"Learning to Walk"
March 12, 2006: 2nd Sunday in Lent, Year B
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org

Scripture:
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him: "I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous." Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him: "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. As for Sarah your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her."

Romans 4:13-25
For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. For this reason the promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all Abraham's descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it is written, "I have made you the father of many nations")—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, Abraham believed that he would become "the father of many nations," (according to what was said, "So numerous shall your descendants be.") He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what God had promised. Therefore Abraham's faith "was reckoned to him as righteousness." Now the words, "it was reckoned to him," were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. In the same way, it will be reckoned also to us who believe in the One who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, Jesus who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen.

Sermon:
Lent is that season in the church when we contemplate the serious matters of confession, repentance, and change—change both in ourselves and in the wider world. So with that in mind, I offer these theological reflections:

Q: How many Southern Baptists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Twelve. One to change the bulb, and eleven to pray against the spirit of darkness that has entered the church.

Q: How many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Four. One to call the electrician, one to clear it with the vestry, and two to argue about how much more dramatic candles are.

Q: How many Pentecostals does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Just one, she already has her hands in the air.

Q: How many members of the United Church...of Christ does it take to change a light bulb?
A: One hundred and nine. Seven on the Light Bulb Task Force Sub-committee, who report to the twelve on the Light Bulb Task Force, appointed by the fifteen on the Board of Stewards. Their recommendation is reviewed by the Finance Executive Committee of five, who place it on the agenda of the eighteen-member Finance Committee. If they approve, they bring a motion to the twenty-seven Member church Council, who appoint another twelve-member review committee. If they recommend that the Church Council proceed, a resolution is brought to the Congregational Business Meeting. They appoint another eight-member review committee. If their report to the next Congregational Business Meeting supports the changing of a light bulb, and the Congregation votes in favor, the responsibility to carry out the light bulb change is passed on to the Board of Stewards, who in turn appoint a seven-member committee to find the best price in new light bulbs. Their recommendation of which hardware is the best buy must then be reviewed by the twenty-three-member Ethics Committee to make certain that this hardware store has no connection to sweatshop labor, defense contractors, or companies building the dividing Wall in Israel-Palestine. They report back to the Board of Stewards who then commissions the Steward supervising the sexton to ask him to make the change. By then the sexton discovers that one more light bulb has burned out.

But seriously folks...

But seriously, Lent is about change, in ourselves, in the church, in the world, and change is profoundly unsettling, even when the change we're contemplating is in itself positive. Think about Abram and Sarai in our reading from Genesis this morning: There they were, living comfortably at the oasis of Haran surrounded by their extended family when the Holy Spirit called them to chuck it all, to leave their country and their kindred and their family's home and strike out for some "promised" land to be named later. Talk about change! And as if all the physical and emotional dislocation of that journey were not enough, God continues to dog them all along the way. So when Abram is ninety-nine years old (!) the Spirit speaks again, calling them not just to a new place but to a whole new way of life, addressing the very essence of their spiritual and moral relationship with God:

"Abram and Sarai?"
"Yes, Lord?"
"I am El-Shaddai, God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless."
....Just that?

Yes, just that. But not just Abram and Sarai. As we stand here contemplating the Lenten road, it seems God is saying the same thing to us. "Change. Everything. Just unlearn all your broken, sinful ways of relating to the world, the ingrained habits of scarcity, captivity, blindness, and oppression that color your every thought, word, and deed—just stop it, stop missing the mark, stop falling short, and instead 'walk before me and be blameless.'"

Oh, ok. Well, since you put it that way: Sure. We'll get right on that.

It's a tall order, this whole repentance thing. And it begs the question of whether change, transformation, redemption is even possible. Can we really learn to walk before God blamelessly, grace-fully? After all, a lot is riding on this question. Some would say the fate of our immortal souls in heaven or hell hangs in the balance on exactly this point. But you know me. I like to focus more on 'life than after-life, and it's clear to me that our fate in this world, and the fate of this world, depend on how we answer.

If we cannot learn a new way to walk, if our human life is unalterably "nasty, brutish, and short," when left to our own devices, as English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes is so often quoted as saying, what hope do we have? None, and God Almighty is reduced to roll of traffic cop, enforcing the law we cannot help but break and under which we must be signed, sealed, and delivered to damnation. Taken in this context, the scene before us in Genesis becomes a cruel, cruel joke. God, who knows ahead of time just how often Abram and Sarai and their many descendents, i.e. us, will not just stumble but in fact run screaming away from the path of righteousness God sets for them—from that angle, God seems to be putting Abram and Sarai through a kind of field sobriety test, asking them to walk a line God knows they will not and cannot hold to. It's a set-up.

But I do not believe the game is rigged. I do not believe that God's call to Abram and Sarai and us to walk before God in righteousness is a joke. I do not believe God intends us to fail; in fact, I believe that God, whose mercy endures forever—I believe that more than anything, God wants us to succeed in changing our ways. God wants us to learn to "walk together in all God's ways, according as God is pleased to reveal unto us in the blessed word of truth"—to quote the words of our Congregational forbears in faith in the Salem Covenant of 1629, the words we used only last week to recommit ourselves together with our newest members to the way of God in Christ.

But how? How are we supposed to learn a new way to walk, at our age? God may want us to, and that's great, but what if we simply can't. What if we are so habit-bound to sin, what if, as the Apostle Paul himself says in the Letter to the Romans just a few scant chapters after today's reading, we "know that nothing good dwells within [us]," that "we can will what is right, but... cannot do it," (Rom 7:18)—well, what then? After all this time, maybe we just don't have it in us; after all, you can't teach an old dog new tricks, and looking back over the ignoble course of human history, not to mention my own personal history, I feel like a pretty old dog, indeed. Maybe, just maybe, as good as God is, maybe damnation is what we deserve? I mean, what kind of God would cast an eye over the inventory of all our sins, the minor and the major and the truly grotesque, and not decide to let us just go on stewing in our own juices for ever and ever, amen?

The God of Abram and Sarai, the God of Jesus Christ and our God, that's who. The God of not just glory, but of grace, who throughout all time bends all of God's Own Being toward loving us into walking and living grace-fully. The God who with divine patience endures everything, even the deadly cross of our sin, because beyond it lies the possibility of our own Easter resurrection. We may not have it in us to overcome our addiction to sin by ourselves, but the good news of the gospel is that we don't have to do it alone. This God we worship, the God who joins us right where we are in the person of Jesus is a God who "gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist;" in other words, what we don't have, God will give us. Where we are dead through sin, God will give us new life. God will not just tell us to walk in a new way. God will not just show us the way. God is the way... and the power to walk it with grace.

This is the covenant God made with Abram and Sarai and their children, the everlasting covenant that is borne out in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, God's eternal promise that extends even to us through the power of the Holy Spirit to overcome any obstacle that separates us from the love of God. This is our own hope against hope, hope beyond hope: God desires to save us, and what God wills, God accomplishes, so we will be saved.

Which is not to say we're off the hook. Far from it. God sets us on the way and walks with us, and guarantees our arrival, it's true, but it's still up to us to set one foot in front of the other and walk the walk day after day, year after year, generation after generation. And if we make God's goal our own, we cannot escape unchanged. There's no way around that. If we set our sights on becoming the people God created us to be, more grace-full people, we will have to let go of the familiar sin that so encumbers us. We will have to learn new habits, better habits, to replace the old. Like Abram and Sarai before us, we may even need to try on a new name—in our case, the name "Christian."

Lent is a season we set aside to be more intentional about taking on these new disciplines and practicing our faith with more purpose. Because, let's face it, most of us our woefully out of shape for this kind of exercise, and the body of Christ, the church? Well, we're plagued by every kind of spiritual ache and pain. We are old in the ways of the world, no doubt, but we are also only newborns when it comes to following God's ways. Or toddlers, just learning to walk, just taking our first shaky steps and still liable to fall down and go boom at any moment.

I am reminded of a passage from the prophet Hosea. Now, Hosea is not an easy book. The prophet was given a hard word to bring to the kingdom of Israel in the 8th Century B.C.E., a word of judgment against the people's longstanding habit of turning to easy-going idols of their own devising instead of pursuing their life-giving relationship with God. And Hosea brought didn't shrink from his call to this prophetic critique, but spoke plainly, even harshly. But in the midst of it all, there lies these very different words:

The Lord says, "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the false gods, and offering incense to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them... How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?... My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath" (Hosea 11, selected verses).

What a beautiful and tender image, so contrary to the fire and brimstone we have been taught to associate with God in the Hebrew Bible! In other words, like the best kind of father, the best kind of mother, God is there when we take those shaky steps, there to encourage us with open arms and support us and lift us up when we fall. But God also knows that this is something we have to learn to do for ourselves if we are to grow in faith, in justice, in peace, and in compassion, if we are to grow up to become the free people God created us to be.

So, yes, we will stumble, we will fall, we will trip over one another over and over again. Yes, we will get hurt and will hurt one another. But when we do, God will be there to embrace us and weep with us in love. We have God's word that God will not abandon us to our sin, but is intent on teaching us the way that leads to life. In Christ we see the depth of God's commitment to save all God's children. The church is God's gift to us of a community in which to practice this faith.

And we have this guarantee from Jesus, who knew God's heart best: "So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened." Then, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, Jesus himself plays out the metaphor of God as loving parent: "Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask!" (Luke 9:9-13).

So how many Christians does it take to change the world? Only two or three, we're told, gathered together in faith, but they have to really want to change... and be changed. For we believe that in God.s good time, we will learn to walk before God and be blameless and full of grace, and that that will make all the difference, for us and for the world. Let's ask God for that good gift today.