Wanting to be Abram

Wanting to be Abram The Dover Church
March 20, 2010 – 2nd Sunday of Lent
Scripture: Genesis 12: 1-4, John 3:1-17


I can still remember exactly what it felt like the first time I really stepped out and followed the unexpected and unpredictable leading of the Spirit. At the time, I was only 20, so I was thinking in terms of adventure. Looking back with more than 25 years hindsight, however, I now know that it was the first time I dipped my toes in the waters of the Spirit.
It was a sweltering Thursday afternoon, July 12, 1984. After a long, hot drive to Kennedy Airport, I had kissed my tearful mother goodbye and was buckled into my seat as the plane taxied down the runway for take-off. On my way to school in Sweden for a year, looking out the window at the gradually diminishing line of planes in front of us turning and taking off, I started to get a sinking feeling in my stomach. Until now, the whole prospect of a year abroad had seemed sort of unreal. Obviously I had made some sort of decision when I wrote the extensive application. Obviously I knew I was on my way when I received the acceptance letter in the mail. Obviously I knew that the time was upon me as I packed my bag. Obviously it hadn’t been all that obvious to me, because it was not until the moment that the pilot started to ramp up the engines and the plane started to tremble with the pent up power of four jet engines right before take off, that it hit me. “What have I done? I don’t even really know where I am going. I won’t know anyone when I get there and I speak the language like a little kid. The one thing I do know is that I’ll be thousands of miles from home for an entire year. What have I gotten myself into?”
You people know me as the extroverted preacher, the boisterous worship leader and singer on Sunday morning, the guy with all the new ideas and energetic enthusiasm in Tuesday night meetings. I do not put a lot of stock in horoscopes, which is to say I don't consult mine to find out what’s going to happen. Nonetheless, I am a Cancer, the crab who likes life best inside his shell. A homebody who deals with constant change from within that hard, protective shell, fiercely loyal and tenaciously holding onto the things that are important to me, a person who likes daily rhythm and regularity. Moving from species to genus for you biologists, I am pagarus poliicaris, a little hermit crab whose head pops out on Sunday mornings and at meetings and then scoots back inside as soon as possible.
Until that moment sitting in that Icelandair plane on that runway, my life had been on a pretty predictable trajectory. We had lived in the same house since I was three. Father worked in an office. Mother took care of us and ran the home. A dog, three cats, hamsters, a fish tank, a yard, summers on the Cape house. I had met most of my best high school friends when we were in nursery school and kindergarten together. Like all the other kids in my neighborhood, I went off to college, where I aimed for decent enough grades to keep my parents off of my back and my options open for possible future graduate studies. I was on the rowing team and lived in a fraternity with a bunch of my teammates. It all sounds so stereotypical now, I know, but it seemed unique, grown-up and even daring to me at the time. I was Joe College.
Sometime in my junior year I started to get the itch for something else, something new, something way out there on the horizon somewhere, far from everything I knew and knew how to do. Why don’t I try this on for size? Drop rowing in my senior year, forget about the political science I had been studying for three years at a large state university, go to Sweden, and enroll in a small, and I mean small, like 500 students, art school on an island in the Baltic. Once there, I drew, painted, learned how to drink a lot of coffee and play the guitar, and sang in a blues band. My friends thought it was hysterical every time I sent them a postcard or a letter recounting what I was up to. I mostly stressed the word “studying” and “seeing Sweden” in letters to my mother. This was when overseas calls cost about $9 a minute.
And it had all come down to this moment of intense fear, buckled into an Icelandair seat. Right then and there, I could have started screaming and running around the plane, which, I am pretty sure, would have gotten me off of that plane and, after a hopefully brief visit to the police station, back to the life I knew so well. But I didn’t and that sent me on a course which I followed for the next sixteen years, a course which, 26 years, 9 months and 6 days later brought me here to this pulpit this morning. As I have already said, I was not thinking in terms of the Spirit at the time, but now I know how Abram must have felt when God did what he did to him. I know how all the rest of us predictable trajectory folks here this morning must feel when we hear Jesus’ words about “being born from above,” about “being blown by the Spirit,” not knowing where we are headed but trusting in the source from which our direction comes. You may not say it aloud, but I imagine many of you are thinking to yourselves, “are you kidding me? What sort of a life would that be like? What would we be getting ourselves into? A 20 year old kid going off to paint and draw with a bunch a beautiful blond people while his parents pick up the tab, that’s not real life.”
Jesus is so wise. I think he knew we were going to think those things and resist the way of Abram intensely, which is why he assures us as Eugene Peterson puts us in his translation of John 3:16-17 “(I came into the world) so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in (me), anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again.” Isn’t that how we feel when we see the example of Abram and hear the invitation of Jesus? Accused? By implication that there’s something wrong with us and the way we are going about our lives? But that's looking at faith backwards. It’s about allowing ourselves to be lead from where we are right now into that fullness and abundance of life which we can’t even begin to imagine as long as we are playing by our rules with our heads drawn back inside our little shells.
My friends, I know that you already know what I am saying is true. You know that life is really a series of pivotal fearful moments on which your life’s journey hinges. How do I know that you know this to be true? Well, how about that moment when you finally decided what you were going to do with you life? What your life’s work was going to be? Or that moment when you walked down the aisle in front of all those people and made all those unbelievably enormous promises to the person you were planning to spend your life with? Or, that moment when you finally told your spouse that the marriage was over? Or that moment when you decided to have a child? Or, what came later, that moment of truth in the delivery room when you actually were holding the living, breathing result of your decision? Or, even a little bit later, that moment when the nurse wheeled you out to the curb with the baby on your wife’s lap and said, “you can go home now.” What? Home? And you looked at each other and wanted to say “We can’t go home. I read the books but I don’t know what to do. Do you?”” And you started dialing your mothers. Or that moment you walked into your boss’s office and told her that you were resigning to do something else, far from your father’s house, far from your kindred and your country? Or that moment you walked into the banker's office with a business plan for your life’s ambition in your briefcase? Do remember how scary it all felt then? Maybe I have left our your moment, but I think those are the biggies for most of us, the biggies when we could have said no out of fear, started screaming and running around and gotten ourselves safely escorted back to our old lives.
In each of these moments, we thought we knew what we were getting into, but the truth is that we really had no idea. At least that has been my experience. The idea and the reality of career, marriage, parenthood, life both in general and in the particulars, are two very different things. The only thing we really knew was that we were setting out with faith. And here’s another truth: hasn’t all the really good stuff in our lives come to us out of just such pivotal moments when we had the fearlessness to say yes to the attractive but unknown? Sure, there have been years and years of hard work to bring it all to fruition, but it all started with that moment and our openness to being Abram.
So what are we going to do, you and I? We are in a bind, you know. Church, by its very nature, is traditional. We cherish our tradition rightly and reverently but it all tends to get in the way of being Abram. The late Jaroslav Pelikan, esteemed professor of history and theology and Yale, once wrote, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide.” It's up to us. We can unbuckle our safety belts, start running around the church screaming and we'll end up safe and sound exactly where we are right now. That's what most churches tend to do. Or we can say "Yes" and allow ourselves to be lead towards the blessings and greatness God promises us through Abram, allow ourselves to live into the new and abundant life God sets before us in Jesus. There is so much more out there on God’s horizon, but we’ll never see it let alone live it, unless we faithfully dare to do what we have done at all the other pivotal, fearful, life giving moments in our lives we have said yes to. I, for one, really want to be Abram and find out.