Beloved, lost, returning, repeat

When I was in seminary we came at the end to the great ordeal of the General Ordination Exams, exams that caused much fear and anxiety in all the third-year students. We took the exams on our own in our dorm rooms or apartments, so one of my friends printed out little slips of paper to tape up all over her apartment: God is faithful, they read. God didn’t bring you this far just to fail your exams, in other words. I loved that – somehow the idea of God being faithful to us felt new to me. It didn’t depend all on me to be faithful: God was at work, bigger than me and beyond my seeing (and beyond how well I did or did not study). Long after the exams were in the past, that line has stuck with me – because sometimes we need reminding: God is faithful.

I mentioned last week that we’ll get to hear the story of salvation history over the next several months, marked by signpost stories from the Old Testament and gospels. We heard today that wonderful tale of Abraham and Sarah and the three visitors. Despite their great age, despite their laughter and disbelief, the visitors promise that indeed, Abraham and Sarah will have a son. And in due time it comes to pass, with much rejoicing: Isaac is born.

But what we didn’t hear was a lot of confusion that came before it – God called Abram to take his family to the land of Canaan, and he went, and then there was a famine, so he went to Egypt, where he had some trouble with Pharoah, and then came back to Canaan, and then had some more trouble with local warlords, and then at last things seem to settle down. The Lord appeared to him and promised many descendants, and more time passed. Abram and Sarai tried to engineer those descendants themselves with their slave Hagar, which didn’t go well, and more time passed. And the Lord showed up again and said, no really, you will have descendants, and it will be through your wife Sarai, and let’s rename you both and circumcise all the men of your household so we can start fresh. And only after that did those three mysterious visitors turn up and renew the promise of a son, yet one more time. God in these stories is faithful to his promises – but God does sometimes operate on a longer timeframe than we might wish.

And then we heard the gospel story about Jesus sending out his disciples on mission. He sends them to go and do the same work he is doing: to proclaim the good news and to heal, and to do so without care for themselves, without provisions, money, or any extra security. But it was just earlier in the same chapter that we heard about Matthew being called as a disciple – in other words, the twelve disciples have barely been assembled, and already Jesus sends them out, giving them the authority and power to gather in others. They are walking daily with Jesus, coming to know and understand all those centuries of God’s grace to Israel; now they are to give that to others. There are so many lost sheep, people marginalized by sickness, ignorance, poverty, alienated from the sources of power in Israel, to be brought into God’s love. Go to them, says Jesus. And don’t worry, but I’m sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. And they’ll flog you and persecute you and turn you against each other. But all the same, God is faithful. And with this inspiring pep talk, off they go.

Here’s the pattern we see in scripture – and in the lives of all the saints. God is faithful. God chooses us from the beginning of time, calls us sacred and holy, a people made for God. God leads us out of the bondage in which we find ourselves – the entanglements we get ourselves into, the limitations set upon us by the world we live in – and God carries us through the wilderness of transformation, creating us anew. We have moments when we see and grasp the love God is giving to us, and we respond in love. Good things happen.

And yet things go south, repeatedly. Troubles arise, sufferings unfold, life is difficult and doesn’t go our way. And over time, or maybe not so very much time, we wander off, going our own way and forgetting that God cares for us. We get anxious, and think that we can make it better on our own, with gods of our own devising. We worry that all this suffering must mean that God isn’t actually with us after all.

But time and again, in ways both subtle and obvious, God shows up again to remind us that he loves us. It takes being attentive sometimes, extra listening, extra looking, to see the signs; at other times God decides to whack us upside the head in ways we can’t possibly miss. But God is faithful – little tiny slips of paper appear on our wall, in the words of someone in our community, in unexpected waves of joy at sunset, in astounding miracle healings. We’re reminded, again and again.

And even though we don’t quite think we’ve got it all clear in our heads how this is supposed to go, with all that, God sends us out to others. To go and find those whose way has been barred by poverty, oppression, addiction, illness, their own bad choices, and to give them the good news of God’s love for them. To heal them, to cast out the demons and false gods that we set up in this world, to restore people to fullness of life – and to bring them in to the heart of God. That is what we are sent to do, as people of faith, as holy people of God. And we find God’s faithfulness as we go.

Being human, and human nature being what it is, this is all a cycle that we repeat over and over again. Knowing ourselves to be God’s, straying from that, being called back in love, and going out to bring others into that love – over and over again. We tell these stories every Sunday because we need to hear them time and time again. We tell them because they are true; because they place our individual experiences squarely in the context of the story of all humankind. We tell them because they comfort us, knowing that no matter where we are or what we have done, God loves us and calls us home. And we tell them because they challenge us, sending us out to share that love with others in the most radical way possible, bringing all of humanity into the healing and wholeness of God.

Paul offers this in his letter to the Romans:

We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. 

God is faithful. So we have work to do. May we hear and know the truth of God’s love for us; and may we go to proclaim that good news to all the world.  Amen.