Journey

Genesis 12:1-4a

John 3:1-17

                      We shall not cease from exploration

                  And the end of all our exploring

                  Will be to arrive where we started

                  And know the place for the first time.

                                                                                          —T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” in “Four Quartets”

            Our oldest and best stories are about a journey.  The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest story we have and it is about a journey.  Some of our greatest literature takes journey as its theme.  It is almost April, the time when “longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,” as Chaucer said about the journey to Canterbury in his tales.  And Dante, too, takes us on a journey from hell through purgatory and paradise.  So also Dorothy took a journey to Oz, so very similar in symbol to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as Christian heads to the heavenly city. 

            Amidst all the many journeys recounted in the Bible, the one that stands out as perhaps the most mythically powerful, theologically loaded, and intriguingly personal is the journey of Abraham.  We always get a snippet of Abraham’s story on the Second Sunday in Lent.  One of the reasons why is that the story of Abraham’s journey is the first step in God’s creation of a people who will ultimately be the instrument of blessing for the entire human family.  Another reason is that the figurative journey that the Church makes during Lent is, like all journeys, rooted in trust, in faith, in exploration of strange, new territory.   Abraham’s—Abram’s—journey is the pattern of all such journeys. 

            “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to a land that I will show you.”  There is hardly a way to unpack that so that modern American people can possibly understand what a radical, preposterous, scary, perhaps even comical story that is.  The average teenager in our part of the world cannot wait to leave home, though economic realities and the lengthening of adolescence seem to have blunted that impulse in recent times.  In Abram’s day people did not up and leave tribe, kindred, and home routinely, nor did they for a good while after Abram’s day.  This is the first clue that the journey Abram makes is frightfully novel.  It sounds the initial warning bell that your journey in faith will very likely be just as startling, awesome, amazing, fearful, and ultimately transformative as Abram’s was. 

            When Paul and other New Testament writers pick up the Abraham story (incidentally, one of the features of Abraham’s story was a name change from Abram to Abraham, so from here on out, let’s go with Abraham)—when the New Testament writers take up the theme of Abraham’s journey they see in it the model of faith.  For Paul, Abraham is the model of being made righteous—that is to say just, or in a right relationship with God—simply by his faith, his trust—not by keeping the Law, for there was no Law in Abraham’s time.  That was to come later.  Someone once told me that if you are going to depart from your family and tribe and all the people that have a stake in making and keeping you theirs, don’t expect for them to stand and applaud when you leave.  They will take it as an insult and will do everything in their power in all likelihood to keep you exactly as you have been all along.  There are exceptions, of course, but many of us can tell by chapter and verse our own stories of self-differentiation.  When you chose a career that your parents counseled against; when you started dating and ultimately married a person that your family did not approve of; when you came out to your family as gay or lesbian, bisexual or transgender; when you identified yourself as belonging to a different belief system or political party; when you left the church of your origin or the faith of your fathers and mothers:  not everyone, of course, but many can attest to the enormous strain (to say the least) that such decisions put on family relations, and sometimes friendships as well.  Leaving the territory in which you were raised, striking out on our own, listening to your inner truth when it patently conflicts with what others define as truth are things so hard that it is sometimes impossible to believe that we can actually be right or justified, so weighty is the resistance that pulls us back into old, familiar orbits.

            So that is what happens when another character comes upon the scene.  He is a man who has embarked, but barely perhaps, on a journey that threatens or promises to take him to a very new and frightening place indeed.  He has been schooled in the ways of his ancestors.  He not only believes the stories, the lore, the symbols, the traditions of his people, he is a teacher of those things.  He has a deep investment in the religious and cultural establishment of his time.  And yet he, like Abraham, hears a voice calling.  His name is Nicodemus, and he comes to Jesus out of darkness and in darkness, saying, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  That is quite a confession of faith by most standards.  One would think Jesus would congratulate him for getting the point.  But in fact he does not get the point, as the ensuing conversation reveals.  Jesus begins to talk about what is in essence the journey of transformation that Nicodemus apparently knows nothing about.  Anyone who takes the trouble to check Jesus out is probably on some level attracted to his message and challenge; but it is possible, even commonplace, to imagine that Jesus is just another teacher who can be jammed into an already crowded field of models, an already packed pantheon of gods and guides.  Instead, he tells Nicodemus and us that one cannot even see the Kingdom of God without being transformed—born from above as it were.  For that kingdom, or realm, is in fact the destination of a journey, not a synonym for an improved version of whatever life we happen to be living at the moment.  How daring a thought!  You have to start from scratch, be born anew, born from above.  Elsewhere and in other gospels Jesus says, “Except you become as a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.”  That is tantamount to saying to all would-be travelers, “Leave your country and your kindred and your father’s house and go to a land that I will show you.” 

            Now it should be obvious that embarking on the journey of faith does not necessarily involve literally relocating, although it might.  It does not necessarily mean switching careers, although it might.  The journey is not defined by setting and scenery, but by plot and destination.  The plot, if you want to call it that, is constantly and always being changed.  Changed we are in all kinds of ways.  We grow.  We do stupid things.  We form opinions and drop them.  We experiment.  We lose our way.  We get back on track.  We encounter dangers, losses, grief, sometimes torments.  But the destination is worth all of that.  For the destination is ironically what we already possess.  You can call it heaven, if by heaven you mean where God is, and that is everywhere.  You can call it life eternal, if by life eternal you mean being totally merged with the life of God.  You can call it the discovery of your deepest Self, if by that you mean the truest, deepest, most honest part of you that you can also call the divine image that you bear.  One of the prayers we pray in the Way of the Cross, which we do regularly on Fridays in Lent, is a collect from the Burial of the Dead, which goes, “Lord Jesus Christ, by your death you took away the sting of death:  Grant to us your servants so to follow in faith where you have led the way, that we may at length fall asleep peacefully in you and wake up in your likeness;…”  That is the destination.  And the amazing thing about this journey is that we get a glimpse of the destination every so often along the way.  You can see the outline of the place towards which we are moving when suddenly you come to, say, the top of a hill (a joy, a thrill, a delight, a moment of total bliss, a sudden rush of tears from being deeply moved), and there it is before you.  When my daughter was about 2.5 years old, we were returning from vacation when in the distance we saw the skyline of Charlotte, which was home for us.  I said, “There it is!  Yonder is Charlotte!”  And she replied, “That’s Charlotte?  I’m so ’cited!”  Yes.  We wake up in his likeness, and that likeness starts to form in us even while we are on the road, in the desert, on the sea, or centered in the stillness of our own hearts.

            We have a thousand questions, don’t we, Nicodemus?  How can these things be?  Can a person enter a second time into the womb and be born again? Keep going, Nicodemus.  Let’s get all the questions out, yours and ours.  Will we lose ourselves so much so that we’ll lose our minds?  Will we get to the destination and find out that the Wizard is just a sham pulling levers and masquerading as powerful?  Does the journey really deliver what preachers say it does?  And how can we know before we buy our tickets and sign on? 

            Well, yes.  We have lots of questions.  Probably to have no questions means that you are not on the journey at all.  The point, however, is not the questions we have nor the answers, if there are answers, to those questions.  The point is whether we grow.  We cannot grow without changing, and we cannot change without running some risks.  We cannot move to a land we do not know and not be confused, confounded, even lost and in the shadow of death.  But remember two things.  One is that the journey is one of transformation, not conformation.  “Be not conformed to this world,” wrote the Apostle Paul, “but be transformed, by the renewing of your mind.”  The other is that the ultimate battle has been fought and won.  God loved the world so much that God gave the only-begotten Son, that whoever lives and believes in him might not perish, but have everlasting life.  For God sent not the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.”  Done.  Accomplished.  Won.  This journey is not about your working for salvation or your trying to get into heaven as if you had to have a certain number of coupons to get in, or a password, or a pile of points.  It is about being a child:  inquisitive, playful, unabashed, maybe a little wild or shy, but at least relatively uncontaminated by the forces that squeeze you into the social mold, wasting much of your creative juices while you dry out and assume the shape that someone else thinks you ought to have.  There is another way, and it is the way of him who, “though he was in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing to be seized and hoarded, but emptied himself, and taking the form of a slave, became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.”    

            This Son of Man who was lifted on that cross left country and kindred and his father’s house to go to a strange land.  That land is you.  And the journey that is yours is his.  And he is the journey itself, and the journey’s end.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2014

Just a Moment

A couple of days ago a Facebook friend of mine wrote and asked me where to find in the Bible a passage that says the dead have no consciousness. I had no earthly idea what he was talking about. I pulled down my exhaustive concordance to find that there are about 358 appearances of words translated “dead.” I could not find one on the list that remotely resembled anything he might be referring to. When I wrote back, he explained that he and his boyfriend were mentoring two castaway brothers who knew nothing about how to live and behave. They wanted to teach them something about the Bible. Wasn’t it true that only a hundred thousand or so people would make it into heaven? Didn’t the Bible say that we are at peace when we die until God comes back and takes us to heaven?

It is almost impossible to give people a handle on something so massive as the biblical tradition when they understand virtually nothing about it. And if you feel anywhere between ignorant and less-than-secure about the Bible, be aware that you are not alone, nor in this place will you be put down because of what you do not know. On the other hand, we don’t want to encourage illiteracy. So, I pointed my friend to the online Book of Common Prayer and the Outline of the Faith that it contains, which is a totally accessible summary of Christian teaching at least having the virtue of being dependably accurate without being simplistic.

If you happen to pick up a copy of the King James Version of the Bible, you don’t have to read beyond the title page to hit upon the main idea in the whole book. Because on the title page you will see “Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments.” The word “Testament” is the same as the word “Covenant.” And there you have the point of the Bible. It is a book about covenant.

Today, as always on the Second Sunday in Lent, we focus on the seminal story of Covenant in the entire tradition. It is, of course, the story of Abraham. There are several stories of the Covenant involving Abraham. The one we hear today comes from a priestly writer who lived several hundred years before the time of Christ. It is based on much older stories, and probably reflects even stories that are older than anything in the Bible itself. Because the quintessential story of humanity is the story of a journey, and that is essentially what the story of Abraham is. A few chapters before our reading today, God calls Abram to leave the land of his upbringing and to move to a totally new place. Abram obeys. He strikes out on a journey of faith. There is no covenant at this point, only a call, a promise, and a response. A little later on we discover what the journey is all about. It is about the unfolding intention of God to create a human community that will respond in faithful obedience in a way that the first humans did not.

There are all kinds of covenants, both in the Bible and outside it: covenants between friends, between equals, between kings and vassals, between superior and inferior parties, between husbands and wives. God is clearly the initiator of the covenant with Abram, and its everlasting nature is rooted in the sovereign will of God, not in human behavior. What is interesting is that Abram does not ask for anything in this story. He does not have to. He is offered “the world,” so to say. “You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.” Get that. This is not a covenant that encompasses just one people, but a whole array of peoples. Moreover, the covenant involves not only a whole new relationship, but a profoundly new identity. Abram and Sarai are no longer known by their old names but as Abraham and Sarah respectively, "Ancestor" and "Princess." A part of the covenant is that Abraham and his descendants will have a land to call their own, and another part of the covenant is the way it is sealed: with the rite of circumcision. And most important, God says, “I will be their God.”

This has everything to do with you and me. This is our story, our holy story, because the story has claimed us. And I am not talking about “us” as an in-group. I am speaking of anybody in the entire human race who cares about finding a place in this world, the meaning of his or her life, a way of living that accords deep joy, a ground of hope for the future, and a profound sense of identity. It is open to you and me, and while the expectations and demands of living in a covenant relationship are serious and rigorous, it is the most freeing—and free—thing you can imagine.

You can claim your part in the heritage of Abraham, if indeed you have not already done so. And if you have, you can renew your place in that great caravan of people that are more numerous than the sands on the seashore and who have it in them to outshine the stars of heaven. But be aware. This story, and its facets like covenant and blessing and promise, is not the only one out there, nor the only one competing for your attention and allegiance. And the stories that have the most appeal tend to be the stories that claim to be valid expressions of the Will of God. I am not talking, of course, about other religious traditions, but certain versions of the very biblical story itself. There is a quite popular gospel of prosperity that hooks up religious affiliation and behavior with material success. There is also a version of so-called biblical religion that presents the relationship with God as fundamentally making no demands whatsoever beyond what we consider to be our convenience. And there are versions of our own story that twist it beyond recognition into a program for self-aggrandizement and tribal promotion. You know what I mean.

But the covenant story that we inherit from Abraham and Sarah is quite different. It is, if nothing else, counter-cultural. And it is so precisely because it cuts across cultures of all sorts. It started out as a simple story of God calling a man to move and start a new life. Before too many centuries had passed, it became a story that his descendants used to ground their identity. “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” became a way of referring to God that distinguished them from other tribes and peoples. But the story did not stop there. The covenant came to be seen as embracing all people everywhere, and the covenant people came to be called a light to the nations, so that all could be drawn into this community that acknowledged the God of Abraham as the universal God, indeed the only God.

But the Covenant did not stop there either. Centuries rolled by, and, as usually happens among humans, people took the very instruments of covenant and made them not a way to include the human family but a way to exclude those who somehow did not measure up to the terms of the covenant. God’s initiative in inaugurating the covenant was replaced by increasing emphasis on human behavior. And when humans messed up and transgressed not necessarily the covenant itself but various human interpretations of it, group upon group found themselves outside the covenant, which more and more became regulated by a power group. Sound familiar? It is, because it is that ordinary human cussedness that continues to assert itself and play itself out in human history.

Then, out of the blue one day, so the holy story goes, there appeared a messenger from God to a girl in a very improper town in a remote section of the Land promised to Abraham, which had been overrun time and again by armies and occupiers. Its people were worn down with waiting, and the dream of God’s community, when it had not become a nightmare to the disenfranchised, had dimmed beyond recognition. Like her ancestor Abraham, the girl said yes. “Be it unto me according to your Word,” said she to the messenger. The covenant was on its way to being renewed in a way that no one—no one in the world—could have predicted.

The girl, whose name was Mary, gave birth to Jesus. From the beginning he was the instrument by which God initiated once again the construction of a new humanity. His life manifested a breadth of acceptance that set the teeth of those controlling the covenant community on edge. Full of Spirit, everywhere he went he made things come alive. The sick recovered. The hungry ate. The blind saw and the lame leapt. Good News finally got preached to the poor, and the old idea of Jubilee took on new meaning as joy ran through the wadis and wastelands of Israel. Suddenly the Promised Land was abloom, and looked as if God might actually be walking around in it; for how else could one explain the dead being raised to life? The Covenant God, El Shaddai, the Mighty One, who had appeared to Abram at age 99, and who had delighted old barren Sarah with the promise of a child in her old age, was known to bring life out of bodies as good as dead. Now in the person of Jesus people saw the old power return with indescribable results.

In the middle of it all arose a thing called baptism—which initially was a simple ritual bath outwardly signifying an inner change of heart and mind. Jesus’ disciples took it over from a prophet known as John the Baptizer, and made it the way of making disciples that would follow the Way that Jesus walked, an entrance into a radically reshaped covenant community. But one does not reshape communities radically or otherwise without running into resistance. Conflict brewed. Fear proved to be just the heuristic needed to manipulate the right people into doing what Power always needs, which is to secure itself. Again, you know what I mean, because it is a dynamic you see every day. Power had its way. Jesus was executed. Not only did Jesus die, so did the dream of God. But if there is one thing God knows how to deal with it is death. In bodies as good as dead, like those of the Ancestor and the Princess, God had stirred new life and brought forth the first birth in the covenant community. So God did it again. In a tomb, in a lifeless body, God stepped in and became the midwife of a new birth.

It took awhile for people to realize what had happened. But clearly what had happened was not just the raising of a corpse, as wonderful as that might been. It was the raising to new life of the ancient dream of a covenant community. It dawned on them what Jesus meant on that night before he was handed over to suffering and death when he had given them bread and wine saying, “This is the New Covenant in my blood.” The covenant had not died, but had rather awakened in a new body. And that body was this group of people that Jesus had managed to collect around him. They took this thing that they had been using to make disciples—baptism—and realized they could no longer pour water all over people without staging something that looked quite like burial and resurrection. Within a few years what had once been a simple bath became the community’s way of broadening the covenant community to include all comers. No longer did one become a member of the covenant people by circumcision—by definition and nature something reserved to males only—but by birth-bestowing water, a gift from God to women and girls as well as men and boys. The covenant community was at that moment blasted open so that every man, woman, and child in the entire human race had an invitation to join the caravan—as equals.

And join they did. The covenant community grew. Persecutions could not stop it. Martyrs’ blood merely nourished it. They surprised themselves, and maybe even surprised God. For something like four or five hundred years they took seriously for the most part that they were not just ordinary people on a pilgrimage to self-actualization or something of the sort, but indeed the body of Christ, doing what he had done, healing and feeding and teaching and guiding.

Through the years and centuries the covenant has been sidetracked, hijacked, warped, twisted, manipulated, bought and sold. And every now and again, such as in the thirteenth century, there appears a Francis of Assisi who, like Abraham, says yes again. Or in the sixteenth century, a Luther who, like Mary, says something memorable like, “Here I stand. God helping me, I can do no other.” And the covenant struggles with the birth-pangs of renewal, as the community, sometimes stalled, sets out anew on its pilgrimage.

And that is where we are, you and I, today. This is a moment in some ways like any other. But so was the moment just before El Shaddai appeared to Abram saying, “I am God Almighty. Walk before me and be blameless. I will make my covenant with you and make you exceedingly numerous.” So was the moment before Gabriel appeared to Mary saying, “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with thee.” So was the early morning before the sun had risen and some dejected women padded their way through the darkness to a tomb. The world is waiting for the covenant once again to take on new life, hesitant to believe that it really could be true that God will once again open up the future, call together a liberating people, and announce through them to all the world, “I shall be their God and they shall be my people and I myself will be with them.”

Where is Abraham? Where is Sarah? Where is Mary? Could one of them be hearing this?


© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012