Second Sunday of Lent
Now 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. 2I
will make of
you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name
great, so that you will be a blessing. 3I will bless those
who bless
you, and the one who curses
you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’ [Gen 12:1-4]
This is the story of the call of Abraham, when God
called Abraham
to leave his country, his kindred and his father’s house to go to a
land that
God would show him. Perhaps Abraham
was fleeing famine or war. Perhaps
he was restless, didn’t get along with his kin, or just had a desire to
explore. The story says
Abraham leaves because God told him to leave. God spoke to Abraham, maybe in a dream
or in a thunder storm, and tells him to leave and
that God would
bless him and show him the where to go.
If Abraham would obey the call of God, God would do two things for Abraham; God would bless Abraham and God would make Abraham a blessing to all
the families of the earth. God said, ‘I will bless you…so that you will be a blessing…in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’ So I understand the story to say to us that if we obey the call of God, God will do two things. God will bless us and make us a blessing to others.
Consider first the divine promise of a personal
blessing,
that if Abraham would leave his country, kindred and home, God would
bless
him. Obeying the call of God would result
in his own benefit. Rashi, the
great Jewish Biblical exegete, translates the opening words, ‘go
forth’ as, ‘
go for yourself’. This journey would be
for his own
benefit and good. He stands to gain
more than he will loose. God promises
to give him
land, make of him a great nation and make his name great.
The first lesson from the story is that when
we yield to the call of God, God will
bless us. When we do the right thing, we
stand to
benefit.
God makes Abraham a second promise.
If he would leave his country, kindred
and home, God would make Abraham a blessing to others.
‘In you all the
families of the earth will be blessed.’ So,
the second lesson of the story is that
when we obey the call of God; God will make us
a blessing to others. The moral of the
story is that if we
will be faithful to the call of God, God will bless us and make us a
blessing
to others.
The
third lesson from the story is the assumption that we can hear God. The legacy of Abraham is that he
received revelation from a transcendent source that guided his life. He heard God and this was to
Abraham’s credit. The journey
outward was God’s idea and Abraham went out in faith, believing God had
called him. Abraham was receptive
to God, open to God’s challenge and call. The
story is about a God
who calls
people to believe and obey. Before
Abraham can obey he must listen, he must hear God’s call.
The story teaches us to listen to
God. Abraham converses with God, sometimes
with an air of doubt and with questions.
Evert Fox writes, ‘All that the text wishes us to know about is
God’s speech and Abvram’s immediate obedience…”
Our
challenge is not merely to obey God but also to believe God speaks, to
be open
to the real possibility of divine revelation and guidance.
The story of the call of Abraham
challenges us to be willing to deconstruct the ontological barriers we
may have
constructed
between matter and spirit.
For today’s practical exercise I challenge you to be open to the
call of God and to be willing to practice what you
hear.
God calls us to
‘leave our country, kindred and homes to be blessed by God.
God
is calling us to leave our past behind and to journey out to an unnamed
land,
to leave somethings behind in order to be blessed
by God and to be a blessing
to others. Could God be challenging
us to leave the church and take our life into the world?
This ‘journey outward’
is both
for our own good and also for the benefit of the world.
Going out into the world will bring out
our best and it will also enable us to be a blessing to others. God is
calling
us to go out from familiar ways and places, our homes and houses of
worship, to
go on a journey to other people who God will show us. God
calls us to be a light to the
nations, to love those who are lonely, to befriend and challenge the
marginalized,
the secularized, the materialized, the militarized, to take the God of
peace
and the gospel of Jesus into the world, for our own good and also for
the good
of the world. Jesus calls us to
take his life into the world, he says, ‘You have not chosen me but I
have
chosen you, to go and bear fruit that will last.’ ‘Peace
be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send
you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them,
‘Receive the Holy Spirit. John 20:21-23
Jesus gives us the power of the
Holy Spirit and calls us to go into the world.
The
call of Abraham was not
Palistinecentric. It was not
God’s intention to cloister Abraham, to bless him with land and
possessions merely for his own good but for the good of the world. The Diaspora of Israel in which
by Jeremiah as useful. The Jews become
like seeds scattered
among the nations to bloom where they were planted.
They were to ‘seek the welfare of
the city’, to be ‘for the nations’, they are God’s
people who exist to ‘repair the world.’
Thus
says the Lord of hosts, the God of
your daughters in marriage, that they may bear
sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the
welfare
of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord
on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. [Je. 29:
4-7]
John
Stoner writes, “the church could turn the world toward peace if every
church lived and taught as Jesus lived and taught.’
The
legacy of Abraham and Jesus teaches
us that we exist to bless others, to bring forth the fruit of love and
peace.
Making an application
Conyers, in his book, The Meaning of Vocation,
says that
vocation is not our job or profession, but the sense of our being
raised up by
divine reality. He writes, ‘vocation is about
being
raised from the dead, make alive to the reality that we do not merely
exist,
but are ‘called by God to
a divine purpose’ [p19] Think of
‘call of
God’ in a practical, ordinary and simple way? What
is one, simple, ordinary, practical
thing you hear
God calling you to do?
Doing this one thing will bless you and enable you to be a
blessing to
others. Ask yourself, ‘What is one thing that I
hear God calling me to
do.’ I hope that each of you
will leave here today having heard God call you to do one thing.
This
‘One Thing’ may be a combination of something you are called to leave
behind and something you are called to take hold of, something to put
off and/or
something to put on. God calls us
to be a blessing to others. We each
have a unique role to play for the influence
and accomplishment of good. Lewis Smedes
writes, ‘What really
matters is not whether Abraham is good or bad or cowardly or heroic,
but
that
God pursues His design for the welfare of the human family with people
like
that -- in other words, people like us."
Saint
Teresa of
with
which He is to bless us now.’
We
are called to continue the work of Jesus.
We are conduits of divine power and love, we are what Paul
called,
‘the body of Christ’.
We are the incarnational presence of Jesus on
earth. Jesus was the incarnation of God in human flesh, and the
incarnation
that began in Jesus has not ceased but continues in us.
‘The body of Christ’ is not
just a metaphor but describes how Jesus is present in our world. God continues the work of Jesus in our
material existence. John Roth, in
his book Stories how Mennonites came to
be, writes, ‘God’s people are called to the nitty gritty task
of being incarnational – participating in the making the word flesh. It
is exactly is such settings that our Lord
promised to be with us, to the close
of the age.’
Ronald
Rolheiser is a Roman Catholic priest who tells a story about a four
year old
girl who awoke one night frightened, convinced that
in the darkness around her
there were all kinds of spooks and monsters. She
ran to her parent’s
bedroom. Her mother calmed her down
and, taking her by the hand, lead her back to her own room, where she
put on a
light and reassured the child with these words, ‘you needn’t be
afraid, you are not alone here, God is in the room with you.’ The child replied: ‘I know that
God is here, but mama, I need someone in this room who has some skin.’ [The Holy Longing, p.77]
We
are the skin of Jesus, his hands, feet, heart and mind in the world. Rolheiser continues, ‘A theist
believes in a God in heaven
whereas a Christian believed in a God in heaven who
is also physically present on this earth inside of human beings.’ [81]
God
is calling us to be a "Missional church" with a witness to be shared
across the street and around the world.
Church of the Brethren motto calls us ‘to continue the work of
Jesus, simply, peacefully, and together.’ The
be followers of Jesus Christ and,
by the power of the Holy Spirit, to grow as communities of grace, joy
and
peace, so that God's healing and
hope flow through us to the world.’ This
is our vocation, as Conyers said,
we are ‘being raised from the dead, make alive
to
the reality that we
do not merely exist, but are ‘called by God to a
divine purpose’
I
am not suggesting a grand vision, that God is necessarily calling you
to be a
prophet, priest or monk. I am
suggesting that God is
calling us to love ad extend hospitality beyond our
borders for our own good and to be a blessing to others.
Perhaps God is calling you to let
go of a
destructive habit or resentment or a responsibility that is no longer
fruitful. Perhaps God is calling
you to write, to volunteer at hospice,
to have a discipline of prayer. Challenge
you to share what you hear
with others as a way of accountability.
Toivo
Tulev is a composer who came
to prominence on the Estonian music scene in the early 1990s. One of his compositions he entitled, Be lost
in the Call. Tulev borrowed
the title from the closing lines of an English translation of a poem by
Persian
poet Jalaluddin al-Rumi (1207 – 1273). – “Remember God so
much that you are forgotten. Let the caller and the called disappear,
be lost
in the Call.”
Remember God so much that you are
forgotten. Remember that we are
the little touch of Jesus, we are conduits of divine power
called to extend the
love and the challenge of Jesus in the world. It
is Christ who works throurgh our
little actions that does this work, for God
has chosen to have divine power
flow through us to others. We are
together and separelely the incarnational presence of Jesus in the
world.
Call us out, O God, from familiar
settings. Lead us into unexplored
regions, and
make our lives a blessing to all whom
we meet. Amen.