Sermons from the Pulpit
Camels Coming
Preached to Exeter Congregational United Church of Christ on the fourth Sunday after Pentecost, July 4, 1999, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.
"click" to hear.Genesis 24; Romans 7:15-21, 24-25; Matthew 11:28-30Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.
-Matthew 11:28Isaac went out for a walk, looked up and saw camels coming, and that was his introduction to Rebekah, the great love of his life. It's an odd sort of love story: the camels play a much bigger part in it than Isaac does. And it's odder still for the way it makes God the star of the show. God the matchmaker.
I wonder how prominently God figures in your story, your love story or any other story of yours. We are reticent in this day and age, we are hesitant about claiming to see the hand of God at work in and between and among us. Abraham's servant says, "If I ask her for a sip of water and she not only gives me a sip of water but also waters my ten thirsty camels, then she is God's gift to Isaac." This man has faith!
And it's through the eyes of faith that Abraham, and Abraham's servant, and Bethuel and Laban, and Rebekah and Isaac can all see the love of God underlying the love of two people. The thing comes from the Lord, they say. Isaac himself might have said, The camels come from the Lord. By the grace of God my true love comes to me riding on a camel.
Isaac and Rebekah could have said, Aren't we lucky to have found each other! and left it at that, as we ourselves might well do. But they went further: they recognized their "luck" as a gift from the very heart of God. When that happens, you don't just feel good; you are changed. Your life becomes ongoing worship, your thinking becomes a continuing prayer of thanksgiving, and you are a vessel and a channel of God's grace.
The whole of Scripture testifies to this. What changes people and draws them toward godliness is not their attentiveness to God's rules and regulations, but their awareness of God's active grace permeating their lives. But we tend to have problems seeing that. I don't know - maybe we would see it more clearly if it came to us as it did to Isaac, riding on camels. Something to make it obvious.
People who don't see camels coming keep getting it backwards. They keep supposing that the rules will do it. That's what is behind the latest Congressional brainstorm to make us stop killing and mistreating each other: let's post the Ten Commandments in the classrooms! It's comically wide of the mark. It's idolatry: worshiping the gift instead of the giver. And that proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw the desecration of the flag? More of the same. The verb "to desecrate" means to violate or profane something sacred. But for Biblical people it's blasphemy to call anything sacred except God. There aren't that many points where I think the Jehovah's Witnesses have it exactly right, but this is one of them.
You think kids and grownups need more of that old-time religion to make them better people? Fine! Then let's have more evangelical lives, that is, lives that testify to God's love at work in them, and more channeling of God's love and grace to the people who have known the least of them. It's written right in the Book of Exodus: the very people who waited at the bottom of the mountain and received the commandments from Moses would not and could not obey them unless they were able to recognize them and receive them as a gift from the loving heart of God.
Words are the things that give shape to reality for us humans, and once you have seen those camels coming you adopt a whole new foundational vocabulary. Underneath your ambition and your career you have a vocation, a calling from God. Underneath leisure, rest, and down-time you have Sabbath. Underneath your good old American Fourth-of-July patriotic individualism you are children of God and members of one another. Underneath your flag is God's gift of a free society, given for no apparent reason to us of all possible people. Underneath the dinner table is a heavenly banquet, a sacrament, nourishment for the soul. May it be so.
Amen.