger to himself.   He is making his way to Jerusalem with a vision of a mother bird, gathering her chicks in safety under the protection of her wings.  And at the same time he knows that setting people free from fear is a threat to men like Herod, that fox, men whose grip of terror over the chicks is the key to their own power.  The disciplines of Lent bring us a little closer to the stark realities of life as Jesus faced them, as millions of our brothers and sisters face them every day—hunger, deprivation, oppression, and terror. 

We do this in imitation of Christ, who chose solidarity with the poor and fearful over the prerogatives of power.  And we do it because it puts us in touch with our highest needs and desires.   Above our desire for safety for ourselves, comfort for ourselves, satisfaction for ourselves, is the longing to live in a world where these things are abundantly available to everyone. 

And when we view the world from that height we also find relief from our most profound fear.  Which is the fear that we will come to the end of our lives and know that our time on earth was wasted, because everything we did we did for ourselves.  We risked nothing, and hid from danger, and played no part in the great adventure of God’s salvation of the world.  We played it safe and so we spent our lives without ever really knowing Jesus Christ.  We never knew him because we were afraid to meet him in that place where our individual lives, so vulnerable, so fragile and insecure, connect with the great life that lives in all things.  We never knew the joy that persists in the midst of suffering, or the justice that triumphs over evil, or the life that rises from the tomb, and all because we were afraid: afraid to endure suffering; afraid to confront evil; afraid to die. 

But in Christ God enters into our condition of fearfulness and redeems it, not by violently eliminating every threat, but by strengthening our hearts to do our work.  The example and the spirit of Jesus gives us courage to keep going, to keep pursuing peace, and wholeness, and freedom for everyone, in defiance of the dangers, in spite of our fears.  We aren’t all going to be great heroes.  Not everyone is called to martyrdom.  But everyone who has felt, even for a moment, the mothering love of God, that yearning to gather us together in the shelter of her wings, has also felt the desire to gather and to shelter and to love.  And the way to be faithful to that desire, the way to stay firmly on the path of transformation in Christ, is to keep going through the places in your life where know you most need to hear these words—“Don’t be afraid.”