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The God Who Says “Go”: On Going From
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis October 19, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 12:1-4; Exodus 3:16-20 Matthew 28:16-20
God said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” God said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt…and I will bring you out of the misery of Egypt, to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey.” And so too the same God made known to us in Jesus Christ said to a gathered group of fearful disciples, according to the cadences of King James, “Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and lo I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” Presumably God is still saying to God’s people, saying to the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, “Go!” Unfortunately over the course of many years, human communities (just like human beings) become hard of hearing…or as my mother says of my father, they become “selectively deaf!” When that is the case (as it always is), the church may busy herself with many things, may head in any one of a multitude of directions, may do good works supposedly in God’s name, but to what end? For having quit the lively conversation prompted by God’s address in favor of our own institutional chatter or religious certitude, the place we are headed is nowhere and the people we are becoming is no people in relation to the promises of the God who says “Go”. So the question in this 150th year of our church’s life is simply this: are we merely talking among ourselves at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill or do we at least mean to be a community engaged in lively conversation along the way with the God who says “Go”? Prompted by God’s Spirit long before we were, and taking place even now outside of the walls of the visible church, the conversation is joined by us as we dwell together in the biblical story. Yet God’s Spirit does not have a chance with us short of our leaning in close enough to scripture and lingering long enough to hear the silences wherein our hearts stop, the contradictions wherein our minds are teased into active thought, and the characters in whose broken lives the pieces of our own are lodged. Over the next three weeks, therefore, we will lean in and hang around these texts together, in hopes of hearing God say anew, concerning the next 150 years before us, “Go!” So to the first text this morning: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” “Go!” said God to Abram and Abram went as he was told. Without a recorded word of protest at the start, he went simply because God had commanded. Why would Abraham leave so willingly, we wonder? Of what he left behind, we have only these collected stories of mythic proportion; stories we would do well to rehearse at the outset of our journey lest the plot of God’s redeeming purposes be lost on us from the beginning. We read, in the beginning, that God’s first “go” with humankind had gone badly. Adam and Eve had abandoned God’s word for the word of a mere worm--a snake, in fact--promising immortality. Speaking the truth of human mortality to the lie, God says for the first time “Go,” and in so saying expels these two figures from a life lived freely and gratefully within the bounds of God’s intention. The story sounds vaguely familiar! What follows is murder east of Eden. Then dark clouds portend universal mayhem. In the face of rising waters, only a remnant is given refuge by the God who thus intends to begin again. Yet with the slate literally wiped clean, it soon becomes apparent that there is nothing new under the sun! The city of Babel rises out of the mud as a monument to merely human achievement. In Babel, observes Leon Kass, “the city appears as a remedy and the universal city a dream of deliverance, peace and prosperity…. Protected by its walls, warmed and comforted in its habitats, and ruled by its teachings, the children of Adam…neither know nor seek to know anything beyond. Contentment reigns or so it does seem.” Here God must do the going, saying to the heavenly court, “Come, let us go down and confuse….” Presumably thereafter, for generation upon generation, confusion reigns rather than God. Then into the confusion of human voices, God speaks. God chooses one man with whom to converse and so begins anew. “Now,” we read in the twelfth of Genesis, God addresses Abram saying, “Go.” “It is a word spoken,” says Walter Brueggemann, “which lets one not be the same again.” The creatures “expelled from” now becomes the creatures who “depart to.” “Go” is spoken as a command to leave the place we are for the place promised, to leave behind the people we have been, that we may--by God’s gracious promise--become the people we were destined to be. Again, the text says simply, “So Abram went.” We can barely imagine. Admittedly like Abram and Sarai, the known places we inhabit and the known people we are may be confused and barren and without real hope. Still, this “secure barrenness” is humanity’s bird in the hand. Moreover if we read ahead, we find that obeying the God who says “Go” ultimately demands of Abraham a willingness to sacrifice the very future promised by God in the birth of Isaac. “Take your son, your only son whom you love,” says God, and “go.” This time, Abraham rose early and went to sacrifice his son! The fact that a ram in the bush ultimately is provided for an only son on the block simply confirms our instinct. Between faith in the God who says “Go,” and the security of our religion and our civilization in shambles, we will go with the bird in the hand. Yet, says scripture, Abram went, and in so going “a new historical alternative began, alternative to the history of expulsion and dislocation,” says Brueggemann. “No way to the future. No heir to receive all the riches. Nothing, future closed off, everything as good as over and done with. And God spoke and there was newness. He is the Lord of all things new,” says Brueggemann, “and his partners in history are pilgrims who believe he will do what he says…. The family of Abraham left the history of expulsion and began the pilgrimage of promise.” With an ear cocked to understand our history through the story of scripture, we cannot help but hear a disturbing word. For if we do lean in close enough and listen long enough to hear God’s “Go” spoken to us, we take it first to be not a command to depart for a promised land, but a word of expulsion from the fixed community to which we comfortably belong. The church is the garden wherein we believe we have gained the knowledge of good and evil, have ordered the common life just the way we want it to be. We are Adam and Eve, who believe the promise of immortality to be our exclusive possession, though in these latter days we have begun to trust the snake’s peddling of personal and institutional survival by way of this strategy or that entertaining scheme instead of God. “Go,” God says. Out of this garden created to meet our needs, quiet our fears, confirm our worldview, and keep our young from straying, we are told to “go” for God’s sake? How could it be that the “saving status quo” that is our religion is called into question by the very God who has called us and the church into being! Or are we rather survivors of the flood, children living somewhere over the rainbow of our utopian dreams: the happy, productive inhabitants of Babel, or so we were before the towers crumbled. Protected by its walls, warmed and comforted in its habitats, ruled by its teachings, neither knowing nor seeking to know anything beyond, we were content. But now the edifice of Christendom has crumbled. We are a people confused because the paradigm has shifted, truths abound, and the world no longer privileges the word we have been given to proclaim. So even as we shout our truth amid the confusion of voices, we also must confess that we are going nowhere without some word from the God who once said, “Go!” The gospel, my fellow would-be pilgrims, is that we are addressed not as those expelled from the garden nor are we left to the cacophony of Babel’s confusion. For the God who entered human history anew to address Abram with the command to “Go” is the same God who has entered human history in the Word made flesh, addressing us amid a confusion of voices in the one voice of Jesus Christ. “Go” he says, that by his grace we might leave the place we are for the place we are promised; might leave behind the people we have been, for the people we were destined in him to be. If he is the one we mean to follow, then I cannot fathom how the church can hear any other command from the living God but the command to quit the saving status quo of our well-kept gardens and our fortified cities to “go from our country and our kindred and our parents’ house to the place that God has promised.” This God who quit the heights of heaven for Bethlehem’s manger reveals no other life for the children of God than the life of a pilgrim band. So he calls Peter from fishing and Matthew from the tax office and Luke from the clinic saying, “Go.” He commands any who would follow him to quit their excuses and not look back. He troubles the “saving status quo” of the religious leaders and tells those who would limit God’s dwelling on earth to a human institution that they may expect its destruction. Then setting his own face toward Jerusalem, he goes the way it is written of him, dying the death we must die. Yet even in death, he is obedience to the God who says “Go,” for the grave cannot hold him. He must go to His Father, whose substance he is, to the God who send his only Son, his beloved saying, “Go” that we might quit all others and come unto Him. In him, my friends, the God who says “Go” addresses us still and gathers us to hear the word that would make of us pilgrims…strangers and sojourners on earth…a people whose life together makes is clear that we are always departing the known for the land that is promised, quitting the old arrangements for the new thing God is doing, leaning in just close enough and long enough to catch in the characters who have gone before us the plot of our destined days. So “[those] we who would true Valour see/Let [them] come hither;/One here will Constant be,/Come Wind, come Weather./There’s no discouragement /Shall make [them] once Relent,/[Our] first avow’d intend,/To be a Pilgrim.” Thanks be to God. |