WORSHIP

Selected Sermons

“Hope Turned Outward ”
By Rev. Mary Louise McCullough
Second Sunday of Lent - February 17, 2008

Genesis 12: 1-4a
Romans 4: 1-5, 13-17

John 3: 1-17

No one really knows why God picked Abram to leave behind every known thing, wander to a new land, and become the father of the people we now call the Israelites. The story of Avraham Avinu, Father Abraham, doesn’t begin until he is 75 years old. Speculation abounds, there are wonderful stories to be found, but no one really knows, why Abram. Abram was his name before he became this chosen wanderer. I ran across one rabbi’s explanation that sounded about as good as it can get:

“Abram was a remarkable individual who had arrived at a deep and profound knowledge of God and was prepared to sacrifice his life for this belief. However, all this was on his own terms. It was something which he pioneered and continued the way he saw fit. After Abram turned seventy-five years old, God initiated a connection with him that would transform him into a new entity. Abraham was about to become a ‘Jew’ and a father to all future Jews. This new relationship was one which God initiated, and which God was to dictate and inform Abraham how to maintain and nurture.” 1

Note the emphasis here: Abram had a strong sense of a God who was utterly different from the vast array of divinities that were common in his time and culture, and this made him unique perhaps, but things didn’t get interesting until God approached Abram. What changed and started everything moving in a new direction was that God made contact with Abram, told Abram to leave home and thrive, got Abram going on God’s terms.

It’s almost impossible for us to comprehend how extreme a request this was – go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house – leave all that you are and know. In Jewish studies of this story we learn country represented land, birthplace, desires, Abraham’s entire way of being. Go from your kindred – this represented not only the tribe but all their ingrained habits, their ways of thinking and organizing the world. Go from your father’s house, meant leaving everything acquired through intellect and reasoning. Leaving literally, the “head” with the father being the “head” – head of household and head of the body.

Abram is called to give up absolutely everything except for his heart, his wife, Sarai. Abram is called to completely disconnect from who he had been.

Physical dislocation, spiritual dislocation. It took a lot for God to prepare Abram for the personal transformation that was ahead. That would take years to realize. But God wanted this mutual relationship, this partnership. God was not satisfied to leave things at the level of comfort and respect, a distant friendliness. God wanted to get close. To get intimately involved in Abram’s life.

Why? Because a lot of stuff about the world, and about Abram needed to be changed. God had to start somewhere to work on this human with all his ways and all his needs and desires, his likes and dislikes. In that action, God started on everyone.

Move along a few thousand years to the Greek Testament and we see Jesus saying something that is similar to Nicodemus. Here is Jesus, the extension of God in the world, God who has fully entered human existence all the way.  And Jesus says to this fellow Nicodemus who has already proven himself as a prominent leader and expert in the law, when Nicodemus comes to him by night – suggesting that Nicodemus, for all his knowledge, is in the dark spiritually – Jesus says, if you want what I am offering, you have to leave everything you think you know and start over, like an infant, being born from above, born of Spirit, which is completely different from the way you have already been born, the way you have lived in the world.

Then the apostle Paul comes along, as we read in his letter to the Romans, and tweaks this whole thing a bit more! Paul says, you wonder why Abram was chosen? It wasn’t because he had done all sorts of good things – that may or may not have been the case. Abram was chosen because he was capable of saying yes to God. Abram got up and left. He allowed God to reshape his life. That’s what was special about Abraham.

Following Christ, Paul says, involves letting God’s active pursuit of you grasp you and overtake you. Receive that awareness – don’t just stare at it and say, “Maybe….maybe not.”  Receive it, in your heart as a freely given gift. God extends this call to life, God finds us. Then it is up to us to respond.

And as we have seen this morning, in Baptism, people can make their jokes about Presbyterians being the frozen chosen, but our words are not the least bit frozen – our tradition says, baptism is a response to this astounding thing God does to all of us.

Before we are even born, God embraces us in a loving relationship, and this sacrament is our way of responding to that as a community and saying, “Yes! You come into our lives over and over. Let us open another door through this child for you to come again.”

These passages are about God’s ongoing gestures  – lifting Abram out of a barren life that would have brought nothing new into the human understanding of how we carry God with us and have our being in God.

Helping Nicodemus to see that all his intelligence and achievements were his own work, not the work of God, that he needed this whole new perspective of how life is to be far more challenging – it is to be lived in the tension of being fully human, yet capable of being swept off our feet, born from above, if we allow it, if we freely choose it.

It’s kind of like what happens when a person leaves behind the illusion and the expectation of being straight and that person admits to himself or herself and God and your families and friends, that she is gay.  Everything you thought was true falls away and you begin the long and amazing process of learning to live anew.

Or it is kind of like leaving your country of origin and going to another country to pursue an education or a career. Living in a different culture can smash the lenses we have used to view life and our own existence in this great river of humanity. The call to relationship with God is like that, but more. More wonderful, more difficult.

Divorce or the breakup of a committed relationship can be similar. It can rip you away from all you thought was true, so that you find yourself on an island where it is all you can do to remember your name. How do you get started again? How do you respond? Sometimes it is not until we are brought to our knees this way that we are able to see what God is offering us.

And what exactly is that, what God is offering us? Certainly we are not being called to start a new tribe of people.  What is God offering us, what does God matter?

You may have read the new bestseller, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I had seen it but didn’t get myself a copy until I read in Presbyterian Outlook the other day that hundreds of people are showing up to meet Gilbert as she travels now to talk about her book.

The book is her story of putting her life back together after a nasty and prolonged divorce but more importantly, finding herself as she visits Italy, India, Indonesia, almost as if she puts herself back together physically with all the food and beauty of Italy, spiritually with the mysticism and meditation she disciplines herself to undergo in India, and then finally expressing her compassion for others in Indonesia.

It is a story charmingly written, with the limitations such stories have when they are written by attractive people with educations and bank accounts that allow them to move about the globe and utter newfound truths in such a way.

Apparently this story is striking a chord. Is it a modern day Abram story? I wondered, reading it. On her web site Gilbert writes,

“I have come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call ‘The Physics of the Quest’ – a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: ‘ if you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally) and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself … then truth will not be withheld from you.”

Can’t argue with that. And of course, it’s been said before. Many times. But something tells me that Abram was about so much more than comforting himself, patching together his life, which at the time of his call, did not need patching, but needed it badly after he signed on with God.

We never seem to tire of stories such as Gilbert’s though, because so many of us do not feel the freedom to get up and move to Italy. It can be much harder to face the difficult journey of going into the heart of who you are in your own world, in your own family, without the luxury of travel without the lovely boyfriend waiting at the end to jump into the water with you.

In fact, we can spend years building our best attempt at an authentic life, just as Nicodemus did, and still end up realizing that there is something missing. Something large.

If anything, our lives are overflowing with the prospects of re-creating ourselves. Our problem is that we can re-imagine ourselves at the drop of a hat, but often, we still do not know what we are yearning for.

The Church has long struggled with what life in Christ looks like, what it  will do to you, how it will change you if it’s real, what does it look like, day after day, to try to live closer to God, what does it do to you year after year.

These efforts often veer away from the truth of the gospels as they become entangled with everyone’s desire to claim the truth and to turn that into power. The gospels are full of mystery and ambiguity – the gospels are eccentric – you can’t wrap them up into neat little stories. They’re full of things that can’t be explained simply.

The tension in the story of Nicodemus is the tension of how to live in the world, yet be born from above, born anew, a subtle and complex notion which many people have experienced but have trouble putting words around.

The mystery of the language of Jesus has been sideswiped for generations by the effort to make a formula for salvation. The gospel of John in particular has been misused to suggest that the good news is something exclusive – that we can limit who it applies to, who gets a portion.

What a sad rendering of this God of Abram, this Holy Spirit who blows where the wind blows, who gives life and hope and abundance far beyond the ability of the human mind to predict, control or define it.

What Abram had, and Nicodemus came to find, was something very small but far more powerful. It was hope in something that was not fully realized. It was hope in lots of sentences that were left dangling. But Abram was able to sink his hope fully in that presence that he called Hashem, God.

Because it was a different hope, hope that had turned outward as well as inward. It was hope realized by realizing we do not simply belong to our families and churches. We belong to something larger. We belong to God and through God, to our whole world. To something outside of ourselves and yet with us at every moment within ourselves. Both vast and intensely personal.

Our hope has the flavor of purpose. God says, “You are important to me, you are my comrade, every hair on your head is important, believe it or not.”

We are not simply part of some anonymous eye in the sky or mathematical equation. We belong to a God who pursues us. Who loves us. Personally. Deeply.

Karl Barth wrote, “We are in the world not to comfort ourselves, but to comfort others.”

It is because we know we belong to God, that we can do that. Otherwise, comfort is empty. Fleeting.

Our confessions state, “God’s work in Jesus Christ embraces the whole of human life.”

We are the recipients of that work, and we are partners in that work. Our hope is inward, but it must be turned outward in order to be fully realized.

And we’re serious when we say this hope is grounded in love because when we fail, which we will if we live authentically, it will still be there. When we give up, it waits and calls us to go on. When we succeed, it helps us to keep perspective, and know where our strength has come from.

Small and grand, it names us as worthy of the supreme gift. The gift of a whole life. The life of Jesus. Not because of anything we have done. But because of who we are.

And the ongoing life of the Spirit bathes us in baptism each time we remember who we are, and whose we are.

Thanks be to God.

Copyright 2007 Rev. Mary Louise McCullough

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1 Rabbi Yossi Lew, “75 and Counting,”

  http://www.tfdixie.com/parshat/lech/007.htm