Oh, what a family (we are called and empowered to be) -- sermon from Sunday, February 25, 2018

Reading

 (The illustration is from the illuminated Sauvigny Bible, 12th-century France, titled "Abraham Holding in His Lap His Descendants: Jews, Christians and Muslims")

Jews, Christians and Muslims are all descended from Abraham and Sarah, the old and childless couple whom God chooses in the Book of Genesis to be father and mother to a great people who, in communion with God, will bless all people and all life on Earth.  What kind of people are they?  And are their children at all like them?

Selected and abbreviated verses from Genesis

Now Terah was the father of Abram and two other sons, and they lived in the great city of Ur, in what is now Iraq, between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf.  Abram was married to Sarai, who was barren.  They had no children.

Terah took Abram and Sarai, as well as Lot, the son of a brother of Abram who had died, and left the city of Ur and the kingdom of the Chaldeans, to travel to the land of Canaan.  But when the family – such as it was, came to Haran – only half-way to where they planned to be, they settled down.  Some years later, Terah died there.

Then the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your father’s house to the land I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the Earth shall be blessed.”

So Abram went as the Lord told him, and journeyed by stages as the Lord showed him.  (Gen. 11:27 – 12:1-3)

And along the way, at a number of points in Abram’s and Sarai’s long and continuing journey, God repeated this promise to them and to the family that eventually was born to them:

"Look toward the heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.  So shall your descendants be.”  (Gen. 15:5)

"You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.  No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations.”  (Gen. 17:4-5)

“I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore.  And your offspring shall possess the gate of their enemies, and by your offspring shall all the nations of the Earth be blessed and gain blessing for themselves, because you obey my voice.”  (Gen. 22:17-18)

Sermon

According to the commercials, ancestry.ca is a powerful tool for bringing people together and creating vibrant, inclusive community by helping people recognize and celebrate their common ancestry.  In one commercial, a man watches a new family move in next door – clearly different in lifestyle, culture, family patterns, behaviour and language.  The new family is deeply Irish, and it’s hard for the man who’s been there for years to imagine ever really connecting with these strangers next door.

But when he learns through ancestry.ca that his background includes Irish ancestry and blood, he calls his new neighbour over to the fence between their back yards, pulls up the evidence of common blood on his Smartphone, and the two of them suddenly have a connection that over the last ten seconds of the commercial turns into a growing life-long friendship between their two families with the fence between them torn down to make two backyards into one!

Can you imagine if there were a spiritualancestry.ca available to us?  If all people on Earth somehow were able to see in black and white pie-chart evidence on their Smartphone app, our common connection with one another as descendants of Adam, and children of God? 

Or if all Jews, Christians and Muslims at least, were able to remember over our backyard fences of our shared ancestry in Abraham and Sarah, long-ago chosen servants of God?  That in spite of our differences and our sibling rivalries and conflicts, we really are brothers and sisters?  That the fences can come down, or at least have a few more gates put in, so we can work at a single backyard for the good of all the world around us?

Together, we are the stars of the heaven – God’s lights beyond number twinkling with hope in the darkness of our time.  We are like the sand of the seashore – grains of holy grit beyond number that individually, in small handsful and in large accumulations are able to be good for the world in so many ways.

If only we could get our act together.  Work out the details of a family re-union.  Really address and heal our family’s dysfunctions – the dysfunctions that separate our different streams, as well as the dysfunctions we suffer within our own traditions, and even in our own little faith communities.

Because think what kind of family this is in the world.  The family of God under Abraham and Sarah is not a blue-blood, royal house like the Tudors or Windsors, somehow high and lifted-up, separate from the rest of us ordinary people.  It’s not a family like the Kennedys or Bushes, or the Molsons, Irvings, Trudeaus or now the Mulroneys – an establishment-power family somehow feeling entitled to rule or at least have the power to sway others who do.  Nor are we the Cosa Nostra or some Mafia family with closed doors, secret handshakes and a need always to win out over rivals and come out on top.

We are the family of Abraham and Sarah, and it’s worth remembering what this means for how we see ourselves, and how we go about our business in the world. 

Does it mean anything, for instance, that at different times instead of settling down and comfortably in to wherever they were, they are willing whenever God calls, to pack and go, and accept whatever journey God has for them now to take?  Even when it means leaving a home they have grown to love, leaving a place of influence they’ve come to have, leaving behind and never seeing again the final resting place of Abraham’s father.

And does it mean anything that even though God promises them a land, they seem to be in no rush to get there?  That even when they get there – unlike some of their later children, later generations of their children, instead of treating what God gives them, as their possession that they need to protect with force of arms, they hold it quite lightly and even let it go from time to time to become poor wanderers again when God and life seem to demand it?

In their time, whether by choice or circumstance, they are marginal people.  Not marginal on Earth; they are quite at home on Earth because they know all of Earth is in God’s hands.  Bugt marginal to any culture of their time that sees any part of Earth as their exclusive domain.  They are outsiders to the dominant culture of the day.  They are powerless and vulnerable. 

And they’re okay with this, because they trust in God.  They let God and not something less, be the answer to their fear and anxiety.  In their acceptance of vulnerability they learn to be open to others along the way.  They learn the meaning and necessity of compassion, generosity, tolerance, love and justice – not just for themselves, but for all the world.  They show the world a new way of being – different in spirit and in purpose than what any other family and culture more naturally encourages.

I wonder if Abraham and Sarah were the only people God called.  Or if maybe God also called others – tried enlisting others in God’s way of being, but they were just the ones who heard and answered God’s call.  And let it shape their whole life.

Whatever the reason behind their becoming people of God, thank God for them.  And thank God for the chance we have to be part of their family – one little constellation of stars among so many others in the vastness of our time’s night sky – one little bit of beach made up of our little grains of sand gathered together like others are elsewhere for the good of the world, on the seashore of the ocean of God’s great good will for all the Earth.