THE SACRED JOURNEY

1. Adventure

March 11, 1990

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
John 3:1-17
Genesis 12:1-9

“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... So Abram
went,...journeyed on,..." -Genesis 12:1, 4, 9 {RSV)

Can you imagine the day when Abraham and Sarah tried to explain it to
their neighbors? Abraham is seventy-five. Sarah is at least that old.
They. have no children.. What they have, of course, is each other, and the
comfortable routines of fifty years or so of life together. Since the day
longer ago than they can remember, the day when Abraham's father Terah
moved the whole family to Haran, they had lived in one place. Abraham and
Sarah were settled, established, comfortable. There's something nice about
that... something good about knowing you don't have to move anymore, that
this is the place you can expect to live out your days. There is something
comforting about the daily routine and ritual by which time is measured:
up at 7:00; coffee and newspaper at 7:30; walk the dog at 8:00; lunch,
cocktails, dinner, and TV until bed time; the buffet at the club on
Thursdays; not exciting, but no surprises, no problems. Abraham and Sarah
are settied, substantial, mature people. Can you imagine the day when they
tell the neighbors they are selling their place, having a garage sale,
withdrawing their money from the bank, and leaving? "Where are you going,
Abraham? To a retirement village, maybe?" “Well, actually not. Actually,
we don't know exactly where we're going. We're headed for the promised
land, but we really don't know where it is. So, we're trusting God to show
us the way, and to provide for us. And -— we hate to mention it — but we're
expecting that sometime soon Sarah's going to be pregnant. So we'll be
parents, not just of a child, but a whole new nation. That's a whole cther
story! Anyway, we're leaving."

Can't you imagine the neighbors first trying to talk them out of it?
“Don't leave home! Enjoy! You've worked hard and dene well. You're home
safe. Don't throw it all away for a wild dream. You don't know what
you're getting into. Things will never be the same again." [See Going

Home, Robert Raines, p. 27] As Abraham and Sarah continue packing, can't
you see the neighbors rolling their eyes at this peculiar pair of old
eccentrics about to do something if not absolutely crazy than terribly
unlikely and inappropriate... and frightening!

We do know a little about moving. In fact, we are more mobile than
anybody before us. The average American will move from place to place
thirteen times during his or her lifetime, ten times as an adult. The
proportion of the population which lives in one place only is now 3%.
Every year 17% of us move... [Population of the United States - Historical
Trends, 1985] Until a generation ago, many people never moved at all, or
what moving they did was down the street, or across town. In the old
country, generations lived in the same house. We have visited the farm
where they all lived for centuries. Our parents lived within a several
square mile area all their lives. We have packed up and moved five times,
and that's fairly stable. Contemporaries of mine have moved twelve,
fifteen, twenty times. IBM,-d've been told ruefully by a sequence of
friends who have passed through my life, stands for "I've Been Moved."

We know about separation anxiety and the psychological dynamics of
joss, and that moving is like losing something precious which in fact it
is, and how we can anticipate the occurrence of the grief process -
numbness, depression, guilt and anger. This business of moving from place
to place leaves us with some emotional fragility and maybe even poverty in
addition to exhilaration and energy. We also know that when Genesis 12
says a settied seventy-five year old couple hear God telling them to move
and promising them a child, and they actually do it, actually trust the
voice and move, the Bible is saying something either very silly or very
important.

This story of Abraham and Sarah is arguably the most important story
in the Bible. In the Abraham saga the Bible makes its first and most
breathtaking assertions about the one God. In the first two chapters of
Genesis there are stories of creation, a great flood, a high tower and
people unable to communicate with one another. There is nothing unique
about the theological assertion that God is creator, nor that there are
perimeters within which the creatures must Live, and that there are severe
consequences when these boundaries are crossed. What starts to emerge in
the 12th chapter of Genesis is an utterly different idea of God. This is a
God whe is not content with the way things are in creation, and so makes a
people, a family, a nation to reflect the true intent of the creation.

This is a God who enters into conversation with people, has a relationship
with them. This is an altogether different God who is always making new
and unlikely things happen and who expects people to not be too settled, to
live loosely, to be mobile enough to respond to the new things God is
doing. This is a God who prefers a tent to a building; a God who is
suspicious of temples and the trappings of religion; a God who likes to be
on the way - in the wilderness - with the people. This is a God whose love
allows peopie freedom and promises to be with them always. This is a God
to trust when God calls people to be on a journey of faith, a God who makes
of our lives a Sacred Journey.

It is a very old story in terms of literature, older than the stories
of creation. It is, some believe, the first and fundamental Bible story.

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It occurs in the middle of the Bronze Age, when people in the area where
the story occurs are mostly nomads, merchants, a few settled farmers, but
not very any. And what this story says with sweeping literary beauty is
thal in al] the human history before, things have not gone well. People
have rebelled against the basic rules of creation and the result has been
alienation, separation, violence. This particular family, of which Abraham
is the last member, is itself at a dead end... Old Abraham and his old
wife, in their barrenness, are a metaphor for the human condition. They
live without hope. They live without passion and love. They live in their
settled stability, putting in time until they die, waiting day in and day
out for their lives simply to play out.

And it is in their barrenness and hopelessness that they hear the
voice calling them to move and promising them a future - as unlikely a
promise as anyone ever heard (unless you count something Gabriel said to a
young Jewish girl 1,500 years later, about her illegitimate child being the
savior of the world). it is an outlandish, almost preposterous, promise.
And Abraham and Sarah believe it, trust it. They pick up and go.

It's important because of what it says about God and about faith and
about the world and our own journeys.

It says, first, that the reality of God is not located in the past,
but in the future. It says that the power and energy of God is not so much
pushing us from behind, out of our memories and traditions, but pulling us
from ahead, out of our hope. It says that we do not live in a static,
settled world, but one full of possibility because of the activity of God.
It is, says Walter Bruggemann, an eloquent Old Testament scholar, a polemic
against the notion that we live in a settled state, a static situation in
which everything that can be already is. That posture, which is the arid
world view of secularism, is essentially atheistic. If God has no power
nor potential to change things, to create new possibilities, but exists
only as a memory, it is reasonable to question whether that God exists in
any meaningful way and consequently whether worshipping that God is
anything other than an exercise in nostalgia or wishful thinking.

But the simple fact is that change is happening radically throughout
the world. We are in the middle of an adventure and where it will end,
even our best and brightest don't know. I was intrigued to read one
commentator's observation that things begin to ferment spiritually for a
generation or so before there is major change at a political level. So
What we have witnessed transpiring in Eastern Europe has been a stirring of
the human spirit for decades, a stirring we know has been occurring in the
arts, and in religion long before it was expressed in the streets and the
halls of government, a stirring this Abraham material suggests, is surely
the activity of this amazing God of the future.

We live in the midst of incredible change, not stability...
Megatrends 2,000 details ten major changes in the human situation. The
opening sentences of the book set the pace -

"We stand at the dawn of a new era. Before us is the most
important decade in the history of civilization, a period
of stunning technological innovation, unprecedented economic

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opportunity, surprising political reform, and great cultural
rebirth. It will be a decade like none that has come before.’
[p. 11, John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene j

In point of fact, our aldest story about Gad suggests that God is a
God who likes change, stirs up change, calis people to change, wants people
to be free and unencumbered enough to engage creatively with a new world
God is creating.

And so the story says a Jot about what it means to be faithful.
Somewhere we got the idea that te have a religion is to obey the religious
rules and believe certain ideas about God. That is, religion is ethics,
negatively defined, and theological orthodoxy defined by tradition, custom.
However, here in our earliest story, faith is a matter of following the
voice, trusting the promise, and courage to live without security, relying
on God's providence. Abraham isn't much of a theologian, is not an
abstract thinker, doesn't say anything about the nature of God. He simply
entrusts his future to Ged. It's what faith is in the Bible. And from
beginning to end Abraham's trust is the example the Biblical writers use to
illustrate faith.

Faith surely doesn't mean saintliness if by that word we mean the
steadfast avoidance of the moral ambiguities of life in-the world. Read
on. As soon as Abraham is finished showing us what faith means he ends up
in Egypt looking for food and because Sarah is an attractive woman and he
knows will catch the eye of the Egyptians, convinces her to pretend she is
his sister instead of his wife - to save his own skin, which is what
happens. Sarah ends up as one of Pharoh's concubines for a while and
Abraham gets rich because of the arrangement... until Pharoh discovers that
she is actually Abraham's wife and returns her promptly. It is an
appalling story, a tale of moral ambiguity and human culpability. And it
demonstrates that faith is not moral saintliness.

Abraham and Sarah also have a word to us personally. In Alvin
Toffler's important book several years ago, Future Shock, he argued that
the way we cope with rapid change in the world around us and the mobility
that makes us feel like modern nomads is by building into our lives what he
called “personal stability zones"... "To compensate for the rapid change
to which they are subjected some people restore dated automobiles, wear
clothing styles of earlier eras, or hold rigidly to dated routines. When
transience and turnover leave most things up for grabs, to what do people
cling? At the deepest level what they cling to is a 'god.'" [see
Proclamation 4, Lent, Robert Hughes, p. 27]

And Philip Wogaman in the book we are reading in the Lenten Academy,
Faith & Fragmentation, takes a similar tack. One of the fragments of faith

to which people are clinging is the "nostalgic vision" - a "vision of piety
and church life as we knew it or as we fancy others knew it. It is faith
turned inward and backward... In purely personal terms, it may recollect

that 'no spot is so dear to my childhood as the little brown church in the
dale,’ the cherishing of familiar sentimental hymns, the clinging to
childhood images of faith and childhood expressions of prayer." [p. 12-13]

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The fact is we are talking about something that is a very real part
of modern Jife. Change is Frightening, threatening. It belongs to our
humanity ta want and need security, not adventure and when things outside
gel a little unstable, to devise “personal stability zones." Religion
often becomes one... an experience we can count on to not need change...
and to be full of reminders of a gentler, more stable past.

The Abraham and Sarah story is a personal summons to let go of that.
and to see our lives as a faith journey. It is a summons to think anew, to
entertain the truly Biblical notion that God is and has always been present
in our own lives, calling, pushing, prodding, enabling, discreetly and
subtlety urging us into a new future, working against our tending to settle
down and in, pull in our horizons and live with predictability but not much
hope. The story is an invitation to think of your own past as a kind of
Sacred Journey, but also your future. Frederick Buechner writes about
it... About his surprising decision to enter theological seminary.

Looking back, from the perspective of thirty years, Buechner says
eloquently, what many of us can only confess in humility and mystery — "it
seems to me now that a power from beyond time was working to achieve its
own aim through my aimless life in time as it works through the lives of us
all and all our times." [The Sacred Journey, p. 95}

So the invitation is to trust this God with our future. To let go of
the securities and certainties we have come to depend on. To see that we
have made gods of them - our investments, our career, our relationships,
our pension plans,

“Whatever your heart clings to and relies upon is your god," Martin
Luther said. This very old story invites you to identify whatever that is
in your life and to let it go: to live without the security and ego
support it has provided you and to cling to Gad, God of the future, God of
the journey.

This very old story reflects another story actually. The story of a
man who one day walked by fishermen mending their nets and said, "follow
me," and they laid down their nets and followed: a story of the one who
calls us to discipleship which always means trusting him absolutely with
cur lives - our futures - even our deaths, letting go of everything.

The pranise to Abraham was that there would be a future, a land, an
heir and then a nation. Abraham, of course, wasn't personally going to see
much of any of it. So what Abraham gets for trusting and following is God
~ God's company, God's presence, God's promise, God's love.

"Lo, I am with you always," Jesus said, “to the very end of the age."

Even in the darkness “I am with you." Even on the bad days as wel]
as the good days, the ambiguous days, the days of failure as well as
Success ~ on every day of your journey “I am with you" which is why it is
a Sacred Journey.

When JI was reading in preparation for this sermon I happened upon
something that illustrates. I was reading in Volume 1 of the Interpreter's

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Rible, a ten volume commentary on the whele Bible, a slightiy oul-of-date,
but still reliable standard reference work. Some of us own the whole ten
volume set. TI happen to own mine because a dear friend of mine left a note
in her papers that if I were still around when she died, she'd like for me
to have her set. She was a widow - a woman for whom the word “lady” is an
appropriate description. She was active in church and civie affairs.

For years she and a group of similar women met weekly to read and talk
about the Bible. They were literate and well-to-do enough that some of
them owned the whole Interpreter's Bible. It impressed me when } saw them
on her shelves and I teld her. It was on that same occasion that she
alluded to the sadness and profound pain in her life; haw she had had to
think new thoughts and do things she never imagined she would have to do in
order to maintain the most precious thing in her life, her relationship
with her only daughter... She related how very difficult it was for her,
both to keep some semblance of a relationship alive, but also to live
without the grandchildren and normal family support she always assumed
would give her comfort and joy in old age... This little group of women,
faithfully and quietly reading the Bible, had sustained her for her very
arduous journey. And so I was touched when reading the commentary for
Genesis 12 and came upon a paragraph — which my friend Peggy underlined — I
imagine, maybe on a day when her own journey was particularly difficult.

"Faith is not the anchor but the hoisted sail. It is not
the ship in harbour but the ship that puts out to sea. It
is not holding onto something that is but exploration and
adventure toward samething vaster that lies ahead.’
{Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 1, p. 568]

God called Abraham and Sarah. God promised them a future.
God calls you, wherever you are, whoever you are.

God grant you and me - to hear the call, faith to follow and
courage for the adventure, the Sacred Journey.

# # #

You call us into the future, 0 God.. and you ask us to trust our
lives to you. We confess that it is not easy to do. So in addition to
your call; we ask for courage to follow and strength for the journey.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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