The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick Sermon
Posted on
Trinity Church, Hartford, August 11, 2013
Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost
Proper 14C
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16, Luke 12:32-40
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Last Sunday the chief message in our scripture lessons was the futility of acquiring possessions independent of a generous and Christ-filled spirit. In today’s lessons the emphasis is a little different. Jesus asks those who would follow him to sell their possessions. This seems to go a step further than simply not considering possessions as essential to living a Christ-filled life. Today’s lessons point us to what happens once we have given up our psychological reliance on those superfluous possessions. What today’s lessons suggest is that when we give up our reliance on possessions we can begin to enter the Kingdom of God when the Son of Man appears.
The letter to the Hebrews reminds us that Abraham was promised both the power of procreation (and this for a man and his wife long after their child-bearing years: the text actually calls him one as good as dead) and he is promised entry into the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. It is significant that the biblical text uses the word ‘city’ to capture the fullness of God’s promise. And it is distinguished from the nomadic life in moveable tents which Abraham has lived up until the moment God sends him on his new mission.
There are, I think, a couple of points that can be drawn from these texts that apply to our life today.
First is the gratuitous or gracious nature of God’s promise to Abraham. Abraham had done nothing to earn God’s grace and he could only receive God’s promise as a matter of faith, not a matter of right. And yet Abraham is asked to accept God’s gift without knowing where it will lead and without having earned it. “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.” What God promises him goes beyond anything human beings have any right to expect even on the basis of righteous behavior. We might remember this point when people come seeking comfort from those of us who constitute God’s community in the world today, especially when they are in the midst of broken lives for which they may even be in part responsible. They bring nothing of merit or worth to those from whom they seek assistance and yet we should follow God’s example and grant it to them regardless of merit. God has the freedom, which he exercises constantly, to grant the promise of the Kingdom to anyone, no matter how messed up they have made their lives and the lives of others, if they receive that promise in faith. If they come in faith to us seeking our help we can do nothing less than grant it to them.
And faith, in this context, means trust: trusting that God will deliver on his promise even when he doesn’t give us a fully-developed, detailed game plan or annotated itinerary of how our lives are going to go in the future. Abraham had no idea of where the promised land was. “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.” So the first step is to trust that obeying God’s command can initially take us over uncertain, unchartered waters.
The second step is trusting, in faith, that where we are being led is toward the fulfillment of the divine promise. God does not command things simply for the sake of being obeyed. Obedience to God’s call is part of the larger, more inclusive, divine grant of human fulfillment to the creation which he loves and for which his Son Jesus died so that we might live more fully. The logic of the universe is simply this: God has our best interests in mind (even when those interests have been perverted by us, even when they are the opposite of what we think in our selfish greed-obsessed lives is best for us). And God knows that whatever he commands is in service to those essential God-given interests. Faith is not blind: it is the sure and certain hope that in putting our lives in the hands of the one and only power in the universe who can fulfill and satisfy our most basic nature, we are on the way to fulfilling that nature, a nature which as the lessons today and last week point out does not consist in the ownership of possessions or the acquiring of more stuff. But once we’ve put our lives into God’s hands, faith is the confidence that even when we don’t know the details of how we are going to get there, we will get there, we will eventually arrive at the banquet which God has spread for all those who will follow him.
And yet we do have an inkling, albeit in metaphor and symbol, about where the “there” is, the Kingdom, to which God is calling us. It is called a city, which in Biblical times was the place where people came together, as a body, as persons and tribes joined together into a community of common interests, ideally working out their differences in harmony. It was not a bunch of solitary, withdrawn, or private little enclaves in which people turned away from each other in order to meditate solely on their private relationship with God. While that personal relationship with God is a prerequisite for all healthy interpersonal relations, it is not for the sake of the solitary self in and for itself but always for the sake of others. The promise to Abraham was not that Abraham would live independently in the splendid isolation of a mystical relation with God but rather that through the procreation of children Abraham and Sarah would extend God’s promise of blessing to descendants who would be, "as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore." Only the image of a city to which many are called captures this profoundly social interpersonal understanding of what God’s promise will lead us to.
Why is this important today? Because cities in some form are our future, especially cities that look outward to a global world in which the world’s population becomes increasingly urban, and interdependent, financially, culturally, agriculturally, and interpersonally. The promise of the city is the promise of life woven together, lived humanely and justly and with sensitivity to the needs of all others. Now to be sure, cities can be dysfunctional, corrupt, dirty, confusing, overly complex, and even frightening to some who shy away from messy and uncomfortable contact with the “teeming masses yearning to breathe free” who have come to our cities from their own places of origin, often coming by faith. But they come to cities because that is where life has the possibility of being lived most robustly and fully in the complex of a diverse set of relationship with others. Cities are where we can experience the riches of human life most intimately and most fully. Cities are where people have to come together to work out their relationships, to accommodate their differences, to share their lives, their views, their insights, in short, to struggle for a common good that will enrich all who participate in it. Cities are the crucibles, the testing ground, in which people can build up the common ties which make life richer and more robust than anywhere else. Cites are where our complex interdependence is made most clear.
Jesus knew the promise of cities even though he knew their downsides. That is why he set his face toward Jerusalem in order to complete his mission to us. Surely Jerusalem and Rome were messy, noisy, complex, teeming places for 1st century people. And yet Christians lived and flourished in them. Many come to our cities today with the same faith that guided Abraham as he headed out on his journey: with the faith that is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Whether they have come north from the south, from the countryside, from rural isolation, or from other countries, people come to our cities for the promise of a better life even if they have not yet seen that to which they are coming. And if cities are beacons of hope to thousands of people we don’t have the moral right to abandon them by retreating into enclaves cut off from responsibility for the city. This may not mean that we all will live in cities but we don’t have the luxury of neglecting our cities by cutting off financial support for them. City, suburb and rural areas are bound together in a moral bond of mutual support. That is why Jesus does not shy away from using the image of the city as the symbol for the Kingdom of God which was itself a symbol for God’s gift to us of the redeemed life.
And if this is the case, then we have to regard today’s city as capable of redemption and renewal, even when that requires a faith at least as strong as Abraham’s. Rather than being discouraged at the outset at the enormity of the task of redeeming those places where our fellow human beings are working to bring civility and justice and decency and a sense of belonging and working together for a better future, we should approach the task of redeeming our cities with the same faith as Abraham had: willing to step forward in trust even when the details of the road map or the game plan are obscure. We have not yet seen the fullness of the redeemed city but we can be sure, by faith, that, by God’s grace and the divine promise, the redemption of the city is possible and that we can contribute to its arrival.
It is far better to be found working for the Kingdom and the city of God than having gone to sleep or become preoccupied with possessing more things that we think will protect us from others. And this requires constant vigilance: for as Jesus reminds us all: “You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour." AMEN