Genesis 15:1-12;17-18
Here’s something I’m struggling to
understand: My father died a week and a half ago. I was there when he died, sitting with him through
the hard, final hours. My sisters and I
took care of the arrangements for his cremation. With my mother, we planned a celebration of
his eternal life and reveled in the love that his life had brought us. I’ve received prayers and good wishes from so
many of you, loving offerings of your beautiful hearts. All the evidence points to my father’s
absence from the life we shared here, and I know his death to be a fact. But here’s the thing: I don’t feel like he’s gone.
Now, maybe that’s denial. I do know grief doesn’t keep a schedule but comes
in waves when you least expect it, and those waves will continue to crash on
me. But even when I confront my sadness about
the distance between my father and me, it doesn’t feel like the relationship is
gone. So, rather than what I’m
experiencing being denial, maybe instead what I’m experiencing is friendship,
just now at a distance.
Friendship with a parent isn’t a given. Early in my life, my father was the authority
figure, the provider, the guy who went to work each day, and my partner in
playing catch in the back yard. Later,
he was the guy who didn’t understand me and whose advice seemed tired and worn.
Still later, there didn’t seem to be very
much for us to talk about, and getting together for family gatherings kind of felt
like a routine. My father and I did
share an annual special event – a trip together to see baseball games – and those
were good moments of remembering something deeper. But then there were the other 51 weeks of the
year. There wasn’t anything wrong,
exactly. We were just on hold.
And then, my father did something out of
character: He told me what he
needed. One of his great strengths was his
willingness to put the needs of others first; but the shadow side of that is
how hard it is, then, to say what you need yourself. Well, several years ago, my father found the
words. He simply said, “I’d really
appreciate it if you’d call home more often.”
He wasn’t looking for some huge change in my life or wanting me to feel
badly for the ways I’d been missing the mark.
He just wanted more connection. So
– through regular phone calls, and more-frequent visits, and those annual baseball trips, too – my father and I took stagnation
and turned it into a relationship that connected us even when we weren’t together. We took a good-enough parent-child dynamic and
turned it into friendship instead.
So, here we are at the second Sunday of
Lent, the season when the Church calls us to mend the ruptures in our relationship
with God. As you know, through this Lent,
we’re encouraging you to think about creating a rule of life as way to hold up and
nurture your spirituality. Now, for those
of us who find it hard even to give up chocolate or remember to say the Lord’s
Prayer at night, creating a rule of life probably sounds way over the top, something
more for nuns and monks than for folks like us.
But a rule can be just a few simple practices that encourage us to focus
on and strengthen our spiritual lives. So,
through these weeks of Lent, the sermons will flesh that out and ask us to consider
what we might do to build our relationship with God, with ourselves, with others,
and with God’s creation. You can also
join the Café 9:15 class, or the parents’ class, on Sunday mornings to learn more
about a rule of life – or you can just take home the green booklet in the entryway.
So, this week, the focus is building our relationship
with God. And as you might have guessed,
the experience of my father’s death is making me think about my relationship
with God differently.
I sort of missed the boat with the start
of Lent this year: I skipped Ash
Wednesday and the first Sunday of Lent; I haven’t really figured out something
to give up or take on; and I’ve been feeling kind of badly about all that. It’s not great form for the priest to ignore
Lent. But I’ve also heard God saying –
especially through the kindnesses so many of you have shared – I’ve heard God
saying it’s OK give myself a break and let go of the sense of failure, despite how
well I hang onto that. Because building
our relationship with God isn’t about getting good grades in religious
observance. Building our relationship
with God is about turning an acquaintance into a friendship.
We hear an example of that in today’s Old
Testament reading. As we come to this
story, Abram and God are in the process of building an extraordinary
relationship. A few chapters earlier, for
no apparent reason, the God of Israel tapped Abram on the shoulder as he was
enjoying his life in Mesopotamia and told him to leave his country and his people
to receive great blessing in a new land.
And Abram went, apparently persuaded by the power of God’s self-revealing. But over time – as Abram encountered famine,
and used his wife as a bargaining chip to save himself in Egypt, and rescued
his nephew’s household from warring tribes – over time, things didn’t seem to be
going so well for Abram, who’d risked everything he had on nothing but a
promise.
So, God comes to Abram again, which is
where we pick up today’s reading. Abram
is thinking God’s promise of a new land hasn’t really panned out. Plus, even if he does hang onto the land he’s
occupying in Canaan, he’s got no one to leave it to; so, it’s basically an empty
gift. So, even though it may seem disrespectful
to talk to the Lord God this way, Abram turns to God with some honest questions. He says, “Look, you brought me here, but how
am I supposed to know this land’s really mine?
And if it’s mine, who will it
go to once I’m gone?” So God says, “Look
toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. … So shall your descendants be.” (Genesis 15:5) Look at the signs I give you, God says, and
know that my word is good. Well, Abram
trusts their relationship enough to believe what God has told him. And God honors Abram’s trust by renewing the promise
of blessing beyond his dreams.
This kind of honest exchange between God
and Abram keeps going for several more chapters in Genesis, through blessings
and crises alike. There’s God renaming Abram
and Sarai as Abraham and Sarah, deepening the covenant they’ve made. There’s the question of whether Abraham’s son
with a slave will be his heir, or whether God can provide a child through Sarah
in her very old age. There’s Abraham’s
negotiation with God to save even a handful of faithful people in the doomed
city of Sodom. And there’s Abraham’s
time of deep testing, when God asks him to offer his only son as a sign of
Abraham’s dependence on God alone. This relationship
between Abraham and God isn’t easy; it’s full of twists and turns. Their relationship takes work, and faith, and
honesty, and investment, and patience.
Above all, it takes connection – like any friendship. And that’s how later books of Scripture describe
Abraham, as nothing less than the “friend of God” (2 Chronicles 20:7, Isaiah
41:8, James 2:23).
OK, so, we’re not Abraham. Few of us receive the word of the Lord in
visions or witness holy fire and smoke to assure us of God’s promises. But we, too, can be friends of God. We, too, are inheritors of Abraham’s covenant,
the mutual promise that as we invest our hearts and lives to follow God
faithfully, so God will invest God’s heart and life to bless us in ways we can’t
imagine. And though we might not see visions,
I do think we should listen for the voice of God calling us to a friendship we
might never have expected was possible. Because
God asks for our friendship with the same surprisingly vulnerable request that
I heard from my own father: “I’d really appreciate it if you’d call home more often.”
In churchy language, we call it
prayer. But as it says in the guide to a
rule of life that we’re using this Lent,1 prayer is not about saying
the right words at specific times, no matter how much we may love our prayer
book and its liturgy. Prayer is about how
we live – being responsive to God’s presence in all the facets of our lives. It’s seeing God’s hand in the beauty of
creation and hearing God’s voice in the insights of people we trust. It’s looking for God’s direction in
situations that might otherwise bind us in anxious fear. It’s saying “thank you” for momentary gifts
of beauty and blessing. It’s saying “I’m
sorry” when we find ourselves headed the wrong direction, and then turning a
different way instead. I think that’s
what St. Paul means when he writes about “praying without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians
5:17) – prayer that’s like breathing, prayer that offers nothing more and
nothing less than our whole selves, prayer that brings us divine love in response. In the same way that God takes mundane bread
and wine and makes Jesus Christ present within it, God inhabits the mundane moments
of our lives, sitting beside us as our true companion. As Jesus said to his followers at the Last
Supper, “I do not call you servants any longer, … but I have called you friends”
(John 15:15).
Growing a relationship with God isn’t
nearly as imposing as it seems. God’s
not asking for heroic efforts. God’s not
demanding that we get all the answers right.
Our heavenly parent is simply asking us to pick up the phone and call
home more often.
1.
Society
of St. John the Evangelist. Growing a Rule of Life workbook.
Available at: www.ssje.org/growrule.
Accessed March 15, 2019.
