Not as Expected

Second Sunday in Lent       March 12, 2006

(Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 16:5-11; Romans 8:31-39; Mark 8:31-38)

Abraham left home.  He left home in Ur, northwest up the Euphrates from where Basra is today.  Not much going on there today.  It’s Shi’ite territory, south of Karbala.  Mostly just villages and fewer archeologists than there used to be.  During the first Gulf War Saddam Hussein stored a couple of his MIG fighters there because he figured we’d be less likely to bomb archeological ruins than populated cities…. and he was right.

But Abraham was way before that.

Abraham left home to wander, with his flocks and his herds and his wife and her maid, and occasionally his nephew.

He left following some sort of calling.   But after 30 years of ordained ministry I know that a calling can sometimes be hazy, sometimes misinterpreted, so it’s hard to know why he really thought he left.

This was the cradle of civilization, this land between the rivers.  (We’re not the first ones to show an interest in Iraq.)

Maybe Abraham just didn’t like civilization very much.

Maybe city life just got to him and he heard a voice or a Babylonian version of Horace Greeley saying “Go west, young man”.  He was only about 75 years old at the time.

And that might not be far from wrong.  The people who came west in the 1800’s in the United States were seeking a kind of personal freedom, and a wider scope for the development of individual potential, an opportunity they felt they didn’t have in the east.

Ur-Babylon, the land between the rivers, the cradle of civilization was like one of those cities in the east.  It was the birthplace of law.  Hammurabi, the first codifier of law, ruled in Babylon just about the time that Abraham left.  Maybe Abraham didn’t like the law.  Maybe he didn’t obey the law.  Maybe he just didn’t want anybody else telling him what to do.  (There are those who have seen in Abraham the first real individual in history.)

He followed, as they say, a different drummer.  He worshipped his own God.  He went out after his own destiny, wandering in the wilderness with an open desert and a starry sky as far as the eye could see.

And then it all began to come true.

He sat by his tent and he heard that inner voice telling him that his descendants would be as countless as the sands of the desert and the stars of the sky.

That took quite a leap of faith at his age.  He was 99 when Isaac was born.  And with that event the whole purpose of his coming out of the city seemed to be fulfilled….the open land and his son there beside him.

And then he heard the voice again.

“Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains that I shall show you”

We can imagine how he felt.

But he obeys.  And, for me at least, that marks the real point of conversion for Abraham.

St. Paul says that Abraham obeyed the voice of God when he left home, and “that faith was reckoned to him as righteousness.”  But this was the real test.  This was the real sacrifice, and although in the end what was required was simply the offering and not the sacrifice, in his heart of hearts, Abraham was ready to go the whole distance.  And that’s what really mattered. He follows his destiny by letting go of that destiny.  And it’s fascinating to see where that destiny took him.

I pointed out that he left home to go off on his own, resisting the law in what amounted to an early model of rugged individualism.  He ends up with Sinai and Jerusalem and a covenant far more binding than any code that Hammurabi ever thought of.

And the same story could be told of Saint Peter, although maybe on a more human scale, mainly because he’s closer to us in time.

Actually Peter is a little different, since he didn’t exactly think he had much of a destiny at all.  He wasn’t searching or questioning or wandering or anything.  He just wanted to go fishing.

In a sense, Peter gets dragged into it all, at least in one version, by his brother.  “Come and see the Messiah!  Come and see the one that John the Baptist was talking about.”  (Another one of Andrew’s new religions, none of which ever seemed to amount to very much except for giving Andrew an excuse not to mend the nets.)

Then Peter saw Jesus, and something clicked, something happened.  He knew that Andrew was right this time.  Maybe he even knew more than Andrew because, for Peter, a religious experience wasn’t an everyday thing.

The King had come at last.  God had fulfilled the promise beyond anything Peter had hoped for.  There would be freedom and justice and all good things.  And, as they followed and saw him heal, saw him draw the crowds and heard him speak, witnessed the miracles, the more Peter became convinced, and the more he longed for the hour of triumph.

Here was the Christ going up to Jerusalem to convert the scribes and the chief priests and elders.  And it was Peter’s destiny to be with him.  And on the way, “Jesus began to teach them that the son of man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed.”

Peter couldn’t believe it.  That wasn’t at all the way he’d pictured it.  And he told Jesus, taking him aside and rebuking him.  “But turning and looking at his disciples Jesus rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me Satan.”

We can imagine how Peter felt.

But again, as was the case with Abraham, the imagined road to glory had to be let go, had to be turned over to God.  And again, as with Abraham, the destiny is fulfilled, but in a way that was totally unforeseen, in God’s way, not Peter’s.

Lent is often a time when Christians get a little more serious about following God’s call.  This lent in particular, with the world in such an uncertain state with an uncertain future, the seriousness deepens.  We focus on purpose, on values, on destiny.  We’re called to cut through the easy answers and the “habits” of faith, to ask ourselves where our faith really lies.

Are we open to God’s call?  Are we open to a call that may go in directions we neither expect nor really desire?  Are we open to conversion, to the chance for something really new, to the possibility that even our religious ideas may be serving selfish ends?

Are we open to the possibility that the small, often narrow lives we care so much about, that we craft so carefully and nurture and control and protect at such expense, and often in such fear, contain within them the seed of a sacred purpose that if cracked open will reshape the universe and transform history for generations as countless as the sands of the desert or the stars of the sky?

The Lord will show you your path of life.  Take up your cross and follow.

Thanks be to God.