Ancestor of Nations

The year was 2002. In Peterborough, Ontario, Helen McCarthy was teaching World Religions at St. Peter’s High School. Helen had invited Elizabeth Rahman, a Muslim woman who worshipped at the Masjid alSalaam, the Peace Mosque, to speak to her class. When Elizabeth arrived at the class, there were no students there. Elizabeth hadn’t realized that it was a “snow day.” However, Helen was there, so she and Elizabeth spent the class time talking with each other. They discovered that, despite the differences in their respective faith traditions, there was much that they shared. Some weeks later, Heather Pollock, a member of Beth Israel synagogue, came to the class. As she spoke, Helen realized that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same God and recognize Abraham as their common ancestor. She set up a meeting for the three of them. With great hope, Elizabeth, Heather, and Helen began to plan an Abraham Festival that would honor Abraham as a prophet in all three of their faith communities.1 It took a year of negotiating with St. Alphonsus Roman Catholic church, Helen’s parish, Beth Israel synagogue, and the Masjid al-Salaam. Finally, the first festival was held in 2003, and there has been one every year since. In addition to speakers, the festivals include authentic worship services at Jewish, Christian, and Muslim houses of worship. This year’s festival, to be held in late April, will showcase the Millennium Development goals. Eight different speakers will talk about the goals, why each one was developed, and how different faith communities can work together to achieve the goals, in the world and in the local community.

Are you surprised that Jews, Christians, and Muslims can work together? Certainly the church has a long history of anti-Semitism, and political events of the last decade have heightened fear and mistrust of Muslims in this country. As we look at the second of God’s many promises to the ancient Hebrews, perhaps we might gain, as people of faith, a new understanding of the relationship among our various faith communities. The covenant that God initiated with Abraham and Sarah takes us a step beyond the covenant that God made with Noah. You remember that in the ancient world, covenants were binding promises between two parties, with firm agreement about who was to do what, and about the consequences if one party failed to live up to the agreement. In the covenant with Noah, the agreement was essentially one-sided. God promised to “remember” Noah and to renounce forever God’s ability to destroy creation.

Now we come to the story of Abraham and Sarah. This story is from the same source and time-frame as that of Noah, i.e., it was put together by the returnees from Exile sometime in the fourth century B.C. I want to begin by focusing on two elements of this story: name and covenant. In the Hebrew Bible, names are important. One’s name is a decisive marker of identity, and a change of name, as for example, when the renamed Jacob became Israel, always marks a fundamental change within the person and in that person’s relationship with God. In today’s story, everyone receives a new name. Although the English obscures it, when God announces Godself, when God says, “I am God Almighty, walk before me and be blameless,” the Hebrew word for God Almighty, el Shaddai, occurs in the Bible here for the first time. The meaning is uncertain – it may mean “God of the mountains” – but the intent is clear. God is declaring in a new way God’s oneness and God’s new expectation that Abraham and Sarah will give their loyalty only to el Shaddai, to God Almighty, and not to any of the gods of the other ancient peoples. What is more important, God gives Abraham and Sarah new names. Notice that God doesn’t ask them if they want new names. God simply renames them. In so doing, God declares God’s sovereignty over them, and God’s power to change their destinies.

The changes in Abraham’s and Sarah’s names are part of the covenant that God establishes with them. Even though both of them are well past the time when they could expect any further descendants – Abraham had had a son by Hagar, Ishmael, but Sarah had been barren -- God takes the initiative and makes an extraordinary covenant with them. Notice that, like Noah, Abraham does not ask for anything. But God promises an “everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” In effect, God promises to be God to Abraham, through Abraham to all Israel, through Israel to the church, and through the church to all of us. What is more important, God extends God’s covenant even beyond Israel and the church. God promises Abraham that he will be the “ancestor of a multitude of nations.” Sarah too is a full partner in this covenant. Not only will God bless her, but “she shall give rise to nations, kings of peoples shall come from her.” God has promised to be bound ultimately to all peoples, all who find their ancestry in Abraham, either by birth or by adoption.

You remember that when God promised Noah that God would never again destroy the earth, God made all the promises and asked virtually nothing of Noah. All Noah and his family had to do was to have children, not eat blood, and not murder each other. However, in the covenant with Abraham and Sarah, God raises the ante. There is a piece of the story that is missing in our lection. In those verses we hear what else God asks of Abraham besides just loyalty – hard as even that proved for the ancient Hebrews. In the verses in between the two parts of our lection, God requires Abraham, to undergo circumcision. God further requires that, on the eighth day, all the males in his family, and all the males in the generations after him, will be circumcised. In effect, God marks God’s covenant in Abraham’s flesh, binding him body and soul to his relationship with God. To be faithful to God, Abraham will now have to do more than just trust God’s promise and answer to a new name. He will have to put his own body on the line. On his face in front of el Shaddai, Abraham knows that his life has changed forever.

Abraham will have to put his own body on the line. On this second Sunday in Lent, the church bids us reflect on how our use of our own bodies reflects our relationship with God. As Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us, “We do not head straight to Easter from the spa or the shopping mall. Instead, we are invited to spend forty days examining the nature of our own covenant with God.”2 As we join the retreat of the church, we might begin by considering our own names and identities. Just like the ancient Hebrews, we know that names are important. Although we may not realize it, much of our identity is bound up with our names, and names reveal much to others about who we are and where we have come from. As baptized Christians, we have a particular identity, one given to us in baptism. We may not have received new names at the font, but as we died and rose again with Christ, as we were sealed with the chrism, we were made “Christ’s own forever.” And so we might ask ourselves what about our lives reflects our identity as one of Christ’s own.

What is more important, we are bid to consider the nature of our covenant with God. What is important in our relationship with God? On what does it depend? What do we expect of God, and what do we think God expects of us? Do we trust our relationship with God to be life giving, or do we still fear God’s anger and condemnation? The Anglican expression of Christianity emphasizes the incarnation, i.e., we believe that what we do, either in liturgy or ministry, is ultimately more important than what we think about God. So we might also ponder how we act out in our own bodies our covenant with God. In what ways might God expect us to put our bodies on the line by taking up our own cross? Finally, we might ponder our relationship with those of other faith communities, most especially with other children of Abraham. Do we grant the inclusive nature of God’s covenant? Without discounting the differences among our faith communities – and they are significant – are we willing to see what we hold in common with Jews and Muslims? Can we respect our brothers and sisters of other faiths? Can we put our own bodies on the line in partnership with them, to help advance the Kingdom of God?

According to tradition, Abraham kept his tent open in all four directions, the more easily to share his food and water with travelers from anywhere. In that spirit, may we join hands with all those who thirst and hunger for justice, peace, and dignity.

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1. The story of the Abraham Festival is found at http://abrahamfestival.org/index.php , accessed March 2, 2012.

2. “Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008), 55.

Walking with the Spirit

It seemed to come out of nowhere. In the dirt yard of his Aunt Seneva’s house, John Lewis was happily playing with his fourteen cousins.1 Suddenly they saw the sky grow dark, they felt the wind come at them, and they glimpsed distant flashes of lightening. As Aunt Seneva rushed the fifteen terrified children into her little house, the wind began to howl, and the house started to shake. Then the wood plank flooring of the house began to bend, and a corner of the room began to rise. As the children wondered whether they and the house would fly away, Aunt Seneva had them all join hands and walk toward the rising corner of the floor. As the storm howled and beat the outside of the house around them, the children walked back and forth, changing direction with the changing direction of the wind and holding the house down through the sheer weight of their bodies. After that experience, “walking with the wind” became a metaphor for Lewis, a way of talking about his life that reminded him of Jesus’ invitation to Nicodemus. From his childhood home in Troy, Alabama, Lewis walked with the wind to Fisk University and the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville. That same wind pushed him onto freedom rides and civil rights marches, and into leadership of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and other community organizations. In 1987, again pushed by the Spirit, Lewis joined the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Georgia’s fifth Congressional district, a position he has held ever since.

Like John Lewis faithful people are restless people. Faithful people are always ready, faithful people continually hear God’s call to leave the safe, the familiar, the cozy, and the known, to head out into the unknown, trusting in the leading of the Spirit. Today we’ve heard one of the most challenging sentences in the entire Hebrew Bible: “Abraham went, as the Lord had told him….” Here Abraham was comfortably settled in Haran, with his wife, his in-laws, his servants, his tents, and his flocks. Although he was childless, God made him a most astonishing promise: “I will make of you a great nation.” But with that promise there was also a command: “Go from your country and your kindred … to the land that I will show you.” Did Abraham want to hear that command? We don’t know. Scripture only tells us that the father of the members of at least three faith communities didn’t argue, or hesitate. He packed up his family, his servants, and his tents, put his animals on the road, and headed out towards Canaan. Thank heavens, brother Lot was willing to go along! Paul too was ready to accept God’s call. Knowing full well what his own change of direction on the road to Damascus had cost him, he strongly identified with Abraham’s willingness to trust God’s call and do the unthinkable.

Nicodemus’s story is a little different. John’s Gospel was written at the end of the first century. By this time the lines had hardened between the Jewish religious leaders and those who professed allegiance to Jesus, and the easy co-existence of the two communities had begun to dissolve. We don’t know much about Nicodemus, other than that he was a leader of the group that read and followed the Mosaic law very strictly. Yet clearly he and others had seen the “signs” that Jesus was doing, the signs that clearly demonstrated his identity as the Word made Flesh. Nicodemus had come by night, perhaps in some fear and trepidation, perhaps to confirm what he had seen and heard. Jesus doesn’t affirm or dispute Nicodemus’s opening statement. He doesn’t ask Nicodemus who he represents. Instead, he offers Nicodemus an invitation: “Come, be born anew, experience that inner transformation that will lead you more deeply into God’s life than you have ever been.” Birth. Think about it for minute. It’s a messy, difficult process, that’s painful for all concerned. Good Pharisee that he is, and used to parsing every aleph and bet of the law, Nicodemus, of course, takes Jesus’ invitation literally and thinks he has to be reborn physically. Was Jesus being deliberately opaque when he answered Nicodemus by talking about the wind? Both in Hebrew and in Greek, the language in which the Gospel is written, the word for “wind” and “spirit” is the same. Like the wind that blew through John Lewis’s life, like the Spirit that delivered God’s call to Abraham, perhaps Jesus was inviting cautious, confused Nicodemus into something completely new and different. After he voices his confusion, we don’t know how Nicodemus responded – he drops out of the conversation after Jesus’ mention of the wind. We do know that he reappears twice more in John’s Gospel: in chapter 7 when he comes to Jesus’ defense, and at the time of Jesus’ burial. In each case, his motivation is unclear. Did he eventually walk with the wind into a Christian community? We don’t know.

We do know this. The Spirit/wind continues to blow, Jesus continues to invite us into renewed life, and during Lent especially, we are invited to engage in self-examination, and inner transformation. We are invited to listen more attentively to the Holy Gust, both personally and corporately. Martin Buber once said that the young of any age are those who have not yet unlearned what it means to begin. The voice teacher in Jonathan Levy’s “Master Class” gently tells her students, “Let us begin again.” Abraham, Sarah, Paul, and, hopefully Nicodemus show us that faith to “begin again” is essential to a deeper relationship with God. Where are you stuck? What do you need to let go of in order to begin again? Perhaps the place to which Jesus invites us is a place of wondering, even confusion. Yes, change is difficult, but, if you were born again, would you grow up differently? If you had the chance, would you let the Spirit blow you into a different place? Is Jesus inviting you to see your life from a different perspective? Would your life be different if you believed with absolutely certainty that God loved you so deeply that God was willing to demonstrate that love on the Cross?

What would it mean on the parish level to be reborn, to be blown by the Spirit to a different place? Is St. Peter’s a warm, comfortable place, a womb from which God is straining with all God’s might to push us out? Or, to put the question differently, supposing we were to re-found this parish? Would it look as it did in 1841? Would it look as it did in 1964? Would it look and feel as it does now? Would we build a building like this one? Would we have a building at all? How might this parish be different if we were truly to accept Jesus’ invitation to grow up differently, to accept God’s deep love for all people, including those on the other side of the red doors?

Do you find the prospect of change daunting? When we take the long view, we know that the church has been changing, growing, and evolving since its very beginning. The church’s understanding of the way to carry forward Jesus’ mission changed between the writing of Paul’s first letters in the late ‘40s and the writing of John’s Gospel in the ‘90s. The contents of the New Testament and the statements of the various creeds were not fully determined for three more centuries. The early church slowly evolved into the church that blossomed in the Middle Ages. Out of the medieval church came the church of the Reformation, which in turn gave way to the church of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today we are in another time of profound change in the church, as our denominations struggle to reborn into yet a different world and to create new and different communities in which to experience God’s transformative powers. As we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century, we continue to change, we continue to grow into what we hope will be renewed faith and closer relationships with Christians of other denominations and members of other faith communities. And we continue to ponder what these new and evolving Christian communities might look like.

And here is the good news. God continues to birth us. God continues to invite us to walk with the wind, to let ourselves be blown away by the Spirit. Especially during this season of Lent God invites us to be attentive to the movements of the Spirit, the gales and the puffs. God continues to push, pull, call, and lead us. God continues to challenge us to leave our comfort zones, to change and grow, even when we aren’t sure why we have been called or where exactly we are headed. God does not ask of us certainty. God only asks of us trust.

Christ, your summons echoes true
when you but call my name.
Let me turn and follow you
and never be the same.
In your company I’ll go
where your love and footsteps show,
Thus I’ll move and live and grow in you and you in me.

1. The story is told by Patricia Templeton in Synthesis for March 20, 2011 (Boyds, MD: Brunson Publishing Co.).