A Sermon Preached By

The Rev. Dr. Peter W. Shidemantle

10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 8, 2008

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., DeWitt, NY  13214

Phone:  315-446-0960     FAX:  446-0672

phillchu@twcny.rr.com     http://pebblehill.presbychurch.org

Now that both of the major party candidates for president have been selected, the debate, as both candidates have been saying, will turn in earnest toward the big issues that we face as a nation - the war in Iraq, oil prices and the struggling economy, global warming, health care, global terrorism, and all the rest.  Big solutions to these big problems will be put forward, and we are told that this election will offer a clearer choice on the direction in which we will move into the future than there has been for some time.

            Campaigns are about the big issues and the proposed policies that would address them - as they must be.  But as campaigns give way to elections, and elections give way to actual governing, we know that, at least in our system in this country, solutions to large problematic issues are worked out through series of negotiations and compromises in the rough and tumble world of power politics, democracy in action, if not always inclusive of all the stakeholders.

            In a way, presidential campaigns, especially perhaps this one, operate on the grand scale.  They are about noble visions and ideals.  They seek to appeal to shared values and commitments.  But winning isn’t the end.  It’s just the beginning.  Once you have the power, what do you actually do with it?  You can’t operate on the grand scale forever.  It might get you elected, but then you’re held accountable for the promises you’ve made and the policies you pursue.

            Up to the point in the book of Genesis, where our reading begins this morning at chapter 12, God is dealing with the world on a grand scale.  First, of course, there was creation.  That’s about as grand a scale as you can get.  But soon God had reason to be disappointed with the human side of the created order, whom God had endowed with the freedom to choose between good and evil.  Adam and Eve made their choice, and got themselves kicked out of the Garden of Eden.  Then one of their sons became the first homicide, the other the first murderer.  And then, as humanity obeyed God’s command to be fruitful and multiply, so did the problems.  Finally, by chapter six the writer tells us, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was very great in the earth, and that every inclination of their hearts was only evil continually.  And the Lord was sorry that he made humankind on the earth . . .” (Genesis 6:5-6) And so God wiped out everything and everyone except Noah and his family, and started again.

            But this grand solution, too, resulted in disappointment for the Lord, and when the descendants of Noah tried to build a tower to the heavens and count themselves equal to God, God decided there should be a little less ease of communication among the peoples of the earth, and so confused them with different languages and scattered them to the four corners of the earth.

            If we were to see this as a kind of election, God would have won (after all, it was sort of stacked in his direction, him being the creator and all), but he was going to have to “govern” a world with a whole lot of evil in it.  With humankind free to choose good or evil, it was clear by now that they would choose evil as often as not.  And so God declared, “Enough of the big picture.  Let’s pick just one of them, one family, and see what happens.”  Instead of going after the big solution, God relents and changes course, entering the rough and tumble of the struggle between good and evil, and narrows in on a 75 year old couple and some assorted relatives.  And that’s the beginning of how God is going to save the world from itself.

            You can just picture the scene: Abram comes home to his wife Sarai one day and out of the blue says, “Sarai, you won’t believe this, but we’re moving.”  “Moving where?” Sarai replies.  “Well, I’m not sure, but we have to get going.”  And if this weren’t enough, he told her that God told him they’d be parents of a great nation.  We know that Sarai would have other occasions to laugh at the foolishness of this whole arrangement, but the humor must have started here, for as we are told at the end of the chapter, “Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.”

            Walter Brueggemann says that the story of Abraham really starts at that point, with that verse.  It stands as the storyteller’s judgment on human history to this point.  History was barren - no life, therefore no future.  What had begun with the heady days in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, with humanity in perfect harmony with God, had swiftly run its course.  This was the unpromising world into which God speaks a word of promise.  It establishes the pattern of God making unexpected promises at ridiculous times in ridiculous places.  God’s purposes may still seem cloudy to us, at best, and a lot of the time we’re not sure we like what we are able to make out about them - but we’re still dealing with a God who makes promises - and faith, more than our ability to follow the commandments or to love as we ought to love - is about trusting in the promises.

            For Abram and Sarai it started with the decision to leave home - to leave the familiar and the settled, where you know and are known - not knowing where the journey will take you.  I grew up in a town that you left.  Not everyone, of course, but it was assumed that if you went away after high school there was a good chance you wouldn’t be back, except maybe to visit.  Some of my friends never left, and too many of them drifted into patterns of living that were destructive and even deadly.  There was nothing out there that they could see was for them.  And so they took from life to the point where they couldn’t give, and they were suffocated by it.

            You’ve got to “go” to know the promises - even if you stay in the same place, physically.  We say that faith is a journey, and as much of a cliche as the phrase may sound, it has to be a journey.  To know the promises, to be fed by the promises, you have to “go.”  What do we mean by that?  Well, if we look to God to be a God of answers, or a God of safety, or a God whose ways ought to be predictable to us - then when we are disappointed in those expectations we’ll allow our faith to settle into a kind of legalism that thinks it can capture the awesomeness and wonder of divine life within clearly defined lines of belief and behavior.  We settle for easy certainties and simple consolations.

            In Romans the Apostle Paul holds up Abraham as a shining example of faithfulness, not for his obedience so much as for his trusting that God would make good on his promise, evidence to the contrary not withstanding.  The story of Job may be the greatest biblical instance of trusting against the evidence.  Suffering in incomprehensible ways, Job will not be convinced that his suffering comes from God as punishment for his sin, or for any other reason that would make it understandable or acceptable to him.  He maintains both his innocence - and God’s graciousness.

            Kurt Vonnegut died not long ago.   When I was coming through college and seminary a lot of people were reading his books.  They fit with the times, and helped shape them, I think.  In one of his books he tells a story that speaks to this sense of keeping God close to us in a kind of settled faith and surrounding oneself with the safety of easy assumptions about what it means to be in relationship with God.

            I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for her great dane.  The lady claimed to understand God and his ways of working perfectly.  She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled by what had been or what was going to be.

            And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, “I’m sorry, but I never could read one of those things.””

            Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God, I said, and when God finds a minute I’m sure he’ll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even you can understand”.

            She fired me.  I shall never forget her.  She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than he liked people in motorboats.  She could not bear to look at a worm.  When she saw a worm, she screamed.

            She was a fool, and so am I, and so is everyone who thinks he sees what God is doing.”`

            John Shea, the Catholic theologian and storyteller, commenting on this story, says that people who understand this little scene are not the atheists, for all they see is a kind of mocking of one naive believer.  And agnostics can’t really see it either because it simply confirms a kind of ambiguity they can’t get beyond.  The believers understand it, he says, because through it they are returned to the actual relationship to God “which,” he says, “by definition is not subject to control but only to adventure.”

            What if faith were truly an adventure for us, as many of you have known it to be?  What if, at the end of worship we said not, “Amen,” but “Let’s go.”  Go where?  Well, I’m not sure, just that we’ve got to get going.  If that’s good enough for Abraham, it’s good enough for me.  While we’re thinking of presidential elections, maybe we can paraphrase John Kennedy’s words and say, “Ask not what your church can do for you, but what you can do for your church.”  Let’s go!  While we’re sitting around trying to make sense of all the tragedies in life, all the senselessness and foolishness that we see all around us, maybe we decide to move out in some risky ways to make a difference, however small, in the life of another, to bring some loving order amidst the chaos.  Let’s go!  Maybe we let our faith in the God who holds us, and the Christ whose way has shown us to God, spill over into those into those relationships at work, or at the ball field, or at the gym, or at the club, or at school, and share what our faith means to us - to tell someone, at an unexpected place and at an unexpected time, “I will pray for you.”  Let’s go!  Maybe your heart is touched or your conscience is pricked by some pain or injustice in the world, and rather than just bemoaning the condition of the world you decide to change the world.  Let’s go!

            God’s first word to us is always “Go,” and in Jesus Christ we have been shown the way, if not the destination.  None of us knows what will come, what burdens we will be forced to bear - but we have received the promise that life awaits us at the end.  And along the way, there are songs to sing and love to share, and sisters and brothers to remind us that we are not alone - and God, who is with us.  Amen, and let’s go.  

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