SERMON FOR JUNE 6, 1999
Second Sunday after Pentecost
HEBREW TESTAMENT: “Setting Out in Hope and Trust” ~ Genesis 12:1-9
A family album. That’s what the Bible is all about. I don’t know if you’ve thought of it that way, but the Bible is a family album. It tells the story of a people of faith. Not just the Christian faith family, but the Jewish faith family. I know that you’ve often heard the term “a Judeo-Christian faith” and we stand in the roots and the heritage of the Jewish believers that came before us.
One of the scholars of the United Church of Christ, Walter Brueggemann, said that the beginning of the 12th chapter of Genesis is a very clear mark that separates earlier history from faith history. The first eleven chapters talk about humanity. They describe how God created the world and populated it with humans. They also explain how humans had difficulty in their relationship with God. So if you’ll read the end of Chapter 11 you’ll find the “begats”, the genealogy, the lists of who had who had who had who.
At the beginning of Chapter 12 we find God’s special call to a people. Abram had a nephew, Lot, the son of his brother, so there was some way for the family name to carry on. But for Abram’s branch of the family there was little hope. Abram was 75 years old, his wife Sarai was not much younger. God spoke and said, “I’m going to send you to a place far away and you will become a great nation”. If God called you and said “I want you to go out now and I’m going to form a great nation from your seed.” how do you think you’d respond? If you were 60 years old, 75 years old, 87 years old? You’d be checking around your house for hidden speakers, trying to decide who was pulling a trick on you. Imagine what Sarai thought when Abram said “pack up, we’re ready to leave, God told me we’re supposed to head out for a long journey, and then we’re going to have a great family”. The story continues next week, stay tuned!
Brueggemann says that this is a resurrection story, a new life story. Abram’s branch of the family is coming to an end with barrenness. No children, no one to carry on the family name, no reason to be hopeful about the future. Abram and Sarai were looking at the prospect of old age with no children and no grandchildren, and no great grandchildren. It is into the hopelessness, into this barrenness, that God steps, to call out Abram and Sarai and send them off for a new adventure. This is the starting point for Jews when they talk about being a chosen people. They say “A wandering Aramean is our father.” Father Abram received the call from God. I often think about how difficult it must have been to have received that call from God.
I was surprised when I read in the Good News Bible that Abram and Sarai gathered everything together, including their riches. I’m not sure that they had a lot of wealth, but whatever they valued, they took with them. But even taking their possessions along, they were leaving behind the comfort of their homeland. They left the people and places they knew and loved throughout their whole life. They were going to a strange place, risking everything on this call from God. It takes a willingness to risk to listen to God’s voice instead of being caught up in the hopelessness that is part of life as a human.
What would we be talking about today? We can talk about literal barrenness, Evening Magazine this week had a piece about Cedar Park Assembly of God. Each year they have a prayer service for couples that are unable to conceive a baby. They have a number of successes so each year when they hold this service again, someone is able to step up with a brand new baby. Now I know that some of you, from a rational perspective, are skeptical about that kind of a service. I have my own doubts about exactly what’s going on. I don’t believe it’s as simple as saying “God, please give me a baby.” and three weeks later there’s a pregnancy. The experts who were interviewed said that they thought it was much more complicated than that. They said getting pregnant is a complex issue. It’s not only a physical happening, but it’s an emotional experience, a mental experience. Stress can have a lot to do with the lack of a pregnancy. And prayer could be just the thing that is needed to prepare a couple to receive a child.
But there are other barrennesses, other ways in which we experience hopelessness in our lives. The hopelessness of a world that is still torn apart by division and hatred. Lives that are marked by fear. By fear that we won’t be successful. Fear that people won’t like us. Fear that we will be poor. Fear that our body is failing us. Or fear that we will die. Hopelessness that we can do anything at all to change the gap that is getting greater and greater between the rich and the poor in our country. Fear that we can do nothing at all to stop the continual war in different parts of our world between one group of people and another. In all of these things we have to be willing to look for God’s guidance, willing to listen to a call, to step out, to take a risk.
A concern that I often dwell on is simpler than these deep fears. One of the things that keeps me from doing what God wants me to do with my life, is all of the time that I spend taking care of all of the things that I’ve gathered together. Somebody asked me about the picture on the front cover of the worship bulletin this morning. It comes from a book called the “American Dream” by John E. Carter which celebrates the work of Solomon D. Butcher, a photographer in the late 1800’s. Butcher was born in Virginia and then emigrated to Nebraska along with many others. Some of the settlers were second generation in this country, some came directly from Europe and were moving out to the Great Plains to find a new way of life. The book is filled with photographs of people posing with all of their belongings in front of their sod house. It was as if their belongings helped to define who they were. If you will look closely in the picture on the cover, to the left you can see a sewing machine that was out front for the photographer. The couple itself looks like a model for Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” with the husband standing there with a pitchfork. One of the other photographs in the book that delighted me was one in which the family was gathered around a beautiful pump organ. The pump organ was not in front of the house, but instead was out in the middle of the farm yard with the cattle and the horses in view behind the family. The caption said that the woman wanted to send a picture back to her friends in the East. She wanted them to know that she had an organ, but she didn’t want them to know that she lived in a sod house. She and the photographer hauled the organ out to the middle of the barn yard so that the photograph could be taken.
There is a book called “Clutter’s Last Stand” by Don Aslett. It is a book about organizing, about bringing order to your life. It’s done in a very humorous way, but the point that is made over and over and over again in the book is that we spend a tremendous amount of time and energy taking care of our things. We spend hours looking for something that’s lost. We buy something new because we never repaired the broken thing we already own, but we never threw it away, either. We have this collection, an assemblage of broken, worn-out, obsolete, and lost things that burden our life as we get older. This mess piles up around us.
There was a Newsweek article about six months ago about turning 50. Hillary Rodham Clinton was celebrating that milestone. Billy Jean King, the tennis star, was quoted saying that we spend the first 50 years of our lives collecting things and the next 50 years of our lives getting rid of them. I know that all of the things that I have collected have been a burden for me in my life. They keep me from listening to the call of God. They keep me from responding fully because of the energy they demand. My possessions are often a spiritual burden.
There is a story about immigrants in a book called “ My Uncle Ambrogio” by Gina Morwitz. Uncle Ambrogio is writing to his niece Gina and talking about this wife.
I was thinking a lot about Noni today and there are some things that I want you to remember about her that perhaps you’ve forgotten. Noni had few possessions, but from the old country she brought with her a pitcher. A pitcher that had been a part of her family for a long time. She carried it with her when she came to this new land. The pitcher sat in the middle of the table. It was the same table Gina, where you and your sister did your homework when you stayed at our house. No one else was allowed to wash the pitcher but Noni, and she took care of it with great gentleness. Everyone who sat at the table was very careful. But one day Gina, you and your sister were playing and you bumped the pitcher and it shook, and you had such horror on your face, you began to cry. And Noni, she was shocked. She bent down and she kissed you and she said, “That’s all right.” Then she picked up the pitcher. She walked over to the back door. She opened the door and stepped out on to the porch (CRASH!!) and she dropped the pitcher. I asked her, “Why didn’t you just take the pitcher and put it away?” “If I did that then they would know that there was still something more important that them.” I wanted you to remember that about your Aunt Noni.
There is something more important than the things that own us. More important than our success, or our security. What is important are the people around us and the love that God calls us to share with them. This is the message that our family album brings to us. We give great thanks. Amen.