fragile

2 Lent C 2010
(Genesis 15: 1-12, 17-18; Ps 27; Philippians 3: 17-4: 1; Luke 13: 31-35)


Fragility is in the air these days.

A season of earthquakes shows us how fragile are our buildings, our roads, and our lives. Late winter snow falls on the Northeast, my birthplace, and travel stops and trees fall. And lives to which I am close are showing the fragility of human flesh and human minds.

Into this fragility comes the God who speaks and the God who draws near, the God whose glory, says the Collect, is mercy.

It’s hard to wrap ourselves around the idea of a God who is mercy when the earth shakes or the snow doesn’t stop, or the clinic is supposed to call with our test results or our lives feel like they are coming apart. Maybe it is best that we do not even try. We do not always have the strength or the will to reach out our arms. We cannot always stretch our minds to come up with a concept of God that fits the overwhelming pressure of our lives. We give up under the effort.

It’s then that we need to let God do the reaching. In fact, that’s really all we can do. One preacher said recently, “God’s habit is to draw near.” I say yes, and more. God’s habit is to strain towards us, and to break the divine heart in the reaching and the straining. God’s habit is to reach beyond all limitations, and to break down the barrier of his own flesh in the reaching.

Abram was sunk in his own fragility and anxiety and failing. He had lived with the promise made to him, the promise that set him off on his epic journey from his home in the east. His life and Sarai’s life had seen ups and downs, joys and disappointments, but the promise of his and Sarai’s own flesh and blood inheriting his life and the promise had not come true. And now he was old, Sarai was old, and Abram was feeling his own fragility and the fragility of the hope and the promise that had kept his life together.

That’s when God draws near, or rather God strains forward through the cosmos and through Abram’s own doubt and disappointment. “Look up, see the heavens, see the stars…You are akin with the stars, your descendants will be as many as them.” Abram’s disillusion and disappointment and fear are raised to see the stars.

But the light of the heavens is not the only way that the God of promise strains to reach out.

The lovely scene of stars and peace switches to blood and darkness. A dark and ancient ritual is where God and Abram next meet. Animals are chosen and split open, and the scent of blood lingers in the air as Abram sits and waves off the vultures. Old, old ways, the old ways that people felt were the only way to feed the desires of bloodthirsty gods whose help and protection needed to be bought.

We may shudder or shake our heads at this bloody ancient ritual, but the instinct and the practice is alive and well in our own lives. Who has suspected that, when cruel things happen, that God is angry or has turned away or has been revealed as cruel or even to be non-existent? So much lovely comforting faith withers under the heat of loss and pain. Through the years I have often wondered at why people seem to drop away from the church when life goes wrong. But we feel that our lives are supposed to be all together and settled and resolved before we bring ourselves before a God who we were raised to think was all about order and resolvedness and having one’s life all worked out.

But the God who strains forward to us is at home in our mess and our unresolvedness, in the heat and the unevenness of our real lives. God comes to Abram in the midst of this dark sacrifice, as Abram lays in a dark trance overcome with primordial darkness, the kind that we taste a little of when we awake with our hearts pounding in the middle of the night. God comes, and passes with smoke and fire between the halves of the sacrifice. God comes in the midst of Abram’s doubt and fear and darkness, and shares it. The ancient gesture of passing through the halves of the sacrifice is known still in some parts of the world. It’s what we get the expression “cutting a deal” from. In darkness and doubt, in the fear of the night, God comes and cuts the deal, makes the promise again.

God can be trusted to come to us wherever we are, whomever we are, in whatever darkness or doubt or discouragement we find ourselves. God does not scorn mess or darkness or primitive emotions or undeveloped thoughts. We do not need to have it all together in order to be loved with passion by a seeking, longing, passionate God.

It is this God who speaks in anguish in the words of Jesus. With the love and anxious care of a mother hen I love you. And you would have none of it. But the day will come when my love will be raised up and in the breaking of my heart you will know me.

Every Sunday we sing (say) those simple words that Jesus said would be said only when we see him, only when we know him. “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” When we sing (say) those words today, the question for each of us is, do we see him? Do we know him? The words and images are familiar of course. But do we see him as he is?

Do we see the unspeakable love of God straining towards us through the struggle of the world and the struggle and murk of our own lives?

Do we see the God who scorns nothing that is us, nothing that is human, and embraces us in order to love and transform us?

Do we see the God who enters our lives and pushes past all reason and doubt and all our inability to keep up appearances, to keep ourselves together?

This God’s love is only truly visible when we stop trying to reach out to him with lives resolved and work out, and instead know that this God reaches out to us.