SunAug82010
It often seems to me that life is a long process of leaving home and coming home again.
Robert Frost once said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
My family of origin is growing older and larger and getting more spread out as the years pass. As a result some of us have, in sort of an unspoken, not overly organized fashion, endeavored to get as many of us together at least once a year as possible. So in July I flew home to the northwest and over a two-week period in the latter part of the month, was able spend some quality time with my 92-year-old Mom and six siblings. All of us and our families, a group totaling 45-50 persons, plus a couple of pets who think they are persons, gathered at my youngest brother’s home on July 24. There we enjoyed conversation and food and games.
Living in northeast Ohio, I have gotten farthest away from the geographical center of my family in southwest Washington State. My younger sister Diane with her husband Steve and their four children, now pretty much grown and flown, have settled in southeast Oklahoma and the southwestern part of the country, a long way from where we grew up. A younger brother Dave lives in Eureka, California, about a nine-hour drive south my hometown of Castle Rock, Washington.
When people learn that I grew up a long way from here, they often ask how I happened to end up in northeast Ohio. In fact Jan’s and my journey to the Cleveland area and Federated has been long and interesting (at least to us). We graduated from college in southern California in 1970, packed all of our earthly goods into the smallest covered U-Haul trailer you could rent, hooked it onto the back of our 1970 American Motors Corporation Hornet and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where I enrolled in seminary and Jan went to work at the international headquarters of Hallmark Cards.
Three-and-a-half years later in early 1974 I finished my seminary course. We again packed all of our worldly belongings, this time into a medium-sized U-Haul truck, and headed for Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, located in the south central part of the state about 30 miles southwest of Harrisburg. By this time our worldly belongings filled about half of the U-Haul Truck. In Shippensburg I pastored a Nazarene church and Jan worked in administration at Shippensburg State University.
Almost five years later in the fall of 1978 we again moved, this time to Duxbury Massachusetts on the Boston south shore. The move required a full-size U-Haul Truck and, when we pulled out of Shippensburg, it was packed to the gills,. During our seventeen years in New England we lived in three different south shore seaside communities. In addition to Duxbury, we also lived in Plymouth and Marshfield. I worked in two different churches over that time and Jan was employed at the Jordan Hospital in Plymouth. Our daughter Kylie was born about a year after we moved to New England.
Then in 1995 I received a call to become associate pastor at Federated. We moved mid-summer of that year to a home in Solon. This time professional movers packed up all of our possessions and loaded them onto a moving van for the trip to northeast Ohio. I officially joined the staff here at the end of August. Do the math and you’ll find that we have been here fifteen years. The fifteen years at our home in Solon are the most Jan and I have lived in any home, since we were married 41 years ago.
So, over the last 40-plus years we’ve been from the west coast to the east coast and now we’re headed west. Calculating the rate and direction we’re going, I figure in another 30-40 years we’ll be back on the west coast.
Both of this morning’s lectionary passages deal with Abraham or, as he is referred to in Genesis 15, Abram. I can identify to some extent with Abraham, because he too was a person who moved around a good bit in life. First he moved with his father Terah and other family members from Ur in the vicinity of present day Saudi Arabia to Haran, which was probably located in what is now the southern part of Turkey.
After his father Terah died in Haran, Abraham sensed God calling him to move with his extended family to Canaan, in what would be modern day Israel. When a severe famine struck the area, as they occasionally did, Abraham was again on the move, this time to Egypt to ride out the drought. He remained there until he and the Egyptian leadership got out of sorts and they invited him and his people to leave, which he did, returning to Caanan.
I don’t know how it is for you, but for me it has sometimes been easier and other times more difficult to know where I am supposed to go and what I am supposed to do in life. What I would like is a vision in living color or a flashing neon sign across the wall that says, “This is the way. Walk ye in it.” I would like a Garmin with where I am supposed to go programmed into it, one that will give me step-by-step instructions on how to get there. What I usually get is something much less dramatic, much more difficult to decipher.
I think during my life God has most often lead through open doors. I have tried not to miss them. I have also tried, not always successfully, to avoid walking through the closed ones or forcing them open. Seeing the open doors is not always easy. And waiting for doors to open can be equally difficult.
There is a great story, which comes out of the book of Acts. The Apostle Paul is on his second missionary journey. He is revisiting churches he established on a missionary journey several years earlier. In the port city of Troas in Asia Minor Paul runs headlong into a brick wall.
He doesn’t know where he is supposed to go. He prays. Going back doesn’t seem to be an option. He prays some more. Still no answer. We don’t know how long this period of indecision and uncertainty lasted. Finally one night in the middle of the night clarity came to him. In a vision Paul sees a man from Macedonia, calling out for help and he responds. As a result the gospel, the good news of how God’s love was expressed in Jesus, ends up spreading from Asia Minor into the southern part of Europe.
Our Hebrews text this morning says, “It was by faith Abraham obeyed God's call to go to another place God promised to give him. He left his own country, not knowing where he was to go.” Does this seem a little unreasonable to you?
God: “Abraham, Come on, get up, we’re going!”
Abraham: “Where we going?”
God: “I’m not telling.”
This past Friday a memorial service was held in our sanctuary for Peggy West. Peggy died a week ago today as a result of injuries suffered in an accident at Lakeside, the Chautauqua-like learning and retreat center west of Cleveland.
As I met with her family earlier in the week to plan Friday’s service, her children, Jason and Tammy, told me of how, when they were little, Peggy would suddenly announce at the beginning of the day, “Come on! Get up! Get dressed! We’re going on an adventure.”
But she wouldn’t tell them where they were going. It was a mystery. It might be to a museum or to the zoo or to a fair. They never knew until they got there. Those were special and memorable times for Peggy’s children, as evidenced by the way they talked about them. Though the children did not know where they were going, when the mystery trip began, they knew who they were going with and they trusted her and that was enough.
“ ...by faith Abraham obeyed God's call to go to another place God promised to give him. He left his own country, not knowing where he was to go.” The one important thing Abraham knew, however, was that he was not making the trip alone.
Melody was six years old and she answered the phone at her home one evening. Her mother had been admitted to the hospital a couple of days earlier and a woman from her church was calling and asked Melody, “How’s everyone doing?”
“Oh, not so good,” said Melody. “Mommy’s in the hospital and me and Markie and Mikey and Mandy and Mary and Daddy are here all alone.”
When a significant person is missing from your life, it doesn’t matter how many other people you are surrounded by, you will still have the sense that you are all alone. And when that person is present, it doesn’t really matter what else is happening in your life. You sense that somehow you will be able to get through it, that no load is too heavy to bear.
As many of you know, I grew up on a small 40-acre farm. When I was younger, we had several milk cows. Though from time-to-time we sold a small amount of milk commercially, most of the time it was used for our family’s consumption. One of my enduring childhood memories involves going out to the barn in the evening to help my Dad milk the cows. I was six years old.
After the task was finished and the cows were turned out to pasture, I helped my Dad carry the large, heavy pailful of milk back to the house. He took a 2 ½ foot broken broom handle and slipped it under the handle of the milk pail. He took one end, I took the other and together we carried the milk-laden bucket. I didn’t realize at the time what was happening, when Dad slid his end of the broom handle down close to the handle of the milk pail. While I thought I was carrying an enormous amount of weight, he in fact carried most of it.
Give all your worries and cares to God, for God cares about you, the author of 1st Peter writes (5:7, NLT). And so we are invited to cast all of our cares – our personal cares and family cares, our vocational cares and health cares, our cares for the present and cares for the future, our cares for our community, our country and our world...we are invited to cast all of our cares on God.
“ ...by faith Abraham obeyed God's call to go to another place God promised to give him. He left his own country, not knowing where he was to go.” Perhaps the place to which we are being called, a city that has real foundations, one planned and built by God, is not only or primarily a physical place. Perhaps we are being called to a spiritual place, a place of faith and trust.
There we will discover we are not alone. There we will experience healing. There we will be nurtured. There we will grow and develop and become the people we have the potential to become. There we will be equipped and sent out to help make God’s realm a reality in our world.
Where? A place God has promised, a city with real foundations, one planned and built by God.