St. John s United Church Service Sunday February 25th, 2018 Scripture: Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 Reader: Michael Bennett Reflection: Rev. Karen Verveda SCRIPTURE READING: Genesis 17 1 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram, and said to him, I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. 2 And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous. 3 Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, 4 As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. 5 No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. 6 I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. 7 I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring * after you. 15 God said to Abraham, As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. 16 I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her. REFLECTION: I hope we ve all had the opportunity to hear the C.S. Lewis story, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at one point or another. Maybe you remember reading the book, or having it read it to you in your younger years. Who knows, maybe the last time you heard the story, you were the one reading it aloud, or maybe you were seeing the 2005 version on the big screen. I ve been thinking about the part of the story when Aslan dies to save Edmund. According to the story he dies to save Edmund from the Deep Magic of the land of Narnia, the Deep Magic which says treachery is punishable by death. But, as you may member, that that is not the end of the story. We learn that there is a Deeper Magic that the White Witch does not know about and the Deeper Magic is the reason the Table cracks, and death starts working backwards, and Aslan is restored to life. 1
We have begun the Lenten journey. The journey of walking with Jesus towards Jerusalem. And this year as we do so we are reflecting on passages that highlight what we might call the Deeper Magic. We are reflecting on the covenant promises God has made with humanity and with all creatures, the promises that reveal the deepest truths about God s relationship with creation. CS Lewis fierce and gentle Aslan describes the deeper magic of Narnia in a way that has forever captured my imagination and helps me think about what the covenant promises in the Bible are all about. We often find ourselves trying to navigate life according to what might be called the deep magic, or what Jesus calls human things in Mark s gospel. The value of scripture is that it can help awaken us to divine things, the deeper magic, the deeper truths in life, the covenant promises God has made that will never be broken. Last week we reflected on God s promise to Noah, to Noah s descendants, and to every living creature a promise that, despite the pain and suffering, despite the scars caused by human selfishness, hatred, corruption and violence, God won t give up on creation. The story says God sets a rainbow in the sky to remind us that there is a limit, a boundary, to the damage humans can do. It is a reminder of the Deeper Magic that no matter how we may damage life by our disobedience the final word belongs to God and it is a word of forgiveness and grace. This week we continue our journey, still walking the Lenten road and we hear the story of yet another of the Deeper Magic truths of our life and our faith. This week we hear the story of the covenant promise God makes to Abram and Sarai. A promise that they shall be the ancestors of a multitude of nations. Not unlike Noah and his family first coming out of the ark to begin again, this couple faces their own difficult circumstance. As far as they can see their story is at a dead end. According to the story, Abram and Sarai are almost 100 2
and still no child, no future, no next generation. Their future is barren. Navigating life based on the deep magic would lead them to conclude that they have been forsaken, left without, abandoned to their fate. God s promise that they will mother and father a blessed people in whom all the families of the earth will be blessed (Gen. 12:4) must seem an empty one. And while we might be tempted to jump quickly to infant Isaac that we know to be coming soon, the story doesn t permit a rush to the birth and to a new future. The story lingers in this time of barrenness and forsakenness. Abram and Sarai wait into their frail final years without anything but the promises. This is all they have. YHWH keeps making promises, promises that have yet to arrive in the delivery of a child, a future and a blessing. Here, in this morning s text, yet another promise is given in new names. Abram is to be called Abraham, meaning father of a multitude. Sarai is now Sarah, meaning kings shall come from her. New names given because of the new thing that is to happen. Notice that the new names are given before the new thing is done. If we make name changes, we do so after the marriage is consummated. We add titles after the degree is granted. But here the new name is given before the changed future has occurred. I have been pondering the covenant promise to Abram and Sarah this week these new names that God gives at a time when all the evidence would seem to be contrary. I can imagine Abram and Sarai experiencing these new names almost as salt in old wounds, or as God kindling an ember of hope which at this point represents pain more than possibility such that they would rather just let it die. I have also been thinking about ways that covenant promises come alive in surprising ways often at times in our lives when the evidence would seem to be contrary. And I ve been thinking about all this while watching a number of videos related to Pink Shirt Day. 3
One that I found quite powerful was created by some 8 th grade students in a leadership program. The video depicts one student s anguish as a result of the names with which she is bullied at school: names like Loser and Slut. It also depicts how tables are turned when one student reaches out calling her by the new name of Friend. We can imagine this the hell this student (and others like her) has been through feeling abandoned and cut off from her peers. We can imagine the torment of thinking she is somehow to blame for the situation, that she somehow deserves this treatment because there is something wrong with her. And we can feel God s longing that she know the deeper truth, God s desire to draw her into relationship with God that she might know that she is blameless, that her name is beloved, that she is part of a huge family, as numerous as the stars. And we know God s desire comes alive in those students who feel drawn to engage in this conversation about bullying and who want to be part of the solution, who want to be the ones who step up and show up in ways that support all students in knowing and experiencing the deepest truth that they are not alone or cut off, but are worthy of love and respect like everyone else. Naming is important. The names we are given. The names we choose. Abraham and Sarah discover that when God gives them a new name, nothing is ever the same. I can imagine the same is true for the eighth grader who is claimed by the new name of friend. There are lots of ways God gives us new names. I have also been remembering a colleague who talks about a time when he was burnt out and contemplating leaving ministry and of his experience on silent retreat when he felt and knew with sudden clarity that he was intimately connected with the universe and with all that had gone before him that his life came to him as a gift of 13.7 billion years of creation s evolving. He talks about how that experience changed his sense of identity, which is pretty much the same as being given a new name. No longer was he a little self but in his sense of connection with the universe 4
he experienced an expanded sense of himself, knowing himself to be one with creation. And this became the basis for a whole new phase in his ministry. Both the video and retreat experience strike me as examples of the surprising and unexpected ways we humans come to know and experience the deeper magic, the deep truth of the covenant promise God makes with Abram and Sarah, and with us, that we are part of something so much bigger than ourselves, that we are blessed, and that we will be a blessing to others. The poet W.B. Yeats also manages to capture this kind of experience in a poem. He writes: My fiftieth year had come and gone. I sat a solitary man in a crowded London shop, an open book and empty cup on the marble tabletop. While on the shop and street I gazed my body of a sudden blazed. For twenty minutes, more or less, it seemed so great, my happiness, that I was blessed, and could bless. Yeats is describing the ordinariness of a middle-aged person sitting at a side-street café a rather unpromising spot for a sudden experience of the holy. Yet who among us hasn t had such moments? Often coming when we seem least ready, God does suddenly seem close to us, that that felt closeness releases a surge of joy joy not to be savoured as a private treasure, but joy that spills outward as a blessing to others. In such moments, there are no strangers. We know, really know in our very bones, that every person is brother and sister. This is true community, what theologians call the communion of the saints, the reality that all of us are inextricably connected. And because we know ourselves to be blessed we discover that we can become a blessing for others. We might understand this more fully if we think about the opposite of blessing: curse. The word has a very old-fashioned ring to it, but the root meaning of curse is to cut off, to excommunicate. Whenever we cut other persons off from us, or from the community, or when we treat them as unwelcome, we are cursing them. 5
Any time we set boundaries and declare that certain others must stay on the far side, we are cursing. Anytime we choose to divide them from us we are cursing, stifling the life-breath, the Deeper Magic, the Spirit whose movement is always towards reconciliation and unity. Today s scripture readings remind us of the deeper magic, the deeper truth of life, of God s covenant promise, and they invite us to be part of it, part of God s covenant blessing, part of extending the circle of our concern until no one is left outside, no one is a stranger any longer. And certainly it is in this spirit that we are asking, How Big is Our Tent? and opening ourselves to learning more about the differing streams of theology that can be found in the United Church and amongst us here at St. John s. Rather than distancing ourselves from these differences as a curse, with greater understanding we are learning to welcome them as a blessing. This afternoon we will have an opportunity to reflect on how our differences can be a source of healing and wholeness. The Lenten journey reminds us that God s Deeper Magic is sometimes costly, it may involve opening our hearts to God s promises that have yet to be realized, it may involve feeling the ache of hope for that which has yet to come to be. Today s text reminds us that we can do so in trust trust in God s covenant, in the deeper truth, in the deeper magic. May today s reading, with its reminder that God is forever welcoming us, creating space for us, allowing us to be who we really are, inviting us to know ourselves as be part of something so much bigger than we ourselves, part of the family of God, blessed and a blessing to others, and our experience of this the deeper truth of life, give us the courage we need this Lent to walk with Jesus to the Jerusalems in our own lives, wherever they may be. May it be so. Amen 6