Covenant Series, part 2. Abram and God's future

From Second Sunday in Lent. Based on Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16.  The covenant with Abram and Sarai.

  

What if Abram said "No?" What if he said, "I'm too old, too tired for this." It’s a long journey.  It’s scary.  I don’t have what I need, I don’t know how to respond. What if Abram chose comfort and stability over leaving and going and trusting and obeying the LORD?  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share this origin story.  Its worth noticing that this is Genesis 17, and that God has been communicating with Abram since Genesis 12.  This is actually the fourth time God has made a covenant promise to Abram, with the hope and expectation that Abram would receive the promise and live his life as if it were true. God had to talk to Abram four times in order to get through to Abram!  Have you ever had to say the same thing, give the same direction four times before the person you’re taking to hears you?  If you’re married or have children, this has happened to you.  How many times do I have to tell you?  Didn’t you hear me?  I’ve told you four times where we’re going.  We listen worse to the people closest to us.  Abram listened badly to God.    

 God promised descendants, land, and a national identity.  A nomadic people will become settled. To live as if it were true would be for Abram to see his life as one filled with meaning, significance, and hope far beyond himself. It’s also worth understanding that Abram is a representative character and not merely an individual as we think of an individual.  Abram saw himself as an insignificant member of a tribe or clan.  Individuality is a modern thought about the person.  Abram was part of a group, perhaps its leader, but still an interdependent tribe or ethnic group.  Later known as Israel or the Hebrews.  Abram represents to us the revelation relationship between this God and this God’s people.  This God is invisible, yet appears to speak.  We can hear God, too. But we have to listen.  And listening for God involves trust.   

 I love this text for so many reasons.  1.  If you are under the age of 99 you are eligible to play on God's creation restoration team. God is inconveniently disrespectful of retirement. You're not too old for this stuff.  This is especially important because our congregation has a number of elder adults in it. God is a lot older than you, so…you’re not done yet, God ain’t done with us.  2.  If you haven’t figured out what God is saying to you, maybe you’re not listening.  Listening to God involves silence, stillness, and Scripture.  3. God intends for covenant faithfulness to be generationally passed down. So, children matter as much as elders do. God is the creator.  If we want more youth and children in our faith community, then we have to be willing to do our part, to be fruitful and multiply.  Create space that is inviting to children and youth.  4.  God is exceedingly generous in the unfolding drama of creation restoration. The covenant is lopsided with God taking the brunt of the responsibility for the unfolding plan. 5.  There is hope for the future.  God invites Abram and us to imagine a future beyond ourselves.  I'm guessing that Abram could have said 'NO', but having said "yes" by falling on his face, he is changed. His life was about himself or a nomadic tribal experience of daily survival, until his life was consumed with the God who spoke and speaks. After that his life was about the descendent, the nations, the people more numerous than the stars who would call him "Father Abraham." It was about the land on which he walked.  The name change signifies that he received his life direction as a gift from God that changed him.  So, to what adventure is God inviting us to say yes? Is there a future child of God depending on our faithfulness today? You know, God doesn't need us to do anything, but our children do. And our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It’s never too late to be faithful.  I see in the Wittel Farm and the growing community of children who worship and serve here a sign of God’s covenant promise to Abram in this place. Land and descendants!  But what are we willing to sacrifice, to change, to give up, to surrender in order to be faithful, fully committed to this walk with God? The promise cannot be fulfilled if we are stubbornly clinging to ourselves, our time, and our possessions.  This covenant is serious.  Involving flesh and blood.  Both Abram and Sarai are equally part of the covenant promise.  Sarai and Abram will die long before the covenant is fulfilled, though they will experience the joy and laughter of an infant named Isaac, which literally means laughter.  But they will not see a kingdom or a national identity emerge.  In four generations they will become slaves for 400 years.  But the promise is everlasting and continues. The amazing endurance of Jewish and Christian community, despite thousands of years of change, disruption, war, political upheaval, abuse of power, persecutions, holocausts, plagues, is testimony enough to see that God keeps promises alive. We are enduring a time of great challenge and change, in which faithfulness is tested.  What do we stand for?  What do we say as the community of Jesus?  How we love our neighbors matters. 

So what does it look like to live in the Abrahamic covenant? As a community of Jesus, we have been drawn into that family of faith. Our response to God’s activity, God’s voice has a name.  We call it discipleship.  The lifelong pursuit of Jesus, his way of life, and the formation of a community that looks and sounds more and more like him.  Eugene Petersen calls Christian discipleship “A long obedience in the same direction.”  It looks like the cross.  A lifelong pursuit of the life God is giving you.  Its like receiving, unpacking, and putting together a great gift.  Its like building a cathedral, one brick at a time over several lifetimes.  There were faithful Christians right here before us. Will there be faithful ones after us?

Parade Watchers or Protest Marchers

On Palm Sunday, the day after a massive student movement called "March for our Lives", marched on cities across the country to mobilize against gun violence and demand action.

Was it a parade or a protest march?  I guess it depends on your perspective.  Parades celebrate victory and power and cultural pride.  A parade gathers a crowd to celebrate life as it is, the status quo. Every fourth of July parade is the same.   Protest marches, on the other hand, demand change, justice, an end to oppression, often instigated by marginalized or disenfranchised people, those who are struggling with the way things are.  Protests provoke, challenge, and confront the powers that be.  Nobody gets arrested at a parade.  Was it a parade or a protest march?  We know what happens after Palm Sunday’s protest parade.  He’s arrested and put to death for rebellion. 

Pain.   Violence.  Destruction of bodies.  This is what we are confronted with in the story of Jesus.  The state and religious sanctioned killing of an innocent man.  Our vile familiarity with cruelty, our casual acceptance of violent acts perpetrated by those with power against those without, our callous disregard for the fragility and beauty and wonder of life, any life, one person’s life at best leaves us with shame or righteous anger.  We may feel the weight of the injustice and the shame of our cowardice in the face of it.  We may not.  We may accept death and dying as undeniable truth.  We may wonder why Jesus had to die?  For our sins?  Because of our sins?  As a consequence of sin, injustice, violence, prejudice, rage and hate that kills us. Those who benefit from the status quo are not interested in revolutionary change.  Protect what is mine, even if someone else bears the cost.  I am now aware that many black lives, southern black migrant workers, the grandchildren of slaves who worked on our farm-- bore the cost of my childhood and education.  I do not know how to repay that debt.  They bore the cross for me.  I did not ask them to do it.  I was not responsible for it.  But I benefit from it. This is why the message of the cross matters.  It tells us the truth.  We are in that story somewhere.  Politicians.  Religious leaders.  Crowds.  Police.  Executioners. Bystanders.  Fellow prisoners. Mourners.  Family members.  God, this keeps happening.  We keep doing this to ourselves. Yesterday’s march for our lives and that march on Jerusalem 2000 years ago have this in common:  a resilient hope, despite strong opposition, for political change that ends suffering and violence and brings peace to all people.  Call it the coming of the kingdom of God.           

What happened to Jesus of Nazareth on that hill outside of Jerusalem was not and is not a unique, unprecedented, or unexpected event.  We will not turn Jesus’ crucifixion into a special divine act, an act of great courage or holiness.   The cross was not and is not a one-time event that happened to one man many called and call the Christ.  No.  Jesus was not crucified alone for a reason.  It was to show his compatriots that Jesus was not special, that he was no more or better than any other common unnamed prisoner of the empire.  Killed by the empire to protect the status quo, to demonstrate power and control, to assure everyone of their place in the world.  Palestinian Jews, the poor, the sick, the non-citizen, are at the bottom---are nothing, disposable, expendable, less than human.  So they can be treated as such.  Stripped, beaten, mocked, crucified, left for dead.  The empire destroys the body to show that they have the power to control the body.  To take life.  They decide who is free and who is not.  Who is good and who is not. Who benefits and who suffers.   Rome is not the only empire to use violence to control.         From European colonialists and slavers to totalitarian regimes.  Every war.  War is always about power and control.  Someone is trying to take it from someone else.  The crusades.  The holocaust. Hiroshima.  Apartheid.  Slavery and segregation.  Sometimes the Christians are the oppressed, sometimes the oppressors.  Sometimes the oppressed become the oppressors.  The abused become the violent abuser.  There is always innocent suffering, collateral damage.  In Syria. In Vietnam.  From the trail of tears to the mass incarceration of black and brown bodies, this country, this empire has its own way of maintaining power and control.  Segregate by race.  Marginalize, dehumanize, and destroy black and brown bodies.  In ghettos and prisons and impoverished schools and jobless communities.  We don’t crucify anymore.  Its too inefficient.  We have found far more efficient ways to kill.  Unarmed black bodies are targets.  From whippings to lynchings to drug wars and incarcerations and shootings.  If we want to understand Jesus and the cross, we have to look at communities of the oppressed and suffering.  We must look at the refugee, the disabled, the impoverished, and especially the non-white person of color.   

The effect of Palm Sunday is to snap us to awareness. So we can find our place in that story. In the crowd. As bystanders.  Onlookers.  Indifferent.  Or worse, ignorant.  Are we powerless victims?  Are we privileged citizens that can afford to look away?  If we have not grieved for the death of Stephon Clark, who was killed by Sacramento police last week.  If we have not grieved the murder of school children.  If we do not grieve the death of Syrian children.  What have we become? Fragile avoiders of pain? Parade watchers?  But if you find yourself marching with Jesus in the story, then its not too late.  We can become protest marchers, hoping against despair that the world changes, that the gun fight ends, that the war ceases, that nonviolence prevails, that love wins and peace comes to earth. May we march with that King and that Kingdom of peace to come. May we shout Hosannas and march on until it does.  Amen. 

The soil we're planted in

The soil you plant in matters.  My work with the Wittel Farm Growing Project in these last few years has given me much to reflect about in my life.  I grew up in a farming family in Upstate New York.  Started in the 1920s by my great-Grandfather Lenahan, we were a large commercial green bean farm and dairy, until the 1970’s.  Gradually, we transitioned from a commercial cash crop business toward a small market vegetable and fruit business.  We grew hundreds of acres of crops that we sold in a farm market store we built, similar to our Reiff’s or Hoover’s.  I grew up working on the farm, harvesting crops, tilling, planting, and selling.  As a teen, I loved taking my pickup truck load of fresh-picked sweet corn to a weekly outdoor farm market (like Lititz Farmers market) to sell.  I also loved to eat what we grew on the farm.  Summer was a daily diet of fresh fruits and vegetables.  It was hard work and in 1992 I left for College with a strong desire to follow another path.  I heard a call to ordained ministry while I was at Susquehanna University, a call to leave behind the family farm and pursue another work.  I never imagined that this path would bring me to another farm to grow fresh vegetables for hungry neighbors.  Along this journey I have learned many things about God, myself, and other people.  Now I am learning the role racism and white advantage has played in my life.     

I had my only encounters with non-white people on the farm.  We hired migrant Hispanics from Guatemala and Mexico to labor and live on the farm in the summers.  They taught me Spanish, hard work, and how to eat hot peppers.  They didn’t watch TV.  They played guitars and sang together.  They were generous and happy men, who sent their paychecks home. Nobody worked longer or harder than they did.  They rarely took a day off.  Now I know that their charm for me was based on racial inequality and white privilege (dominance).  At the end of the day, I went home to a comfortable place with my family.  These men spent months apart from their homes and families in order to support the children they left behind.  I will never have to do that because their work provided income for my family that helped me to go to College.   

I was always a passive racist, not personally prejudicial toward people of color, but not aware of systemic bias and oppressive inequality either.  Only now am I learning to become an active anti-racist.  Like an emerging seedling, I'm beginning to see the light above the soil in which I was planted.  I recently had a conversation with my parents about race, because I knew that our farm used to employ and house southern blacks migrants on the farm to pick 800 + acres of green beans in the summer time, in the years before mechanical bean pickers.  I learned that over 50 people came up from the south, men, women and children.  In the 50s and 60s, they came up to our farm, lived in crude shacks with no plumbing, and worked hard for very little pay.  They held dances and played music and drank beers on Saturday nights---to feel human and free, and not like a “negro”.  Now I understand that my family’s livelihood, my childhood, and college education were bought by the hard, cheap labor of poor southern black families.  It was understood then that they needed the work and that they were willing to live under those crude conditions. I don’t blame my ancestors, least of all my parents. (They were kids then). This was the way of things. It was a cultural reality, a system, a way of life.  My ancestors' ignorance and prejudices were embedded in the American story. How many of those black migrant workers were the grandsons or granddaughters of former slaves? Though I lived in a racially homogenous, predominantly white rural community, my life was also bound to the black experience in America in ways I am only now beginning to understand. This is hard to share. But it is my truth.  

What is your race story?  What is your experience with people of color?  How have you benefited from being white? I understand how uncomfortable these questions and this conversation can be for us.  I am uncomfortable, too. But I am also enriched by this awareness of race and by a growing passion to actively resist and oppose the systemic racism that effects American life in so many ways.  I cannot live in ignorance or denial of my own story anymore.  And I believe God is calling me again to till this soil and plant seeds of courage and water with hope and ready us for a harvest of love and understanding, justice and reconciliation. 

In peace,

Pastor Matt