Rev. Mark A. Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
August 25, 2002
Genesis 12:1-9
Romans 4:13-25

INTRODUCTION

Is there anything better than packing all your possessions into a car and moving them hundreds of miles down the interstate into a concrete room you share with a complete stranger? I know that college is more than that. But that’s how it all gets started, isn’t it? You get the family SUV, or station wagon, or you rent a U-Haul, and you pack it up with as much as will fit inside.

You say goodbye to your friends and head out, leaving your familiar life behind. Some things, you’ll discover, you don’t miss at all. Other things, you find yourself longing for, like authentic Buffalo wings, a particular restaurant, a favorite place. A box of Freihofer’s chocolate chip cookies. (If anyone here is from Upstate New York, you know what I’m talking about). Of course your parents come along too and simultaneously provide manpower, a little comfort, and a little stress as well.

But that’s how it all begins. You pack up the car and go. And your college journey gets underway.

THE TEXT

In fact, this whole process reminded me of the passage from the Book of Genesis we read earlier. Abram receives the call from God: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” We read later:

Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan.

There are a couple of things that occur to you upon close examination of this text. First: that’s a lot of stuff to move from what is now Iraq to what is now Israel by foot! Oh, I’m sure that they had camels or other beasts of burden to carry the heavy things, but the people had to walk. Quite a different thing than cruising down I-70 in air-conditioned comfort with a car full of CDs and blankets. The other thing is that Abram is no entering freshman when he makes this trip–he’s seventy five years old.

Seventy five! Can you imagine? I’m a little older than you, but that’s still more than twice my age. What must that have been like? There’s an old line that says that old people don’t change, they only get more so. How set in his ways must Abram have been? How much more difficult must it have been for Abram to uproot himself from his life than it was for you to do so when you first came here?

If you thought it was tough to tear yourself away from everything you ever knew at age 18 and pack up the family car to go to college, imagine what it would be like at age 75 to pack up everything you had and leave everything you ever knew for a land you didn’t know. Particularly when you have to walk all the way!

There is a certain poetry in the way that God calls Abram to set out. He is to leave his country. Now, we’re not talking country in the way that we think of it: political entities and nation-states. The Hebrew word is eretz ‘land.’ He is called to leave the land he knows. That’s a hard thing to do. He is to leave his kindred–extended family and relations. His “people.” For those of you who have traveled far to study here, you’ll have a sense of what that’s like. Either the people in DC talk too slow, or they talk too fast. They eat the wrong foods. They don’t like the right football teams. When you go back home, you’ll feel as though you’re among your people again. “go…from your kindred.”

“Go…from your father’s house….” This is the hardest one. As hard as it is to leave one’s homeland and one’s people, leaving family is the hardest. Our first relationships as human beings are forged with our families–our parents and our siblings.

It’s hard to leave home. Think of how central an understanding of home is to us. “Home is where the heart is.” “Home sweet home.” Dorothy’s “There’s no place like home.” Even in baseball, the object of the game is to run home. When the President decided to create a new cabinet position in charge of providing security on the domestic side, it was not by accident that he called it “homeland” security. Home exerts a powerful pull on us.

God calls Abram to leave all that behind. And he does.

That’s faith.

That’s the faith that St. Paul is talking about when he writes of the faith of Abraham, which “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Indeed, Abraham has been for thousands of years a model of faithfulness on account of his association with such acts of trust in God. “And the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your kindred, and your father’s house to a land that I will show you.’…And Abram went.”

OUR JOURNEYS

In many ways, the journey you are on–some of you at the very beginning, others at various stages along the way–is a journey of faith. Some of you have left your country (most of you have at least left your state–your region, your land). Most of you have left your kindred, your people, your relations. And very nearly all of you have left your parents’ house for a place, an experience you had not seen before.

It takes faith to do something like that. Faith in yourself. Faith in your parents and their guidance. Faith in your high school teachers that they actually taught you enough to keep up. Faith in the God who calls you along this path.

But there’s something a little disturbing about the model of faith we have been given here. I mean, with rare exception, most of us plan to go home at some point. If not at Thanksgiving, then at least at Christmas. We plan on seeing our families again. We plan on seeing our homeland again. The kind of thing Abraham did–that’s a whole order of magnitude different, isn’t it? I mean, God’s not really asking us to make that kind of sacrifice, right? Does God really ask us to leave everything behind to begin a journey of faith? That’s how Abraham had to begin his journey–but we don’t have to do that, right?

I’ve got to tell you, there’s something very discomforting about all this. I’m not sure I want God coming to me when I’m 75 and saying, “Guess what! It’s time to completely upend your life!” If, God-willing, I should live so long, I’d really kind of like to be settled at that point. Maybe do a little traveling. I’m not about to radically alter my life.

So I have real problems sometimes with this whole notion that faith, as Abraham lives it, requires a willingness to completely up end our lives and everything we know. Does God really expect us to do such a thing? Is this what we signed on for?

I suspect that most of us are uncomfortable with this kind of faith. It’s not reported in the text, but we wonder: what did Abram’s family and friends think about this? What would our friends think if at the end of a long life we told them we were about to embark on such a thing? They’d think we were crazy, wouldn’t they?

Sometimes God’s call challenges everything–even our own security–as with the case of Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador. Oscar Romero was appointed archbishop in El Salvador precisely because he was thought to be harmless. A safe guy. Not likely to make waves or cause trouble. But one day after two of his parishioners were murdered in the cycle of violence in that country, Archbishop Romero was transformed. God had called him out of his complacency. He began to speak out–in sermons and in public. He became the voice for the oppressed. He left everything that was comfortable to him and put his life on the line–taking a risk that ultimately resulted in his being assassinated while he performed the Eucharist during mass. Romero had talked the talk–God had called him to walk the walk. He had done it, but it cost him his life.

But God’s call needn’t even be as drastic as that. Let me tell you a story about someone I know fairly well. He was a young lawyer here in Washington. Graduated from one of the local law schools and decided to stay around in town and look for work. It was in the early nineties and the recession was still being felt in the legal community. There were not a lot of jobs to go around. After six months of looking he finally found a job working with a sole practitioner, just in time to start paying his law school loans back. After a year or so, he left that job–was briefly unemployed–and finally found another job working with another sole practitioner who treated him much better than the first, though, he was not able to pay the young lawyer very much money–only about a third of what his friends were earning at larger firms. Still, after a number of years working at this firm, he was beginning to develop an expertise in a particular field of law and was finally making a dent in his personal debt.

Now, it was about this time that some of the clergy at his church started suggesting that he go to seminary. He found the idea ridiculous. But when he mentioned the idea to his friends, they all agreed that that was what he should do. In fact, everywhere he turned, people were either suggesting the idea or were agreeing with it. It was as if God was speaking through his friends and associates. He was incredulous–he was finally beginning to get his head above water when it seemed as if God was calling him to leave the comfortable and embark on a journey to a place he did not know. As much as he protested: “But I have a career!” “I don’t want to go back to school again–I spent enough time in school!” and “How am I going to pay for my law school loans on a minister’s salary!” the call of God seemed to keep coming in that still, small voice: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house…”

Well, it’s three years later and I still don’t know how I am going to pay for my law school loans on a Methodist minister’s salary, but I am on the road. I set out for a nice long walk. Can I claim that what I did was anything like what Abraham did at age seventy five? No, certainly not. At least not to the same degree. And compared with Oscar Romero’s journey, it almost seems trivial. But we all face circumstances where God is calling us away from the safety and comforts to respond in faith. And it does take faith to set out.

FAITH IS A JOURNEY

It’s not just that a journey–Abraham’s, ours, others’–is an act of faith: it is. But it is also that faith is itself a journey. It is not an accomplishment. (We often make that mistake). Again the text gives us a clue. God says to Abram: “Go.” In the Hebrew, what he says islech l’cha. Lech comes from the Hebrew word halach that means not only to go, but to walk. God is calling Abram not simply to go, but to walk. To walk a life of faith.

There’s another clue in the text. At the end of the scripture passage for today we are told “And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.” The journey is not all in one shot. It moves on in stages. At different paces. In different directions. For different periods of time.

Faith is a journey. Often, a journey without an end. It’s not a quest. Our journeys of faith do not end when we throw the One Ring into the fires of Mt. Doom in the land of Mordor. We are not Frodo Baggins. Our journeys have no clear ending other than the ending that comes to all of us. Our journeys last our entire lives.

But does such a journey demand that we leave everything behind? In Genesis we read of God calling Abraham to leave everything that is familiar behind for a journey in faith. With us it is no different. For it’s not as though God is calling us to leave comfort for the sake of the journey–leaving comfort is necessary to the success of the journey. In order to set out on these journeys of faith, we need to leave what is comfortable and familiar. Sometimes, we need to leave the comfort of the Shire to walk the long road…okay, so maybe we are Frodo Baggins.

Sometimes ya gotta pack up your car and hit the road. And when you begin a journey of faith, you’re going to find that you’re leaving a whole lot more than Freihofer’s cookies behind. You’ll take a lot of stuff with you, like Abraham did, but you’ll be leaving a lot of things behind. Familiar places. Familiar people.

Familiar ideas.

Your very preconceptions about the world will change. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: if you make it through 4 years of college with the same ideas and opinions you had when you entered, you have really missed the point of the whole enterprise.

God is calling you, me, all of us, on a journey of faith. Your years here at American University are part of that life long journey of faith. There are many things that you’re going to have to leave behind. Pack up your car.

WE DO NOT JOURNEY ALONE

But here’s the saving grace: we do not travel this road alone. We travel this road together–as a church, as a community of faith. In fact, the earliest name for Christianity when it was a sect in Judaism was “the Way”–the path, the road. The road we walk together.

You many not always know the way. And so we ask questions. We ask directions from one another. That’s part of the journey.

It also means you’re going to do a lot of exploring. You’re going to try new things–new fashions, new hairstyles, new ideas. All three of which will absolutely thrill your parents.

You might be a Democrat your freshman year. A socialist your sophomore. A libertarian your junior year. A republican your senior year.

But there is one thing more about this journey that the text indicates. Something about the call. In the text we read, “Go… to a land that I will show you.”

God is not calling us to a journey alone. God calls us to a land that God will show us. God goes before us on this journey of faith. God prepares the way ahead of us and guides us along the way. God is at the end of the journey.

And not simply at the end, either. We are accompanied on this journey by one who gave up everything for our sake. One who left the throne of glory to walk the dusty pathways and byways of ancient Galilee. One who walks with us even now, guiding us, undergirding us, empowering us along the way.

So pack up your car. Set forth on a lifelong journey of faith. Come, let us go from our country, our kindred, and our father’s house, to a land that God will show us.