The first word that Abraham hears from God is the word leave. Leave your home, leave your country, leave your family, leave everything you have ever known to be true in your whole life. Leave, for an unknown land, and I will then make your family great. Abraham gets this message when he is 75 years old. He doesn’t get a visit from God either, he just hears a voice. If this happened today, most of us would probably just dismiss Abraham as a crazy old man. We would say that he should be put in an old folks home. We’d say all sorts of strange things about him, the people that knew him probably laughed at such a notion, that Abraham was going to follow the voice that was in his head is absurd. There is only one thing more absurd than telling people that you believe God is talking to you, and that is acting on it. How many of us actually act on the strange thoughts that run through our heads? Even if we think about acting on some of the things we think about, we run them by other people, making sure that our ideas aren’t as crazy as they might seem. Abraham doesn’t do this. He just accepts the fact that God is going to make him the father of all generations.
This is when we pick up in the story of Abraham and his wife Sarah. Sarah is almost 100 years old and has still not born any children for her husband. Obviously, she believes that she cannot have a child, and quite frankly, who can blame her? Is there anyone in this room today over the age of 60 that would still want to do all the work that comes with having a child? My guess is that very few of you, if any, would want such a thing. The faith that had originally sustained Abraham and Sarah was long gone. So much so that when this stranger stops by to visit, they laugh at him, they laugh at the idea that the God they once believed in would actually fulfill the promise made so many years ago. It is my guess that Abraham and Sarah didn’t actually believe the stranger until she started to show the signs of pregnancy. And understandably so, because as we grow older, we think that we are wise enough to know when someone is telling the truth or not.
This is the difficulty of faith. That faith used to fill us, and yet, as we age, it seems to disappear from view. It is quite similar to when we are children, believing in something like Santa Klaus or the Easter Bunny. At a young age, we are naïve enough to believe anything we are told. Then as we grow older, when we have had more experience at all that life has to offer, we become jaded, so much so that we start to not believe anything that we once thought might have been true. Have you ever gotten to the point where not only do you not have faith in something, but you begin to believe that anyone who believes in it is disillusioned? I’m pretty sure that this is what Abraham and Sarah were feeling. They know that God keeps most promises, but maybe one or two are forgotten, or perhaps fulfilled in different ways, like Hagar bearing Abraham’s first child. Maybe the promise changed, maybe it wasn’t meant to be, so many different maybes, that they were not sure what to believe.
When I look at the situation with Abraham and Sarah, I am reminded of our Moravian church and the long history that we have had. As the oldest protestant church in the world, we have been around quite a long time. In most non Moravian circles, we are described as a church that was important a pretty long time ago, but in modern times, seems to be pretty irrelevant. Sure, we have moments of goodness, we do some good out in the community, we have some mission work, but we aren’t anywhere close to where the church was when Zinzendorf was around. We are missing something that the church once had, and I think that thing is faith.
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with your pastor about this congregation. He was telling me about all of you, and about how loving a congregation this is. We spoke of his hopes for the congregation as Gordy will be ending his interim position. When I was reflecting back on our conversation for this sermon, I realized that as a whole, most of our churches are filled with loving people, we have a lot of hope for the future of the church, but something tells me that we are generally lacking in the faith department.
That begs the question, what is faith? Earlier in the liturgy we made a profession of faith, saying that we believe in God, the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. We professed belief in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, all things that we as Christians must have faith in. To me, it seems that we have gotten too comfortable with the thought that saying those words together means that we have faith. What good is a public profession of faith if we are only doing it in the presence of fellow Christians? While it does have some good, I must say, believing that such a statement is sufficient to call us people of faith is misleading.
True faith though, is more than a statement, but it something I have found extremely difficult to define in words. One of my favourite quotes on faith is from William Sloane Coffin. He writes in his book Credo: "I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings." That is the essence of what Abraham and Sarah do in the story today, they took a leap at the age of 75, and it took them nearly 25 years before they grew those wings. Abraham showed that faith is more than words, it is an action. That leads us to take a look at everything we do in our lives and see if it is something we are doing out of faith or something we are doing merely because we ought to do it. Are we walking off cliffs and letting our wings bring us down, or are we merely taking the stairs down, descending at our own pace? One of my favourite stories about the early Moravian mission movement is how the missionaries who came to the Caribbean islands brought very little with them, but when they did bring something, one of the few things they took with them was their headstone. That, my brothers and sisters, is a faith that very few of us are living today.
I wish that I could tell you that such a faith is possible if we just pray for it to happen. Of course we need to pray for such a dynamic faith everyday. But just because we pray for it doesn’t mean we simply receive it.
About few weeks ago, I was listening to the radio and heard the following quote. This person said that when we pray for something like patience, we do not simply get our patience meter refilled so that the next time we are in a tough situation, we will not be anxious, instead, God when we pray for patience, God grants us more situations for us to be patient in, thus learning as we go. I believe that the same is true of faith, we do not simply receive faith every time we pray for it, but instead, God grants us more times for us to radically live out the faith that we profess.
This last January, we had a class on Evangelism where we did a little bit of role playing. If any of the church members are here who went to the last synod meeting, you’ll remember what I’m talking about. Two people were given a situation in which one person could attempt to show their faith by talking to the person across from them. My friend got the role of playing a poor person on the bus who was asking for money, and I was the person who he was going to ask. Apparently, the scene was supposed to take place with me giving the person only a few dollars, maybe the spare change from my pocket, and then hoping he would go away. Instead, I pulled out my wallet and without looking at what was in there, pulled out a hundred dollar bill. Now, I knew it was a hundred dollars because of where I keep my money in my wallet, but completely threw my friend off guard. Now, perhaps I only gave him the money because I knew I would be getting it back, or because I wanted to impress my friends by whipping out a hundred dollar bill. I wish that I could tell you that I was carrying that much money when someone came up to me and really needed it, but I can’t do that. But I do know that someday, when someone does ask me for something, when God shows me an opportunity to live out my faith, that I am able to give more than just the spare change in my pocket, that I am willing to do something big, to do something reckless, that my faith in Christ comes through.
In the coming days, weeks and months, allow for God to speak to you. Allow God to guide you in a way in which you are uncertain of the outcome. Allow yourself to leap without looking. Next time a stranger asks you for money, think less about how they might spend it on booze and think more about how your generosity will shock what they think about Christians. Living our lives as people of faith is difficult. Abraham and Sarah did it, even in their old age. I’m pretty sure that we can do the same thing if we simply see the opportunity in front of us. Amen.
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