Called to an Adventurous Faith

We heard in our first reading that Abram responded to God’s call and journeyed to an unknown land.  He had no maps, charts or computers to guide him.  It was an act of faith trusting in God and going to the land that God showed him.  He had to leave his family and country to make this journey.  It was a decisive break with all he had known. 

Do you ever think about faith as a journey, a journey both inward to self-understanding and outward toward others and as part of our covenant relationship with God?  We talk about Lent as a journey or a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the cross of Calvary.  We sometimes follow it imaginatively in our hearts and minds as we read and reflect on the Biblical texts for Palm Sunday and Holy Week.  The readings today, however, suggest a deeper, richer, and a more exciting metaphor: they suggest an adventure.

Abram's decision to go to a strange land is significant.  The whole biblical story and the influences of Christianity are the result of a decision to embark on an adventure.  The history of faith begins with those who were willing to accept and risk an unknown future, to adventure and struggle with an unknown destiny.  To leave home and all that seems secure is a difficult decision.

Prior to the time of Abram the biblical history and story was about the separation, alienation or estrangement of human beings from God.  That history culminated in the Flood, the story of God's intervention to correct what had gone wrong.  Then, following the Flood, Abram became the first ancestor of the Israelites, and he was the first person with whom God made a covenant.  At the time of establishing this covenant, Abram's name was changed to Abraham and his wife's name was changed from Sarai to Sarah.

Abraham's story tells us that he did not seek God, it was God who proposed the covenant to him.  A new relationship was needed, and God initiated it.  God offered to make Abraham and Sarah the forebears of a huge nation, provided that Abraham would follow God wherever that might lead.  Abraham chose to trust God, to accept this adventurous faith, and do what God asked, although he was already a seventy-five year old man with a wife and no children.  Life can be full of surprises at any age.

Another account of adventurous faith, although different from that of Abraham, is our gospel story about Nicodemus.  Nicodemus was also asked to make a significant decision.  He was a good person with enviable qualities, a leader and Pharisee, and a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Council.  People looked to Nicodemus for guidance and saw him as a mentor.  He was a courageous seeker of truth, but he was also a cautious person.  So he went after dark to see Jesus and to question him about what he had been hearing.  When he met Jesus he said, “no one can do the signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  Then he was caught off guard by Jesus' reply, "No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above."

Perhaps Nicodemus should have known that if new life is ever to be lived there must be a new direction, a transformation.  After all, this was Abram's story, and it was part of Jewish history.  Nicodemus undoubtedly knew the prophecy of Ezekiel, "Thus says the Lord God:  I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you to your own land.  I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you.  A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.  I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.  Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people and I will be your God."

Nicodemus had some doubt about Ezekiel’s prophecy and asked Jesus, "How can anyone be born after having grown old?"  Jesus replied, "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.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit."  In other words, some things cannot be predicted or proven.  Mystery is real.  The wind comes, who knows from where or how, cleansing, invigorating, freshening, and then it is gone.  It is the same way with God.  Faith and trust are needed to assure that change is really possible, and that new life can be attained.  Jesus said whoever believes, whoever has faith in God, “may not perish but may have eternal life.”

In your bulletin insert on “Reflections from the Center for Reconciliation” there is a quotation that speaks to the reality of adventurous faith and the concept of friendship.  It requires faith and trust for the work of reconciliation to occur.  Reconciliation is about “restoring relationships to the center of our lives, ministry and mission.  Friendships that open into reconciliation validate the message of good news.  Our practice becomes inseparable form our message, and affirming the imprint of God in each human being compels us to love as an extension of God’s love at work in us.”

Adventures often result in surprising experiences, exciting and sometimes risky or dangerous undertakings.  There is a sense of the unknown and the unexpected.  The poet Maya Angelou once wrote: "Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure.  We leave our homes for work, acting and even believing that we will reach our destination with no unusual event startling us out of our set expectations.  The truth is we know nothing, not where our cars will fail, or when our buses will stall, whether our places of employment will be there when we arrive, or whether, in fact, we ourselves will arrive whole and alive at the end of our journeys.  Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen didn't happen.  We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed."

During this season of Lent God calls us to an adventurous faith, a journey toward the place that is our center, our inner self where the Spirit of God is within us.  It is the place of our wholeness, our authenticity, the place of from which creative responses to life’s challenges emerge.  It is where our awareness of God’s presence within and around us surfaces.  Are we willing to leave the comfort of the familiar and go on an adventure of faith?  Our corporate adventure in faith is our covenant with God and our relationships with one another.  It is our love of God and our compassionate care for each other as we care for ourselves.  This level of meaning has to do with our worship, our outreach and service to others in friendships that lead to wholesome relationships and reconciliation.

Let us risk an adventurous faith, to be creative, and to work for the sake of God's love in the world.  "God so loved the world that... whoever has faith in God may not perish but have eternal life."  Amen.