February 17, 2008 Second Sunday in Lent Genesis 11:27-12:1-4a John 3:16-17 Get a Move On! Now the Lord said to Abram, Go from your country and your kindred to the land that I will show you And Abram went. Genesis 12:1,4a We ve all heard the news by now: the television writers strike is over. The writers got the piece of the pie they were after. That s a good thing, right? Some wise person noted that the problem is not so much what TV does to us, but what it keeps us from doing. I saw a cartoon the other day with a husband turning the living room upside down looking for something. His wife, in the next room is saying to a friend: The doctor says he needs more exercise. So three times a week I hide the remote. Health experts disagree on many things, but on this one point everyone agrees: Exercise is good. They want us to get up and get moving! Walk, run, swim, bike, row, hoe, mow, or putt it doesn t matter what we are doing as long as we are moving. I slipped over to the hospital to see one of our folks who had just had some surgery. I expected to find him flat out on the bed still groggy from the anesthesia. Instead, as I came round the corner to his room, I nearly ran smack into him standing upright in the hallway, IV pole in his hand. Now this is a big man, maybe 6 2, athletic. There was some pain on his face though he was trying hard not to show it. Should you be doing that? I asked, confused. He grimaced and pointed to a pretty young nurse standing behind the station. She made me. This caused the young lady to look up and give us both a look that said, You better believe it, baby. So we walked the length of the hall and back again. And my friend recovered quite nicely. No pneumonia or other difficulty. Get a move on. That s the theme. We hear it over and over and over again. Get up. Get going. Get moving! I am trying, in my own stealthy, under-the-cover-of-darkness kind of way. I go out to run in the early morning, before sun-up; I feel a little less ridiculous when no one can see me. I don t know why I m worried about it; everyone feels awkward and uncoordinated exercising. Everyone, that is, except my neighbor Jim Harding. Jim is a marathon runner. Twenty-six miles at a time, he runs. Isn t that like getting up in the morning and deciding I ll just go for a run to Palmetto and back?
2 If you are old enough you probably remember Chariots of Fire, a wonderful film about Olympic runner Eric Liddell, a Scottish Christian who won a gold medal for the 400 in the Paris games of 1924. In the movie, at least, Liddell talks about his running. He says: I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel God s pleasure. i I understand that. Very early in the bible s story God begins telling people to go, to move, to Get up and go. When Jesus is just an infant, Joseph, his earthly father hears God say: Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. ii Then just as abruptly God tells them to get up and go back to Israel. iii The entire story of Jesus is like that dynamic, constantly in motion When Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem he knows that the journey will mean torture and death. And when Mary Magdalene discovers that God has raised Jesus from death, the first thing the angel tells her is: Go quickly and tell the others he is going ahead of you to Galilee. iv And Jesus is there. Meeting them on the hillside, he commands them to: Go into all the world and make disciples baptizing and teaching them. v This is the same God who called Paul and Timothy to go over to Macedonia to preach the gospel in Europe vi and sent Moses to: Go to Pharaoh and say, Let my people go that they may worship me. vii When we pick up the story of Jesus ancestors in the 11 th chapter of Genesis and read that Terah and his son Abram, and his wife Sarai are settled in the land of Haran, we can tell that something s up! Something is about to happen. In the unfolding story of God s saving work, no one and nothing sits still for very long. Like water, God s plans are constantly moving, flowing, changing. Nothing is stagnant; God is continually doing a new thing. If you are like me, you may complain about that. You may not fully embrace change. Your life, if it s like mine, has plenty of get up and go. The alarm rings and we shake off the cobwebs. Go take a shower, grab a cup of coffee, go have our quiet time. We go to breakfast, go get dressed. Then we go off to school, our job or whatever volunteer work we do. We go to lunch. After work we go to the grocery store or to the gym. In the evening we go for a walk, go to a meeting or go to the movies. When we are sick we go to the doctor. We go on trips and
vacations. Even in death we say that we are going home to God. I guess you could say that s what life is all about go, go, go. 3 But are we heading anywhere? Or just going around in circles? For Abram and Sarai (God will later change their names to Abraham and Sarah) being called by God meant letting go of their routine. It meant leaving their familiar home and moving out in faith. God issued them a call but not a road map. They had no GPS, no triptik to follow. The New Testament book of Hebrews says they went out not knowing where they were to go. viii That s what happens when you live in faith. You sign up to go where you re needed, to do what needs to be done. Genesis notes that Abram was 75 years old when God called him to go not a time in life when we typically welcome a lot of change in the routine. What did God give to him for all the risk that Abram took for God? A blessing. Not even a blessing exactly, more like a promise of blessing, the steadfast presence of God in Abraham s life. It is not a gift he could keep to himself. The promise can t be hoarded. Sarah and Abraham are not being singled out for privilege, nor will their life be free of difficulty. They are simply blessed to be a blessing. And through them all the families of the earth will be blessed. It is an affirmation of faith so bright in its clarity, a statement of trust in the hearts of an old couple who believe that new possibilities are right around the corner and, in fact, they are. God chose Abram and Sarai and said Go. Grow, change, multiply my word. Last spring while I was traveling in the Holy Land, I loved reading from a couple of books that I brought along by Bruce Feiler. Do you know him, the Walking the Bible guy? In one called Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths, Feiler says: This is the ultimate power of God s Call: it s a summons to the world to devote itself to God If you put your life in my hands, God suggests, you will be rewarded To be a descendant of Abraham is to live in that to glance back at your native land, to peer ahead to your nameless designation, and to wonder, Do I have the courage to make the leap? Abraham makes the leap he does so silently, joining the covenant with his feet, not his words. The wandering man does what he does best, he walks. Only now he
4 walks with God. And by doing so, Abraham leaves an indelible set of footprints. He doesn't believe in God; he believes God. He doesn't ask for proof; he provides the proof. ix I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we aspire to that kind of faith, vital faith that loves the world so much that it cannot but go, the way God taught us in Jesus, to go out into the world to love and to serve. This is the kind of faith that is willing to move out in bold and redeeming ways. It is unconditional love, agape, love that so flowed from the heart of God into the world that God loved so much that God gave a son, the only son, that whosoever believeth in him, and trusts in his power, should enjoy the abundance of God s eternal love. This is the love we see in Jesus, the love that he offers us, the love he asks us to imitate when he asks us to Go. Last Friday night I had dinner with a friend who is a member of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance National Response Team. These folks are specially trained to respond immedately in disaster situations. They were in New Orleans just days after Katrina. They have recently been in Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky offering compassion and help with clean up after the tornados. I don t know if you realize this -- but you make the work of the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance National Response Team possible through your regular gifts to the church, and special offerings including One Great Hour of Sharing. In turn, PDA makes it possible for groups like our own New Orleans mission teams to get up and get going down the Gulf Coast and other places where needs arise. When Presbyterian Disaster Assistance teams go out, just like with our own mission teams, they go out not knowing. They don t know if their kindness will be repaid, or even noticed. These volunteers give without a guarantee of receiving any kind of blessing, or anything else in return for their faithfulness, or even if they will find safety. They don t go for that. They go because God so loved the world and they want to be a part of that love. They have to be a part of it. Earlier I mentioned the well-known story of Eric Liddell, The Flying Scotsman as they called him, who earned two Olympic medals for Great Britain in 1924. The next year he returned to China where he had grown up the child of missionary parents. He became a minister and served there for the next twenty years. In 1941 the Chinese were at war with the Japanese. Foreigners who had not evacuated were placed in Japanese concentration camps. Eric Ridley Liddell died in the camp at Weishien in 1945.
5 In his book, Shantung Compound, Langdon Gilkey wrote about Liddell s work with the youth of the camp and the evidence of God s grace that he found there. x Some say that a few months before Liddell died Winston Churchill approved a prisoner exchange and Liddell was one of the prisoners chosen to go. In the classic stubborn manner of a Scotsman, Liddell refused to leave, insisting instead on giving his place in the exchange to someone else. While that story was never substantiated there are plenty of historical accounts of Eric Liddell saving other prisoners from cruelty and even death. xi For Abraham and Sarah faithfulness to the call of God required a willingness to move, to risk, to go out not knowing where they would go. For Eric Liddell that very same love meant staying put, refusing to move, to go. Only you know which is the call of God for you. Let us pray: Guide our feet, Lord, while we run this race that you have set before us. Grant your people a clear and certain knowledge of your call to serve this world that you so love. In Jesus, our Lord, we make our prayer. Amen. Dr. Susan F. DeWyngaert First Presbyterian Church Sarasota, Florida i Chariots of Fire, Warner Brothers 20 th Century Fox, 1991. ii Matthew 2:13. iii Matthew 2:20 iv Matthew 28:7 v Matthew 28:14 vi Acts 16:9 vii Exodus 8:1 viii Hebrews 11:8 ix Bruce Feiler, Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths (William Morrow, 2002) 43-44 x Langdon Gilkey, Shantung Compound (HarperOne, 1975) 192. xi Doug Gillan, Did Eric Liddell turn down freedom to help another prisoner-of-war? The Herald, August 11, 2007