LIKE A CHILD AT HOME

A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown

Market Square Presbyterian Church

June 8, 2008

 

Scripture:  Genesis 12:1-9 and Matthew 9:9-17

 

Our lesson from Genesis is one of the great pivot points in the Biblical drama.  The first 11 chapters of Genesis have to do with the entire human family, with God’s providential care for the world.  Now we come to God’s election of Israel to be a model for all the nations of the world.

 

The setting is a dramatic one.  In verse 30 of the previous chapter the author uses an emphatic redundancy to drive home the hopeless plight of Abraham and Sarah.  Sarah “was barren; she had no child.”  Full stop.  What promise could there be for a future full of hope for Sarah and Abraham?

 

This brings us to the story of Abraham and Sarah’s “risky life of faith.”[i]  God speaks a word to Abraham, and a great drama begins to unfold.  That word is quite simply, “Go.”  You are to pack up your belongings in what was then Babylonia (and today is Iraq) and make your way west to an unknown place that God will show you.  This all happens about 2000 years before Jesus is born.

 

Everything hinges on God’s powerful word.  The outcome does not depend on Abraham and Sarah’s potential, but on God’s intent.  Go, and I will make you, I will bless you, I will magnify your name, I will bless those who bless you, I will curse those who curse you.  Five resounding first-person imperatives come crashing into Abraham’s conscious and I suspect unconscious life.

 

Then comes another simple but loaded word.  Abraham went.  He believed what he had heard and he “set out, not knowing where he was going” is how the writer to the Hebrews put it 2000 years later.  He set out without knowing where he would end up.  This is starting to take our breath away.  Now knowing where we are going makes us uneasy in a day and age when “being in control” is a standard descriptor of the successful life.  It’s no wonder soaring oil prices are giving us the willies, for they prove the lie to our desire to be invincible. 

 

John Calvin’s comment from the 16^th century is as challenging today as it was then.    There are times, says Calvin, when we are called to go “with closed eyes until having renounced thy country, thou shalt have given thyself wholly to God.”  Imagine, in our self-indulgent culture, someone giving him or herself wholly to God and venturing forth to a new land.

 

Maybe it’s not so hard to imagine.   Just think of Peter Ngang’s wife Rebecca and her daughter, who have languished in Nairobi in Kenya lo these many months awaiting the necessary documentation to come to America to join Peter, a Lost Boy who has matured into a fine man.

Rebecca, with lots of help from Peter and Ardith Buffington and others, has assembled vital travel documents again and again, including going back and forth to the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Northern Kenya on 12-hour bus rides each way to get copies of their wedding license. 

Peter, Rebecca and the baby underwent DNA testing to prove they are a family as another step in the arduous journey to America for a grand reunion.  Rebecca had to park herself on the doorstep of the American Consulate to plead her case again and again.

 

Dearly beloved, the way is now clear for Rebecca and Ayuen to come.  “Go,” says God.  And as of this Tuesday, we will, in God’s providence, be able to say, “They went.”  By Wednesday afternoon they will be landing at our Harrisburg airport a little after three in the afternoon.  There, with Peter and Rebecca and Ayuen, we will invoke the name of the Lord just as Abraham did.  

 

Ray Smith, the able assistant in Senator Specter’s office who has been such a help in this long process, did this very thing when I called him last week to thank him for his efforts to reunite Peter and his family.   I told Ray that the US Consulate in Nairobi had at last produced the necessary travel documents for Rebecca and Ayuen.   The first words out of his mouth were, “Praise the Lord!”

 

The thought of their arrival took me back to 1995 when I flew into a number of small villages in Southern Sudan with a group of eight or so Presbyterians.  This was the trip when I met a number of the Lost Boys of Sudan who were among the 50,000 refugees at a UN camp in Northern Kenya.  The pilot of our small plane dropped us down out of the sky onto short muddy runways carved out of the bush.   After each landing I would open my eyes to see delegations of church folks attired in the garb of their particular congregations—mostly Anglican and Presbyterian—running to meet our plane as it slid to a stop in the mud.  When we stepped out we were serenaded with Dinka hymns and shouts of acclamation.   Would that we were greeted in such a fashion at all our airports in this country!

 

A text like the one from Genesis is always as fresh as the morning breeze if we take the time to reflect and study and pray about it.  In my study this week I read a commentary by a professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.  His name is Terrence Fretheim.  When I was in Seminary at Princeton, he was a graduate assistant.  I’ve not seen him in forty years. 

 

He makes a point about this passage which left me saying “Aha, yes, this is absolutely right and yet often overlooked.”  Here’s what he says about God’s covenant with Abraham.  He notes the obvious, that Abraham and Sarah’s lives will never be the same again.   Listen to what comes next:

But the God who commands and promises will also change forever

as well….God will never be the same again.  By his word, God has

created a new family, indeed a new world for both Abraham and

God, which gives to each a new job description, though the goal of

a reclaimed creation remains the same.[ii]

 

Did you catch that?  God will never be the same.  If this is true for Abraham and Sarah and God, might this not also be true for Peter and Rebecca and Ayuen and God—and for us as well.

 

 

This passage of Scripture contains a metaphor for any and every life of faith.  We move forward day by day, straining to reach the goals God has promised, knowing full well that like Abraham and Sarah, who will indeed have children, it will fall to our offspring and to God to fulfill all things. 

 

What I find so refreshing is the reminder that when God covenants with the human family, God enters the journey for good and forever.  We are not alone in our struggles and our joys.  That is really the bedrock claim we make in Jesus Christ.  We are not alone.  God is with us.

 

I truly believe we have entered a moment in history when one of our main responsibilities as people of faith is to hold this claim up before the eyes of the world’s peoples—the claim that God has entered the fray and will, ultimately, not be deterred from making all things new.  It’s the “how” of this that may surprise us.

 

In this regard, I read something recently that astounded me.  I knew this, but I hadn’t let it sink all the way in.   A century ago, 80 % of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and North America.  Today 70% of the world’s Christians live in Africa, Asia and Latin America, leaving 30 % in our neck of the woods. Joel Carpenter, who heads the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity at Calvin College, goes on to make this telling observation about the new day that has dawned right under our noses:

 

What is it that we have to learn from these brothers and sisters

in Christ who live in the parts of the world where Christianity is

on the rise rather than declining?  The average Christian in the

world today, historian Dana Roberts reminds us, is a woman

from Africa or Latin America.  Her family has little money.  Her

husband farms, and he scrounges up short-term cash jobs when

he can.  She tries to sell a few things at market.  The children

haven’t had their shots, and they get sick.  She struggles to keep

them in school, where there are no textbooks.  The political

situation is fragile, and the national government doesn’t get

much done, while local officials demand bribes.  Our sister

reads her Bible, and its accounts of famine, plagues, poverty,

displacement and exile, tyranny, cronyism, and corruption—which

seem distant to most of us in the global North and West—are

immediately relevant to her.  The Bible is her book.[iii]

 

My only question is whether things like cronyism and poverty and corruption are really as distant from us as we would like to think.

 

The Bible teaches that God is always entering the fray to bring about wholeness and justice and compassion and goodness.  If we believe this, we best pay close attention to what is happening to our brothers and sisters in faith across the face of the earth.  In the Old Testament Israel was to be a model community for the world to emulate.  In the New Testament it is the church that is called to fill this role along with our Jewish brothers and sisters. 

 

Needless to say, the whole idea of being called and then going forth is very much on the minds of the 41 of us (15 teenagers and 26 adults) who will be leaving this coming Saturday on a mission trip to New Mexico.  We are flying into Albuquerque, where we will pick up vans that will take us north to where we will reside for the week at the Santa Fe campus of Ghost Ranch.

 

Four of our mornings will be spent an hour north of Santa Fe in the little town of Peñasco at the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church.  This small congregation is a product of the work of what Presbyterians called the Board of National Missions a century ago.  We planted churches and clinics and schools in places like Embudo and Chimayo and Peñasco and raised up several generations of Hispanic leaders in our denomination. 

 

The Emmanuel Church is facing real challenges as young people leave the village for the big city in places like Albuquerque due to a lack of jobs.  We have taken on the responsibility for a Vacation Bible School for 30 or so young people and will also be adding three new windows to the church buildings in an effort to cut down on the crippling cost of propane in the winter months.

 

We will work hard and find plenty of things to enjoy, such as a Georgia O’Keeffe tour at the main Ghost Ranch campus in Abiquiu and a visit to the famous Santuario or church in the village Chimayo that is sometimes called the Lourdes of North America due to the purported healings associated with dirt dug up from the chapel floor.

 

Above all it promises to be a rich opportunity for our family of faith to explore where God is leading us and to listen attentively to the church family at Emmanuel about the signs of God’s presence they are experiencing as they move through a time of transition in their congregation’s life.  In all of this we will be full of the expectation that, in the words of the beautiful hymn, we will no longer be a stranger or a guest, but like a child at home among our brothers and sisters in faith. 

 

As we prepare for this adventure it is heartening to hear God say “Go,” and to venture forth in the confidence that God will be with us each step of the way.  Pray for us.  We’ll be praying for you.

 

 

MARKET SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Like a Child at Home