Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
[please click on one of the items above for more information]
============================================================
SERMON
Have you ever been on a retreat,
or in a class or somewhere,
where they made you do this thing called a “trust walk”?
That’s where they pair you up,
and they blindfold one of you,
and then you have to trust your partner
to lead you around, and keep you from
running into a wall,
or falling down the stairs,
or tripping over a rock,
or whatever!
I always hated those.
I didn’t mind so much when it was my turn to see,
and to lead someone else;
that I could handle.
But I can’t stand when it’s my turn
to have the blindfold!
I don’t like being told that it’s time for me to make a journey,
but I don’t get to see where.
I remember one time,
a partner had me running across an open field.
It probably should have been exhilarating,
but it wasn’t.
All I could think was,
suppose I fall down and break my leg
and they have to shoot me?
I want to know where I’m going.
I’m not sure I could do what Abram did.
Pick up and leave a place where he was successful,
where he had land and possessions and a family,
and journey off to a place known only to God,
who says to him, basically,
“just keep walking, and I’ll tell you when you’re there.”
I mean, that would be even worse than
packing up the car and leaving Texas
to go to seminary in New Jersey for three years!
Then, at least, I knew exactly where I was going,
and when I would be able to come back!
Abram had no such assurances.
He had no carefully-highlighted road map from AAA
to guide him for his journey.
No way of knowing whether he would ever
see his native land again.
And yet he went.
At age seventy-five, no less!
I’m especially not sure I could do that.
Now of course, the Bible tells us
only the highlights of the story;
there’s not room for all the picky details.
So it might be that Abram
required a good deal of persuasion.
Maybe he really didn’t want to go.
Maybe he argued with God about it for a while –
we certainly see him doing a lot of that
later on in the story.
Or maybe God called him when he was fifty,
and he only got around to answering the call
when he was seventy-five!
We can’t know any of that, of course.
But what matters is that Abram did respond.
He obeyed the call of God
to journey forth into the unknown.
And whether we know it or not,
that is God’s call to us as well.
It may not be quite such a dramatic uprooting
as happened to Abram and his family …
Our journeying might take place
entirely within the limits of Dallas County.
Or it might take us halfway around the world.
It might involve our whole family,
or it might be a journey for us to make alone.
We can never know all the details at the outset.
Which is why, sometimes,
it is so hard for us to say yes
when God calls.
It’s rarely ever just crystal-clear
what it is we’re saying “yes” to.
And so our “yes” requires a leap of faith,
which is a difficult acrobatic feat for many of us.
Sort of akin to what those crazy freestyle ski jumpers
have been doing in the Olympics recently.
I suppose that there ae a few folks around
who really enjoy the flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants
way of living,
and who like to be unplanned and spontaneous
about nearly everything.
I’ve known a few,
and find them very interesting
though I don’t understand them at all!
These people may find it easier
to answer a call from God
simply because it doesn’t matter to them
if the road ahead is clearly mapped out.
Whatever happens, happens.
It’s an adventure. It’s life.
You go with the flow.
But most of us, I think,
want more clarity than that.
If you’re obsessive like me,
you want a microscopically detailed road map.
Most of us at least want a general direction,
a compass heading.
But God’s call to Abram is, get up and go.
When you get there, I’ll tell you.
Until then, just keep walking.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about why
that is so difficult …
to journey into the unknown at God’s command.
And I can only speak for myself,
but I don’t think I’m that atypical.
The first feeling, deep in the gut, is:
I’m afraid to venture into the unknown.
Like the ancient maps,
which would draw in the whole known world,
and then out at the edge of the sea
was written, “Here be monsters.”
What if there are “monsters” in the unknown?
What if I get lost?
There’s no map, remember?
What if people don’t want to hear
the message that I’m supposed to bring them?
What if God wants me to go far away
where they eat really strange stuff?
What if God wants me to do something
I’m really scared to do?
I imagine we can all think of fears we have
in relation to an unknown future:
things we might be asked to give up,
scary things we might be asked to do,
or that might be done unto us,
and so on, and so on.
But what I invariably recognize in myself
when I start to dig behind that fear
and try to discover what’s really going on …
I find that what allows the fear to happen
is a lack of trust.
So often, we are fearful because
we don’t trust God to look after us.
We’re afraid God will send us journeying
into some unknown wilderness
and then leave us there, alone and unsupported.
But that’s not how God operates!
We know that in our heads;
we affirm it as a statement of faith.
But how hard it is for our head to get the message
into our fearful gut.
How hard it is sometimes
to take even a few little trusting steps,
much less that giant leap of faith.
For the first twenty years of my life,
I was a normal human being;
I was scared to death to
get up and talk in front of people.
That is one of the most universal human fears.
And yet … here I am.
I ought to have learned from experience long ago
that God does not ignore our fears.
God will address them in one of two ways:
One possibility is that God will not call you
to do something that you’re afraid to do.
If you are petrified to speak in front of people,
maybe God isn’t calling you to be a liturgist,
or a preacher, or teacher.
If you find it genuinely scary to visit people in hospitals,
then perhaps God has in mind
something entirely different for you to do.
If you’re afraid to approach a stranger
to invite him or her to church,
then it may be that God wants you to focus on your friends.
But the second possibility
is what seems to happen to me the most often:
God calls you to something that God knows quite well you’re afraid of,
and the call is clear enough
that you can’t ignore it, at least not for long,
but God works some kind of divine magic
and somehow removes the fear from you.
I wouldn’t be standing here otherwise –
I couldn’t be.
I don’t know how that happens;
I only know that it happens.
It’s happened to me too often to ignore.
But that still leaves a question –
why journey into the unknown at all?
Why would God want us to do that?
Why can we not stay where we are,
doing what we do well,
living with what is familiar, and comfortable?
I think the answer is found in
God’s words to Abram:
“I will bless you and make your name great,
so that you will be a blessing.”
We are to be a blessing to others of God’s children.
Maybe someone as near as the next pew …
maybe, someone just down the block from the church …
maybe, someone halfway around the world.
We are God’s instruments, despite our fears,
to be a blessing to the world.
We don’t make the leap of faith,
the journey into the unknown,
for our own sake, or God’s:
we do it for others.
And we are at a crucial moment in the life of this church,
where we have to make a journey.
It may be a literal journey, or a symbolic one,
but it’s increasingly apparent that we can’t stay where we are.
What’s tough is,
it’s not at all clear to us yet
where it is we’re supposed to be journeying.
God is telling us to get up and go,
to leave our comfort zone and journey to a place
that God will show us …
only, as with Abram,
God for some reason isn’t going to show us the destination yet.
We’ve been talking among ourselves about various possibilities,
and some of them sound really scary to some of us.
Kind of like falling off the map into “Here be monsters.”
Somehow, we have to recover our trust …
To trust that either,
(1) God isn’t going to call us to something
which is that frightening to us, or,
(2) God is going to fix us so that we
no longer find it frightening.
Either way, then the journey can continue.
Without that trust, that leap of faith,
we can’t start the journey at all.
And, we may go astray from time to time.
Abram did some incredibly stupid stuff along his journey
at times when he got scared again,
and forgot that it was God’s journey he was on,
and started trying to save himself.
So we may make mistakes;
we may take wrong turns and have to backtrack and try again;
we may do a few incredibly stupid things.
Welcome to the human race.
What matters isn’t knowing the destination before we begin.
What matters is deciding to get up and make the journey.
And then going, even when the end point is unknown,
even when the road isn’t clear,
even when we’re a little bit scared about what lies ahead.
Our calling is to be a blessing,
and not only to one another!
“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house
to the land that I will show you …”
Go, from what is familiar and comfortable and what you’ve always known,
into the unknown.
That is where God is,
waiting to bless us.
Amen.
© 2002 Julie
Adkins (e-mail: Drjadkins@aol.com)