The Bone Rattlin' God

Please Click Here For Sermon Video

Ezekiel 37:1-14; Colossians 3:1-4

When I read this text from Ezekiel I read it with my imagination.  You can’t help but visualize it and it’s not for the weak of stomach.  I can't help but picture this as an awesome, fearful, and gruesome sight.  Ezekiel standing in that silent Valley, the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  Who knows how he got there - The Spirit brought him - whatever that means.  There lying in the valley are the dried-out bones of hundreds, maybe thousands of people.  God compels him to walk around in the midst of them.  And he walks.  He stops, picks up a skull and says, “Alas, poor Yurich! I knew him well.”  (Sorry. The moment demanded a bit of Shakespeare.)  Ezekiel must have been overwhelmed.  How horrible could it have been?  How did all these people die?  How was this valley turned into an open mass grave? Who were they - soldiers? The innocent population of a nearby town some enemy devoted to destruction? Don’t know.  We just know it was a vast multitude.

Then God spoke to Ezekiel and asked a seemingly senseless question to which there was an obvious answer.  The question - "Mortal - you who can die - can these bones - which are very dead - live?”  Well, the answer we would expect Ezekiel to give would be, "No, these bones are very dead.  They cannot live."  But Ezekiel, knowing that it was God who was asking him the question, he did the Matlock thing.  Y’all know the Matlock thing?  Matlock was a TV series starring Andy Griffith as a southern detective.  The Matlock thing is something we southern boy's do so well when we feel we might be getting tricked.  We put on our best Gomer Pyle accent and play dumb so to see how a situation is going to play out so that maybe we can turn it back around on the trickster.  Ole Zeke said "O Lord God, Almighty ruler of the Universe, you know ‘cause you know everything.  I'm just a little ole mortal."

God starts to answer his own question.  "Say to those bones: I will cover you with flesh, put breath in you, and you shall live."  Well, Ole Zeke plays along and does what the Lord asks him to do.  Starts talking to them bones.  And low and behold…there’s the mighty sound of rattlin’ bones and it’s…"Foot bone connected to the leg bone.  Leg bone connected to the hip bone…..Them bones start rattlin'.  They start coming together joining together and the meat comes back on ‘em and then the skin.  Lord, have mercy. Hollywood can’t touch this.  There’s not just bones everywhere.  Now there’s bodies everywhere, but they ain’t alive.  

Then the Lord tells Ole Zeke to prophesy to the four winds to come and breath on them that they might live.  Ole Zeke again does as the Lord asks and the wind comes and there in the Valley of Dry Bones stood a multitude, a vast multitude, alive.  It seems them bones can live and Ole Zeke has got to be asking himself what sort of God he’s got there.  Most gods back them would just as soon melt the flesh off of mortals for entertainment.  Israel’s God restores them to life.  What kind of God can and would give life back and why?  What are we mere mortals that God should care?

God finishes up by telling Ole Zeke to prophesy to the house of Israel, who believed about themselves that they were dead.  They had been taken into captivity in Babylon.  Their idolatry and abuse of their own poor had gotten so evil, evil to the extent of sacrificing their own children to foreign gods, that God had to renege on his promise to their forefathers to give them the Land and make a great nation of their descendants.  Well, cast off their land and no longer a great nation, they were as good as dead and their bones, figuratively speaking were bone-dry with hopelessness and feeling alone, cut off from their God.  Can these bones live?  The God of the living who restores life was promising to the whole house of Israel that he was going to open up their graves and bring them back to the Land of Israel where they would again live as his people knowing that he truly is God.  Roughly 70 years later God did.  He brought his people back from exile and they began the arduous task of rebuilding.   

In the early church and in early Judaism this prophetic I don’t know what you’d call it, served as a prooftext of the resurrection of the dead.  It gave hope in assuring them that God can take what is dead - as dead as dead can be - I mean laying there in the field, dried out, and disjointed and restore it anew - put breath into it so that it lives.  They believed, as do we, that the day will come when God will do just what Ezekiel saw him do - Raise us from the dead and put flesh on us.  Breathe new life into us.  We believe that God has power over life and over death and that our God who is gracious will give life where it seems death has taken over. That’s the way God is. 

The early church also believed that this prophetic experience that Ezekiel had there in that Valley of Dry bones was in a way but not fully fulfilled when God poured out his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, upon the church on the Day of Pentecost.  Though God has not yet literally raised his people from their graves, we are raised with Christ.  We participate in his resurrection by baptism and by God breathing his Spirit into those who follow Jesus as Lord and Savior.  

Well, I know it’s Lent and we should probably be doing some old school Bible-thumping on how we are hopeless, dried-up bones living in captivity to sin and we got some repenting to do, but…why?  Why walk among the bones when we have the opportunity to breathe the fresh air of the new life in Christ from the Holy Spirit?  As Paul says in our reading from Colossians, we have been raised with Christ and our life is hidden with him in God.  We live.  We live.  We are alive.  God has breathed his life into us, the Holy Spirit.  What’s the evidence of that?  Quite frankly, it’s the basic fact that we are here right now and not somewhere else.  Going to church is no longer a cultural expectation where people are shamed for not attending.  Those of us who still come to worship particularly in small congregations come for the simple fact that we know we live in Christ and he lives in us and the loving fellowship we have at church is an important part of what it is to live.

As a congregation we may feel like scattered, dried-up old bones, but we live.  We may ask how?  We’re quite aged and don’t have the energy to do the things we used to do as a congregation that made us look and feel alive and vibrant.  That is certainly true and it’s ok.  It is ok.  Aging and it’s effects are a fact of life in everything that lives.  There’s no need to feel like we’re failing God.  You see, the new life in Christ is not found so much in what we do as it is in our relationship with God and with one another and with others.  

Here’s what I think new life in Christ looks like.  A woman came up to me last Sunday at lunch after church and got down close to may face to speak candidly to me.  She and her husband are what we call a bit up in years.  His health is a major concern and most of her time and energy goes towards helping him.  That’s beauty of love among the aging.  She said, “I just want you to know I pray for you.  I pray for you.  I pray for these churches.  At night when I can’t sleep, I lay there and I pray for you, for this ministry.  We don’t have the energy or the health to do much, but I pray for you.”  I couldn’t say much more than “Thank you” as I was getting a bit choked up and didn’t what to get weepy at the table.

Praying is at the heart of what it is to be raised in new life with Christ and seeking the things that are above.  Prayer.  Praying to God.  Praying for one another.  It is in and through the helpless, desperate, humble, and so often tearful task of prayer that we live the new life in Christ who is seated at the right hand of God the Father.  Prayer is the ultimate act of dying to ourselves; of relinquishing control of our lives and submitting to the will and care of the God who has loved us all our lives and proved himself faithful time and again.  Prayer is letting God be God so that we don’t have to be God ourselves.  It is in and through prayer that the bone-rattlin’ God who gives life rattles them bones, enfleshes us, and breathes the life of his Spirit into us.   Prayer teaches us patience for rarely does God answer our prayers right now in the way we want especially those prayers that involve relationships and the hearts and lives of others.  Some prayers take a lifetime and simply serve to teach the painful lesson of endurance.

Prayer is how we take off the clothes of the old life and clothe ourselves with the new clothes of the new life in Christ.  Paul writes later in Chapter three of Colossians telling us to clothe ourselves were certain qualities of character that are indicative of those who are alive in Christ.  He writes: “Therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.  And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.  Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.  And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:12-17).

Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, bearing with one another, forgiveness, thankfulness, and most of all, love – unconditional, unselfish, sacrificial love; these are the marks and ways of the new life in Christ that God breathes into us with and by his Spirit while we pray.  I’ve been with you folks nearly nine years now (and I can say this about all four of my churches and the two I served previously), you are very much alive with the new life in Christ.  You bear the marks of the new life in Christ richly.  Who knows what the future holds for us four churches and this cooperative arrangement, but as long as we are praying, we are alive.  Seek the One who is above, humbly trust in God’s will and care.  Our God is the Bone Rattlin’ God who gives life anew.  Pray!  What more can I say?  Amen.

The Lord Is My Shepherd

Please Click Here For Sermon Video

Psalm 23

One of my seminary professors when talking about how to read the Bible used to tell an old story about a man wanted to learn how to read the Bible.  The story went that the man paid a visit to his village priest and asked the priest to teach him how to read the Bible.  The priest told him to go home and read Psalm 23 over and over and then come back in a week and tell him everything he had learned.  The week passed and the man returned and told the priest that he had learned that God is like a shepherd.  He takes care of us and protects us.  God is with us even in the worst and most fearful of situations.  God provides for us abundantly.  And so on and so on he continued for a few more minutes on things one would glean about God from reading the 23^rd Psalm at face value.  The priest said, “No, you didn’t get it.  Go back and try again for another week.”  

Well, a bit confused, the man thought the priest was nudging him to dig a little deeper so he went to the library and got all kinds of books on Psalm 23 and learned everything thing he thought he could possibly know about the Psalm.  A week later he returned to the priest and went on and on about what this person says this and what that person says and so on and so on.  The priest had to cut him off and told him, “You still haven’t gotten it.  Come back in another week.”  The man got quite angry at the priest and called him a quack who didn’t know anything and then vowed never to come back.  

Well, several months went by and a knock came on the church door.  The priest opened the door and it was the man.  He looked like he’d been through Hell, disheveled, unshaven, tears in his bloodshot eyes.  The man said, “The Lord is my shepherd.”  The priest embraced him.  He had learned the meaning of the Psalm.

The lesson to learn from Psalm 23 is located in the my.  The Lord is…my…shepherd.  It isn’t enough to know what the Psalm says about the Lord, about what God is like.  Knowing about God is not the same as knowing God.  Even more so, knowing everything you could possibly know about a Bible passage is definitely not the same thing as knowing God.  What the Psalm says about the Lord doesn’t mean anything until it hits us that the Lord is my shepherd.  I am a sheep of his own fold.  I am his.  He is mine.  The Lord is my shepherd.  

This Psalm is supposed to have been written by King David, ancient Israel’s second and most influential king.  In I Samuel we get a little biography of David.  He was the youngest of seven sons to a guy named Jesse (not Uncle Jesse of the Dukes of Hazard).  Apparently, he had red cheeks and curly hair.  He was ruddy in appearance.  As the youngest, his main family responsibility was to tend the family sheep, shepherding.  That task occasionally involved the heroic work of protecting them from bears and lions which prepared him for his encounter with Philistine giant named Goliath.  But mostly, the work of shepherding was the monotonous, boring, ordinary drudge of pasturing them – feeding, watering, and making sure they didn’t wander off.  

I suspect David spent a good deal of time sitting on slightly higher ground just watching sheep and thinking, but what about?  If we are to take into account the David that we meet in the Psalms he wrote, he was probably pondering God.  His psalms reflect a person of profound faith and prayer not unaccustomed to a persistent sense of God’s presence with him; present with him not only in those long, monotonously boring, ordinary days of just sitting and watching sheep but also under much adversity from powerful enemies when he was king.  Even in his youth David was a man after God’s own heart as was reflected when he was the only man in all Israel to fearlessly stand up for God’s honour in the face of Goliath’s insults of the God of Israel.

Imagining how David got his poetic fodder for the 23^rd Psalm, I like to think that he must have had a moment one day when his father’s flock was reposing by a cool stream running through a vast, knolly green pasture.  The sheep were safe and well fed, lying there serenely burping and chewing their cud.  It must have occurred to David, “This is the peace I feel in the presence of the Lord who is my Shepherd. I want for nothing.  I fear nothing.  My Lord is with me.  Bears and lions are out there to predate on us, but my Lord protects me.  The pastures are abundant and green; my Lord sets a table of abundance before me.  The joy…my cup runneth over.  Bears and lions after me…Hah!  The Lord’s goodness and lovingkindness are what truly pursue me.  This peaceful repose in the presence of the Lord is what I will know all the days of my life.  I will dwell in my God’s house forever.”  Imagine coming up with that while simply watching a bunch of dirty sheep mindlessly chew their cud.  Somehow it occurred to him that God does for him what he was doing for those sheep.  The Lord was present and watching over him and was indeed his Shepherd. God does speak to us and does so often in wonderfully ordinary ways.  Early in life, David learned God was wonderfully with him and it was incredibly “reposeful”.  He had nothing to fear.  God abundantly provides.  This would be so for the rest of his life.  

Having learned “the Lord is my Shepherd”, David grew up and became the greatest king Israel ever had as well as the most prominent voice of spiritual song and prayer in the lives of both Jews and Christians.  David even had a profound impact on the spiritual life of Jesus, the Son of God.  In the glimpse we get of Jesus’ prayer life in the Gospels, we see that Jesus prayed the Psalms of David.  In fact, Psalm 22 was on his lips while he was on the cross.  It begins with “My God.  My God.  Why has Thou forsaken me?”  The whole Psalm describes uncannily well the experience of crucifixion from the eyes of one being crucified.  Towards the end of it, the Psalmist passes through a moment of silence and resumes with praising the God who has raised this once forsaken person from the dead.  Jesus’ last words before he died were Psalm 31:5, “Into your hand I commit my spirit”.  The verse ends in profound certainty, “you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God.”  God the Father had not abandoned his Son, but rather redeemed him, bought him back from death.

If the lesson of Psalm 23 is the Lord is my shepherd, let me give my own experience of that.  As a small child, my mother took us to church.  When my parents divorced, church attendance got very sporadic. Back in those days churches didn’t know what to do with families going through divorce.  Even so, I kept being drawn to reading the Bible stories book that Mom made sure lived on one of the endtables we had in the living room and even thumbing through the big King James family Bible prominently displayed when you first entered our house.  “Drawn” is an important word.  My best friend’s mom used to drag him and me off to church and VBS in my pre-teen and young teen years.  So did my father occasionally and the mother of my first girlfriend.  If I wanted to date her daughter, I had to go to their Baptist church.  In my late teens, church was only on Christmas Eve and Easter, but for some reason God and becoming a minister were thoughts quite present in the back of my mind.  That sense of being drawn still hovered about me.  Finally, at age 19 a couple of weeks from 20, I threw a New Year’s Eve party to which no one showed up.  I decided if that’s the sum total of my life, it wasn’t worth living and so I gave it to Jesus and the next morning I called my best friend’s mom, Mom Landis, and asked if she was going to church.  She said “Yes” and I said “I’ll see you there.”   I’ve been going ever since.  That call to ministry became my only choice of vocation and I started that long process of preparation which in Presbyterian circles requires a university and a master’s degree. 

University was difficult for me.  I didn’t realize I was mildly depressed and living with anxiety.  Mental health was very stigmatized back then.  I had to work which killed my social life at school and I had to go to school which killed my social life with work people.  I’d date and get dumped.  It was hard, but I really enjoyed what I was studying.  One day during the Spring of my first year, I was out for a run heading up “the hill” on campus and something happened.  It was as if a door opened up and I realized I wasn’t alone.  Jesus was/is with me.  I am and will never be alone.

I’m in my 26^th year of ordained ministry now.  From that run up the hill until now I have been married, lived 3 years with a full blown/untreated anxiety disorder panic attacks inclusive on top of that persistent mild depression I spoke of, divorced, rebounded and wound up unemployed and guestroom surfing for nearly a year, moved to Canada, remarried and started a family, tried to treat that depression with antidepressants which one of the side effects was an uncontrollable compulsion to drink.  I put my family through alcoholism.  After finally realizing I was powerless over alcohol, my shepherd took away my compulsion to drink.  It totally disappeared one very painful night.  I then went off the antidepressants and have been sober for going on 12 years now.  I never want to be that shame-filled person again.  Addiction is Hell.  What keeps me going in this ongoing life of recovery is the persistent presence of my Lord, my Shepherd, whose lovingkindness is new every morning even as I find myself in the darkest valley.  

These 26 years of ministry have been difficult times for ministers as the church in North America has declined to the point of having just about died off.  The church in North America exists largely in the form of small congregations of less than 30 in attendance who are mostly elderly and mostly pretty tired.  The Pandemic was socially/emotionally/spiritually brutal for just about everybody.  During the lockdowns, we discovered how to be online.  This online presence was and continues to be a blessing, but we can’t forget the importance of real, face-to-face relationships to a vibrant faith.  Physical gathering has been fundamental to the people of God since Old Testament days.  Regardless, when I look at and walk among the people of the “Church that’s left”, I find something nearly all of us have in common.  We still come because we know “The Lord is my Shepherd.”  Remember how you came to know that and don’t be shy to share it.  Amen.

Is the Lord among Us or Not?

 Please Click Here For Sermon Video

Exodus 17:1-7

I have often wondered why the LORD took the Israelites out wandering forty years through the wilderness of Sinai after delivering them from slavery in Egypt.  If I were God I would have turned north and headed up by the Mediterranean Sea and taken the King’s Highway.  The trip would have lasted only a couple of months and there would have been plenty of food and water.  But hey, God is God.  God is who God is and he does what God does.  But God is not arbitrary, nothing is ever purposeless on a whim with God.  He had a reason for taking them into the barren wilderness where there were harsh limitations on things needed for life.  It was, I believe, to teach them faith by providing for them in the most extreme of circumstances.

So, God took the Israelites through the wilderness to teach them faith.  This is a hard one I think for us to grasp.  You see, we are not accustomed to saying that God brings hard times upon us, that God causes or lets suffering happen to us and the reason being so that we can come to know God better and grow in faith.  We find it very difficult to say that God brings suffering to his people, his beloved daughters and sons, that they might come closer to him.  We like to say that bad things happen because this is a messed up world and things just happen or because we brought them upon ourselves and that God will somehow work these travesties out because he loves us.  Rarely, if ever will anyone say, “The LORD has brought me out into the wilderness.  The LORD is doing this to me.”  

But, you know, if we are going to be truly biblical about things; if we are disciples of Jesus born from above in him by the free gift of the Holy Spirit so that we are God’s beloved children as he is; if that is who we are, we are going to spend some time in the wilderness and it’s going to happen because God is going to take us there to go through stuff that seems tailer made to push all our buttons so to speak.  God will indeed lead us into the wilderness, into the valley of the shadow of death where our souls are ripped to pieces rather than take us where he makes us to lie down in green pastures beside the still waters so that our souls are restored. He will lead us to painful places where we are forced to ask, “Is the Lord among us or not?”  In a world so utterly broken and corrupted by sin, the LORD must bring us to places where in the depths of despair, of grief, of poverty of spirit, of loneliness, of boredom our only resort is to turn to the LORD and ask, “Are you here?”…and we find that God is.

In the wilderness we float.  We wander.  We wait.  We cannot help but ask “How am I going to survive out here?”   By nature we, like the Israelites, will complain.  We will want to turn back to the way life was before instead of moving forward.  We will doubt the LORD’s motive of love.  We will take matters into our own hands and serve and worship things that we believe will make us feel better.  We will try to bargain with the LORD.  We will say “Lord, get me out of the wilderness and I’ll do my best to be a better, more faithful person.”  But God’s got bigger plans for us than just wanting to get us to behave a little better.  The grace behind the wilderness is that it is not punishment.  It is the only healing way for us to move forward as disciples of Jesus and the new life he has for us. 

To endure the wilderness we must keep asking the questions “Who are you Lord and why have you brought me here?”  This entails that we must keep coming before the LORD in prayer.  We don’t come asking for what I perceive I need for things to be better.  You see, the LORD brings us into the wilderness to strip us down and show us who we really are.  So, it is important while we are in the wilderness to pay attention to what we are feeling because, chances are, we have felt these painful feelings before and buried them over and over again but now the LORD is bringing them forth from the tomb to heal us.  

There are things we can do in the wilderness to aid in our growth in Christ. We should feel free to rant at the LORD.  We are taught not to be angry and complain to God.  But, God’s a big boy.  He can handle it.  Rant, for sooner or later God very cleverly turns our rants back on us and reveals to us the truth about ourselves.   

Once I was in a wilderness and I got on a rant with God.  I was complaining that I always seemed to be the one to make painful sacrifices so that other people can be happy.  He turned that one around on me one day when he told me, “That’s exactly what I do for you.”  I shut up about that and realized it’s part of what real love is.

When you’re in the wilderness read the Bible listening for something to stick out to you and then spend the day or days pondering it.  Keep a journal of those things so that you can see the patterns that arise in what you hear so you can discern what is actually from the LORD and what are the things you want to hear.  

The wilderness is also a good place to draw together with our brothers and sisters in Christ to worship, to share, to pray and to study.  It is by the love of our brothers and sisters that we are built up in Christ and equipped and nourished in Christ.  The thing to note about the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites was that they all went through it together.  There were no Lone Ranger sufferers.  This is the single most significant strength of the small congregation.  If one of us suffers we all feel it.  This fellowship and support is what the church is all about.

Fellowship in the LORD is what our congregations have to offer particularly now post-Covid.  We don’t have the resources here to meet every perceived need that comes through the door.  But what we do have is a home and a family to offer those who come asking who is God and why has he brought me to the place that am at in life.  Well, God is the mystery of the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  He dwells richly among us and he calls people here to meet him.  Those who come looking for the Lord, will find him and be well fed for the Lord is among us.  And, that question about why God has brought us out into the wilderness where we feel so lost is a trickier one to answer, but it usually has a lot to do with meeting him so you can find yourself and find that you’re not alone.  Amen.

How Goes It with the Lord?

Please Click Here For Sermon Video

Genesis 12:1-4

The man who taught me the banjo and fiddle, Dwight Diller, one of my best friends way back when, passed away a couple of weeks ago.  I last saw him fourteen years ago, but I have thought and will continue to think of him and his family every day.  He gave me the gift of the music that occupied his heart.  When you give like that people will remember you.  He was also a very committed Christian with the heart of an evangelist/pastor.  He had a question of a pastoral nature that he liked to ask.  It’s one that I should ask more often but I don’t for fear that I would be interpreted as being intrusive about the private matter of faith.  If we can be so mistaken as to call faith a private matter.  The question is an important one and I think it is the cornerstone question of pastoral care.  I guess you’re curious as to what that question is so without further ado, it’s just, “How goes it with the Lord?”

Now that’s a hard question to answer because it makes us cut right to the chase with what is going on in our lives.  It sets right down on our relationship to Jesus and makes us think about and talk about something we feel very uncomfortable talking about not to mention ill-equipped to answer.  How would you go about answering if I asked you, “How goes it with the Lord?”  

I think when we try to answer this question using ourselves and our uncomfortableness with the topic as the starting point, it becomes a difficult question to answer.  I suspect that for most of us we’ve been acculturated to think that the Lord’s presence in our lives is conditional upon what we do meaning we’ve been taught that God is not present in our lives or acting for us unless we are carrying out our end of the bargain.  It that “God helps those who help themselves” kind of thinking.  So, if we are doing nothing, then there is nothing between us and the Lord.  Another thing we do is gauge the Lord’s presence and activity in our lives on whether we feel spiritual or on feelings of happiness or misery.  If we are happy, we say “God is blessing me” or if we are miserable ‘God is getting me.”  When we start to answer the question, “How goes it with the Lord?” by looking at ourselves, I think we open up a can of worms that in the end is self-destructive.  It will leave us deluded with self-righteousness or mired down into the muck of trying to please some sort of unknowable god we know we cannot please.

Another way to go about answering this question and one that I think is more fruitful is to start with the Lord and to focus our thoughts more on the Lord’s end of things.  Maybe we should ask “What’s the Lord doing in my life?”  This is what I would call a theocentric or God-centered approach to life.  You see, God is always doing something in our lives that’s ultimately for our good.  His presence and his efforts are not conditioned upon anything we do.  They are a given.  God has intentions for us that involve teaching us who he is and his great love that he will bring forth in his own way and own time and what he is doing will and does change everything for us.  This we can count on.  I’m reasonably certain that approaching the question “How goes it with the Lord?” from the standpoint of what our Lord is doing in our lives as opposed to what we are doing for the Lord is where we find faith and vision for our lives rather than just being left with the feeling that we are failing miserably at keeping our end of a contract with God.  

God’s call to Abraham is a good place to start when trying to define a theocentric or God-centered approach to life.  Abraham was a wandering Aramean.  He was part of a mass migration of people in his day who were moving along the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East from Ur of Chaldea in modern day Iraq up the Euphrates River into Syria and then down through Palestine almost to Egypt.  Apparently, Abraham’s family stopped short in northern Syria at a place called Haran.  I mention these details because I want you to understand that Abraham was not out on a crazy goat chase.  He was part of something larger that was going on in his day, but he needed to go further than where he was at.  

In his 75^th year God spoke to Abraham and informed him of what he was doing in Abraham’s life.  He says, “Go! Go! (“Lek! Lek!” in Hebrew) Leave your land, your kindred and your father’s house and go to a land I am going to show you.  I am going to make you to be a great nation.  I am blessing you and I am going to make your name great and you are going to be a blessing.  No worries.  I will bless those who bless you and those who curse you I will curse.  In you all the families of the earth are going to be blessed.”  Abraham went and did according to this wonderful word.  God opened up Abraham’s life for him.  He does it for us too.

Paul Writes in Colossians, “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.  Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.”   Your life is hidden with Christ.  Look at Jesus and you will start to get a glimpse of it.  God will open your eyes just like he did with Abraham to let you know what’s going on with you from the perspective of his intentions for you.  Look to Jesus and you will see.

Now please notice that God’s word to Abraham was not a conditional, an if/then statement where God is saying if you do this, then I am obligated to do that.  If that were the case, Abraham’s going would not be Abraham’s trusting God’s gracious promise.  It would rather be making faith into work for which God was obligated to reward him.  That’s not what is happening here.  Rather, God is making clear to Abraham what he was doing in Abraham’s life not just for Abraham, but also for all of humanity, for you and me too.  God was blessing him and making of him and his descendants to be a great nation that would be a blessing to the rest of the world.  If Abraham wants to participate willingly in this, then he would simply have to trust God’s word and go and be amazed.  One may ask what would happen if he said “no”.  Well, I’m inclined to think that God would have stayed after him until he did.

Abraham’s faith was that he trusted God to be telling him the truth about what he was doing in his life and he acted accordingly.  He was a willful participant in what God was doing in, with, and through him.  In the Hebrew language the urgency with which God told him to go (it was a double go. Lek! Lek!) made it clear that it would be for Abraham’s own benefit to go.  In a sense, we could say that this was an opportunity that Abraham would be foolish to ignore.  So, he goes and in salvation history his faith/faithfulness is held up as the model for what counts as righteousness or being rightly related to God, which is simply getting on board with what God is doing in your life.  

God’s promise to Abraham, God’s revealing what he was doing in, with and through Abraham was the vision for his life that Abraham lived by.  It was a forth-seeing.  For the rest of the Book of Genesis, not only did this vision make sense of and guide Abraham’s life.  It gave purpose to him and his family.  Abraham was challenged to believe that this promise was what God was doing in his life and would continue on through his family even though he was 75 and he and Sarah were childless.  It was a vision that seemed impossible but he believed it. 

So, what’s God doing in your life?  What’s the vision God is giving to you about your life?  How is he blessing you?  How is God’s love breaking forth on your life?  How is he making you to be a blessing to others?  How goes it with the Lord?  Well, I can answer this question for you generally and you will have to fill in the specifics for yourself.

God the Father out of his love for you has saved you by grace through the faithfulness of his Son who has died for us to set us free from sin-warped perspectives and the fear of death and he is making that salvation real in you right now through his Holy Spirit who brings us together into communion with himself and one another.  God has reconciled us to himself.   Just as in Abraham God was calling forth a people to be his own special people, so through Christ Jesus in the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit, God is still calling forth and perfecting a people to be his own special people.  He has saved us.  He has placed in our lives an opportunity for us to become new people, a new people who truly know him as he is and are being made capable to love as he loves.   God speaks to us, “Come! Come! Leave behind your complicated lives of self-absorption, fear, anxiety, and busyness and come into my presence right here in your midst that I will open your eyes to see as you begin to get know each other.  I will move your hearts with compassion to love one another.  I am making you people utterly new and pouring myself into you so that you will be a blessing.  Come! Come! Love one another.”  

The promise God made to Abraham is being fulfilled in the church, indeed this church.  Get involved in a community of faith that is serious about being on the way with Jesus Christ and you will see just as clear as the morning sun what God is doing in your lives.  This is what the Lord is doing here in this church.  God is creating a loving community in his image so that we might know a taste of our salvation until he comes.  This is the vision.  If you want to know what God is doing in your life look right here.  The yoke of freedom that we find as we learn to love one another and build one another up and bear each other’s burdens is God’s free gift of grace to the world.  We’re Abraham’s blessing infleshed.  Come.  God’s given us more than a land.  He’s given us himself and he’s given us each other.  Let’s leave our dim self-driven purposes behind and center our lives around the vision of shining forth God’s life here in our midst.  Amen.