The Lord said to Abram, “Leave your land, your family, and your father’s household for the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation and will bless you. I will make your name respected, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, those who curse you I will curse; all the families of the earth will be blessed because of you.”
4 Abram left just as the Lord told him, and Lot went with him. Now Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran. 5 Abram took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all of their possessions, and those who became members of their household in Haran; and they set out for the land of Canaan. When they arrived in Canaan, 6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the sacred place at Shechem, at the oak of Moreh. The Canaanites lived in the land at that time.
7 The Lord appeared to Abram and said, “I give this land to your descendants,” so Abram built an altar there to the Lord who appeared to him. 8 From there he traveled toward the mountains east of Bethel, and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the Lord and worshipped in the Lord’s name. 9 Then Abram set out toward the arid southern plain, making and breaking camp as he went. (Common English Bible)
“From Haran to the Negev:
When God Foretells Transition,” Week One
I
still remember the daylong drive here from Berkeley to Longview in September,
2011. I had just last month signed the letter of call establishing myself as your
incoming pastor, dropped out of the Master of Theology degree program I would
have otherwise begun at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara
University, and gave away what little furniture I owned in the (extremely)
humble four-room apartment I shared with my seminary roommate.
Aside
from my books, which I had shipped here, the entire rest of my life fit in my
modest 2008 Nissan Sentra—the exact same one you see parked by the church most
days of the week. Surrounded by precipitously packed dishes and piles of
clothes, and chugging Starbucks the whole way to stay alert, I made the sojourn
from the Peoples’ Republic to Kelso in one very long day.
And
I remember being absolutely terrified.
I
was a twenty-five-year-old pastor who had been ordained not even three months
ago. I had never been a solo pastor. The previous two years at First Christian
Church in Concord as I finished seminary, I had always had a safety net in the
form of their then-senior pastor, Russ.
That’s
why I told you I like wearing my robes on Sundays—so you couldn’t see my
new-pastor knees knocking from nerves.
But
God had called me here, just as God calls forth Abram and Sarai (Abraham and
Sarah) from Ur to Haran—and that journey was no one-day road trip in an
air-conditioned sedan. Imagine the fear they had to set aside…for courage in
the face of God is not necessarily the absence of fear, but doing right by God
despite the fear you may feel. And it’s where we are at now, six-plus years
later.
This
is both a new sermon series and my last sermon series for you here in Longview.
With my last few weeks as your pastor, I want to speak to you in spirit and in
truth about the nature of our transition into new roles in one another’s lives,
and what my own hopes are for this mighty family of Jesus followers when I am
no longer here.
To
do this, our Lenten sermon series will cover different stories of transition, moving,
and new starts throughout Scripture. We begin today with one of the oldest and
greatest—the calling of Abram and Sarai by God to pick up their lives at Ur in Mesopotamia
and relocate to Canaan by way of a place called Haran and then to the Negev,
from which this sermon series takes part of its name.
Haran
is located in what is now southern Turkey (and is now called Harran, with the
extra ‘r’), and its name comes from ancient Akkadian to mean “road” or “crossroads,”
which is an appropriate name for both a waystation for a traveling couple and this
series as we approach a crossroads in the life of our congregation.
Truthfully,
our parish has likely been at that crossroads for a while now. My upcoming
departure puts where we are into the spotlight, but we have long been at a
place where we have to decide exactly what sort of a faith family we want to
be.
Take
Abram, for instance. He is already seventy-five years old—already well into what
we typically think of as old age—and as his story unfolds, we will see that he
has no compunctions about pushing back a bit with God when he feels he should,
like when he bargains God down from fifty righteous men to save the cities of
Sodom and Gomorrah to just ten.
But
Abram’s longevity does not keep him from picking up and obeying God’s
commission to move from Haran to Canaan. On the contrary, the Genesis account
states that he “left just as the LORD told him.”
We
may see such response to God’s call as an example of, or a lesson concerning,
obedience. And we would not be wrong for doing so. But we would be wrong for
seeing this story as only about obedience.
It
is about trusting in a new future because it is God who calls you into it.
That
new future for you will not include me in this role. I may still be
young(ish?), but after six-plus years, I can hardly be considered new. But in
some form or fashion, newness is going to have to be a part of our congregation’s
future, whether by hook or by crook.
Embracing
newness in small ways while I am still here can prepare us for the newness that
will come in bigger ways after I am gone. One of my biggest wishes for this parish
is a way back towards that pursuit of newness that defined the process that
brought me here in 2011. I fear that we may have lost sight of that pursuit of
what our future might hold in favor of keep as tight a hold as possible on what
we still have.
Yet
doing ministry from such a place of emotional and spiritual scarcity is never
sustainable, because scarcity by definition does not come with a safety net.
As
the temptation to withdraw back into the shell of our historic building and of
our favorite pews and our favorite fellowship hall tables begins to rear its
head, please remember that this is all it is—a temptation.
It
is right that we should be tempted during this season—it is Lent, after all,
and its forty days parallels the forty days that Jesus spent fasting in the
wilderness before Satan appeared to tempt Him.
The
things with which Satan tempted Jesus were entirely temporal, though, not
eternal. And as you are about to embark on this journey of transition and
discernment, know that you too will be tempted by things that are temporal and
fleeting. My hope and prayer is that you keep your focus upon that which is
eternal: God, God’s love for you, and God’s presence as revealed and mediated
through Jesus Christ.
Return,
then for a moment, to the story of Abram. There were (and are) so many reasons
we come up with to say no to God’s call in our lives—our own insecurities, our
own fears, and our own desires for earthly power that have nothing to do with
God’s own singularly creative power. We as humans are extraordinarily talented at
saying no to God. But Abram said yes—a characteristic which defines his life throughout
Genesis.
Abram
says yes to God.
We
said yes to God together six-and-a-half years ago, and it began for me with a road
trip into the unknown, just as I know that my arrival represented for you the
beginning of a journey into the unknown.
But
now, it is time once more to begin another such journey. It is time to say yes
to the God who calls us onto that path towards the future, whatever it might hold.
We
are not at *the* Haran, you and I, but we are at *a* Haran—a crossroads. We will
soon take different roads from that Haran—different road trips, if you will, each
of us hopefully laden with lessons that we have taken from the other from my
time here as your pastor.
In
that way, too, we shall be a bit like Abram, whom Genesis says brought everything
with him from Haran to Canaan—all his possessions and his entire household.
But
for us, I hope that the possessions we will be taking with each other when we
reach that fork in the road will be emotional and spiritual in nature. For I
know that when I pull that same Nissan Sentra out of the parking lot here for
the last time, it will be laden not with the threadbare trappings of a recently-freed
graduate student, but with the memories of a pastor who has lived and loved
alongside you.
How
grateful I am for that eventual reality, bittersweet though it is for me to
contemplate right now.
May
God laden you down, then, with possessions not of the sort we are tempted by,
but of the sort that we need as the future points us ever forward.
Thanks
be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
February
18, 2018
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