On the Way to Wonder

Genesis 27, 28 continues with the life of Isaac, the son of Abraham, who follows in his father’s footsteps. Isaac marries Rebekah, his cousin.  They too have fertility problems but eventually twins are born, Esau and Jacob.  Isaac favors the elder twin, Esau, who is an outdoors person while Rebekah favors Jacob, a homebody.  Jacob, the younger twin, takes advantage of his brother and gets the birthright of the eldest, and with the aid of his mother deceives his aging father so that he receives the family blessing too.  Perhaps that doesn’t mean much to us today as our families are becoming so geographically disconnected but family squabbles over “the will”, who inherits what, and how it is done, often leave deep scars in families even today.  Jacob has to run to escape the wrath of Esau and goes to his mother’s brother who deceives him.  It is a bit of a steamy story as Isaac spends years working for his two wives and has 12 sons and eventually returns home to face Esau.  The twelve sons of Jacob by his two wives and two concubines become the twelve tribes of the Jews and from this very human story God builds the nation of Israel we see today

         At the birth of our daughter, we were standing in the crowd at our son’s boarding school as President Moi of Kenya walked past right near us.  He raised his ruling stick and pointed it at my brand new baby and said in front of everyone, “She too will go to this school.”  This family story always leads to a discussion among my children about who has blessed them and how.  Being blessed or affirmed is a powerful experience.  Baptisms, weddings, naming ceremonies all reinforce this.  Calling out and pointing out the good seen in another is a wonderful affirmation.  Perhaps you do not have children or yours are grown.  “Uncle Bill” at my church checked in with the teenagers regularly to hear how football games went, how they did on tests, and generally “saw” them and blessed them by projecting to them their “better self.”

         So many children come from broken homes today and the role of community to hold these children and bless them is sacred.  We all have parts of our life when we act less than honorably and to have someone who sees beyond our failures and affirms our potential is huge.  Affirming our value in the eyes of God is even hugh-er!  Jacob was not perfect but it was in those broken times that God was molding him and forming him. God eventually changed Jacob’s name to Israel.  God is working and is not done with us yet.  Perhaps you can think of five people you could reach out and affirm this week and affirm the work you see God doing in their lives.  Dropping a card in the mail or a text that says, “Hey, thanks for being you!” will make someone smile and make you smile too!

Genesis 21:1-22:19, the eighth lesson in our epic story lays the foundation for our modern day Middle East conflicts.  Abraham has a covenant with God that he will be the father of a nation that will bless all people.  His first child, though, was conceived with Sarah’s servant, Hagar, according to tribal customs.  Impatience often leads to shortcuts that have a price tag we do not expect.  The promise was to come through Sarah, and years later Sarah would conceive Isaac.  Isaac means laughter.  With the laughter of Isaac is the reality of the tensions between Sarah and Hagar.  Hagar is sent away to keep peace but surprisingly God meets Hagar, the first time he speaks to a woman, and promises that her son, Ishmael, will also be the father of a great nation, the Arabs.  Sarah’s son becomes the father of the Jewish people.  Both Arabs and Jews claim Abraham as their father!  Our epic story is still being lived out in our lifetime

         Our epic includes another story that tells how Abraham understood God to want him to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice.  Sacrificing the first son was a common tribal custom of the day and something a god would be expected to ask.  Abraham climbed the mountain, built an altar, and tied Isaac up, but God stopped him and told him to look in the bush near by where a ram was stuck and would be the sacrifice.  Christians believe this is a clue that points to the sacrifice on Calgary, of Jesus, at that same spot centuries later.

         So what do these two unique stories say to us today?  So many times we become impatient with God’s plan and take life into our own hands.  But that does not mean God is defeated.  Despite all the detours we take, God is able to work with us and bless.  Often we think there is only one right answer to a situation we find ourselves in and we become frazzled and immobilized trying to do the right thing.  Perhaps God is giving us the freedom to choose and he can bless whichever path we choose as we seek to be faithful.

         Sometimes we do not understand the twists and turns life takes and it feels like God is asking us to sacrifice that which we love so much.  We question why a child dies, why a marriage ends in divorce, a failed business enterprise and many other heartbreaks that redirect our lives and test our hearts.  Abraham sees the ram and we are encouraged at the glimpse, the hint that Christ will die for our sins so that we have eternal life.  We see that now but at the time, I doubt Abraham understood the significance.  He trusted and obeyed and took the next step, as he understood it to be.

         We can take encouragement and hope from these stories.  We may not know the future, the outcomes of our mistakes, the outcomes of our sacrifices, but we know who holds the future, God.  As we continue this epic story, may you be encouraged that he sees you at those moments of despair and at the moments of trial and God has a plan.  Be encouraged!

Remember the song, “Father Abraham had many sons, many sons had Father Abraham.  I am one of them and so are you.  So let’s just praise the Lord.”  God promised Abraham to bless all people through him.  But time passed and Abram and Sarai had no children and Abram grew tired of waiting.  Each month, no pregnancy, until the praise and promise seemed hollow.  Genesis 15 tells of the deep discouragement of the man we call “the father of the faith.”  Even heroes in the Bible knew the depths of despair as well as the heights of communion with God!  God visited again and renewed his promise to Abram. “Look up in the sky and count the stars.”  Some people count sheep when they can’t sleep but Abram was told to count the stars.  That is the magnitude of God’s blessing.

         Despair is when I turn my eyes onto myself, my limited abilities and failings.  It focuses on what I don’t have.  Faith is turning our eyes to the stars, to the heavens, to God and focuses on the God who created the stars and keeps them in orbit and who exists beyond our ability to see or imagine.

         “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.”  Jesus had not been born and that part of our epic story is yet to be revealed.  But Abram trusted God and believed that God is able to do far more than he could even think. 

         I loved the original Star Trek where each week we went “where no man has ever gone.”  We were encouraged to think of worlds that had yet to be discovered.  Faith is like that.  We take our eyes off ourselves and focus on the heavens and on God’s ability and trustworthiness to carry us to places people have yet to discover.

         So where is the growing edge for you today, the area where you have waited so long for God to do a miracle? Perhaps you know the agony of prayer for a wayward child.  Perhaps it is the desired promotion or partner.  Perhaps it is a dream for health.  Abram trusted God when all seemed lost.  He did not know how God would fulfill his promise but he believed.  Faith is not believing you will receive but believing in the God who is able.  We do not know how God will fulfill the desires of our heart but we know he can and he sees and cares.  Patience and waiting is hard.  “Look at the sky and count the stars.”

Our “epic story” seems to be struggling. Our hero, God, has created beings that just seem to keep getting themselves into trouble. Our villain, Satan, has created a communication problem between humans and God: sin. Flood and languages have been imposed to slow the downward spiral. Humans do not seem to be able to help themselves. At this point God does the unexpected. He reaches into his creation and develops relationship with a man who married his half sister: Abram and Sarai. Not a very likely couple. God is wanting to bless the people he created and he is willing to strategize. He has a plan. This is an epic story about us.

Why? John 3:16 tells us that God so loved… God loved his creatures. How many parents look at their child born with Down’s syndrome and choose to love that child that is differently enabled. I remember the nurse looking at my baby and saying, “Well, that one will never be beautiful.” But that baby was mine and I loved him. “Mona Lisa” smiles is about an art teacher at Wellesley College, who shows a painting of a cow to her class and asks if they think it was good art. The debate starts among the girls and then she reveals it is a painting she did at age 6 for her mother and her mother, of course, loved it. God so loved the world.

Why Abram, though, who became Abraham and Sarai who became Sarah? Perhaps taking someone who seems so unlikely presents an epic challenge for an epic hero, kind of like Hildago racing his mustang across the Arab desert. We love these stories of people overcoming despite themselves to reach a goal that is bigger than themselves. God chooses Abram, Genesis 12: 2,3.

“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you;

I will make your name great and you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you,

and whoever curses you I will curse,

and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

This is called the Abrahamic covenant. God, our hero has set his will and his heart. He has a plan for Abram and for you.

         Abram is not perfect. After talking with the God of the universe, he gets scared by famine and takes his people to Egypt and asks Sarai to say she is his sister. He is called “the father of the faith” and even he had his moments. There is hope for us.

         God initiates. God loves. God has a plan to bless you and me. How do we think about that blessing? Are we looking for finances? Fame? Adventure? I suspect many of those things come and go with time. Relationship and love are important. Abram was willing to be in relationship with God, to listen and to obey. May you be growing in your relationship with God as we work through this epic story.

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Dorothy in Wizard of Oz broke into the song, “Somewhere over the rainbow” and Judy Garland, the actress, continued singing that song for the next 30 years, her signature song.  Dorothy who lived in the dry plains of Kansas knew the beauty of color from the rainbow and knew happiness must be over there.  Our fourth lesson is Genesis 8:1-9:17 and is known as the Noahic covenant.  God puts a rainbow in the sky to tell us of his love that goes with us through our trials and is unending.

         Noah exits the ark with family and animals to a new world.  His first act is to build an altar for worship and offers a sacrifice.  God who has not forgotten his creation sees and vows, “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood.  And never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done.”  He places a rainbow in the sky as a symbol of his vow.  It is noteworthy that it is one-sided and nothing is asked of humanity. 

         When we go through rough, trying times, how do we respond?  It must have been wonderful for Noah and family to get out of the confinement, the work, and the stench of the ark.  Questions must have filled his heart.  Amazingly his first response is worship for deliverance.  I wonder how many people received their stimulus checks and immediately put some aside for God, or did they run to store or pay bills?  Attitudes of gratitude so often do not always jump to our minds first.  Noah combines his gratitude with sacrifice, sharing that which God did not demand here at the beginning of our epic story.  We shall see this theme of combining sacrifice with forgiveness from sin and with gratitude.          So when we see the rainbow in the sky with all its colors we can think of the sunny times after the clouds and of God’s promise to not destroy the earth.  Let us take each color of the rainbow – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet – and name one item we can be thankful for.  Perhaps red is for strawberries!  But also remember how the rainbow promises an eternity that will look so colorful compared to the dry lands of now.  He said it and he will do it!  This epic will unfold to explain how.  Hallelujah!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSZxmZmBfnU

“Bet you can’t eat just one!”  Do you remember that potato chip commercial?  As I do the eternal dance with dieting, I realize that once I break down and eat “one,” thinking that will satisfy the desire, so often it leads to “two” and the battle is lost.  Perhaps that is the definition of addiction. The third story in our larger epic is the story of Noah, Genesis 6:5-7:24.

         Yesterday we heard about the epic problem, we are separated from God – we don’t walk face to face with him anymore and out actions separate us from each other.  It appears the villain, Satan, has the upper hand. Humanity has put their hand in the bag of potato chips and for sure, one chip did not satisfy!  Today’s story opens with humans separated from God but God is watching them, they just don’t know it.  Society has spiraled downward as people follow “the inclinations of their desires” and live for self. 

         God’s reaction is “grief” and his “heart is filled with pain.”  Parents watching a child make decisions leading to self-destruction understand this pain.  Watching someone we care about suffer whether because of bad choices or because of disease or because of political conflict and prejudice or hunger or whatever, wrenches our heart.  Today government is trying to put an end to repercussions of the Tulsa massacre in 1921, is trying to deal with children refugees on our borders, is trying to deal with environmental problems – just to name a few.  We know this dilemma. We live the pain.

         God, unlike government that deals in laws and wrangles with getting congress to agree on solutions, is able to see the hearts of people and God could see that Noah was willing to listen and obey.  Noah sought to please God and God saw.  God’s “intervention plan” for dealing with humanity spiraling downward and destroying itself was the flood.  Noah and family were saved to start a new world.  The earth was not destroyed.  A new beginning was made possible.  God’s light began to shine again.

         It is always easy to see the shortcoming of the other person when confronted with sin.  But in fact, we all have our hand in the cookie jar, thinking we will only eat “just one.”  There is a God watching and wanting the best for us.  He does see those desires of our heart and knows if we are trying to please him and obey.  Today let us pray for our own areas where an “intervention plan” might be needed and for our world today that needs help.  Name maybe three areas and pray for a few minutes.  Our epic story will continue tomorrow to see how God continues this plot.  Blessings.

Epic stories have epic plots with epic heroes and epic villains and victims caught in the middle.  Our family loves “Apollo 13” about the space flight to the moon and the fulfillment of the dreams of the astronauts.  There is an explosion that compromises the whole flight.  They communicate with control central, “We have a problem.”  “We need the plan.”  Our reading today is Genesis 3.  The problem, the villain and the victims are identified.  We use the word “Sin” with a capital “S” to talk about the event that separated God’s creation from him.  We do not walk and talk with God, face to face, as we were created to do.  We us the word “sin” with a small “s” to talk about those actions we do that separate us from each other, the world, and ourselves.  The villain is named as “the serpent” or Satan and the victim(s) are God’s creation as death now affects all.

         The space flight was to go to the moon and walk weightless.  God’s plan was the Garden of Eden living in relationship with him, creation and each other in open, trusting relationship and not having to carry the responsibility of knowing good and evil.  Satan introduces doubt – did God say?, did God mean?, surely you will not die! – into the minds of the creatures and here we are today, doubting the existence of God, his will and his way. 

         While doing the Bible translation in Kenya with illiterate people we discovered they had a creation story too.  God lived very close to his people originally so people were very careful to not offend him.  They moved their houses on goats as they traveled the dessert looking for good water and caring for the camels God had given them to be responsible for.  One day a woman who was very stubborn, loaded her house on the back of a camel instead of a goat and refused to obey the elders who warned her.  When the camel stood up, the sticks of the house poked God and he moved far away into the heavens.  Interestingly, the story is not dissimilar to the Bible version.

         The result of sin is labor in childbirth and work, guilt and distance in relating to God, pain, sorrow and conflict with others.  Sigh.  Houston, we have a problem.  It does not feel like the light is shining and each Sunday we open our service by confessing: I have not loved God with my whole heart, body, mind and self and I have not loved my neighbor as myself.  But then the pastor shares the words, the plan that is sought from control center of the space program.  The pastor says, “In the name of God, I declare onto you the complete forgiveness of ALL your sins.”

         Yes, we have a problem because we all fall short and none of us now walk face to face with God.  Yes, there is a plan.  We can find forgiveness and peace and return to God but that will be revealed as this epic story continues.  Christians believe the answer lies of the life of Jesus Christ and his work on the cross but like those astronauts we are going to have to gather all the bits and pieces of this and that and make the square peg fit into the round hole.  Truly this is an epic story for us, offering hope and forgiveness.  Blessing.

Some opening lines to stories set the tone of what is to follow and we remember.  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” opens A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.  “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” opens Robert Frosts’ famous poem “The Road Not Taken.”  “Two households, both alike in dignity…” opens Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.”  The Bible opens with, “In the beginning, God created…”  The opening sets the stage that before all is God.  Today we are challenged to read Genesis 1 and 2 that tells of the creation of heaven, earth and all that fills them, including people, animals, vegetation, and matter.

         God’s first words, “Let there be light” gives a theme that will be unfolding in this epic story, how God’s intention is to shine light into darkness.  God creates form: heaven/earth, light/dark, sky/water and land/sea in the first three “days” of creation.  He then filled the forms with sun/moon, birds/fish, animals and humans in the next three days.  All humanity carries God’s image and God’s life. We quibble about seven “days” but the Bible has God creating, filling, and declaring, “It is good.”

         The important place to start an epic is with the realization that there is a pre-existent God who created us in his image, to care for his world, and to bring light.  We are not a mistake no matter what the circumstances surrounding our inception.  We are valued no matter what mishaps have plagued us.  And God desires to fill us with light and life.

         Let us take a few moments to reflect on how we see the creativity of God in the world around us, in the people around us, and how we might be his instruments to bring light into the life of another today.  It may feel like the worst of times but God is working.  We may be choosing between two paths as we journey through the woods of life but we can have the Holy Spirit guiding us.  And yes there are Romeos and Juliets in our love story but we also know there is a God walking through those rough times with us.  In the beginning, God!  Start your day with this reminder.  Blessings.

“An epic is a large user story that cannot be delivered as defined within a single iteration or is large enough that it can be split into smaller user stories.  There is no standard form to represent epics.”  Examples might be Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey by Homer, or Paradise Lost by John Milton.  I remember reading that C.S. Lewis and J. R. Tolkien were trying to write epics as one created Tales of Narnia and the other wrote Lord of the Rings.  To me the epic that has impacted my life the most is the Bible, written over a period of perhaps 1500 years by multiple writers and including multiple genres. 

         In my 30s with five children under six years old and nursing twins, I was becoming spiritually dry.  My husband and I ran across Scripture Union as a daily devotional.  He read while I nursed.  Now he still reads and I do needle work for twenty minutes each morning.  Scripture Union used international writers and at the bottom of each page was a plan to read through the Bible in a year by reading two Old Testament and one New Testament chapters each day and a Psalm on Wednesday.  I loved to tick off doing that reading and of course it took several years to develop the discipline to read through the Bible in a year.  Gradually names and stories began to become more and more recognizable.  Scripture Union has identified what they consider “[The Essential 100] one-hundred readings through the world’s most important book” by Whitney T. Kuniholm.

         I’m curious.  The Bible is an epic putting in print “God’s interaction with humankind (p.1).”  Of the many sub-stories told in the Bible, what might be the 100 most important, I wonder.  The stories are organized in groups of five so in twenty weeks we will have checked it out and pondered.  Sounds like a good challenge.

         Tomorrow we will start so let’s first ponder what stories have formed our lives?  Who are our heroes?  Yesterday for Memorial Day we remembered cultural heroes whose life stories have deeply impacted our thinking.  What makes someone a hero or a personal mentor in your life?  What qualities do you look for that you pray will be growing in your life or your children’s?  Cultural heroes, personal heroes, literary heroes inspire us to be our better self.  Perhaps we can counterbalance some of the cynicism of our day by focusing on these stories.  I’m excited to hear good news!

I just finished watching the “PBS National Memorial Day Concert.”  So many pictures with so many memories.  I remember that morning of 9-11, turning on the TV and seeing the plane fly into the second tower.  We had just returned to the USA, our belongings were now locked in LA harbor, and I was getting children ready for school.  That is a strong memory in my mind.  I have a son in the Army, stationed abroad.  He is always in my mind and heart.  Near the end of the program, the commentators said that the word that sums up Memorial Day that we celebrate today is the word “remember.”  We remember all who have fought to protect the freedoms we enjoy and who are on the field now.  It is not just an American sentiment!

         I love Lion King.  Simba runs to the river and looks in the water and then from the cloud hears his deceased father, Mufasa, tell him “Remember, remember who you are.”  In Psalm 103 the psalmist talks about God remembering his creation,

As a father has compassion for his children,
    so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him.
 For he knows how we were made;
    he remembers that we are dust. (Psalm 103:13,14)

God remembers that we are dust. We are told elsewhere that our names are etched on his hands.  For those who seek forgiveness our sins are put as far away as the East is from the West.  He doesn’t remember that which needs to be forgotten.  God does not get dementia and forget our names or confuse us with someone else.  Our names are written in his book of life. Our God knows us and remembers us.

         As you remember today people who have contributed to make you who you are today, jot down their name on a piece of paper and write one word next to it that was one of their contributions to you.  Then pray over the list and end by thanking God for remembering that we are dust and need his help.