Journeying by stages

Preached at Brilliant and Rush Run (Ohio) United Methodist Churches
June 9, 1996

Text: Genesis 12:1-9

We got a postcard a few months ago from a friend of ours from seminary—a guy I used to sing with. There were three of us, actually—you should have heard us, it was pure gift to find three men whose voices blended together so perfectly. Anyway, we got this postcard, and it says:

Christopher has an odd sense of humor, I guess, but his poking fun is directed at himself, showing his own difficulties with taking a leap of faith like the one that Abram took. I don't know if Christopher really has a cappuccino machine or new wall hangings. But he shows that there is a tendency in all of us, I think, to start quibbling about the details, the little things, the coffee machines and decorations, when we should be focusing on the big picture. We may be taking a leap of faith that requires that we "Go from our country and our kindred and our father's house to the land that God will show us," but the important thing is that it's God who is calling to us, it's God who is leading us, it's God who is showing us the promised land.

Christopher's postcard was one way of showing what real faith is by talking about what Abram was not. Abram didn't quibble about the details, and that demonstrates his faith and trust in God. I got a picture in my head as I was thinking about this that's another way of showing what Abram was not. I imagined God as a cosmic novelist, sitting down to write a stirring story of adventure. God thinks it through, has a pretty good idea of how the story is supposed to go: God calls to Abram, Abram packs up his stuff and hits the road, traveling from Haran to the land of Canaan, making such and such stops along the way and finally settling in as a foreigner, an alien among the Philistines and the Hittites. So God has this wonderful plot all laid out, and then God sits down to write.

But there's one problem: The main character has a mind of his own. "No," he says, "I don't want to go to Canaan. How about we head East instead? We can explore until we hit the Indus River and make contact with India. I hear it's a real interesting place." And Abram packs up and heads to India instead. God stares dumbfounded, for a moment, at this wayward main character who has taken on a life and a mind of his own, but the story still has to get written, and so God has to figure out how to weave Abram's wandering back into the story. I think that's something like how our lives work most of the time. God's call is there for us, calling us to be the best we can, to serve God in whatever ways we best can, to follow the pillar of fire in the distance though we may not know where it's leading us. God has dreams for us, God knows what our potential is, and gently leads us in the best direction for us to attain that potential. God is a very good novelist, and longs to write us into a pretty amazing story. But we have free will. Though we are characters in that great divine novel, we have a life and a mind of our own, and we have our own ideas of what's best for us, and how we can be our best and where we want to go, and those ideas may not have anything at all to do with God's ideas for us. God wants us to pack up and move west, because it's best for us and best for the story, but we stubbornly refuse and decide to go east. Yeah, it happens all the time. And God has to find ways to deal with that. God has to take into account our willfulness, our stubbornness, our foolish chasing after the wind, and God still has to make it a great story.

And God does. God can take our craziest wandering, even our greatest sin, and bring good out of it. God can weave our wanderings back into the story, without forcing us down a road we don't want to take, without compromising our free will at all. God can make a good story, with a happy ending, out of all the muck and mess we create for ourselves.

Well, Abram didn't pack up and decide to head east to India. He did as God told him to do, and so we got a great story out of it, consisting of a dozen chapters in the great epic that is the book of Genesis. And Abram didn't quarrel with God over details like the cappuccino maker and the wall hangings; he just packed up and went. That is what we are asked to do: to follow God wherever we are called, to serve God wherever we are led, and to accept sometimes that though we cannot see where we are going, God is there beside us and before us, leading us onward and walking beside us, and God will not let our feet falter.

And so we journey on "by stages," as Abram did, writing chapters of the journey as we go, not always seeing how they fit in to the greater story of our lives, not always seeing the hand of God leading us, writing the story with us, working it all out for the good. There are always places along the way where God may speak to us a little more clearly, where we may gain a special insight or catch clear glimpses of the road ahead. And at those times we can stop and rest and build an altar on the roadside to commemorate what's happened, like Abram did at Shechem and east of Bethel. And then we move on, we end a chapter and start a new one.

We move on, on many different paths, sometimes following clear, bold signs along a four-lane interstate, sometimes picking our way along dusty old trails with almost no markers at all. But we move on, and as we look back we can see where God has led us, as we look back we can start to see the dream and the design of God, the master storyteller. And when we finally reach our destination we will be able to see it all, we'll see how God has worked our stories out for the good, and we'll see how the stories of our lives fit in to the great story of faith. We will see our names written in the book of life, our stories told in loving detail, and the masterpiece of drama and tragedy and comedy that God has written with our help.