3/12/17
Rev. Anna Woofenden
The Garden Church
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Scripture: Genesis 12:1-4 and John 3:1-8
Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
This passage from the book of Genesis is one that makes me a bit twitchy, even when I just hear the beginning words of it; “Now the Lord said to Abram…” some part of my psyche knows what might be coming next. Even my subconscious remembers what this verse has done to my life in the past.
It’s been a powerful enough scripture in my life that I got it tattooed on my foot, leading and stepping me forward each day.
It’s always been symbolic that some journey was ahead. I heard those words back in undergrad when I felt the callings to spend time in West Africa and do ministry there.
I remember that there was such fear and so many unknowns that came right along with it. It was like going into a wilderness in many ways. We didn’t know the people, the geography, or the culture. The official national language is English, but most people speak Twi or Ewey, or some other tribal language as well, and maybe solely. The food was unknown, and we copiously did our research to learn what we should peel, what we should wash and how, and what we should avoid—to hope to not get filled with parasites right away.
For three out of five of us on the trip, this was our first time out of North America and in a developing world country. I remember the night before we left, our close friends and family had a gathering to pray for us and wish us well, and while I felt surrounded by so much love and support, I also felt the vastness of the unknown, the fear and wonder of what we would find in this distant land, and who and how God would be with us.
These words between God and Abram felt so poignant, so real. Go from your country, from our community, from your family, from what is familiar to you, go to a land that I will show you. And, I will bless you, and because I will bless you, you will also be a blessing.
Isn’t that just how it is when we take these risks, when we step out in faith and take on a new adventure, a new job, a new location, a trip, a relationship, a journey of sobriety, a deeper look at our internal work and process, a new practice of service? When we hear God calling us forward, the terror is normal and real. But when it comes from God, there’s something promised beyond the fear.
The promise is God’s presence and blessing, and more than God’s blessing—that we will be a blessing. When we step out onto whatever journey we’re being called to, part of the calling from God is that our journey will bless others’ journeys.
In this interconnected web of life, each of us living and engaging our journeys is part of the act of blessing others on the path, a witness to God’s presence with us all. The person who starts the hard journey of healing after a trauma, God is with you. And as you journey, as you heal, you too will be able to be a blessing to others. The young adult starting off to college, learning and receiving instruction and being formed, will soon go forth and be a blessing. The young parent who enters into the new land of sleepless nights and the existential weight of the responsibility of a little person. The elderly saint moving into the age of bodies slowing down and minds letting go. The newly widowed, the divorced, the deployed and the returning. The start of housing, the end of housing, the start of a job, the end of a job. The ongoing, day-to-day challenge and work of getting up each morning and doing what we need to do to keep going. All of these lands, all of these journeys—our scripture is reminding us—God is in, God is blessing us, and God is calling us forward to be a blessing.
Collectively, we’re moving into the land of Lent, into and through these forty days of spiritual wilderness where we look and examine ourselves and remember our mortality. We remember our interconnectedness, and remember from Whom we have come and to Whom we will return, while we remember Easter. As we move into the land of Lent, we might be reminded of the fear or the dryness of the Lenten desert, and the questions and the unknowing of where it is that God is calling us, or how we are even to be faithful to this journey.
Here in our Garden Church community, we are using and inviting the Collective Confession from Ash Wednesday to guide us through Lent. We do this believing that God is always present and wanting to flow through us with love and wisdom, but sometimes we individually and collectively put things in the way that make that difficult.
Our work is to examine ourselves, to recognize and acknowledge those things that are blocking us from God’s love and from being able to love each other, pray to God to help us and to remove them, and then begin a new life—to start living differently.
This week the lines we’re focusing on are the following:
We have been selfish and greedy, and have taken advantage of others.
We have judged those unlike us, and acted without charity to the least members of our community.
Listen to those again:
We have been selfish and greedy, and have taken advantage of others.
We have judged those unlike us, and acted without charity to the least members of our community.
How do those strike you in your own life? Where are those desert areas that you kind of don’t want to examine, but maybe you need to journey into?
It was in my three months in Ghana that I was first exposed to abject poverty. It was the kind of poverty that leaves you with distended bellies, those who are crippled dragging themselves along, begging on the streets. I saw people sacrificing everything to garner an education for their children, and I experienced what actual starvation looks like.
It was there while I was in a distant land that I was first really awakened and activated to the reality of hunger and poverty, an awareness that has moved into a call ever since. And part of that process of waking up was looking deeply at my own discomfort with pain and suffering.
I came face-to-face with both my immense privilege and my drive to either run away or to quick figure out how to fix it so that I wouldn’t have to sit with the discomfort of the children with the their ribs poking through or the great-grandmother struggling to survive.
This external journey was directly tied with the internal journey, the work I needed to do, and continue to do years later to be willing to sit with both the pain and the hope, to both recognize my humble connection with all people and to recognize the places I am privileged and hold an awareness of how that impacts my life and actions towards others.
This process of learning and renewal and change and blessing is the continued work of our lives. It’s why we need to confess, to let go, to repent, and to change. And it’s why we need to remember God’s constant presence of blessing and rebirth.
One of my colleagues wrote this week, “Faith for me has never been about a singular event of being ‘born again,’ but about a staggering number of moments of being pushed out of comfort, growing into my full capacity for love, and midwifing and being midwifed into collective liberation. As our gospel text reminded us, this process of being born again—of changing—is not the obvious of being placed back in our mother’s womb and coming out her birth canal. Instead, the being born again is of water, and of spirit.”
We’re all born of the flesh. But it’s this birth of the spirit—this work to grow and change and be more and more a vessel of love—that is the ongoing birth of the spirit. That is what calls us to new things, what calls us to change something deep within us, what calls us forward.
Like Abram, God is always calling us forward.
And calling us forward even when it feels tough or dry and barren, internally or externally. Calling us forward because it is through continuing and engaging our journey that we find the blessings and can be blessings.
I was listening to a talk by Van Jones this week and he said,
“The worst day of your life, when you look back on it, that breakdown, was actually a breakthrough.” It made me think and look back on my own life, at those times when it was really rough, but then seeing the change and the blessings that came out of it.
Van went on to talk about how we can see and engage this collectively as well, when we look at things and feel overwhelmed and like everything is falling apart—breaking down—we can look for the ways that it is opening up to a breakthrough.
It reminds me of one of my very favorite quotes from Emanuel Swedenborg, when he writes: “Nothing, not the least thing shall occur that good cannot come out of it.” This is not saying that good will come out of every hard situation, but that it can come out of it. No matter what we are going through, no matter what desert we’re called to walk through, God is with us and drawing out the blessings.
The past week we, along with our friends in the San Pedro Faith Consortium, have been hosts for Family Promise. Family Promise is an organization that works with families with children who are experiencing homelessness. The organization provides wrap-around care for the families as they work to get housed again. Various faith communities provide the space for sleeping, breakfast, and dinner, and being hospitable community and friends. Last night was the Garden Church’s night, and David and Connie and Tim and I had a wonderful evening eating and playing games with the family we are supporting. As is the case so often when we have the opportunity to encounter people and hear their stories, we were all blessed and changed. I was struck by just the realness of it all. The journey, the desert that this family is walking through, going from house of worship to house of worship, strange land to strange land, meeting person after person and expressing gratitude graciously for the support, while I can only imagine the fatigue of this stage on their journey.
This morning over breakfast, the mom shared that they will be in housing soon, and how much she’s looking forward to it. “I’ll be able to burn my candles again,” she said. And have one place to be. “It’s the little things.” It’s the little things that are the blessings.
I want to be very careful not to get confused and suggest that if we’re in a tough place in life and don’t feel God’s blessing, that we might be doing something wrong. On the contrary, I believe what this scripture and these teachings remind us is that the blessings are in and amongst and hand-in-hand with the deserts, with the breakdowns, with the difficult journeys that we must walk through.
God calls us into new lands, into inner journeys, to “go.” Yes, God calls us, but never without the promise. God will be with us, giving us blessings, blessings of strength when we thought we couldn’t go on, blessings of that moment when we stop and notice a bluebird landing on the fence, or stop and feel the warmth of the sunshine on our face. God will give us the blessings of companions on the way, of a bowl of soup when we’re just so hungry, of that hug when we had forgotten how to be loved.
And God will call us to be blessings. Not out of any heroic act of saintliness, but out of us showing up with our whole selves in the world: with our wounds and our loves, our honestly and compassion. Showing up having walked through our own deserts and the willingness to be on the journey together, awake to God breaking through.