Willing to Be Willing

A sermon about trusting God

Today we meet Abraham, the first follower of God for whom we’re given specific places and dates. At God’s instigation, at a time when Abraham is already 75 years old still childless, he and his relatives depart their west Asian homeland for the place we call Israel. As Abraham follows along the route he keeps listening for further messages from God. With each one he piles up a stone landmark to commemorate the interchange. After several hair-raising adventures with foreign leaders and food shortages, an exhausted Abraham is finally ready to settle down, when one night God speaks to him again—the dialogue we overhear in today’s reading.

God: Abraham, I’m right here running interference for you and you’ll be glad in the end.

Abraham: God, what use will that be since I’m old and tired and there’ll be no one to carry on when the end does come?

God: No worries! Come outside with me and look up at the sky, count the stars if you can—that’s how big your family is going to be before I’m done!

Abraham: …is silent, overcome with the strangest feeling he can’t shake that despite all odds, God really is telling him the truth.

God: …is silent too, overcome with the most heartening realization that Abraham really is someone he can work with, and things will come out all right.

At last God breaks the silence.

God: Remember, I’m the one in charge and I call the shots.

Abraham: I still don’t get where I fit in…

God: I’ll show you. Just close your eyes as I talk. Visualize this magnificent Temple that will one day be built here for absolutely no other reason than to be a meeting place between heaven and earth. See all your heirs streaming toward the open doors, rich and poor, powerful and weak, young and old, faithfully gathering to sing about me and praise me and offer me whatever they have to give—cows or goats if they raise them, otherwise whatever else they have to show for their day jobs—all singing and praising and offering just to express how much they trust their lives to me and look to me to call the shots. That’s where you and your heirs fit in forever: trusting me enough to put your best into my hands. Then I can be your God, and you can be my people.

Abraham once again falls silent. Trust. Trust God’s offer, and offer God trust. A two way meeting between heaven and earth, earth and heaven. Can he keep his side of it up? And once he is gone, can these heirs God promised keep their side up too?

Speaking for himself at least, Abraham knows he can try. And whenever he falls short—which he most certainly will—he can repent and then get right back to offering God whatever he can, and trust that God will take it from there.

God hears that Abraham’s heart is willing, or at least willing to be willing, and God calls it good enough to go.

All these years later Lent brings us heirs of Abraham back to his moment of decision, and gives us the chance to make his choice our own. This morning we have casually streamed in through these open doors, perhaps never thinking how they open into a two-way meeting ground between earth and heaven, heaven and earth. Perhaps not fully aware of how the psalms and prayers we recite, the hymns we sing, and the offerings we make, all express a readiness for real relationship with God…but are we ready?

In today’s Gospel Jesus shows us what it looks like from God’s point of view if we hesitate and balk. Here Jesus stands, in the very city Abraham long ago foresaw, with its magnificent Temple built for no other reason than to serve as a meeting place between heaven and earth, and ironically even here at the gates to this house of worship, voices speaking out for God are routinely silenced or ignored.

Jesus laments how often and how much he has longed to gather in and protect these stiff-necked heirs of Abraham, but instead they just push back and run away. They are just too caught up in their own agendas, too focused on their own purposes, they hardly know how to notice God waiting to meet them in the Temple…God waiting and hoping for their trust once again, and offering once again to call the shots for them as Lord of their Godforsaken lives.

All these years later Lent brings us heirs of Abraham back to Christ’s cry of lament, and gives us the chance to make a better choice for ourselves. Do we trust God’s offer enough to offer God our trust? Do we trust God enough to put our best into his hands? If we are willing, or even willing to be willing, God calls it good enough to go. Amen.

Listen to the Sermon: