The need to go

It’s been an interesting day. Back in the Fens after being away for two weeks, I have led worship in two of the Circuit's smallest churches today. There were six in the congregation this morning, four of them on the back row, then this afternoon there were three for a Church Anniversary service which was a bit sad as they hoped for more. The optimist among them put out ten cups for tea afterwards! We are now living at least for the next fortnight in a converted barn north of Sutton Bridge very close to The Wash. We took a drive to see where the land stops tonight. A veritable wilderness in Gedney Drove End! 

The lectionary passages today were all about taking a journey. I wanted to encourage the good folk at Murrow and at Tydd St Giles to think about moving on, however hard that is. Here’s part of my thinking today:

The old Irish joke starts with a driver winding down his window and asking for directions, “How do I get to Tipperary?”

To which the driver received the helpful advice, “If you want to get there, I wouldn’t start from here!”

Today we come and we are here, the eighth day of March 2020, the second Sunday of Lent, the people of God called Methodist at Murrow/ Tydd St Giles Methodist Chapel on our Anniversary. 

We are here amid uncertainty and confusion in the world, a world of corona virus where they are stockpiling loo rolls, the working out of Brexit, allegations of bullying by government ministers, stabbings, food banks rationing food the demand for them is so great and people struggling to make sense of what is going on for them as society seems to be getting more and more selfish. And it is here, with all this, the church invites people to come on a journey. 

Our cause today is a lot smaller and maybe we are now struggling. There are not many of us and we wonder how we can keep going. I’m not really meant to have given you ideas this year as I’m without appointment but you will have picked up I’m an optimist when it comes to churches and we work with what we have and we do what we can do. While our doors remain open, we have a task to be faithfully be God’s people. Jesus believes in you, he says wherever two or three are gathered in my name there I am in your midst. Well there are six of you this morning / four of you this afternoon! 

And we will say well, we can’t do anything because there are so few of us and we haven’t much energy. As the white rabbit said in the Alice stories, it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place. I get that. 

But suppose that God is calling us, even a few of us to a new journey? Remember Jesus started a whole new movement with twelve men, many of whom turned out to be totally unreliable! But he believed in them most days. I do love the day he loses it, though. 

“How long shall I have to put up with you?” he yells when they hint at giving up.

Someone once said “I used to be a Christian but I’ve retired.” 

Abram’s calling in Genesis was surprising for the very inappropriateness it seemed to represent. Perhaps there are now laws in place to guard against ageism in recruitment at the workplace but there is still the small matter of judging the best person for the post, then as now. And, if we honestly face the job description of ‘father of a nation to number in people as many as the stars in the sky or grains of sand on the shore’ is a tough one. A weighty responsibility. Surely stamina would be a prerequisite.

Abram was an influential and quite well off person in Haran. People would worship their house gods in their tent. Abram’s God was not their God. So imagine Abram coming to you and saying “We are leaving. We are going on a journey.” And you say, “where are we going? We like it here!”

And Abram says “I don’t know. My God told me he would show me a new country and I will be the father of many nations.” 

And you say “what? You don’t know where we are going. You are calling us into the wilderness for years leaving everything for a whim.” As Romans says “ Abraham believed God and it counted unto him as righteousness.” Despite being laughed at. Imagine the neighbours gossiping. “Has he lost his mind?” Abram is called to leave country, kindred and his Father’s house. He is promised land, a great nation and a great name.

It is a well-known story of God’s call, lauded as a great example of obedience and included in the great hall of faith in Hebrews: “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.”

The three words that begin verse 4 in Genesis 12, “so Abram went”, do not convey any hesitation on Abram’s part. We are not given any indication of whether he is more motivated by the reassurances of the promises than acting out of faithful obedience to what God has commanded him to do.

But reading around these few verses we learn that Abram was not unfamiliar with being on the move; his father Terah had uprooted the family to begin a journey to Canaan that had not been completed and it is towards Canaan that Abram chooses to journey.

It is on this journey that Sarai, not once but twice, would have to pretend to be Abram’s sister and become the wife of another man. And no wonder she laughed when she was told she would bear a son in old age.       

Then there is Nicodemus in John 3. Nicodemus’ curiosity was aroused by this Rabbi who called a motley crew of fisher folk and tax collectors to be his disciples, who has turned water into wine at a wedding in Galilee and turned tables in the temple on the threshold of Passover. He has condemned money- changers for exploiting the poor and putting a price on prayer. He has made scandalous declarations about rebuilding the temple in three days. And perhaps most interestingly and curiously, is drawing more and more people to follow and believe. 

Note he comes at night for fear of his mates finding out, but he does come. A story of getting out into the unknown not knowing what the unknown might bring. Another story of curiosity, reaching out in faith, wanting to know what might be irresistible about what you’ve set out to know more about.  So the question for us in today’s church is dare we journey? Dare we believe God is calling us to a better future. Dare we journey to find out more and see if Jesus is worth following especially if what we are doing isn’t giving us much joy any more? 

Two stories from our own story over the last few weeks might help us in our thinking. You may have heard that our home in Gorefield, being rented for us by the Church, has turned into a disaster. We were left with no heating or hot water for three weeks in a temperature of five degrees in January, we moved out in early February and returning to the house two and a bit weeks ago I developed my old symptoms and had to be put on steroids by the doctor. After much discussion, the Church have said we cannot return to the house to live so at the moment we are on a journey like Abram with no abiding city living out of a car if not a tent! 

We’ve been on Holy Island this past week and have enjoyed sharing evening prayer in St Mary’s even though the Old Testament Readings have been the miserable bits of Jeremiah: 

Do not go out to the fields

    or walk on the roads,

for the enemy has a sword,

    and there is terror on every side. 

Put on sackcloth, my people,

    and roll in ashes;

mourn with bitter wailing

    as for an only son,

for suddenly the destroyer

    will come upon us.

So we need help. Remember Psalm 121. Terry Waite held captive in Lebanon in the 1980’s used the hills in the Psalm as an image to brighten himself in the darkness and drudgery of a cell. He later said “I’m not the sort of person who wears their faith on their sleeve but I could say ‘you can do what you like, but you’ll never take me completely because my soul is in the hands of God not in the hands of other people.’ We keep going in uncertainty because God is in that dark time with us. That’s our faith. And maybe a journey might just be exciting! We’ve just changed Lis’s very elderly Rav 4 for a nearly new one. 

We need a reliable car to cope with the Yorkshire Dales in winter! It’s an automatic. I’ve not driven an automatic before. It takes time to get used to the fact your left foot doesn’t need to do anything! You press the start button and put your foot on the accelerator and it goes. And if there are hazards ahead it beeps at me if there is s speed camera, or if I’m whiggling in the lane and it has a built in sat nav with an awfully polite woman who tells me where to go. All of this despite uncertainties on the road, makes the journey bearable even enjoyable. 

So are we a people compelled to journey? Are we today even if we haven’t a clue where we see going called to take a first step? You know Joseph Goebels, the propaganda minister in Hitlers Third Reich once scoffed Christianity and talk of building a Kingdom. He said “you cant build an empire on moonbeams,” but Abram set out and Nicodemus enquired believing more was possible. 

Where are we going? Well, I guess we keep going. We are here until we decide we can’t do this anymore to be there for a people on an uncertain journey.  On Thursday, we were in St Mary’s Scottish Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh, one of my favourite holy places. There is a painting, called The Presence. The setting is the interior of the cathedral, and the painting shows a lady in distress kneeling in prayer and comforted by the presence of Christ, who bathes her in light in contrast to the surrounding gloom. He invites her into his presence into a new journey of light and hope, joining the journey of Christ’s people working out his will for them in the world.

I encourage us today to be a journeying people even where we don’t have the answers, I invite us to reach out and sense again even in uncertainty God calls us on. And to be a place where people who come might find peace again.  God said go and Abram went. What about us?