Sermons from the Pulpit

Avram went, as the Lord had spoken to him, . . .
and Avram was five years and seventy years old. -Genesis 12:4

        Avram, or Abram, or Abraham, whatever his name is — I think I'll call him Avram today, in honor of this wild, strange translation by Everett Fox. Avram could have said, "I'm too old for this." He could have said, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." He could have shown reluctance or resistance in any number of ways. He could have gotten all bogged down in dumb questions, like Nicodemus did. You note that unlike Nicodemus, who sought Jesus out in the middle of the night, Avram didn't go looking for trouble. He was just minding his own business. Yet it's Avram, the draftee, who behaves like a volunteer, and Nicodemus, the volunteer, who chickens out and shrinks back.

        I wonder how old Nicodemus was when he did this. In one of those movies about the life of Jesus, I forget which one, the part of Nicodemus is played by Laurence Olivier wearing a white beard looking to be in his sixties at least. Maybe you figure it doesn't make any difference what age he was, but it does to me. I want to know when I'll finally be old enough so that I can be safe from having to leave everything behind and start over. When's it going to be my turn to be an old dog?

        Avram is still held up today as the very model of a faithful individual for all ages and places, and I've contributed to that, but the older I get the more he makes me nervous. Scholars of the Bible tell us we shouldn't make too much of how old he was when God fingered him, because all those patriarchs and matriarchs lived so impossibly long that age didn't mean the same thing to them it means to us. Abraham, for example, lived to be 175, so when he was 75 he still had more than half his life ahead of him. In relative terms I'm already a lot older than that.

        So can I relax now? That's the way life is supposed to go, isn't it? In your youth you can be footloose, you're not tied down, you get to sow your wild oats and experiment and explore and all that. And as you get older you settle down, you slow down, you accumulate stuff, you gradually start looking back more than forward, you take it easier, you stop needing to prove yourself. Right? We talk like that all the time.

        Well, so does Nicodemus. "How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?" He'd fit right in with us.

        Oh, we'll go for a new start even in old age if we can engineer it ourselves. Retire and move to New Hampshire and join a new church. How's that for going out on the edge? Pick up a computer and start surfing the 'Net and trading email with the grandchildren. Buy an RV or a houseboat. Take a trip to China or Australia.

        I don't mean to make fun of all that. It's great to think about reaching a time in life when you can actually get clear of some stuff, when you can go out and take advantage of new opportunities that didn't used to be open to you. I'm looking forward to it. Even though one of you said to me that the real reason why we retire is so that we'll have the extra time we need to find our car when we forget where we parked it, and to put out the fire and clean up the mess when we put aluminum foil in the microwave.

        But now Avram, what he got didn't bear any resemblance to retirement. He just got yanked out of life as he knew it and shoved into a life that he had no experience with, that he had never practiced or prepared for, and that he couldn't anticipate from one day to the next with any confidence. Such violence, such trauma! And just at the stage of life where a person needs a break, and deserves it, too.

        Avram is an exemplar of faith, but also, it seems, of rotten luck. We marvel at his faith, wonder where he mustered it, and despair of imitating it — and (I suspect) we hope and pray daily that we will never have such bad luck that we need it. His ready willingness to trust and obey God's summons into the unknown is remarkable, but we'd prefer to admire it from a safe distance. When you take faith too far it becomes what we call "blind faith," which we do not wish to have because it presupposes catastrophic change in one's life and because we do not perceive it as healthy or mature.

        Some of you have already found the hole in this line of reasoning — or rather it has found you and put the finger on you, just as surely as God did it to Avram. You've learned, one way or another, that blind faith is the only kind there is. I don't think this is a discovery we ever make voluntarily. We learn it only when we get cornered by it — when the new start or the rebirth or whatever we call it really does come from above, as Jesus put it, or out of the blue, if you prefer to put it that way, and not at all from our careful plans to do all the things we've always wanted to do but never done.

        No, Nicodemus, we don't have to go back into the womb a second time and get born again. Nothing like that. All we have to do is undergo all the chances and changes of this mortal life, as the old Book of Common Prayer called them. Nicodemus seems to have thought starting over was an option, and he could reject if it seemed undesirable. Don't we wish!

        But promises do get broken, and some dreams don't materialize while some nightmares do. "Grow old with me," we say to someone, and mean it body, soul and spirit, but can't will it to work out that way.

        Where did we ever get the idea that the older you are, the more settled your life is? It's totally false! The truth is that the older you are, the more upheavals and uncertainties you can expect. The world has a lot of gall patting these folks on the head and calling them old geezers and senior citizens and golden agers and whatnot. Their lives are so perilous, we ought to give them medals just for having the courage to get up in the morning, and we shouldn't be fussing about whether they deserve all those government benefits and pensions, we should think of it as combat pay!

        Wow, I'm glad I got that out of my system. I feel better now.

        And all you young folks out there who are thinking you wouldn't have come to church today if you'd known the sermon was going to be a pep talk for the social security set, you better listen up too. There's no sanctuary for you.

        Didn't you hear about Levis? You know, the blue jeans people, Levi Strauss? They just announced major layoffs and cutbacks, plant closings, executives' heads rolling — and you know why? Because the youth market isn't buying them! They're considered, and this is an exact quote from the newspaper, stodgy. One kid said, "They're the kind of clothes your father wears." Take that, you Woodstock generation sixties hippie flower children.

        The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. We do not easily welcome things into our lives if we have no idea where they come from or where they are headed. A sailor likes to ride the wind, a leaf doesn't mind if it gets blown around. Which are we?

        Last Sunday, as a favor to another church, this place served as what we call a "neutral pulpit." One of the more insightful people among us, being a relative newcomer to the United Church of Christ and unaccustomed to the lingo, found this terminology remarkable and told me afterwards that it seemed self-contradictory: how in heaven's name can a pulpit be neutral? And I thought, thank you, God, for sending us people who get it — people who know how outlandish faith is bound to be, in this day and age — people who actually expect God to grab them, and call them, and send them, and mystify them, and stop them in their tracks, and start them, over, and over, and over — people who choose to be chosen by God. People, perhaps, like you.