"Going Faith"

First Presbyterian Church
Peter S. Buehler
February 17, 2008
Genesis 12:1-4a

To Abraham, God's first word is Go. And while God withholds specifics about where Abraham is to go -- something that would make us very uneasy -- God makes a point of telling Abraham who and what he needs to leave behind. It is what God says first: Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. In effect, Before you can go to you must first go from. You cannot arrive someplace without leaving someplace.

Which is difficult! Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house -- Jewish scholar Richard Elliot Friedman points out that the order of the three places Abraham is to go from is not so much geographical as it is emotional. It's not just that he must leave the place of his birth, and his community, and his family -- Abraham must sever the emotional bonds that go with them. Friedman goes further, pointing out that the three places, or groups of people, are in ascending order of difficulty -- it's hard enough to leave the country you love; harder still to leave behind your community of support, your friends, the network of people you know well and interact with often. But to leave your home, the place where you've grown up, the people you have grown up with, your family -- this is especially hard.

Many of us have had the experience. After my dad died my mom moved to a retirement community, which meant selling the house I'd grown up in. It wasn't really "my" house, of course -- and I hadn't lived there for 35 years -- but nevertheless seeing the moving van leave with all the furniture, seeing the rooms sitting empty for the first time in my life, knowing that the house now belonged to someone else and that I would never return to it, never again be in those familiar rooms, the spaces where I had lived and grown and been nourished by countless meals and so much love, it was the strangest feeling. So much had to be left behind; saying goodbye all at once was something I wasn't at all prepared for.

Many of you have had this experience. All of us in one way or another have had to learn how to leave things; we've had to do what Abraham had to do. Even when we have been forced to say goodbye to some place or some one, when it has not been our choice but our life has taken a turn that required leave-taking on our part -- even then at some level we have had to agree to it in our minds and hearts. We call it acceptance, or getting on with our lives. Here in the scriptures it's God's command to Go -- to go from what's comfortable and familiar in order to go to the place of God's promise.

So often in our experience it is Going without knowing. In his book The Jesus Way, Eugene Peterson defines faith as "trusting obediently in what you cannot control, living in obedient relationship with the One we cannot see, (and) venturing obediently into a land that we know nothing about." In other words, faith is a verb as well as a noun: faith is trusting, and living, and venturing. Faith is not so much something we have as something we do. We see it as a body of knowledge, of Christian teaching that over the years we load into our personal spiritual computers like software. Granted there have been occasional glitches and memory loss, of course -- maybe even times when our hard disk has crashed and we've "lost our faith." But often it's then, after months, or years, or even decades, that we learn that faith is not defined as something we have or have lost, but faith is a verb -- faith is actively trusting God.

God gives us the ability to do this; the Holy Spirit empowers living faith in us. God gives us the freedom to trust and to act on our trust, to leave behind something that is past, no matter how hard, and to go to the place he promises to show us.

In John Calvin's words, God asked Abraham and Sarah to go "with closed eyes."
We think of times when someone has taken us by the hand, told us to close our eyes and led us into a room, or down a street, or up a path -- we have had to trust that person to keep us from harm, from stumbling and falling. It's hard to do!
It goes against our most basic instincts for being in control and keeping safe.
No matter how much we trust our friend the idea of trust is different from the act of trust. We can't help but think of the Peanuts characters of Charlie Brown and Lucy: Lucy is holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick a field goal and promising that she won't pull it away at the last second -- something she is always doing, sending Charlie Brown spinning in the air and crashing on his face.
We have a hard time with trust. We can talk all day about it, but we are cautious when we have to do it.

Which is why Calvin puts it the way he does: we are called to be like Abraham and Sarah to go with closed eyes into the new places in our lives; we have to let ourselves be led by God as if blindfolded before we can know how trustworthy God truly is. Augustine's insight in the 4th century is true: faith precedes understanding; lives spent trusting are lives spent learning about the One who is trustworthy.

Our faith is shown it by our actions, by our sincerity, by our willingness each day to hear God's call to us, as to Abraham and Sarah, to venture out of our comfort zone, to Go from our country and our kindred and our family's house to the land that God will show us. What we don't want is to be people who go to church on Sunday but then act the rest of the week as though we hadn't. Faith pertains to all of life, not just to parts or compartments of our life.

There is a story about the small town that had historically been dry until a local businessman decided to build a tavern. A group of Christians from a local church were concerned and held an all-night prayer meeting to ask God to intervene.
It just so happened that shortly thereafter, lightning struck the bar and burned it to the ground. The owner of the bar sued the church, claiming the prayers of the congregation were responsible, but the church hired a lawyer to argue in court that the prayers were not responsible for the lightning and fire. The presiding judge, after his initial review of the case, stated that "no matter how this case comes out, one thing is clear: The tavern owner believes in prayer and the Christians do not."

If anything is a mark of a Christian person, it is belief in prayer! Which is interesting, because most often prayer is something that is highly personal and done in secret, as Jesus tells us to do. Unless our friends tell us, we really don't know how much time they spend in prayer, what their prayers consist of, what they pour out to God but share with few others. We can say to others we are praying for them, just as they can say that to us, but it's just words if there is no real prayer happening. Like the cartoon that shows the pastor noticing a parishioner approaching and saying to himself, Oh no, there's Bill, and I said I'd pray for him! "Dear God, help Bill! Amen."

Real prayer, of course, is trust -- coming back again and again to the one who leads us in paths that are trustworthy and good. Jesus spent hours in prayer.
He prayed with words, he prayed with silence. He asked for the simplest of things, daily bread; he asked for the highest of things, to forgive enemies; he asked for the deepest of things, to be kept from temptation, from helplessness, from giving up on God.

We pray the same things, as Jesus taught us; we live our lives in the hope of these prayers, and our hope is made stronger. When our prayers are connected to our living -- connected to the issues we're having, the fears we're facing, the decisions we're making -- they are a source of blessing. When we take the risk of leaving behind what is old and moving ahead with what is new we show that faith is an action -- trust in action, love in action.

The "going" God has in mind for us may be entirely local, the mileage we travel may be in our hearts and minds. Perhaps forgiveness is the pilgrimage we are called to take -- to trust God enough to forgive, to move forward, not knowing where we're going but trusting the one who calls us to leave hurts and wounds and pride behind and set off for a new land of promise. God says "Go." Jesus says, "Follow me." We learn what it means to trust him as we follow him.

How we deal with uncertainty in our lives, how willing we are to take risks when the outcome is not assured -- that is the measure of our faith.

We always have choices. As a nation, as a society, we are not only making discernments about political candidates, we are also making judgments about our values. How do we want to live? Especially today, do we let fear guide us, or faith? We can choose to live in fear.

This has been a week of tragedy for many families, for our country as well. Two separate shootings were reported on our front pages, one in a junior high in Oxnard, one in a university in northern Illinois. Three other campus shootings have occurred since February 8. We're tempted to stay in a familiar place in our minds, going along with the attitude that "these things happen," that nothing can be done to make a difference, to make our society less violent. Try a 15 year-old as an adult, maybe that will influence other young people and keep them from thoughts of murder. Though surely the prospect of such a young person spending the rest of his life behind bars, treating him as irredeemable, is as brutal as his own brutal act. Another idea being debated in twelve state legislatures is whether to allow university students to obtain concealed weapons permits to carry guns on campus. This "solution" would deal with guns and gun violence by adding more guns! What sense does this make? If the issue of the easy accessibility of guns to troubled individuals is front and center today, are not followers of Jesus to be part of the solution by opposing such fear-based thinking?

At the very least, Christians cannot stop caring. It's not enough just to be on the lookout for people acting erratically, people who may cause harm; followers of Jesus need to be on the lookout for ways we can show mercy and kindness, ways we can help people choose different paths, ways we can invite people back into a relationship with the God whose ways are merciful, kind, trustworthy and good.

If it's one thing the scriptures proclaim, it is that people can change the world.
Viewed from God's perspective, Abraham and Sarah were tiny figures as they set out from Haran through Syria, through Canaan, across the Sinai and into Egypt, where they were blessed and their name became great.
It must have seemed to them an impossible calling, what God was asking them to do, traveling into the unknown, God's promise as their only guide.

Jesus and the twelve were also travelers; when we meet them in the Gospels they are always "on the way." Though when it became clear that Jesus' way led to a cross, others fell away. His death was hardly noticed; nor did the world take notice of Easter. People tend not to notice when God keeps his promises. The disciples were more surprised than anyone! People today need neighbors, surprised disciples, who risk Easter faith, knowing that when they trust in God's love Jesus lives.

We make a difference. We prepare ourselves in worship for the witness of our lives. Each day God's call to Abraham and Sarah is in our ears: Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.

Are we prepared to go there? Yes, we are.