Sunday Service - 2/28/10 - Barbara Brown Taylor

30:12 and lighten us with your celestial fire. For if you are with us, then nothing else matters. And if you are not with us, then nothing else matters. Be with us, we pray, in the name of your beloved. Amen. Abram believed the Lord and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. There may be no other sentence in the Old Testament that means more to followers of the new. God told Abraham that he and Sarah would have millions of descendants, as many as the stars in the heavens. even though there was absolutely no proof that that would come true. Abraham believed God, and that was enough to make him righteous in God's eyes. Abraham did not have to fight any battles, follow any commandments, love any neighbors, or give up anything for Lent.

31:15 All he had to do was believe what God told him, so Abraham did, and God reckoned that made him right. Forever after that, from the Apostle Paul to Billy Graham From Martin Luther to Martin Luther King Jr. From Muslims, Jews, and Christians Abraham has served as the first gold standard of faith As the primal believer who trusted God's promise Though he had no earthly evidence that the promise was ever going to come true For Protestants in particular, his story is key Abraham did not lift a finger to be saved. All he did was believe God's promises, and that was enough. He was saved by faith alone.

32:03 Rewards followed. Because Abraham believed God would give him descendants, God did, along with a land flowing with milk and honey for those descendants to live in. Would God have delivered those concrete goods if Abraham had not believed? We will never know. All we know from the first testament to the second is that those with faith the size of a mustard seed will be able to move mountains. They will be given what they ask for. The doors they knock on will be opened. Nothing will be impossible for them. That has to be great news if you're one of them. The problem is I don't know many of them. Most of the people I know worry that they don't have faith, or not enough of it, or not the right kind. Ask them how they know, and they'll tell you they don't believe everything they're supposed to.

33:04 They keep their fingers crossed during parts of the creed. Or they have a hard time with miracle stories. Or they are not even remotely convinced that God loves them just the way they are. They try hard to do what is right, but that isn't moving many mountains for them. They can't even sleep at night. Some of them keep bottles of Excedrin PM by their beds. Others wake up sweaty from dreams in which something big and loud is pounding on their front doors. Then they lie awake at night, worrying about everything from where their children will go to college to whether they will ever have enough money to retire. if they just had more faith, they say, if they just believed, then maybe none of this would be happening to them. If they had faith, maybe they'd be able to sleep soundly through the night. They could walk around, you know, with a working compass inside of them that pointed north no matter where they were. If they had faith, maybe they wouldn't be angry and afraid anymore. They would be as calm and confident as Abraham, resting on the promises of God. The great thing about Abraham is that he wasn't like that at all. He knew who God was when God came to him in a vision because God had come to him two times before. Plenty had happened since then. Abraham and Sarah had been to Egypt and back. They'd become rich. Abraham had won a lot of battles, but still no son, no descendants, no land. Then Cod came back a third time, you heard the story, to re-promise those awards. In a vision, the Bible says, although Abraham did not see anything at first, he heard something and said, the word of the Lord came to him, the Bible says, and the first four words he heard were, do not be afraid, which tells you Abraham was afraid, or at least prone to being

35:12 afraid, and who wouldn't have been? Sometimes even when you have prayed holes in the rug, begging for a word from God, even when you have announced to the universe that you are full ready for proof of divine life, still, even then, sudden results can turn your bones to water. You can start talking yourself out of what is happening as fast as you talked yourself in. Must not be fully awake yet. Must have been the habaneros on the enchiladas last night. What if this isn't God at all, but an angel from the other side? But Abraham must not have been all that afraid because he switched gears pretty quickly. Oh Lord God, he said, what will you give me? That's so embarrassing. You have to wonder why anybody wrote it down. But that's what it says. The Lord God came to Abraham and the first thing he said was, what will you give me? Now God had told him his reward would be great. So the question was not off topic. It was just a little abrupt. It was a little lacking in reverence. When I was learning to pray, my teachers taught me you always start by praising God. Blessed are you, O Lord, our God, King of the universe. Holy is your name, for you have done marvelous things. Then you thank God for at least some of those things, whether they benefit you directly or not. We thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, for the mystery of love.

36:49 Then you can ask for what you want. But reverently and respectfully, you don't just say, what will you give me? And then follow that up with a direct complaint like Abraham did. You've given me no offspring and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir. But that's what Abraham said. And God did not strike him dead. Instead, God reassured him, no slave would be his heir, God said. No one but a child of Abraham's own body would be his heir. Then God took the old man outside, which means he was inside before that, I don't know, in a tent, where all he could see up above him was maybe some tarp with holes in it. But outside, Abraham could see a lot more than that. I don't know where you live, but chances are you can't see half of what he saw. At the very least, you have three neighbors who leave their porch lights on at night.

37:48 At worst, you live where the lights of parking lots and football stadiums and tall buildings and billboards cast such an artificial glow in the sky that you might as well be in a tent for all the stars you can see. But Abraham could see. Not just specks of light, but the actual colors of them. Some yellow, some red, some flashing back and forth between blue and green. Plus millions of tiny ones, so small they looked like phosphorescent clouds. There were triangles of stars up there, long rectangles of stars up there. There were swirls and rivers of stars up there. And God said, count them if you can. But how could Abraham do that? Every time he started, one would fall or a new one would appear. The stars went on and on. They went deep and deep. If anyone had looked into Abraham's eyes right then, they would have seen his eyes littered with stars, as many as would fit on the twin planets of one old man's eyes.

39:00 So shall your descendants be, God said. And Abraham believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. Wait, what happened there? We get all kinds of other details in the story, right down to Eliezer of Damascus, but at this golden hinge of the story, the point at which the whole history of three major world religions could have turned to naught, all we get is a flat statement of fact. Abraham believed the Lord. Why? How? Because? Since. If we're supposed to follow that example, then could we have a little more, please? Was the tipping point rational or intuitive? Did it require huge effort on Abraham's part, or was it as easy as falling in love? How did Abraham come to faith in God?

40:01 I'm not sure any story can answer that, at least not for every reader, because if you want to know more, the first thing you have to decide is what faith means. How would you define it? If this were a different sort of event and we all twittered, I could have a screen behind me and tell you all to start sending your tweets. Maybe some of you are doing that anyway, even without the scream. Does faith mean surrendering to God's will? Or does it mean accepting an active role in God's future? Does it mean accepting what you have been told without asking impertinent questions? Or does it mean wrestling every single day with all kinds of scary angels? Does one always take a leap of faith, or does one sometimes lurch toward faith instead? What happens inside a person that allows him or her to trust, to believe, to have faith in God?

41:05 I used to think that in order to trust anyone or anything, I first had to determine the trustworthiness of that person or object. If I were going to trust a rickety looking bridge to bear my weight, then I waited until someone else about my size walked across it first. If I were going to trust a friend to keep a confidence, then I first paid attention to whether or not she told me other people's secrets. This struck me as a logical way to proceed, and it worked well enough for a long time. The only problem was that my ability to trust stayed dependent on something or someone outside of me that was beyond my control. If the bridge wobbled, I could not trust it. If the friend gossiped, I could not trust her.

42:00 It was like my trust was not mine to give. It always depended on how someone or something outside of me acted, so that I was never really in charge of it. I was like a day trader on the stock market, extending trust and withdrawing it ten times a day, all depending on how the rest of the market was responding to my investment.

42:27 Then one day, someone offered me a different definition of trust, and it turned my logic inside out. He said, your ability to trust doesn't have anything to do with anyone but you. You weigh the risks, and then you decide. Basically, he said, trust means deciding if you can handle it if you get screwed.

42:52 I'll find out later if it was all right for me to say that here. I weighed the risks and I decided I could handle it if I... But I think the guy was right. Trust is never entirely logical, faith never makes perfect sense. It's more like a gift that human beings are able to give. An act of incredible, stupendous courage in which people who cannot control the outcome of their decisions decide to trust anyway. act as if the universe is trustworthy and who figure they can handle it if they're wrong. If today's story is any indication, then things do not suddenly improve once you believe in God. You don't suddenly improve. Abraham was fearful and cranky before he believed God and he was fearful and cranky after he believed God. He had a nice moment in between while he was looking at the stars. Then God promised him land, and Abraham said, I don't know that. How am I supposed to know that? Here we go again. But God didn't say, I thought you believed me. God just put Abraham to work. You heard it. He said, bring me a heifer, a goat, a ram, a turtle dove, and a young pigeon. Maybe thinking that would keep the old man busy for a while.

44:16 When Abraham fetched them all, he cut everything but the birds in two and laid the halves against each other. God did not tell him to do that part, by the way. Abraham already knew that was how you sealed a covenant in those days. It was the ancient equivalent of cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye. Once you made your vows, you walked between the pieces of the slain animals, as if to say, may the same thing happen to me if I fail to keep my word.

44:55 But before he could walk anywhere, Abraham saw a smoking firepot and a flaming torch pass between the pieces of meat he had laid out earlier, only there was nobody holding either one, the torch or the pot. They were just smoke and fire, God's favorite calling cards. In this way, Abraham learned that God was taking the walk Abraham had thought was meant for him. Abraham did not cross his heart that starry night. God crossed God's heart. While Abraham watched, God accepted the whole risk of the covenant, which included the very great risk of trusting Abraham with the divine promises and being wrong about Abraham.

45:51 So that's what faith looked like on that night at least. Abraham accepted the risk of gambling on a God who was willing to gamble on him. That may not be enough for you, especially since the rewards can be such a long, long time coming, and there's no guarantee that you'll sleep better even after they do. But if there is anything about this story that sounds true to you, then it is your story, and you may step into it any time you want. You may leap, or you may lurch. You may enter it any way you like, but if you do, imagine this. A brand new star will appear in Abraham's eye as he says, Ah, no, and starts counting all over again.