First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
20 February 2005
A Journey and a Blessing
Genesis 12:1-4
"Finding the Right Man", from Does God Have A Big Toe?, by Marc Gellman and Oscar de Mejo
Right then God knew that the right man was going to the right place at the right time for the right reasons. God also knew that such things hardly ever happen. ("Finding the Right Man", p. 51.)
"Such thing hardly ever happen." That's right. Hardly anyone responds to God when God calls. The usual thing is that when God calls, you raise a thousand unanswerable questions and set out ten thousand unmeetable conditions so that you can stay right where you are, and keep on doing what you're doing. If a rustle of God wakes you up at night, you grab your blankie and squeeze your eyes shut and go back to sleep. If your feet get itchy in the Spirit and try to turn left towards who-knows-where instead of right towards home, you go mix up some cement and stick those feet in it ankle-deep so that when it hardens you can't go anyplace. And if God causes a bit of disturbance inside you, and your heart starts thumping so hard that people down in New Haven can feel the vibrations, you pop a pill to pacify your risky dreams.
It's a little puzzling to me, 'though, why people so consistently refuse God's invitations to what seem like really great adventures—especially when these days people will do almost anything! All TV producers have to do is promise a million bucks to the survivor of a trumped-up ordeal, and all kinds of people drop everything and go to Togo on Tuesday at two. And even if the payoff is only, say, a measly fifty grand for plunging your head into a tank of horrid squirmy things, or some other fearsome challenge, all those producers have to do is put the word out in the paper or on the internet, and several hundred contestants will show up, good to go.
So why doesn't anyone show up when God puts out a call? It's not as if God doesn't give us good things for our efforts! Take, for example, that country that God promises to Abram's children's children, once he leads his family to it. Of course, now that I think of it, God never tells Abram which country it is going to be. God just says, "Go to the land that I will show you." For all Abram knows, it could be a swamp swarming with crocodiles. He won't know what sort of place it is unless he lets God show him. (Notice that God is planning to go with him. This is another good thing you get by going when God calls—God's companionship.) The land turns out to have not one single crocodile. It's very good land in fact. Unfortunately, it also turns out that it belongs to other people—Canaanites, who (we soon learn) won't give it up without a truly bloody fight. And now that I've said that, I'm beginning to see why people don't line up when God calls, and why God will never make it as a TV producer.
There is something else besides land that is in store for Abram in God's excellent adventure. Blessings! By the zillions! You know what blessings are. They are little miracles, like when a shooting star flashes across the sky just when you thought there was no light or hope left in the universe. Or when a dying person looks up and sees the faces of people she loves and who love her back, and they hold her hand until she goes to sleep. Or when something good comes out of a disaster. Or when someone who was kicked out of his family or church finds a welcome in a place like this. I happen to think that the very best blessings are the ones that rain down when people value and love others as much as they value and love themselves.
God is always blessing everyone and everything. You know that if you count your blessings every day. So God's promise to bless isn't too surprising. But did you catch the other thing God says? God says that Abram will be a blessing. How can a person BE a blessing? We know that a person can bless other people. You can touch people's heads in the hospital and say, "God bless you." At the end of worship, you can stretch out your arms like this and offer a blessing, "that God might make God's face shine upon us." But how does a person become a blessing? Well, in this story, somehow it happens when you go willingly on a journey, called there by God.
Now, to become a blessing I don't think that you necessarily have to go on a journey just like Abram's. In fact, when you see how badly he starts behaving just about ten verses later, you'll realize that he has a lot farther to go on an inward journey than he does on an outward one. It's the same for us. The journey inward is the harder one, because it is to a land even farther away and more unknown to us than the promised land was to Abram. You could say that it is a journey to ourselves.
Now, ourselves is a place that should feel very familiar. It ought to be a cinch to get to as well, but it isn't. It's foreign, and getting to it is as hard as getting way down to the Galapagos Islands, or over the Bourne Bridge on a summer weekend. It's also a land that is usually already inhabited—by crocodiles and Canaanites like fear, bitterness, apathy, regret, anxiety, envy and greed, all of which are quite happy where they are and don't want to leave, at least not without a serious fight. So if we really want to come to ourselves—to move, as St Augustine would say, from a heart curved in on itself to a true regard for others, a real love for God and for the world—we'll have to be determined about this inward journey, because it isn't over till it's over. It lasts a lifetime.
But if we go with God to the place that God wants to show us, we may make even bigger discoveries than those giant lizards explorers found long ago in the Galapagos. We may discover that at our very core lies a huge and important blessing, a blessing in disguise, one that we are always trying not to see for some strange reason—it is the huge blessing of the beauty and belovedness that God sees in us. Without welcoming this blessing we cannot ever hope to BE a blessing.
That's why God is always asking us to go to ourselves and to settle in the reality of how delightful we are to God. That's why God sends us on this journey to ourselves for our own good, for our salvation; because only by inhabiting that place and receiving its blessing can we grow into what only human beings can become—self-surpassing creatures. God is always calling and sending us to our true selves, for our good and salvation, because only by inhabiting that truth can we love our neighbor as we love ourselves. And that's the best blessing of all. To love our neighbors as we love ourselves. To BE for ourselves and for others the very delight of God on earth, which is what we are.
We've talked about Abram today, but we are not forgetting Jesus, who also went willingly where God sent him, outwardly and inwardly. And because he knew, better (I think) than anyone who ever lived that God was delighted with him and with everything God made, he was God's blessing along the Way, loving his neighbor as he loved himself, loving his neighbor the way God loved him. Just as God called him, he called US also to be followers, to be, in other words, the world's blessing—the right people going to the right place at the right time for the right reasons.
Oh, I know that God knows that such things hardly ever happen, but maybe this Lent, maybe here at First Church, maybe by God's mercy and our responses, they will.
© 2005, J Mary Luti