Sermon for March 7, 2004: 2 Lent, year C

by The Rev. Susan Anslow Williams (St. Luke’s Church)

Particular focus on Genesis 15 and Luke 13:31-35 (Read lessons here.)

 

 

 

Stepping Outside the Tent

 

 

“Next year in Jerusalem!” These words of hope for pilgrimage and family reunion end each jewish Passover seder, as did the one held at St. Luke’s a few months ago. For about 3,000 years, Jerusalem has been the focus of religious life for all the descendants of Abraham: Jews, Christians and Muslims. And as we hear the story once again of God promising to Abram that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars, perhaps we wince at the irony that  –  beginning with the first generation – those descendants would be locked in a struggle of life and death over the claiming of God’s blessing, and the land that came with it.

 

On this Second Sunday in Lent, we are invited into the quandary that Abram began, when he received God’s particular blessing. I wish I could turn the pulpit over to Ross, so he could tell us about the efforts amongst those three faiths who claim Abraham as their forefather, to find peace and understanding beginning with that ancestry. Each time we pick up the newspaper, or switch on the nightly news, we are faced with a grimmer reality: more violence, more demonizing, more distance between the peoples and faiths of the Middle East.

 

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it,”  Jesus exclaims, anticipating the likely result of his own Passover visit. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” We can well imagine his feelings for the city today, as weapons much more terrible than stones are used to blow up buildings and buses and their inhabitants; soldiers fire bullets into groups of adolescents wielding rocks; and cranes and bulldozers work to further separate Jews and Palestinians by constructing a 24-foot-high cement wall between communities. Jerusalem, Jerusalem – can we learn from your distress?

 

Seeking answers to the faith issues that Jerusalem represents, the extraordinary writer Bruce Feiler – an American Jew, or Jewish American, he’s not quite sure which should come first – traveled to the Holy Land, and many other places too, seeking explanations and commonalities that became his book Abraham.[1]  

Interviewing Jews, Christians and Muslims, Feiler discovers not three views of Abraham, but 240 identifiable interpretations, from humble nomad to semi-divine assistant of God. Feiler notes that jewish ideas about Abraham strayed the furthest from Genesis during the Middle Ages, a time of intense persecution of jewish communities. Abe is credited with such blessings as being given a foreknowledge of the laws Moses would receive, so that he could keep Kosher; unwittingly founding the Passover traditions; and in the afterlife being accorded a sort of heavenly role that roughly corresponds to our fanciful ideas about St. Peter guarding the pearly gates.

 

Abraham takes on the qualities most needed by those who call upon him, Feiler concludes. This is not necessarily bad, nor contradictory to the aims of Genesis -- itself written long after Abraham would have walked the earth, by a people in exile, who needed to choose and claim an ancestor who would give them hope for a homeland and a future.

 

As Jesus makes his way through the same dusty hills that his distant ancestor once traveled, in search of security and progeny, I hear in his words about Jerusalem the same sort of longing for happy endings that Abram expressed in his prayers. Would that Jerusalem would repent and change; would that Jesus’ reception there would remain one of blessing, the Palm Sunday “Hosanna in the highest” and not the Good Friday “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

 

I have not yet seen the movie “The Passion of the Christ” and so I won’t speculate on whether the film truly antagonizes relations between Christians and Jews, or strays from what the Gospels report about Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem. (See it yourself in the next two weeks and we’ll consider it together, on the evening of March 21^st.) But the bloody violence portrayed by the movie’s actors must pale in comparison to the real-life explosions and their aftermath that have become almost daily experience in modern-day Jerusalem. The children of Abraham have a long way to go before we can claim without weeping  our common legacy from a man who pleaded, argued with, and ultimately trusted in God.

 

But not without difficulty. “O Lord, what will you give me?” Abram moans in our first lesson. “Where is the promised offspring?  I’m not sure I can wait any longer!” Here is a different view of our forefather than our first introduction, a few chapters earlier, when God mysteriously called upon him to leave his home in Ur and take to the road, destination unknown, simply because God asked him to... and he did it. Now, older, more worldly-wise, thinking about retirement, Abram is having grave doubts. Would his fate really turn out as promised? Or has all this caravaning-about been for nought?

 

It’s a question each of us has faced at some time or another. And Jesus, too, I’m quite certain. Where will our faith take us?  How will we know we’re going the right way? Couldn’t we please have some sort of a sign, a guarantee, that we’re doing what we ought to be, and that our prayers really do have a divine audience? The message Abram receives is to come outside and look up – look at the stars, try to count them, and know that God’s promises, God’s mercies, are more infinite than these.

 

In the middle ages, those dark times for Jews when Abraham was elevated to higher and higher estate, the great jewish scholar called Rashi[2] suggested a new interpretation of this human and divine encounter, a night of eerie visions and an everlasting covenant: Rather than just a literal reading that God took him outside the tent, God also takes Abram outside his usual way of thinking. The stars, via astrology, were thought to control one’s destiny. Instead, God is controlling Abram’s destiny – one that will include many changes, starting with that famous name change, Abram to Abraham; and Sarai who was barren, would become Sarah the mother of Isaac.

 

Stepping out of the tent, or “outside the box” in modern idiom, can open our eyes and our minds to the promises God does make. When destiny – however we try to read it – looks overpowering, God’s love reaches through it and shatters its hold, if only we will dare to look and to trust, and move ahead. Father Abraham, who sounds so much like us in his insecurities and questioning, receives that tremendous promise, vast as the heavens. So did Jesus, in his prayer time and at moments like the Garden of Gethsemane, when he was so terrified to go forward, and yet knew at his core that God went with him, even to the cross. It may not always be obvious; the night may get darker before the dawn, as was the case for Abram, waiting to see what would happen.  

 

Perhaps that was most frightening time of his life, wanting to trust in God yet needing something more. We have known times like that, too. What will be the test results? Will there be good news? Can we afford the plans we always thought we could make? Will someone be there for us when we get sick, or just need a friend? Our nights of waiting can last hours, days, even months I suspect.

 

But to those who wait in faith, a community waits with them. The night is accompanied by the presence of Christ, who waited too; and just before daybreak comes a reiteration  of the unbreakable covenant: “I am your God, you are my own child, and I do bless you.” As it was first given to Abram so many centuries ago, and made flesh and blood in Jesus, so we are to claim it, and look for its reality. The dawn appears.

 

And Jerusalem, unhappy home of Abraham’s children: will there be dawn for her? It will not be easy; and the building of walls only makes reconciliation less possible. Division has never been a means for lasting security. But perhaps more people will claim their common ancestor and go outside the tent, to look for the promise that has never been revoked. So I find both hope and challenge in Bruce Feiler’s conclusions, written after many dusty miles, probing conversations and inner searchings:

 

“We can, like Abraham, leave behind our native places – our comfortable, even doctrinaire traditions –  and set out for an unknown location, whose dimensions may be known only to God but whose mandate is to be a place where God’s blessing is promised to all.  In short, we can create Abraham number Two Hundred Forty-one. And we must.”[3]

 

May peace come to Jerusalem, and to each of us in our own dark nights. Step outside the tent and behold the stars.    

 

Amen.