February 21, 2016
LENT 2
SCRIPTURE: Hebrew Bible: Genesis 15: 1-18 (contemporary reading)
Epistle: Philippians 3: 17 – 4:1
Gospel: Luke 13: 31-35
MEDITATION
Promises! Promises! Promises?
Promises are a complicated thing! This last week the choir, Michelle and I went to Oliver Lodge to do the Thursday service there. I had been thinking about the scripture this week and the problem with promises. I asked that gathered community how many of them had made promises in their lives. Hands went up – almost everyone. Then I asked them how many of them had kept all their promises. Not one single person put up their hand! That’s one of the problems with promises – we make them – we mean to keep them – and we fail in those promises more often than we succeed.
14 years ago I presided at the wedding of my oldest daughter. My son-in-law was not raised with any religious affiliation – never went to church, never attended Sunday School and knew very little about the whole world of faith. Tara on the other hand had experienced as a child all that a church affiliation meant. I told them that if I was to do the wedding service that there would have to be at least one scripture and one prayer. I tell that same thing to all the couples that I marry. I guess there was a lot of discussion going on between my daughter and her fiancé and when we sat down to discuss the service they had a plan! They told me that it would be fine to have the scripture and prayer but they were clear on one thing – they did not want to make any promises to God in their service. My daughter said to me that it would be fine if God made promises to them in the service but they were very clear they didn’t want to make any promises to God! I said OK! In part I think I accepted that because I think it is the way most of us are if we are honest. We are reluctant to make promises to God but we are OK if God promises us whatever it is we need God to promise. That’s another complication that we have with promises!
We, gathered here, are members of a faith community. Just by that fact we are part of “something” that has to do with making promises to God and each other. Each week we begin our service by “passing the peace”. It is such a common practice that we do each week that it is easy to do it with a sense of roote without thinking about what we are doing. It is not just a simple greeting or a friendly “good morning.” It is really a promise that says to each other – I recognize you as a follower of Christ and I promise you that I am also that. I greet you with a promise that in this community of faith you are welcome and I will strive to share with you a journey of faith. You are loved by Christ and so am I. Together we will live our faith and try to be the best followers of Christ that we can be. That’s really what we are doing when we pass the peace. We are engaged in a promise toGod, to Jesus, and to each other.
We live our faith lives in this community of faith under a covenant promise to each other and to God. Your staff and your board members have a covenant relationship with each other and we have codified that in words that we wrote down. We have made promises to each other about how we are going to live out our relationships with each other and God as we go about the work of this community. This coming week your Unified Board is going to spend some time reflecting on that covenant of relationship and how we live that out. At the beginning of each board meeting we read that covenant to each other, that covenant of relationship, as a reminder of who we are and how we want to be. It is not just an empty ritual or empty words. It is meant to make a difference in how we do the work of relationship and how seriously we take that. Promises, such as that, are very important to how we live out our faith journey with each other and the promises we make to you, our congregation, as we take on that responsibility of leadership.
In the story of Abram and God that we just read we learn more about the promises that God makes to all of us. Here in this story we see a pattern, a pattern duplicated in dozens of similar stories throughout the scriptures. God promises, promising to use our lives for God’s high purposes. The recipient of the call expresses fear or anxiety, and then there is divine reassurance, followed by faithful response to the promise of God. We all want that at some level. We want to depend on the promises that God makes to us. We want to know that God is there for us no matter what happens in our lives, we want that sheltering wing that Jesus promises and we want to respond to that in some grandeurs way. And probably that is where the problem becomes real for us. No matter what our faith response is, we often find that we fall short in our response. We don’t seem to be able to live out our side of the promise. We look to those in scripture who seem to do it with such ease and we wonder. Think of Noah, or Moses, or Abraham and of course think of the disciples and most of all think of Jesus.We wonder when we think of those prophets of old, what is wrong with us that we cannot respond in the same way. We struggle to keep the promises we make to those in our lives, those we love and care about and we know how we fail at that and we become discouraged. If we can’t keep human promises then how can we hope to keep divine promises? That’s were the faithfulness of God and the teachings of Jesus’ come in. If we are willing to try then they promise us that they will be with us. It is the willingness that is the crucial point. We must be willing.
I was thinking a lot about this yesterday as I was at Presbytery all day and that is sometimes a challenge. And I was thinking about this yesterday morning as we opened our church to a family who needed a place to “muster” as they conducted a search for a missing 22 year old. They wanted to search the whole of the river front and one of the young women of the family told me that they went to every single church along the river to ask if they could have some spot to muster and where they could warm up during the day. And every church, along the river bank turned them away. I don’t know why, there might have been good reasons – but I wondered about that. In fact this young woman told me that one of the churches was very dismissive and not at all “nice”. That made me wonder even more. When we struggle at this time and in our own place and across our country, even across the world, when we struggle as Christians, as followers of Christ, as disciples, when we struggle to be faithful society seems to say to us “You don’t really matter.” I have to wonder how we fail in that promise to be faithful to what Jesus taught us. I see that in the example of this family. I don’t know if it had to do with racism because this family is Aboriginal, or whether it was just inconvenient for our fellow churches or whether they too were failing in what Jesus taught.
It really is not very much that takes anything from us. They came, they were here during the day, in and out, and I was here when they were ready to leave about 6 o’clock. They were very careful about everything, they asked me had they done everything, was everything OK. I looked and everything was in place, the kitchen was neat and tidy and I said yes everything was fine. They are coming back again today at 1 pm as they once again muster here as they go out on the search. I spoke to another young woman that was there and I asked her if everything had gone alright and had they found anything. She replied that no they had not found anything but that the response they were getting from the community in which he lived was encouraging. People were wishing them well. And that made me think even more about how we might be failing as a church or churches. If a community can be supportive but a church cannot then we really need to stop and think about what it is we are doing as churches. We need to stop and think about how it is we are living out our calling and our promise to be faithful followers of Jesus, to offer to the world all the love and hope that we have and promises of Jesus that we experience here in our faith community. We need to think about that as we ponder why it is that people don’t think that the church is relevant in their lives. And we need to continue to work hard, as hard as we possibly can, to show that world that the fact that we are disciplesof Christ means something to us and it means something to how we live in the world as we live our lives. May it be so. AMEN