God
keeps calling us to be on the move, to be a pilgrim people, to walk away from
what binds us, even if it’s temporarily comfortable, and walk into the freedom
of self-gift, even though that’s hard, walk to the place where death will give
way to life.
We see this
first with Abraham, our father-in-faith, the one with whom God enters into
covenant and starts the story of God’s special friendship with the Hebrew
people. We see Abraham dare to leave
behind all he knew, all that was comfortable for him, and wander, risk
pilgrimage. He consented to be someone
that never quite knew the customs in any place he visited, someone who was
always marked as other, someone who pointedly never quite fit in. And we’re told that it was by faith that he
dared do this. By faith, because his
trust in God was such that while he may never have been able to understand what
he was being asked to do, while he made several serious missteps in his
pilgrimage (rehearsed in scriptures other than the ones we heard tonight), he
knew that God’s call was what he had to follow, that all the human comforts he
was leaving behind paled in comparison with that voice that said, “Come!” We’ll hear it say, “Come, follow me,” we’ll
hear it pronounced by a human, like us in all things but sin, but Abraham got
up and wandered when he just somehow knew that God wanted him to wander.
And in
his wandering, in the state that seemed like death, God worked life. When all sound human wisdom would tell him
and Sarah that would never have a family, and when they had given up their
home, God intervenes and brings life out of deathliness. God keeps on bringing life out of what looks
like death. In fact now God brings life
out of what is undeniably death. And if the reason we consent to wander is
faith, even if we don’t know why; the reason God gives life is love, love for
us, even though we can’t explain why.
If the
only instance of this wandering and life-giving we had in scripture was the
story of Abraham and Sarah, we might start to look at this as some strange
deal. We may still not be able to
account for why God wanted Abraham to wander, but in his inscrutable wisdom, he
did, and it would be tempting simply say, “Well, Abraham wandered, so he got
what he most wanted: a son. Big price,
but big reward, good enough deal, I guess.”
Well, that’s not how God works with us.
We can’t make deals with God, as if we were equals, or there were some
tribunal above God to enforce them. We
can’t make deals like equals, but we can fall in love, like children, with the
God who dares to love us first. And God
can call us to come, and we can follow.
Generations
after Abraham, his descendants would become slaves in Egypt. Robbed of their freedom, unable to properly
worship their God, to offer sacrifice, but reasonably well fed and
sheltered. Then one man Moses comes
along promising to lead them to freedom.
And in the dead of night it happens.
They are told to wait with their belts fastened (loins girded), sandals
on, lamb roasted, and lamps lit and together they will walk out of Egypt. They will walk away to freedom and God will
act to enable this walk, God will part the seas for them and vanquish their
foes so they can dare to walk away. That’s
what the Jews celebrate each year on Passover, that God acts so as we can walk
away from slavery into freedom, and that feast helps form them in the need to
keep walking away from slavery into freedom, to keep daring to embark on
pilgrimage, to keep alive the faith that God will act to part seas and vanquish
foes, that we need not trust in what we think makes us comfortable for now,
because we can have daring faith in God.
That’s why when Jesus says to the crowds in this gospel, “gird your
loins,” they know he’s not giving fashion advice: he’s telling them to adopt
that posture of Passover-readiness, like their ancestors in Egypt, to be ready,
to be watchful, to be trusting and faithful and daring, to dare to walk away
from slavery into freedom.
Because
the one foe God will never vanquish by force is our own heart. When the Israelites had been marching for
days, they started to grumble at Moses because they were hungry: “at least
there was food in Egypt!” “Why not just
wait out the rest of our lives and be buried there, not in this God-forsaken
desert.” But, it wasn’t God-forsaken,
they would learn. Nowhere is forsaken by
our God, but it was in the desert that Moses would come face-to-face with God,
that the people would learn the Law, offer sacrifice and enter covenant, deepen
their loving relationship with God, and finally find the Promised Land. God gives life in the midst of what looks
deathly, because the place that looks deathly is the place free of all that
keeps us back from loving with the freedom and generosity with which he loves
us.
We want
that, but we still find it within ourselves to hold back. We are held back by so much that seems to
make us comfortable. Our desire to be in
control, our desire to have more, our desire to keep up with or one-up our
neighbors, our fears and our insecurities and lead us grasp what we think makes
us comfortable, which leaves us unable to reach out. But Jesus has better for us. Jesus bids us gird our loins, be ready for
that pilgrimage. He bids us come, follow
him, and he spells out in the gospel part of how we do that: by generosity and
by serving others. All that is just
following him, who gave all and who longs to wait on us at the heavenly
banquet. To follow him, who dared walk
the way of the cross, loving us to the point of death, to show us that not even
death, death at our hands, could keep him from being with us, for love is
stronger than death.
And now,
we offer Eucharist. That Passover meal
that stands in awe at what God has done to part the seas to let us walk to
freedom, that strengthens us in the desert, and brings life out of death.
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