Hearing

No one leaves home unless home chases you…No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land. No one burns their palms under trains, beneath carriages… No one crawls under fences. No one wants to be beaten; pitied.

I want to go home, but home…is the barrel of the gun. And no one would leave home, unless home chased you to the shore…unless home told you to quicken your legs, leave your clothes behind, crawl through the desert, wade through the oceans, drown, save, be hungry, beg, forget pride…No one leaves home until home is…saying, “Leave. Run away from me now. I don’t know what I’ve become, but I know that anywhere is safer than here.”

Excerpts from Warsan Shire’s poem Home

“No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”

Like many of you, I have been transfixed, horrified by the stories of refugees fleeing war-torn Syria. This past week, especially heartbreaking were the images of three year-old Aylan Kurdi washing up on shore in Turkey. We have since learned that his family in Canada had tried to facilitate his immigration, but were turned down, because the United Nations had not officially recognized them as refugees. This reality, along with the massacre of Kurds at the hands of the so-called Islamic State, sent them on their treacherous, deadly journey by boat.

His death has become a kind of vivid image that has shed necessary light on a world in crisis. In the days that followed, there have been some glimmers of goodness in the larger story: Hungarian civilians swarming the Budapest train station to offer food and assistance; Austria opening the borders for transit; Germany agreeing to provide asylum to some. But for every moment of hope, it seems like there are thousands of agony. As long as war continues, people will seek safety elsewhere. As the poet Shire says, “No one leaves home unless home chases you.”

We are in the middle of our worship series on worship, where we have been looking at the various beats, moments, strands of what it is that we do here week in and week out. There is an order, a rhythm to worship – one that may not be immediately obvious until we pull back, reflect, and explore. And that’s exactly what we have been doing.

So here’s the question for today: what do people seeking refuge have to do with what we do in worship? Isn’t worship about our relationship with God? Isn’t the whole focus of worship for us to give glory and praise to God, and God alone? What do politics, current events, international issues have to do with any of this?

It’s a fair question. If we look at the map of worship, it is the hearing of the Word that is right at the center of it all. We gather together on the outskirts of town, make our way toward the main square, preparing for what we encounter there. We drop our guards, confessing our imperfection in honest transparency, and thereby opening ourselves to God’s mercy and forgiveness. We do all of this in anticipation of what we encounter in Scripture. And once we have met the Spirit within the Word, everything else we do is a response to what we have heard and known.

So what is it that we hear in Scripture today? We continue to read from the Letter to the Hebrews, this anonymous missive that has a Jewish audience in mind. It is a significant part of our own understanding of the continuity of God’s story from the Hebrew Bible into Jesus and beyond. There is a lot at work there, of course. Today’s lesson tells of the great heroes of faith: of Abel and Noah, of Enoch and Abraham and Sarah, all of them evidence of those who lived the faithful life before the birth of Jesus. And each one of them demonstrated how faith, faith in God, is rooted in hope, in what we cannot yet see.

The author then singles out one of the major threads of these biographies and weaves it into the central metaphor of faith. Noah gathered everything he held dear and put it onto a boat to ride out the storm. Abraham and Sarah followed God’s call to leave their native Ur of the Chaldees, in modern-day Iraq, and head toward the land of Canaan, now Israel and Palestine. These, and other, giants of faithfulness were strangers, aliens, migrants, refugees. They were looking for a new homeland, knowing they could not return to their own. They sought a better place, that beautiful place God had prepared for them.

That’s all fine and good. But here’s the thing: Scripture isn’t, actually, the goal. It may be at the center of our worship, but it is not the object of our worship. We read, study, learn, cherish the Bible; but we do not worship it. The purpose of Scripture is to point us to God. And in doing so, the hope is that it will transform us so that we will embody the faithfulness we encounter there.

So we turn on the news. We see fearful civilians piling everything they can carry into boats, few of them seaworthy. Others are making their way on foot, rejected by one country and hoping for welcome in another.

And then we return to our own faith story, where we see that those who fled are not unique. Flight is not an aberration. It is, in many ways, the central, shared experience. Even Mary and Joseph carried their infant Jesus into exile, finding safety in Egypt from the wrath of King Herod. In the words of the poet Shire, their own home had said to them, “Anywhere is safer than here.”

God’s desire at all times is for us to connect the dots between then and now. And there are times, such as during a refugee crisis, when that connection strikes me as very straightforward. Individually, we may not have experienced the trauma of fleeing home to find shelter in another place. But it is the central story of our faith. It begins with Noah, continues through Abraham and Sarah and their descendants, spends hundreds of years in captivity in Egypt, follows Moses for two generations toward a land brimming with promise, sets roots down for a while, finds itself cast into exile again, is on the move with John the Baptist and the disciples and an apostle named Paul, and finds its fullest embodiment in the Son of Humanity who has nowhere to lay his head.

Look: I’m not naïve. I know that national politics and international law are complex realities. They are not governed by purely religious principles – nor should they be. There are contradictory moralities at work. In the forging of national identity, there is a kind of tribalism to which we consent by necessity. There are economic realities, political battles, ideological principles that come into play. In other words, governments will make choices that are not necessarily the ones that we would make.

That all said, here is the guiding principle of faith as I see it, one that calls us to action today: the church, as the body of Christ, is called to embody what we encounter in Scripture. In this instance, we are meant to be welcome for the stranger. We are supposed to become that God-built city that the world is longing for.

I don’t know if our own nation will do anything to help out. I’m still waiting to see if we will adopt the metric system. Whatever the case may be, I don’t see how we, the church, can wait to act.

I want to point you toward a resource for that very purpose. Our own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), has an arm called Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. The website is up here in case you want to visit it and find out more. PDA, as it is called, is working on two fronts on this particular crisis: one is with churches in Hungary and Europe making humanitarian aid available to the refugees; the second is with the Presbyterian Church in Syria and Lebanon who are providing comfort and aid on the ground; and the third is by helping Syrian refugees relocate here to the United States.

The fundamental principle in all of this is that we are not solitary agents in our faith. We have been led to this place and supported by, as the author of our lesson puts it, this “great cloud of witnesses”, those who have come before us, gifting us with the rich inheritance of faith in God through Christ. Who are the people in your cloud of witnesses?

There are many that come to mind for me; one that I am reminded of today is a friend who is known to many of you. The Rev. Dr. Fahed Abu-Akel, now retired, was the Founder and Director of Atlanta Ministry with International Students for many years. Oglethorpe Presbyterian was one of the founding churches, and we still support their vital ministry, with several of our members serving on their Board.

Fahed, by his own identity, is a Palestinian Arab Israeli. He was born before the establishment of the State of Israel. In 1948, during the war, he and his family fled their village while their mother stayed vigil in their home. They found shelter in a neighboring town, and were among the relative few fortunate enough to return home. Fahed came to study in the United States. His own story highlights the contrast between the hospitality that flows in his blood and the relatively isolated welcome he received here. That experience, as an international student largely left to his own devices, led him to establish this ministry, founded on the principle that hospitality is central to the Christian call.

Over the years, if you have been a part of this ministry, whether volunteering for one of their events or befriending one of the students, would you please stand for a moment? I know from many of you that the impact of these border-crossing friendships is such that they have lasted through the years, long beyond the required time commitment.

For me, Fahed was central in my call to ministry. I was a young, drifting college graduate, who found welcome in his office while I was trying to figure out what was next. After a few twists and turns, I found myself applying to several seminaries. Fahed came to Chicago on behalf of the Atlanta Presbytery when I was ordained. Fahed was here when I was installed as your pastor ten years ago. Fahed baptized my oldest child. In short, Fahed’s own ministry of welcome to this spiritual refugee has shaped me and my ministry to this day.

In short, Fahed is one of many in the cloud of witnesses that has helped shaped me and my faith. I am sure that you have your own that you remember in one way or another. And having remembered them, today we also remember that we are called to join with that great cloud. We were made to embody that faithfulness we have inherited, so that others might be recipients, as they move out in faith.

And that, in essence, is what we do in worship when we hear. We listen to the Word of God as we see and year it in Scripture. We read the stories and lessons of all of those who have gone before us. We remember the great cloud of witnesses who live within Scripture. And yet, hearing is not a passive act; not in the least. It is an act that, when we are truly open, we are changed…transformed…moved. And being so graced by God, we set work building God’s city for all of those who are looking for home in this restless world.

May it be so.

Amen.

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Thy Kingdom Come

In the New Testament, Jesus talks about the kingdom of God more than any other topic. Do you know what’s second? Money. That’s right; but more about debts and debtors later. Today, as we continue our worship series on the Lord’s Prayer, we take a deeper look at the phrase “thy kingdom come.”

As we talked about a few weeks ago, that word “thy” is an archaic remnant from an older English. If I remember my grammatical training correctly, it’s the informal second person possessive pronoun, suggesting that the appropriate relationship with God is one of intimacy, not formality.

And that theme has been consistent throughout our conversations on the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus’ words were far more radical then than we can comprehend. He broke with tradition, praying in Aramaic, the language of the street, rather than Hebrew, the language of ritual. And he also dropped all pretense of formality, praying for things that were simple and close to him. And as we continue to look closely at the Lord’s Prayer, it is my hope that a similar sense of surprise will grab hold of us.

Surprise, after all, is the watchword for Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of God. We have to go back to the phrase as it was used in the Hebrew Bible. There, the “kingdom of God” referred very literally to the kingdom of Israel, which was seen as the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham of heirs and an inheritance. Once the kingdom of Israel is destroyed, the phrase continues to appear as reference to the restoration of that same earthly kingdom, David’s lineage, a political and national reality.

We can see this in the Psalm we heard this morning. In it, the author talks about unsteady footing and wicked nations assaulting all around. God’s steadfast love provides the sure foundation. God is the one who provides the victory to the earthly kingdom.

In Jesus’ teaching, however, the “kingdom of God” takes on a different meaning. Stripped away is the teaching about political rule and national identity. Instead, it centers on moral teaching, a community and personal ethics rooted in relationship with God. And that relationship, time after time, is shown to be one of surprise. In Jesus’ parables, God rarely acts predictably; and even sometimes behaves unreasonably. The point, it seems, is that the kingdom of God is very unlike the kingdoms of earth. And we live somewhere in the middle of the two.

It would be a mistake to say that the kingdom of God is all about the after life. But it would also be a mistake to say that the kingdom of God is all about the here and now. Instead, it’s a little bit of both. And the more we understand about Jesus, the clearer that becomes. Here, in the person of Jesus himself, is heavenly reality, divine essence, God’s presence in human form. The kingdom of God, perfected, exists beyond our immediate comprehension. But God “breaks in” to creation nonetheless, giving us these glimpses to see the way that God desires the world to be.

In other words, the world isn’t perfect, by any stretch; but neither is it abandoned, either.

When we look again at our two lessons from Scripture this morning, things begin to come into focus. In the Psalm, the writer speaks of times when the imperfections of the world seem more present than any sense of God’s presence. Even so, the writer is convinced that God will have the last word. We may cringe when we hear the phrase “God will wipe them out”, and rightly so, but what we can take away from this text is that perfected justice is in God’s hands, not ours…and that this same justice will, ultimately, triumph over wrongdoing.

That thread, of the kingdom of God that is, but not yet, runs through the whole of Scripture. In the letter to the Hebrews, the author lifts up Abraham and Sarah as paragons of faith. What they chose to believe, that God would give them an heir in their old age, was nothing short of absurd. And what they did to show this faith, leaving their home for a nomadic life of wandering in deserts, was pretty much nuts. But here’s the nugget that holds it all together:

“…they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, making it plain that they are looking for their true home…they were after a country far better than that, a heavenly one.”

In short, the world they knew does not look like the world that God intended it to be. For us, we should be able to recognize that creation is corrupted. The world bears little resemblance to the kingdom of God that Jesus describes. And ultimately, much like Abraham and Sarah, we are not meant to feel “at home” in this world. We should be unsettled by what we see and experience, as we note how different things are from the way God desires them to be.

As that great theologian Westley – not the founder of Methodism, but the character from The Princess Bride – says, “Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

All of which brings us back to the topic at hand, this phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, “thy kingdom come.” The best translation would be something along the lines of “let your kingdom come.” In other words, there’s a yearning that goes on. When we put Jesus’ parables side by side with what we see at work in the world around us, there is this huge gap. Whether we are talking about issues of personal integrity or societal standards of justice, we are not a reflection of God’s desires.

In the Lord’s Prayer, then, there is this pleading. It is as if to say, “God, we know that this world doesn’t look the way you want it to. Please let your kingdom take over, because that’s the world we want to live in, where forgiveness is more important than power, where selfless giving is more important that material excess, where there is celebration over what is found rather than weeping over what is lost.”

Are we sure that’s something we want to pray? I think there’s risk inherent in praying the Lord’s Prayer. Do we really want the world to look like the kingdom of God? And do we really want to live in that reality?

Think about it:
If we want forgiveness to be our priority, that means we have to let go of grudges. If we want generosity to be the watchword, that means we have to be willing to give of ourselves and our possessions, no strings attached. If we want celebration to be the order of the day, we have to be willing for old wounds to heal.

If we are honest with ourselves, I’m not sure we would want the world to be this way, because we have too much to lose. Just like Abraham and Sarah. And so, that right there is the essence of faith as the author of Hebrews describes it.

Faith requires a willingness to be seen as foolish in the world’s eyes for the sake of the kingdom of God. And that’s not easy, because we are so shaped by a desire to be seen as respectable in the eyes of our neighbors. If that’s the case, then faith takes more courage than humanly possible; or it takes prayer, and loads of it.

What better time to begin than right now?

Amen.

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Sacrifice…?

Genesis 22:1-14
Psalm 89
Romans 6:12-23

If you were paying attention to the Genesis lesson this morning, then if you’re anything like me, you were probably shifting uncomfortably in your seats. And it probably left you with more questions than answers. It is, truly, one of the most difficult passages in Scripture with which to wrestle. And as the lectionary brings us here this morning, it strikes me as fitting. This morning’s reflection takes me into territory that I didn’t expect. It makes me uncomfortable, and leaves me with more questions than answers.

A cursory glance at the lesson might leave us thinking, “Who is this God, anyway?” We might read this as God’s cruelty, dangling Abraham around on a string, like a puppet. Either that, or God’s fickleness and unreliability, changing the divine mind when the situation suits it.  God has called Abraham out of retirement and onto a journey, has urged him to send his first-born son Ishmael out into the wilderness, and now is threatening to take away his remaining son, the one who is the fulfillment of a long awaited promise? What kind of God is this, anyway?

This morning, I want to suggest that there are three different ways to read this passage. The first is the personal. And that centers on understanding Abraham’s character in the midst of this story. Abraham, after all, is the one who responds to God’s “get up and go” by getting up and going. There’s no equivocating. And the story has wound around so complexly that Abraham may, very well, now see this as another step in a journey on which God has been every step of the way. The problem with this is that it is so personal as to be irrelevant to us. How many of us have that kind of unquestioning, innate faith where we can say “yes” to God at a moment’s notice? How many of us would have that kind of simplicity? And how many of us, rather, wrestle and struggle with the demands of faith on a regular basis, knowing that we never quite pass muster?

This brings me to the second reading, which I’ll call a philosophical reading. It is the one that dates from the earliest Christian interpretation, one in which the story is seen exclusively through a Christian lens of the New Testament. The story then becomes kind of a metaphorical foreshadowing of the crucifixion. The Father is willing to sacrifice the Son. The Son is bound to the wood for the sacrifice. And God provides the lamb of God, Christ himself, to substitute for the child and so that human sacrifice becomes unnecessary. Again, helpful. It focuses our attention back on the cross and its meaning for our lives. But it doesn’t answer the most troubling questions at the heart of the story. Did Abraham understand all of this? Should Abraham have understood all of this? And what does God’s character look like to those who don’t have the benefit of foresight?

Which brings me to the third possibility, which I’ll call the contextual. It is the reading which is most accessible for me. This requires living into Abraham’s time a little more fully. And in that time, there was a whole array of gods; gods of war, gods of fertility, each tribe worshiped its own god. In this pre-nation time, each nation had its own deity. And it was not unusual for the practices around each god to include child sacrifice. Think of the practices of Central and South America around the temples there. What God appeared to be asking Abraham to do was absolutely par for the accepted course of the time. And so, when God stops Abraham, it is a moment where God says, in a very dramatic way, I am not that kind of God. Remember that this is still early on in the revelation of this “new” God called Yahweh to the world. And perhaps God could have said, “Abraham, follow me, but don’t sacrifice your son. That’s not who I am.” But if Abraham was anything like us, saying it is one thing; taking it to the brink of reality is something else.

Now I don’t know if that is helpful to you at all, especially as we live several millenia on this side of the story, with the benefit of hindsight and generations of children of Abraham so ingrained with the idea that child sacrifice is not the character of the God we worship. But maybe that’s the point. We are at a point of worshiping this God Yahweh down through the centuries where this different, defining character of God is so assumed that the questions Abraham would have had to wrestle with in his time strike us today as nothing short of barbaric.

So: here we are, with this incredible gap of time between us and our ancestor Abraham. What, possibly, could this archaic story of a god who doesn’t demand child sacrifice have to teach us today? We know that lesson, don’t we? So, lesson learned, we move on? Or could it be that there is something to the essence of this story that transcends, that moves through the centuries, that builds a bridge to us in the present, 21st century that can help us look at ourselves? Perhaps it’s a bit of a leap, but as we continue our conversations about stewardship this summer, I am drawn to the possibility that this lesson might teach us something about the parent/child relationship, about what it means to worship, and about how God provides.

There is perhaps no more pressing topic in the church these days than the question of children and worship. And before I move any further, I want to offer up a couple of caveats (don’t you love reflections with caveats?). First, this is part of a conversation. This grows out of conversations with you all in various capacities over the past three years. And I intend this not to be the final point of the conversation, but rather as a way to continue the conversation. I say that with full recognition that I’m the guy who gets to stand up on Sunday morning and speak uninterrupted for twenty minutes. So I really invite your responses to this conversation. Tiffany and I will find ways in the coming months to continue it. For those of you that are technologically inclined, I have begun blogging my sermons as a way to make them more interactive. And for those of you that prefer more traditional modes of communication, let’s get together – beyond the brief conversations that fellowship allows for – to speak in intentional ways. The second caveat is that I recognize that my reflections today might reflect that Abraham story a bit too directly; uncomfortable and with more questions than answers. But that is intentional, so that we might engage in more conversation in the years together that we have.

The third caveat is that I know I approach this conversation as not only pastor, but parent. I have no desire to make my own parenting some kind of canonical standard. My ultimate Biblical stand is that the parent has the final say in the faith education of the child. After all, the parent has the child throughout the week. We, as a church, have the child for one, maybe two hours out of that week. And what Elizabeth and I choose to do as parents now may change in the years to come, as our child’s needs change and grow, or as other children come into the picture. I don’t want to appear so foolish as to think that I am now an expert on the subject. And I do not want for my son to be the poster child for Christian parenting. Preacher’s kids have enough pressures of the public life. I have no desire to add to them.

And the final caveat is this: as the uninterrupted guy, I want to be clear that while I recognize that my voice has a certain role in the conversation, I want to make it clear that I do not believe it is the only voice by any stretch. Presbyterianism allows for a fuller conversation in theological ways. Elders are gifted as a means by which the Spirit speaks. And I also believe that each of you are drawn here by that same Spirit; it is our common voice which gives voice to God’s desires.

OK. Caveats out of the way. On with the show.

 I begin with my own story. As many of you know, I was raised at First Presbyterian, just eight miles down Peachtree from here. My mother was in the choir. My father attended Bedside Presbyterian (right next to St. Mattress Episcopalian). So I sat between my grandparents in the corner pew. At some point, I must have been in the nursery (I don’t really remember when that was), because I have a few fuzzy memories; but early on, I ended up in worship. I was bored and restless. The sermon was agonizing. I don’t remember actually hearing any sermon that was preached. My grandmother would give me paper to draw on. Sometimes I would rest my head on her lap, and she would scratch my back. If I coughed, she’d dig into her purse for a cepacol lozenge. Sometimes I’d fake a cough just to get one. I didn’t learn much during the sermons. But what did I learn? I learned the songs, the prayers, the rhythms of worship.

When worship was over, and the pastors headed for the exits to greet us, Pastor George would walk down our aisle. I’d lean out, and he’d tossle my air. That was something else I learned: I was welcomed, and I was loved. It was a church that took seriously the baptismal vows it made for me up until and past seminary.

Our context here at OPC is different. We don’t have any unanimity on how to answer this question of children and worship. Some parents prefer to have their children in worship so that they, too, would learn these rhythms. Others prefer to have them in the nursery, so that they themselves can focus and worship; it simply isn’t fair to expect children to sit still for an hour or more in worship. Others come rarely, and for some it is because we don’t make our expectations clear. They don’t know what to do with their children, and the choice itself is exhausting. It is because of this lack of clarity we have that I want to propose, in parallel to our three views of the Abraham story, that there may be three ways to view this topic.

The first is the personal approach. Many churches take this way. Children go to children’s church, where the lesson is age-appropriate. There is a contemporary service for the youth, a traditional service for the adults. And there is much to recommend this approach: the gospel isn’t for adults alone, and people of different ages and developmental stages get the lesson in a way that is age-appropriate. But it has it’s limitations as well. What does it mean to be one body of Christ when we are segmented? What does it mean that those who volunteer to run the other services don’t themselves get to worship? My own experience at churches where this has been the practice is that children are alienated from traditional forms of worship. When they do attend later on, it’s like being dropped in a foreign land without even a phrase book.

The second approach would be this philosophical one. In it, the worship space is radically altered so that all ages are in the same room. The children’s sermon is longer and much more focused on the children. There are dedicated areas for children. Congregants act as surrogate parents. And children are not expected to sit still for an hour. It, too, brings much to the conversation. The community is in one place. Christ’s desire that the “little children come to me” is enacted. But it, too, has its downsides. There is noise, and distraction from that and movement can crowd our ability to concentrate on what worship asks of us. The sermon, which is so central and adult-focused in our tradition, becomes shorter or stripped down so that there is more than just adult conversation taking place. It is an approach which has it’s limitations, too.

And so, there is a third way, which is more contextual. It recognizes who we are and what we bring to this worship and to this community. It leaves intact that desire that parents ultimately make these decisions for their children. And in a sense, it is what we are already. But here’s the difference: it’s intentional, and it’s clearer. There is a deep desire that the community of faith be the place where parents can be resourced and supported to provide for the spiritual nurture of their children. There is an embrace of children and parents, meeting them where they are, and giving them what God needs for them to grow.

What does it look like? Again, this reflection is more about questions than answers. And I really don’t know the answer to this one. But I do know this: we will come to a place where we will learn, as did Abraham, that the God we worship has a very different character from that which our times might want us to believe. And in that moment, we will feel the draw to worship that God. And like that ram in the thicket, God will provide all that we need to make it possible.

Friends, I do hope that this is the beginning of the conversation. Please respond with honesty. Email me or put a comment below. Call me and let’s get together. I trust that God will speak through the wisdom we gather together.

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Raising Our Voices

Genesis 21:8-21
Romans 6:1-11

Do you pray? How often? What is it that you pray for? If not, why not? Is it the words (or lack thereof), the “audacity” of “bothering” God with “petty” requests?

Many of us are probably like the man who flew in an airplane for the first time. He was nervous on the cross-country trip. But sitting by the window, he grew more anxious as he saw flame shooting out of one of the engines. The plane began to hiccup and bump. And so, desperate as he was to land safely, he turned to the deity at hand and said, “O Lord, I know I’m not the best person, but if we make it through this flight, I will give you half of everything I own!” The plane leveled out and the rest of the flight was just as smooth as could be.

As the passengers got off the plane, a preacher came up to the man and said, “I heard what you said, my friend, that you’re going to give half of everything you own to the Lord! And you know, you’re going to start right now!” The man replied, “No, I made a better deal. I told the Lord that if I ever got on another plane, he could have it all.”

Are we prayer bargain hunters? Do we try to make deals, prefacing our prayer at that time of desperation – be it need or want – with all the caveats about how we mean to pray more often or give more or attend more or be a better person? And do we finally go to prayer only as a means of last resort, when that engine is on fire and we feel the steady ground beneath us shake?

Perhaps we see ourselves in that prayer of Hagar, that cry she raises up in the wilderness.

The story of Abraham and Sarah has taken many turns thus far. They have left the land of Haran, leaving behind what they know for the unknown, for the promise of plenty and offspring. And so far, they are still childless. Assuming this to be some kind of test, Abraham and Sarah decide that he should bear a child by Hagar, Sarah’s servant. Ishmael is Abraham’s first-born child. And he is raised in the household. But this was not what God had intended. Despite the absurdity of it all, God still intends that Sarah herself will bear a child. She does, and Isaac is born.

By the time our lesson picks up, Isaac and Ishmael are both being raised in Abraham’s household. The story hear translates that they are playing together, but the better translation is that they are laughing together. Sarah grows jealous; perhaps for her son, perhaps because of Hagar’s continued presence. She demands that Abraham send them away. Abraham, rightly so, is concerned. He loves his son Ishmael and desires his well-being. It is only at God’s intevention, as Abraham and God speak, that Abraham understands that this is all OK. Ishmael is going to be fine. God will provide for his future and all will be well. So Abraham sends them away with a few days provision out into the desert.

It is there that the story takes its dramatic turn. We can imagine Hagar’s pain, out of food and ready to give up. She sends Ishmael away so that she won’t see his agony and suffering. It is then that she cries out. She raises her voice and weeps. God hears the weeping – the text says it is Ishmael’s cry that God hears, but at that moment, the cries of mother and child are really one and the same. God opens her eyes (note that God doesn’t make a well out of nothing; it was simply that she could’t see what was already there). They make it through the wilderness, and as the lesson leaves off, Ishmael thrives.

Mother and child raise their voices. God hears. God provides.

Are we willing to believe something like this? That all that is needed for us to thrive, even and especially in the middle of the wilderness, is simply to raise our voices, to have our cries ring out?

Since Pentecost, we have been looking at the theme of Stewardship: not only in that narrow sense that we Presbyterians usually mean, which is the question of how are we gonna pay for all of our ministries; but in that broader sense of how is it that we act as good stewards, caretakers of all that God has entrusted to us. We will continue that conversation as we move outdoors in two weeks for our July services, and as is fitting, we will take a closer look at the question of environmental stewardship. Thus far, we have looked at our finances, our buildings, our ministries, and how is it that we have been entrusted. We have explored the question of trust, like Abraham leaving behind everything. We have looked at surprise, as Sarah and Abraham encounter God’s absurd promise of a child in their old age. Today, we look at prayer.

First, a straightforward question. What is prayer? Is it eloquent words spoken aloud, the leader, the pastor, taking the hopes and fears of the gathered into poetic words that can somehow be appropriate to address to God? Is it theological integrity, where every item needs to fit into a larger worldview and an appropriate understanding of God, the kind of thing that only time and wisdom and education and experience can grant? Is it simply a checklist for God, ticking off the things we want or need (and not really sure about the difference) as though we were hunting through the catalog at Christmas time? Is it a practice, something we engage in regularly, on a daily, weekly, or committed basis? Or is it something that we turn to only at the most desperate of times, our Hagar-in-the-wilderness moments of fear and agony?

I want to suggest something rather straightforward this morning. Prayer, whatever we might think of it, is simply conversation with God. That’s it. The moment where Abraham  is distressed, that was prayer. When Hagar and Ishmael cry out, that was prayer. There’s no need for eloquence or theological integrity. Simply speaking the desires and groans of your heart, or even trusting that the groans are enough, that is prayer. And for a faith that proclaims boldly that we are so close to God that we share in death and resurrection with Jesus Christ, that kind of intimacy is one that ought to bring us into regular conversation, prayer, with the one who washes us clean and welcomes us and sustains us, even in the middle of the wilderness.

I want to share a story of prayer with you.

Joy Fisher is a friend of mine. She serves as pastor of Midway Presbyterian Church in Decatur. It is a struggling little church which has missed several generations of transition in the neighborhood. The congregation is elderly and mostly white. The neighborhood is mostly African-American. In Joy’s time there, and due in many ways to her leadership, the church has gone from fantasizing about how to recapture the “glory days” to embracing the reality that it it may be time to admit that this church is dying; and in doing so, to proclaim that promise in Paul we heard this morning: that in its death, it might live again. The Session of Midway has come to the realization that it is time to discern to whom the church should be handed off. Joy has been asking her members to pray through it all. She has asked them, as they walk by empty pews on Sunday mornings, to lay a hand on it, and ask that it might be full. As they walk by the baptismal font, to pause for a moment and pray that others might come to feel the cleansing of its waters. Prayer has undergirded all that has happened at Midway Presbyterian. And yet, for years, it has been the slow decline of status quo which has been its mark.

It was in the midst of all this that Joy had a dream one night. She was at the pulpit, preaching to her congregation of a couple dozen, the pews far outnumbering the attendance, as was usual for a Sunday morning. At that moment, a man put his hand on her shoulder, and said, “It’s time for you to sit down.” She turned around to see a male and female pastor sharing the chancel with her, both of them dark-skinned. African-American, she assumed. She went down to the communion table, knelt, and wept; and when she turned around, the sanctuary was filled: old and young, white, black, brown, “It looked like heaven,” she said.

It was a vivid dream; and Joy, being the faithful Christian she is, knowing the role that dreams play throughout Scripture, knew it was a vision. She began to pray for those co-pastors she saw in the dream. Not long after, a Kenyan man stopped by the church. He and a Somali man had begun a ministry of outreach to the nearby Clarkston apartments, one of the largest immigrant communities in Atlanta. They needed a place for their community to worship. They met and prayed together. A few Sundays ago, the plan was for the community to begin worshiping at Midway at a separate service; for a variety of reasons, they were unable to do so, so suddenly the congregation tripled in size. Joy found herself preaching to that sanctuary she had seen in her dream.

The ministry had a bus, too, since most of the people in Clarkston do not own cars. This was vital to bring people to and from the church. The bus driver quit, so Joy added “bus driver” to the prayer list. Within days, they had not only one, but two, one of them a PhD student who had moved to Clarkston in order to do ministry with the immigrant community there. In these conversations with God, there has been answer. There has been provision. They have raised their voices, and God has heard.

Think about that story in connection with our Genesis passage. This church, much like Hagar cast into the wilderness, has been despairing about its future. It has wanted to return to the household, that Ishmael might grow up there in the splendor and warmth of it all. But God had intended a different future. And as soon as they raised their voices in earnest prayer, albeit desperate prayer, God opened their eyes to the deep well that was there all the time.

But also consider the residents of Clarkston apartments. Many of them come from uncertain political climates, many of them are refugees who have been resettled here due to the simple fact that they will not be likely to return home any time in the near future. They are poor. They are hungry. And here come two pastors, a Kenyan and a Somali, showing up with bags of free bread and a simple word about Christ’s love. For these folks, the story of Hagar rings true not only in a spiritual sense of doubt and fear, but in a primal, physical sense of despair, of desperation, of hunger, of thirst. And in the wilderness of Clarkston, so far from what they know as home, God has heard their cries and has brought them the possibility of a new future and of new relationships.

Are we so bold? Do we believe that we might be audacious enough to raise our voices in prayer, to speak with God and to listen to God’s nudge? What is your prayer? What are your hopes, your desires? What is it that you fear? What gives you anxiety? What are the changes that face you right now, the uncertainties, the ways that you are leaving behind a home you knew for an unknown place, whether that be literal or symbolic?

What are your prayers for OPC? Do we pray for growth, for baptism, for pews to be full that others might be able to experience what it is that brings us here each and every Sunday? Would we be so bold as to pray for something as seemingly crass as money, that we could meet budget and pay for all of these ministries to which we are convinced God is calling us? Will our cries mean that God will simply open our eyes so that we can see the deep wells that are right there in front of us?

What about our community? When we drive past empty houses, new construction, empty lots, do we dare to stop for a moment, or even to pray briefly that these folks would come to know that close relationship that God desires for each of us, that they would come through our doors – and not just ours, but the doors of communities where God is proclaimed and hope is known and eyes and hearts are opened?

Do we pray for our world, that wars would end, that the hungry be fed, that justice and mercy rule the day?

Do we dare? And what will we do when God answers?

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On by Stages

It was 2001, and Elizabeth and I stood at Ur. It was hot. Ridiculous hot. And the breeze, that hot desert breeze, just made it worse. But we were there, where Abram’s people came from, where Terah first left for the land of Haran.

I don’t want to dwell on our trip too much, but I don’t feel I can “visit” Iraq without saying a word about the Christian community there whom we came to know in our brief travels. The reason for going was a peace conference hosted by the Iraqi churches. They were a small minority, but vocal and active. We had the chance to visit the five Presbyterian churches there.

Since the war, the church has all but disappeared. Pastors and educated leaders have left in droves, marginalized and threatened in the Sunni-Shiite conflict that has come to summarize Iraq’s political and religious dimensions. It is a mere shadow of its former self, paralleling Abram’s travel into diaspora. Huge communities live as refugees in Syria and Jordan now. Our own Church supports them through the ministry of the Middle East Council of Churches; Rev. Nuhad Tomeh, who has spoken here at Oglethorpe, is a minister in their service.

I mention all this because so often we see the lands where these stories took place as just that: lands, backdrops for ancient tales of travel, faith, and struggle; however, they are all beset by their own struggles today. And while we need to be careful not to privilege one group over another, since God shows no preference, we do have particular concern for our sisters and brothers in Christ. For when one part of the body suffers, all suffer with it.

So having spent time with fellow Christians in Iraq, we spent some time among the antiquities as well. The centerpiece of present-day Ur, which is in the absolute middle of nowhere, is the ziggurat. It looks like a squared off pyramid, a stepped structure towering into the sky. It dates to 2600 BC. So by the time Abram would have seen this as a boy, it would already have been close to 800 years old.

Ziggurats were temples, meant to honor a particular deity in a particular region. And the steps represented just that: a giant staircase reaching toward the heavens. Imagine a large anthropomorphic god walking down the steps to connect with humanity; and amid these larger stones were smaller ones, representing our desire to climb toward heaven. The ancient ziggurat represented an eternal desire to connect heaven and earth.

Abram’s family’s travel would have been difficult, if not impossible. To go from Ur to Haran, from Iraq to Syria, would have been a trek; and then for Abram to pick up stakes in Haran and head into the land of Canaan, settling at first in Schechem, then the Negev desert, and finally being buried in Hebron, not to mention a time spent in Egypt, would have represented a tremendous sacrifice of movement. It’s difficult enough to do nowadays even with the conveniences of modern travel. Imagine packing it all with you across the ancient world! The travels echo the near impossibility of the whole tale.

Why did he go? God spoke. He said, “OK.” And that settled it.

Now, Abram’s roots were back in Ur, in the shadow of that ziggurat. His father had already decided to leave for Canaan; we’re not sure why, but there are always reasons for travel in the ancient world. But he only made it as far as Haran. Perhaps Abram saw this as just finishing what his father had already begun but could not complete? Maybe…but by the time this all happens, Abram is already in his eighties. He’s amassed quite a fortune there in Haran. Why would he pick up and move at that point in life? Was Canaan the ancient world’s equivalent of the house in Florida? Abram would have had eight decades, not to mention his father’s legacy, to root him in place. Why would he pull up stakes? Can we see a parallel with our Iraqi brothers and sisters in the current context, rooted people forced into exile and wandering?

It may be moving us beyond the text a bit, but I like to imagine that maybe Abram wasn’t the first one that God asked; he was just the first one who said, “yes.” Maybe there others, dozens maybe, in very different circumstances, who would have been better candidates. Maybe they just all said no.

So what was different about Abram that made him say yes? Well, according to Paul at least, Abram had faith. And that’s what set him apart. So what does that mean, to have faith? We can’t really boil faith down to this one momentary exchange between God and a man and call that the whole of faith. Abram’s story goes on for another thirteen chapters. And the whole arc contains pictures of what faith contains. Faith inhabits a land filled with promise: in Abram and Sarai’s case, the promise of offspring. They wait patiently, and then decide that they must have misunderstood, so Hagar comes into the picture as they try to work around God. So in some ways, faith has this natural tendency to doubt or question. There is amusement, Sarah’s laughter; there is sacrifice, and there is struggle. All of it together paints a fuller picture of what this “faith” is that Abram has.

But here, in this story, faith is simply response. God said, “Go from your country” and Abram goes. Faith means responding to God’s nudge.

Can we do that? Do we have the kind of faith that could respond unconditionally in the way that Abram does in the first leg of his journey into promise? There is this notion in that relationship of God and humanity, that theological ziggurat, that God acts toward us unconditionally. God’s love for us is unconditional. We don’t need to do anything to deserve it; it just is. In the Psalm we sang and read, creation itself is God’s act of love. Both creation and loving are these acts that are so central to God’s very being and existence. Or as Paul puts it, it is not by fulfilling law that we receive any of these good gifts from God. Or if we take our ziggurat as an example of faith, which steps are the ones that are most effective for bridging that gap between earth and heaven? Is it the little ones, or the large ones? Or can we finally see that the cross, the means by which God frees us from all that weighs us down, that this cross is our ziggurat? That it is God who descends, period? Who comes to us, period? Who lifts us up, period? If so, then the unconditional response simply seems like a natural response.

Over the course of June, and on into July, we’re looking at the broader context of Stewardship. It’s a churchy word that we use largely to talk (or not to talk) about money. But really, it is a broader, much broader word, which means this: how do we take care of the gifts which God has given us? So in this context, could it be that Abram, by virtue of his response to God’s call, is showing us something that is at the heart of nature of stewardship? Could it be that taking care of what we have been given means living into a willingness to let it go? Abram left his home to a land of strangers. Along the way, he spent his savings to fulfill God’s desires for his life.

Could we do the same? What is it that we have that keeps us rooted in ways that make it impossible for us to respond? What would it mean to let go of that, to be willing to give it up in order to really take care of it and God’s claim on our lives?

There is this falsehood, I think, in the way that we understand the nature of faith; that somehow, this responding to God comes purely naturally. That we can simply show up and live the way God intends us to live because it’s part of our DNA. But the reality is that this faith thing doesn’t come very naturally for many of us; we may have the possibility of it in us, the divine spark, the image of God, but it is with practice that it comes to fruition. And when that practice takes root, it becomes a part of our reality.

A simple example is prayer. How many of you prayed before every meal as a child? Then you probably grew up knowing that this is what you do. But for those same of you, how many of you prayed with your family when you ate out? It’s as though there’s this God-free zone in the restaurant industry. What would it mean to begin a practice of praying before meals in public? At first, it’ll be strange. But soon, it develops into a practice that becomes second-nature to us.

We don’t know anything about Abram’s first 85 years. Could it be that he spent those decades in practice, such that this response to God in faith was second nature? Could it be that he had been asked before, but it was only at this age that he said, “yes?”

What are your practices? What is it that you would like to develop as a practice of faith, and how is it that you can move toward that practice, on by stages, through little practices to begin? And doing so, where will that journey take you?

Where is it that our journey will take us?

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