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En el nombre del Dios: creador, redentor, y santificador. Amen.
Have you ever been on a family trip where that question came up? Did you notice how the tone of the question changed over time from “Are we there yet?” to “Are we there yet?” to “Are we there yet?”
The story in today’s reading from Genesis is that kind of journey. It’s a story of new beginnings… lots of them, all part of a larger divine plan that the people involved couldn’t have known at the time. Every time they landed somewhere, they were sent off again, so the answer to “Are we there yet?” was “We’re on our way!” …over and over again.
Abram went wherever God sent him, whenever God sent him. It was an act of faith, trusting God enough to obey God’s call to him to “Go…. to the land I will show you… and, God promised to make a great nation of Abram, to bless him, to make his name great (meaning lots of descendants), and to make Abram himself a blessing.
So, Abram and his entourage of family, servants, and livestock left his hometown of Ur and made the arduous journey to Haran (about 600 miles- a journey that would take months to complete) where Abram purchased slaves which he added to their number. Then, following God’s leading, the clan went to Canaan (another 600 miles). But Canaan wasn’t ready for them. They couldn’t live there because there was a famine, in spiritual language, there was extreme scarcity. They weren’t ready, so they were sent down to a foreign place where they knew they were not yet at home. When all was ready, years later, God sent them back to Canaan.
Being semi-nomadic, the frequency of the changes may not have been entirely unexpected, but given their number, each move of Abram’s clan was an enormous undertaking. As they traveled, Abram built altars to God, physically and spiritually identifying the land as God’s land. Where the name of God had been absent in the land, Abram made it present.
I wonder what Abram and his clan thought when he finally got to Canaan, where God promised him, “To your offspring I will give this land” only to discover the great famine. Did they blame Abram for poor leadership? Did they wonder if God was punishing them for something? Did they get frustrated or mad at God? Did their trust in God’s promises wane?
We know from this side of history, that the promises God made to Abram, later called Abraham, have been fulfilled. God did make of Abraham a great nation with many offspring, and Abraham continues to be a blessing to us thousands of years later.
As Christians we are part of the nation of descendants promised to Abram. Our Muslim kin are too. We celebrate this truth every time we come together at our Abraham’s Table gatherings: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim children of the one God, sharing a meal, teachings, and friendship together here in Cullowhee, NC. It’s a beautiful thing.
When God says to Abram, “To your offspring I will give this land” this isn’t so much about a particular location as it is about the nature of “land” in God’s kingdom. As Jesus’ parables in the gospel show us, in the kingdom of God, land is an earthly womb where divine seeds are planted. In the first parable, we learn that no matter how much we watch and study, the phases of transformation, which Jesus described as moving from seed to plant to fruit, remain a mystery to us.
In the second parable, Jesus demonstrates that God holds all creation as sacred – which means set apart, dedicated for a purpose. Jesus uses the example of the mustard seed, a tiny little seed which somehow becomes so large a shrub that it serves many of God’s feathered creatures, providing a safe place for them to birth and house the fruit of their wombs. This tiny seed serves a very big divine purpose.
As Julian of Norwich wrote in her “Revelations of Divine Love,” “And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God. In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”
This is a comfort to us as we journey as a people into our divine purpose, which in the kingdom of God, happens in phases. As Abram wandered from Ur to Haran to Canaan to Egypt and back to Canaan, he and his clan were going through their own phases of development, much like the tiny mustard seed went through it phases of development.
Some of these phases can be really scary or painful. Imagine how the seed might respond if it could know it must shed its protective outer covering and die in order to live as a plant. Imagine if the plant knew that its life will only last long enough for it to produce its fruit, then it will die. Imagine if the fruit could know that within it were the seeds of new life but it would have to die in order for those seeds to be collected and planted in the divine womb.
The truth is, we don’t have to imagine. We’re living it. We are the seed; we are the plant; we are the fruit. In the divine economy, the presence of the harvest is in the seed.
At St. David’s, we are on a journey, and the new life being formed in us right now, our sacred purpose, is happening within the womb of God. There are phases of this journey that will be painful and scary. We may get where we think God is sending us, our Canaan, only to find that all is not yet ready and we must travel on while God prepares the “land” to sustain life.
Like Abram and his clan, our part in this is to trust God enough to live fully into each phase of this journey; trusting also in God’s plan, the fullness of which cannot be known to us; and traveling in unity as a clan: a close-knit community of interrelated families.
As we prayed in our Collect, “through the changing of the seasons Your Spirit renews the cycles of life.” We know this because we can observe it in creation all around us. And we believe it because we can feel it deep in our souls.
The Spirit of God renews the cycles of all our lives including our church life. God made us, God loves us, and God sustains us.
Do we trust that? Or maybe I should ask, Are we there yet?
Well, we’re on our way, aren’t we? Amen.
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