Lent-Returning on Purpose-Blessing Genesis 12:1-4a Chris Oakton Church of the Brethren

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1 Lent-Returning on Purpose-Blessing Genesis 12:1-4a Chris Oakton Church of the Brethren What would you do if without warning, today, you were asked to head off on a journey?... without a description or a destination, or even the duration? What would you do? How would you feel? In fact, let s try that right now. I m looking for five volunteers. The only thing you have to promise is to is to do what I m going to ask you... up here... after you volunteer. Seriously. Let s try that. And if you are younger than 16 you have to get your dad or mom to volunteer with you. So, five volunteers... You can t keep it; give it to someone who you think needs it; receive nothing in return. The history of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all trace their history back to one man. His name was Abraham. One of the five daily prayers Muslims pray includes a prayer for God s blessing on Abraham. And when they pray they face the Kaba in Mecca... the Holy Place that every Muslim is expected to travel in the Hajj at least once in their lives. The Kaba is thought by Muslims to have been built by Abraham and his son Ishmael as the first place of worship. The Jews also trace their story back to Abraham. When they talk about God they speak of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Abraham is the one upon whom God first placed His promise. In the call and testing of Abraham comes the saying God will provide. Abraham is called the friend of God. Christians share the Jewish scriptures about Abraham. And in our New Testament, Matthew s lineage of Jesus goes back to Abraham. Jesus symbolizes Paradise as resting in the bosom of Abraham. Jewish leaders are told that being physically related to Abraham is not as important as doing the works of Abraham... living a life of faith and blessing others.

2 So all three great religious traditions can trace back to this one man, this one God, and this one conversation. YHWH said to Abram, Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So Abram went, as the LORD had told him. So with all three traditions taking this moment so seriously, perhaps we should look at it more carefully. There are important insights here about who God calls, how God calls, and why God calls. First: who God calls. It is astonishing to me that Abraham is nobody before God calls him. The chapters before this story are written to show that Abraham is nobody special. He does nothing to warrant God s call. Before Chapter 12 there is absolutely nothing exceptional about him. He s not even mentioned by scripture until we stumble across him in the un-exceptional droning of so-and-so begat so-and-so... you know, the scriptures Worship Leaders most dread: Terah the father of Abram, [that was Abraham s name before he was renamed by God], Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran the father of Lot. Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans. Abram and Hahor took wives; the name of Abram s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor s wife was Milcah. There is nothing, no discernible reason that God chose him over anybody else. Some might say, Well, God knew ahead of time that Abraham was special. Perhaps that s true. But that must be our projection because scripture says nothing about that. So, instead, I urge us to consider that this may just be the way God works. It s a warning! If you ve ever heard yourself saying Oh, God would never call me to be a pastor, or a missionary, or a deacon... I m just a nobody. Well, the moment you say I m nobody you might as well

3 start packing. Because there is a whole long line of nobodies that God turned into somebodies with the word of a call. Over our history Brethren have focused on this idea. Everyone around here is on an equal level. And if a call should fall to one of us or the other, it doesn t mean that person is any more special in the eyes of God, only that they were called for a task for a time for the folks around them. The first shall be last and the last shall be first, said Jesus. Paul says in First Corinthians 1: Consider your own call, Brethren, not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are... Nobody can boast in the presence of God. Who is called by God? Nobodies. Second: How God calls. Think about the passage read by Jan. Abraham got no warning. It doesn t say, God took Abraham out to Starbucks and talked to him for a long time before he finally issued this call. To my great surprise the scripture doesn t even say that Abraham was particularly religious or even believed in God or had any previous experience of the Divine Creator of the Universe who was calling him up for a chat. The call started when God said to Abraham Time to go. And here s the funny thing. He said, Time to go to a place I will show you along the way. No guarantees of protection, no direction or location. Just a promise that God will make of you a great nation. And God promises to be there but God never promises that everything will go swimmingly. Did you notice that? God doesn t say, I will bless the people who bless you and make sure that nobody will curse you. But the call is devoid of detail. There s no GPS, no schedule, no guarantee of safety; There are a lot of things missing in this call. In fact,

4 there are a lot of things missing that I would require before saddling up my camels. And it s not just Abraham. Think of his wife. I mean seriously, it s one thing to respond to a personal call from God whether we imagine that as a booming voice from heaven or a dream in the night or a hunch over lunch. But no matter how certain we feel about a call as nobody in particular to nowhere in particular think about the conversation with our spouse. Honey, we re moving. Where? We ll know when we get there. When? Any moment now. For how long? I have no idea. Why? This is the third thing we notice in Abraham s call. The why. You will go where I am sending you, says God, so that all the nations of the world will be blessed through you. In fact, God says this twice. I will bless you, and make your name great, says God, so that you will be a blessing. Listen! This is true not just of Abraham s calling. This is the ultimate why behind all who are called by God. Micah 6:8 He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Hosea 12:6 But as for you, return to your God, hold fast to love and justice, [of others as you] wait continually for your God.

5 Zechariah 7:9 Thus says the LORD of hosts: Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another. Jesus 101: Love one another. and By this they will know that you are my disciples that you love one another. Bless those who curse you and do good to those who hate you. This just goes on and on. God did not call Abraham because of who he was, Abraham became who he was because God called him to be a blessing to others. God did not call Abraham to be blessed so much as to be a blessing... to journey as God s agent of blessing for others. Our sacred pilgrimage is not to Mecca or to Jerusalem. It s not a call to go to special sacred place to find peace and joy and happiness and money and everything our heart desires. It s a call to be part of God s blessing wherever, with whatever, to whomever God sends. God doesn t just sign his letters with Be blessed. More often he signs them, Be a blessing. And that makes all the difference in the world. As churchianity is fading away, Christians are beginning to re-think what it means to be people of God. And the idea of being people called like Abraham, sent like Jesus disciples, or empowered as were the apostles... this idea of being a missional church is gathering strength. The church is not something we go to, it s something we are wherever we go. Church isn t a place. It s a people. As disciples of Jesus, we go where he goes and do what he does. Worship for us is not something we produce for people it is something we do in service with other people. Mission is not something your home church sends you overseas to accomplish it s something you are all the time. Faith in God is not the destination, it s the journey we are on right now. When we are called and claimed by God it s not like some extra thing is added to our lives like some spiritual appendage to an already

6 complete body. It is a change in the life itself. Faith is not addition, its intention: it is living on purpose living in God s purpose...for others. Get up says God. Time to go. I ll let you know what we re doing along the way. This is the launching point for the three great religions of the world: Abraham believes and goes. God claims and sends we are blessed as we are a blessing to others. We don t really know what Abraham believes or what he feels or even what he expects. Hebrews 8 makes this point when it says, By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. The promise, in this missional calling, is that wherever we find ourselves on this journey of life, we are automatically, and always in a place that is just waiting to be blessed by God. Regardless of the strength of your faith or your expectations of your own ability, God wants to bless others through us. This changes how we travel through this world. We no longer just go to church to see God; we are the church when we see God wherever we go. Let me put handles on this with two quick examples. Sherry and I were walking our usual route through the neighborhood and one of our neighbors a couple blocks down was out shoveling snow and he yelled out: Hi Chris! Hi Sherry! And I yelled back Great to see you today! Good luck with the snow. Once out of earshot Sherry turned to me and said, Who is that? And I said, I have no idea! But he knows us! So we should either be embarrassed or scared. If we had been tuned in a bit more to being God s missional people to be God s mission of blessing to others, my guess is we d know our neighbors names. Because when we follow Jesus we don t just follow

7 him to church. We follow him home, and into the world and into our neighborhoods to be a blessing wherever he sends us. Another example of the importance of being the church and not just going to church is seen in the everyday witness we give. Pastor Chad Roberts of Christ Church in Kingsport, Tennessee, heard about the terrible reputation of church-goers in restaurants in his area. So he set up a website where waiters and waitresses could vent about waiting on Sunday church crowds. The site is called "Sundays are the Worst." After her Christian customers wrote on their bill, I give God 10%; why should you get 15? One waitress posted: For me, what made the experience so bad wasn t just the rude behavior from these adult women, or the cheapness of stiffing me on the tip, or the sneakiness of leaving fake money on the table, or the assumption that I was beneath them because I didn t discuss my beliefs with them, or any of the other things that added up into that experience. What really got me was that I was in a place [in my life], that very day, where I was considering going to church. A friend of mine had just committed suicide, and that very church had been recommended to me for grief counseling. I never went, I worked through it on my own, but the point is, those rude, presumptuous, and honestly mean women were the ONLY thing standing between me and the church that it was so important to them that I attend. Let me repeat that last part: Those mean women were the only thing standing between her and the church that the mean women wanted her to attend. These self-professed Christian women were on their way home from worship; unfortunately they forgot that they were still the church.