God gives life to the lost – Luke 12:32-40, Heb 11:8-12

19th Sunday, Ordinary Time, Year C; St. Pius parish (South Bend).

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.