March 20, 2011
Details, Details, Details - Genesis 12:1-4
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadIn the event that you wanted to know, some of the issues of this past week for me have been the following: It started last week, actually, very early last Sunday morning when the time changed. I love falling back in the fall, but springing forward in the spring is just brutal for me. Fortunately for me, my four-year-old daughter has been on Spring Break this week. It seems like she has of break about every week, but finally after completing the rigors of the first five day week in at least a month in her preschool, she is on a well deserved Spring Break. It all makes life easier for me because my oldest daughter, like me, is a night owl, and time change would have been that much worse for us. The Church is in the season of Lent, which makes life a little busier for me as a pastor. The country is in the season of taxes, which makes life infinitely busier for my CPA wife. Last but certainly not least, my Wofford Terriers battled very valiantly against the Brigham Young Basketball team in first round of March Madness, but came up short.
Meanwhile, a world away, or at least half a world away, the people of Japan are reeling from the fifth most powerful earthquake in recorded human history. Earthquakes happen when plates below the earth, about the size of the State of South Carolina, shift under pressure. If that shift happens on land, it creates an earthquake. If it happens at sea, it creates a tidal wave, or a tsunami. In Japan’s case, it was both, and the devastation is unimaginable. Coupled with the resulting nuclear meltdown, the Far East is coming off the most miserable week it has had since its last exposure to radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
From the outset, my story and Japan’s story are completely unrelated to one another. Why should anybody care about the minute details of my life, or your life for that matter? And, for that matter, why should God care? How do minute details of my little life possibly relate to the cosmic events of an earthquake and tsunami? How can anything that we do at all have any effect on something so big? And besides, we’re looking at two entirely different things. My behavior very much affects my life. It does not affect earthquakes. If the two are related, then I am at a complete loss as to tell you how.
Abram would have been at a loss, too, but Abram learned a few things in Genesis 12 and so will we. Even though this is a short passage, there are tons of minutes little details in it. First of all, it all actually starts with a detailed genealogy. There are nine generations from Abram to Noah. That’s quite a storied past. Abram was probably very wealthy. He certainly became wealthy, and he certainly had a lot of land. From that, he also had animals, and crops, and servants. He also had a wife, named Sarai. If you keep reading in Chapter 12, you’ll read that Sarai was drop-dead gorgeous, which I’m sure made Abram very happy. The only problem with Abram and Sarai was that they were barren, which was a very real problem, for Abram and Sarai. Abram’s family had no future. Some of ya’ll know all about that agony.
Yet in the grand scheme of things, in the cosmic picture of the world, that is a detail, isn’t it? It’s not a detail to you, but it is to the whole world. It’s certainly not going to affect earthquakes on the other side of the world. And yet God told Abram, in spite of or regardless of all those details, to go. That was it. With one command, God changed every minute and complicated detail of Abram’s life. What do you do with all this land? What about your animals? What about your house? How do you talk your wife into it? I’d like to be a fly on the wall in that conversation. And, oh by the way, where in the world are you going? That would be very nice to know, would it not? God just told you to go. It’s not like moving to Greensboro. It was dangerous. Abram had security at his house. And God just told him to leave all of that.
Details, details, details, all of which were very important to Abram, but probably not to anybody else. Why are we supposed to care about Abram’s details? Yet God also told Abram that he would bless every family in the entire world, all of God’s creation. That’s what faith does to us. It forces us to look beyond our details to something much, much bigger.
If yours is a normal human life, then it has some details to it. And, those details are complex. God is not going to solve all those details. Sometimes those details are very hard. You may think, for example, that me losing my dog on Thursday is a detail. We’ll I can tell you with certainty that it was a whole lot more than a detail for me. I loved that dog and I mourn her loss. God’s call does not change that. In fact, God may even do the opposite. Abram’s life got considerably more complicated when he met God in Genesis 12. In spike of everything else, regardless of everything else, go. That’s hard. The details did not go away, and they don’t go away for us.
I often stand up here in this pulpit and proclaim the value of education. But I’ll have to say that if there’s one area in which my own personal education has crippled me, it would be that I’m too calculating. In fact, I think that’s one of the problems with the Presbyterian Church. We’re too smart. We oftentimes talk ourselves out of doing some really good things. It’s the details, you see. Something costs too much money, or it’s too risky, or it would make half the Church upset, or another Church down the street tried it and it failed, or we don’t have the personnel, and on and on it goes. Now all of those are good reasons not to do what we might believe that God is calling us to do.
Abram had thousands of good reasons not to do what God was calling him to do, either. For the record, Abram wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. If he was, he would have stayed put. What Abram did was entirely too risky for any reasonable, half-way intelligent person to do. How you would feel if you were Abram’s father-in-law? Would you think it was a good idea for Abram just to go? A homeless shelter uptown was out of space. Caldwell Memorial Presbyterian Church let them use their Church. Caldwell is a very interesting story. It was the place to go Church in Charlotte at the turn of the century (last century that is). For whatever reason, it declined and its families all transferred to Myers Park and Covenant. It declined so much that they called a meeting to close the place down. That particular Sunday rolled around, and they had maybe fifteen people in sanctuary for worship that could hold probably four hundred. The service ended and the meeting began. The motion was put before the congregation to close it down, when these two visitors protested. They had planned on joining that day, they said, they just couldn’t close it down. So Caldwell voted to give themselves one more chance. They called a pastor and got some members somehow, and because they had such a large facility, they had a lot of extra space. So that space is now a homeless shelter. Caldwell also discerned that the community around them was increasingly bilingual. So they opened up a bilingual preschool. Now I can think of a long list of real good reasons why they should not have done any of that. Details, details, details.
And yet, God called them to go, and they went. And in doing that, they have lived into God’s blessing. We talked last week about the fall in Genesis 2. Ever since then, God has been determined to restore his good creation, to bless it, to bless us, to bless them, to bless and to save the whole world, bit by bit and piece by piece, all the way from a minute little ant, to us, to geological shifts in the far east.
As it turns out, the world has a future after all. You don’t hear that much in the media. You only really hear that at Church. But God’s blessing and our future go beyond us and our details, even though those details are very important. It may seem like a stretch to say that what we do in our Church has any effect on earthquakes in Japan, but it’s very true that God intends to use us in the world’s salvation. We hear a lot about God’s plan of salvation. We’re not just the recipients of that plan. We’re participants in it. We have to discern how God wants to use us in that plan. Then we have to just go. It involves lots and lots of details. It involves leaving a few things behind. It’s risky. It’s painful. It’s disruptive. But more than anything, it’s faithful.
I don’t know all of what that involves for us at Central Steele Creek. We do some very good ministry here. But what else is God calling us to do? We have to figure that out. We can’t just be content with the way things are. We’ve got to step out. We’ve got to take some risks and have some faith. God has put us here to be a working part of God’s Kingdom. God intends to bless us. God intends to give us a future. But we’ve got to go, in spite of, regardless of, but certainly not absent the details. God has given us some really good opportunities. I’ll bet you a good chunk of change that at least a few of those really opportunities are right at our back door. We just have to have some faith and step out of our comfort zones and go. God has given this Church some incredible opportunities. I hope we take him seriously.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
