Abraham's End

There’s an old joke about teenager who wanted to borrow his dad’s car.

“I’ve told you” said his father: “You’re not getting to use the car ‘til you get your hair cut. It’s right down to your shoulders and it’s a total state.”

 “But dad” said the boy, knowing his father was of a religious persuasion.  “Jesus had long hair. And so had all the disciples.”

 "Aye son”, said his father. “And they walked everywhere too”!

Indeed they did! One thing you could never accuse the Biblical characters of is standing still for too long. They always seem to be on the move.

And in this morning’s service we’re bringing two such journeys alongside one another. This is Epiphany Sunday, and on this Sunday it’s traditional that we read the story of the three wise men and their journey to see the newborn king. But it’s also time to draw our travels with Abraham, to a close and reflect a little on all of his ups and downs.

So journeys are very much on our mind today.

But is ‘journey’ a good metaphor for the likes of you and me?

By and large we’re settled people. Some of us are so settled that we own the land where we live and work. Maybe that land’s been in our families for generations. We were born here and in all likelihood we’ll spend our final days here.

The rest of us might not have such deep roots, but most of us have significant ties to this place which mean that a move isn’t on the cards unless something exceptional crops up.

So for folk as settled as we seem to be, does journey work as a metaphor for life any more?

I’d like to argue that it does. Because even if we’re rooted in one place, life is never static for any of us.

New challenges present themselves all the time. Jobs change, circumstances change, relationships change.

And we change too, of course.

My father-in-law has this French painting hanging in his hallway – one he inherited from our great aunt in Oban.

And it’s entitled “Degrees des Ages”

Shows the spectrum of ageing in ten year blocks from ‘adolesence’ through ‘jeunesse’, ‘l’age viril’, ‘l’age de maturite’.. all the way through to l’age decrepitude!

Like it or not, that’s a journey that we’re all on.

And the central question, I think, is what will we learn from this journey that we call our lifetime?

Will we pause long enough and often enough to learn from it, and from God? Or will we end our days feeling like we were swept along by a life that happened to us and that we never really paused to own or to question.

I know that my tendency is towards the latter – to batter on and get everything done that I need to do. But I know that however hard I run, I never manage to get it all finished, and without pausing to reflect on what it all means, life soon becomes monotonous and drab. We weren’t meant to function that way – we were made for more than that.

It was Plato who once said that the unexamined life is a life that’s not worth living.

So if you haven’t made a New Year’s resolution yet - or more likely, you’ve already broken them! - you could do worse than commit yourself to making a little time in the day simply to be with God

and reflect on what’s going on within you and around you. It’s that simple discipline of prayer, exercised over time, that brings movement back to a spiritual life that seems to have got stuck.

Now, having said that – let’s get back to the two stories we’re thinking about today.

Each year we think about the wise men, and I honestly don’t have a whole lot that’s new to say this morning. I just want to remind you that their journey wasn’t plain sailing.

We know very little about where they came from, but it’s safe to assume there was a personal cost in doing what they did.

Who did they leave behind? What else did they have to leave undone?

Who raised their eyebrows in scorn when they heard about this harebrained notion? Who cursed under their breath when they heard that those three were heading off on their travels again?

What did it cost them to go? Money? Friendships? Marriages? The affections of their children? Other opportunities?

We can’t be sure. But we know there must have been a cost.

Think of the highs of finally arriving in Jerusalem, thinking the finishing line was finally in sight. And then discovering that you’d made a mistake - that the old man glowering down at you from his throne was the only king for miles around.

Think how it must have felt to be told that Bethlehem was – at best - a long shot, and then find a star guiding the way to the stable.

And then think what it would have been like to finally behold the child and his bemused parents. The bittersweetness of journey’s end, when the journey home was still to come, and – according to an angel - it would have to be by another way.

Ups and downs, every step of the way.

And it’s just the same with Abraham’s story.

Biblical historians are fond of plotting his geographical journey in maps like this (image). And it does help with these stories to have an idea of scale and distance and place names.

But I think it’s far more interesting to plot Abraham’s spiritual journey, and I took an hour or two earlier this week to do just that.

 

Started by hearing about his call to leave home – how counter intuitive that was at his stage of life – but how attractive the promise of land and family was to him

But he’s no sooner in the promised land when famine comes, and he strikes out prayerlessly for Egypt and ended up in a right mess by passing his wife off as his sister and incurring the wrath of Pharaoh.

Back in the promised land, he does well by separating from Lot graciously when dischord arises, and then he’s blessed by Melchizedek for defending the region from skirmishing armies.

God solemnises his promise to bless Abraham by making a covenant with him, but no sooner has he done so than – at Sarah’s bidding – Abraham tries to take the issue of descendants into his own control by sleeping with Hagar and fathering Ishmael.

 

Circumcision was given as a sign of the covenant, and for the first time Sarah was mentioned as the mother of Abraham’s promised son. And not long after that Abraham was visted at Mamre by God, in the form of three persons. and God’s promise of a son was re-iterated.

Finally Isaac was born to much joy, but again – in a passage we’ve not looked at – Hagar and Ishmael were sent away because Sarah perceived the older boy as a threat to her son’s future.

But just a few years later Isaac faced a greater threat at the hands of his own father. “Go and sacrifice your son to me” God said, imitating the gods of the surrounding nations, but never intending that Abraham should go through with it. This was an object lesson that Abraham and his people had to learn: other Gods demanded. His God provided. For him, a ram to spare Isaac’s life. For us, generations later, a saviour to spare our own.

And finally, the loss of Sarah was tempered a little by the satisfaction of seeing his son married to a like-minded girl, Rebekah, a happy union that allowed Abraham to go down to the grave in peace.

Now I know this graph is very arbitrary, but it makes the point I want to make very clearly. The story, even of a great patriarch like Abraham, is full of ups and downs. Chart the life of Moses, or David, or the apostles Peter or Paul and you’ll find exactly the same thing. There is no such thing as straight-line spiritual growth for any of us, and we can’t expect there to be. Overall the gradient is upwards, but it gets there through an endless procession of ups and downs. Mistakes and successes.

 
If that’s what your spiritual life looks like this morning, then take heart.

If it looks more like a straight line across the bottom of the page, then take warning. You don’t need me to tell you what that pattern means on a hospital monitor when you’re watching an episode of Casualty.

 

Two things I want you to take away from the graph this morning, as we finish.

The first is to realise that though we might want to avoid making mistakes or facing challenges, very often they’re the experiences that help us learn the most.

A few years back I was taking a weekend away for Ruchill church and I asked them to chat in small groups about a time in their lives when they had felt particularly close to God. I hadn’t planned it this way, but most of the stories that were fed back were times when folk had found themselves in difficult circumstances.

Provided we remember to seek God in those times, they offer just as much opportunity for growth as the good times. And that’s something to take with you into a New Year, with all its challenges.

And the second observation is this – these peaks and troughs are what we live, but they are not the only reality – though at times it may feel like they are.

Always and ever, the call for men and women of faith is to see beyond their present circumstances to the God who holds all our times in his hands.

From Ur to Haran; from the Promised Land to Egypt and back again. From the high country to the plain, from Mamre to Sodom and Gomorrah, from doing it God’s way to doing it his way, from Isaac in his arms to Isaac on a pyre; beneath, between and behind it all was God, only God. Every step of the way.

I don’t wish you a happy new year. I wish you, and me, a year where we know God close in all the circumstances of our lives; and where our attentiveness to him helps us live well and make wise choices whatever lies ahead of us in the months to come.

Those of you with good memories will remember that I started this series on Abraham by reading a poem, and I want to end it by reading the same poem because it underscores everything that I’ve been trying to say to you this morning:

Birth is a beginning

And Death a destination
But Life is a journey,
A going - a growing
From stage to stage.
From Childhood to Maturity
And Youth to Age.
From Innocence to Awareness
And Ignorance to Knowing;
From Foolishness to Discretion
And then perhaps to Wisdom.
 

From Weakness to Strength

Or Strength to Weakness--
And often back again.
From Health to Sickness
And back, we pray, to Health again.
From Offense to Forgiveness,
From Loneliness to Love,
From Joy to Gratitude,
From Pain to Compassion,
And Grief to Understanding--
From Fear to Faith.
From Defeat to Defeat--
Until, looking backward or ahead,
We see that Victory lies
Not at some high place along the way,
But in having made the Journey,
Stage by stage;
A sacred pilgrimage.
 

Birth is the beginning

And Death a destination
But Life is a journey,
A sacred pilgrimage
Made stage by stage--
From Birth to Death
To Life Everlasting.