Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's June 19, 2005 Sunday worship service.

---

Father Abraham

Hebrews 11:1; Genesis 12:1-9

Bethel 6/19/05 Congregational Meeting

Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD

I love to hear you tell old stories about Bethel. Stories about what it must have been like for 19^th century spiritual ancestors who disassembled this church building, numbered the parts, and carried it down from the hill with mule and sled and rebuilt it here, or the time when there used to be a balcony in the back (hard for me to imagine!) and some of the shenanigans that went on there during church, or the time during the communion service when you discovered, as you took from the small cups, that the communion steward had inadvertently used prune juice instead of grape juice. I suspect you had a hard time believing the scripture, “O taste and see that the Lord is good!”

Twice-told tales of colorful characters and humorous happenings form us in faith in more ways than we can ever fully comprehend.

It must have taken thousands upon thousands of campfires to preserve and transmit the stories we have about Father Abraham and Mother Sarah, and all our spiritual patriarchs and matriarchs remembered in Genesis chapters 12-50. In that nomadic, oral culture of ancient Israel, the campfire is as likely a place as any where grandparents would have told and retold the grandchildren the one about the time Abraham’s tribe left their homeland behind to make the southeastwardly trek from Haran, which is up north in Mesopotamia, down into the land of Canaan. It probably took 7, 8, 900 years of campfires to get the spoken story to it’s written phase, and then, eventually, to us.

Of all the stories about Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs, it’s this one about Father Abraham that is the granddaddy of them all. Abram, as he is called at first, heard God’s call to venture forth into the unknown, and he responded in faith. Genesis 12 is where Israel’s real history begins, and it begins with a childless 75 year old man and his postmenopausal wife.

Who’d have thunk it? How crazy is God in choosing this couple, who at this time have no heirs, yet chosen to be the very first link in the chain of bearing children through whom the divine covenant promise will be established forever? Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?
Anthropologists tell us that often the patriarchs and matriarchs of a tribe or kin group are the ones who most want to conserve the tradition, the ones who come to venerate roots, who want to stay put, but the story of Father Abraham is anything but about staying in one place. He travels from Haran, to Shechem, into the hill country in eastern part of Canaan, and then he journeyed by stages toward the Negeb, the southern desert region of that area.

Ironically, two folks who are up in years, who would seem to have the biggest stake in not moving at all, are precisely the ones whom God designates to hear and respond to the call to be on the move.

But what is really interesting to me is that, after, Father Abram and his household were on the move in the Land of Canaan, he pitched his tent and built an altar on a ridge overlooking the city of Bethel, an old city that actually predated the time of the Genesis stories. Beth, which in Hebrew means house and El which means God – house of God. Bethel, the same place where Jacob, later, another of the patriarchs, will lay down with stone for pillow and dream of a ladder of heavenly angels ascending and descending. Jacob, too, was on a journey, and like Abraham before him, both used Bethel as an important point of reference, marking their path under the providence of God.

187 years of our own Bethel’s history may seem slight compared with the thousands of years of God’s salvation history, reaching all the way back to Abraham and before. Bethel, we need to be reminded, is, neither then nor now, the destination, but on the map of faith, it does offer one reference point for citing where faith should now lead.

The faith that Father Abraham had and that we are called to have, too, was not faith in possessions or money, not faith in the land itself, not even faith in family or ancestors, but it was trust, radical trust, that the God who called him to go forth on a holy adventure would provide all things necessary for the journey ahead.

If the dream here at our Bethel of a safe, accessible, welcoming, aesthetically pleasing house of God becomes a dream deferred for too long, then the risk is that, eventually, there might be the memory of a building called Bethel, but no longer a people of the same name, no longer a living reference point on the map of faith.

Just as the Bethel of Abraham and Sarah’s day pointed the covenant people in a new direction, so we, too, must decide anew our responsibilities, not so much to the past, because the past is past, but how will we discern and respond to the God who calls us into the future? Will the journey of faith for future generations continue to pass through our Bethel?

I close with a verse from Hebrews 11, a chapter about Father Abraham and all the rest who risked it all in obedience to God’s call, one of the most often quoted verses I have heard from various ones of you: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

So let it be. Amen.