September 4, 2022: Faith Story: He Followed God
He Followed God
Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-10; Genesis 12:1-9
Rev. Rhonda Blevins
September 4, 2022
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval.
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. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
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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. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.
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Imagine that you are a couple of miles out in the Gulf of Mexico. You’ve got two rowboats, and you are standing with one foot in each boat. One boat, however, is filled with holes and is sinking quickly. Unless you do something, and fast, you will soon be in the water!
There are times in the life of faith that feel just like this. The boat with the holes represents everything we know, everything we hold dear, our values, our ideologies, our very ego—everything that is impermanent. The boat without holes represents the eternal, what we in the church call God or Christ.
Straddling the two boats, it’s daunting to shift our equilibrium. “Will I fall in if take this step?” However, it’s even more daunting to keep one foot in the sinking ship. You must make a leap—a leap of faith.
Today we come to the place in our study of the exemplars of faith in Hebrews 11—the “Roll Call of Faith”—where we meet Abraham. Of all the exemplars named by the author of Hebrews, Abraham receives the longest narrative. Next week we’ll continue Abraham’s story, but he’ll take a bit of a back seat as we explore the life of Sarah, his wife. Today we focus on the aspect of Abraham’s life that earned him a spot in the “Roll Call of Faith” from Hebrews 11:8: “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.”
It’s the “not knowing” I want us to focus on today.
To begin, let’s think about where we find this narrative of Abraham, who becomes the archetype for all who journey. This story is in Genesis chapter 12. This is pretty early in the biblical narrative. Only ten chapters earlier (Genesis 2:16b-17), we find the first man, Adam, in the garden. God tells Adam “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” By the time we get to the next chapter, guess what Adam does? He eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam chose the path of knowledge, which the biblical writer equates to the path of death.
When we get to the story of Abraham, it seems that the writer of Genesis juxtaposes Abraham against Adam. Adam chose the path of knowing—the path of death; Abraham chose the path of not knowing—“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.” Now, this is completely counterintuitive, but this path of “not knowing” is the path of faith that leads to life. Adam isn’t mentioned in the Hebrews “Roll Call of Faith.” Abraham, on the other hand, is the “Roll Call’s” biggest star.
Abraham “set out, not knowing where he was going.”
Have you ever “set out, not knowing where” you were going? You didn’t know where you were going but you knew you couldn’t stay? Maybe when you left home for the first time. Maybe when you quit that job without having another one lined up. Maybe when you got married or divorced or widowed.
Sometimes “setting out” on an epic journey is something we choose. Alternatively, sometimes life pushes us on our way against our wills. Who would ever choose a path of grief or suffering? Yet circumstances sometimes force us to “set out” into that wide open space, leaving us “not knowing” where the path will lead.
Abraham is an archetype for us all. And so is Adam. Knowing and not knowing, a never-ending cycle as one progresses in the life of faith. Some frame this cyclical pattern as “orientation—disorientation—reorientation”:
· Orientation: you’re happy in a boat out in the Gulf.
· Disorientation: your boat begins to take on water, so you place one foot in another boat so that now you’re straddling between the two.
· Reorientation: you settle into your new boat. You have memories from the old boat, but the boat has little value for you now.
Here’s another illustration to help us understand. Let’s think of spiritual growth like climbing up a mountain. If you’ve ever done much hiking in the mountains, you know it’s rarely a straight shot. Rather, it’s up and down, up and down, up and down again:
· Orientation: you’re at the top of a hill with beautiful vistas.
· Disorientation: you’re walking down that hill.
· Reorientation: you’re climbing up a new hill. Once you get to the top, you’re at “orientation” once more.
If you’re growing spiritually, you’ll take this journey multiple times throughout your life. And here’s a promise I’ll make you: it’s rarely comfortable.
Back to Abraham. “He set out, not knowing where he was going.” How do you think the conversation went when he told his family, “Hey guys, I’m leaving here, never to return.” “What?!? Where are you going?” “Ummm, I dunno.”
They surely thought he was crazy! How could they understand? Why would Abraham leave everything and everyone he knew? Why would he trade his “knowing” for “not knowing”?
Because God called and Abraham followed.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “Hold on there, pastor. I thought that faith is about certainty—about knowing where you’re going after you die.”
There is a whole branch of Christianity in which that idea—“knowing where you’re going after you die”—takes center stage. I don’t want to dismiss that idea entirely, because that may be a starting point for many, but I do want to suggest that there’s so much more to faith beyond that.
When I was about 14-years-old, I went with a church group to hear a famous evangelist preach at a big rally at one of the local football fields. Maybe it was the cool spring air, maybe it was the lights, maybe it was the music, maybe it was the naivete of my tender 14-year-old faith, but when that evangelist started talking about hell, about how hot it is, about how I was going to end up there unless I knew for certain that I was going to heaven . . . then he asked, “Do you know that you know that you know that you know” with complete certainty that I would go to heaven . . . whatever the combination of prompts . . . before I knew it I was rushing down the stairs of the stadium to do whatever it was I should do so I could “know that I know that I know that I know” that I would go to heaven. In other words, I “got saved.” Again. A couple of weeks later, I was baptized. Again.
That certainty lasted, until it didn’t. Eventually I began to recognize some real pitfalls with this expression of Christianity. Eventually I grew to understand that “knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt” isn’t faith at all. It’s just religion. (And a lucrative religion for certain famous evangelists.)
And there’s the rub. Religion—like the way of Adam—is the way of knowing. Faith, on the other hand—like the way of Abraham—is the way of not knowing. Religion says, “this doctrine, this dogma, this is the only right way to believe.” Faith is the way of Abraham, relinquishing what is known, understood, clung to. Faith is setting out, not knowing where you are going.
Here’s how the Apostle Paul described his journey of faith to his friends in Philippi (Phil. 3:12-14:
Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
Do you see how Paul was talking about leaving what was known for what was unknown?
To the Romans, Paul wrote (Rom. 12:2):
Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind.
How does one “renew the mind” if not by letting go of firmly held ideas, beliefs and convictions and opening the mind (the path of “not knowing”) to new revelations of God?
In other words, when the boat you’re in begins to take on water, it’s time to jump ship!
I guess you could say it worked out pretty well for Abraham: because Abraham followed God, God established a covenant with Abraham, God gave Abraham a new land, and God kept the promise to make a great nation from him. Abraham became the father of the Hebrew nation and the preeminent exemplar of faith to the Hebrew people. All because Abraham chose the way of “not knowing.”
I wonder: is God calling you to step out in faith in some way? The boat you’re in—some life situation or some set of beliefs or some way of looking at the world—it’s becoming uncomfortable, untenable, unrealistic, un . . . something. It used to work for you, it used to be comfortable for you, but you see the holes in it. That boat is taking on water, and you have to jump ship, you have to leave the boat you know, across the chasm of unknowing, to a new boat.
Is God calling you to make some leap of faith?
Abraham followed God into the great unknown. Will you?