A Sermon By: The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick for the Second Sunday in Lent
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Second Sunday in Lent
March 12, 2017
Trinity Church, Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Genesis 12:1-4a
Psalm 121
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17
In this morning’s text from Genesis the Lord says to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” It is hard to fully appreciate the unsettling effect these words must have had upon Abraham and Sarah. They are being commanded by God to literally uproot themselves, to unsettle the settlement which they had established, to move on from that place and the kinship ties on which their identity had been staked. In ancient times calling a piece of land one’s own was at the very center of one’s sense of self and meaning in life. And here is God directing Abraham to move from the place of his well-established identity to a place unknown. This must have been initially terrifying in the extreme.
This story raises a whole host of equally unsettling questions for us today. It compels us to ask whether we might be prepared to move from where we are, both geographically and mentally, and to alter our current practices and ways of thinking and to be born again to new ones. There is something reassuring in the certainty of remaining where we are. Why would we want to change?
As we anticipate our waning years Liz and I have just built a room on to the back of the first floor of our house to keep us as long as possible in the place we have lived for over 43 years. We raised two children in this house and it fits us comfortably as we try on the meaning of retirement. The last thing we want to hear is a voice from God saying “get out and move from this house of yours to an unknown place that I will show you.” No thank you, God, if it’s all the same with you. But for Abraham it apparently was not all the same with God who sent this very old man and his wife away from their home to a place they had not chosen for themselves. The only response Abraham could make to God’s call had to be made in faith, not in the certainty of a humanly devised travel-agency certified road-map of where they were going and what would happen when they got there.
A similar call to leave one place and journey to another, in this case not related to land but to frame of mind, is found in Jesus’ words to Nicodemus. Jesus calls him to change his way of thinking and to be born again in the Spirit. For many of us in the older generation it may be even more difficult to change our settled views than to change our place of settled residence. For an older generation, in the twilight of its time on earth, newness is not especially appealing. Haven’t we earned the right to the comfort of our present beliefs and convictions when they have been hard-won through a lifetime of struggle with opposing points of view?
Nevertheless, like Abraham we can face these challenges to our settled states of mind and place only on the basis of faith. We have to believe that God is not yet done with us no matter where we are in our journey of faith, whether at the beginning, the middle, or near the end.
We often hear in Scripture the anticipation of time when we will be able to rest from our labors. But there is a tension between resting from our labors and being prepared to pick up and move on from where we are.
There are moments when we simply want to stop time: to hold in place an experience that we would love to preserve unchanged forever. Think of those times of sheer joy when seeing beauty all around us in the light of the rising sun, or sitting quietly with a child or grandchild reading or talking. We don’t want those times to end: we want to hold them in a strong embrace that we wish would go on forever. We hope that by stopping time we might freeze in place the things that bring us joy and fulfillment whether they be the satisfaction of an experience, or a place, or an idea. But the finger of time does not grant us that luxury: it continually moves on leaving our ever fleeting experiences relegated to the past as ever new but always transitory present moments, of both joy and sorrow, envelop us. As the 12th century Persian poet Omar Khayyam, author of the much quoted Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, once said:
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
(I might note parenthetically that were this great world-renowned poet alive today he would be denied entry to our country because he was both Muslim and Iranian).
But his insight into the vicissitudes of time suggest that there is only one way to respond to these existential dilemmas of time and that is the way of faith. Perhaps the greatest challenge to our faith is finding a way to experience the joys that time brings without holding on to those times so fiercely that we smother them or wrench them out of their place in the span of time that constitutes the narrative of our life.
Faith, however, is a double-edged sword. It is destabilizing, decentering, discomfiting, and disorienting. It is also the rock-solid, never changing ground on which we walk through the perishable times that constitute the historical arc of our life. No matter how strong and persistent they are, the ever flowing changes of time cannot erode the permanence of faith or the transcendent source from which it comes. Faith does not erase or stop time but it gives us the power to experience the fluidity of time with confidence and a certainty that God will never abandon us to the erosion and dissolution that time brings.
Holy Scripture is a narrative all about historical and temporal change in the context of a permanent relationship with an unchanging God. Living that relationship in faith is what brings us through times of uncertainty and change. In our Psalm this morning we hear the promise that:
7 The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; *
it is he who shall keep you safe.
8 The Lord shall watch over your going out and your coming in, *
from this time forth for evermore.
This is the profound truth contained in the words of faith we so frequently affirm when we say: God is good all the time. All the time God is good.
We might well ask, however, where do we see such faith today? I’d like to suggest, without stereotype or condescension, that we see it most vividly and strikingly in the people who are today’s refugees and migrants. Think about how extraordinary their faith must be to embark on their journeys to a new land? They know in their bones what it’s like to leave the country where they lived and started families and were known by their neighbors and kindred, and to go on a perilous journey to a new land where they don’t know the language or the culture and where there is a current mind-set that often receives and surrounds them with suspicion and fear.
Pilgrim people may not have chosen to embark on this journey from one land to another but the sheer tenacity and courage with which so many of them are facing the journey ahead even without a clear and certain vision of where their journey will take them, is literally awe-inspiring and humbling to those of us who have never been called beyond the comforts of our present homes and experiences. We should be humbled by the testimony of their pilgrimages and in our humility be willing to open ourselves to whatever new thing God may be calling us to do to aid and assist them.
And not all is negative in embracing the call to change. In moving on from our present locations and possessions we have a chance to declutter our lives: to discover and appreciate those things that make life truly meaningful and rewarding: not ‘things’ in a material sense, but values and relationships with people whose presence in our lives enriches and rewards us. These are the things we can take with us wherever we go.
We must, of course, retain our ability to discern the realities of the places or ideas to which we are called: there are scams, and false utopias that call out to us. We must not think differently simply for its own sake. We must never give up our duty to evaluate false messiahs who offer us pie-in-the-sky unrealistic promises that can never be redeemed. Moving on from where we are is not movement for its own sake but for the sake of finding, even helping to create, a new time and place that more fully allows us to be the people God called has called us to be. A people of love, compassion, and justice.
We must not move to places that promise us a sure-fire defense against the sufferings and injustices of the world. It is truly a utopian fantasy to think we can wall ourselves off from the plights of our brothers and sisters in God no matter where they presently live. We must not move to places that surround themselves with walls and fences to keep out the victims of war and injustice which we have at least partially helped to create.
New ways of thinking should be rooted in and moving us toward better, more fulfilling ways of being human. We can be born again to valuing our social lives together with more emphasis on community and less on advancing the desires of our individualistic selves who seek their own gain at the expense of others. We can be born again to an understanding of ourselves as people who share in the travails of others; as people who are called to relieve the sufferings of others without first deciding whether that generosity is compatible with our economic self-interest.
We have all the resources necessary, given to us by God in scripture, prayer, and fellowship, to challenge and resist the siren calls to selfishness and to free us to march boldly into newness of thought and of location because, by faith, we can and will know the power of God’s grace and steadfastness through all the contingencies of time and place.