Genesis
15.1-6, Luke 12.32-40
Do not be afraid, little
flock, says
Jesus to his anxious disciples, for it is
your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
When
Jesus talks about the kingdom, he doesn’t just, or even mainly, mean life after
death. It is far broader and better than that. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus
talks about it as “life in all its
fullness”, life in the here and now that is rich and deep, life that is
beyond our expectations, beyond anything we could kid ourselves we had earned
or deserved. It may not always be easy – neither Jesus’ life nor the lives of
his first followers were easy – but it will be full of meaning, full of
treasure, because it will be lived in the company of God. And this kingdom,
this new place to live, is given to us, by God’s good pleasure. All we need to do is to learn open our eyes
to see it.
Jesus
tells a parable about slaves waiting for their master to return from a wedding
banquet. Of course, they would need to be awake to look after him when he
arrived – they would expect to get into
trouble if they weren’t. But Jesus turns that expectation on its head here. He goes on to say , “He – that is the master - will fasten his belt and have
them – that is the slaves - sit down
to eat , and he will come and serve them.”
The slaves don’t need to be awake so they can work; they need to be
awake so that they can share in the joy of that wedding he had been to, hear the
stories, feel the excitement. They are going to be part of the celebration.
Who, in their right minds, would want to miss it? Everyone hearing this parable
would have known what the life of a slave was normally like, a life of
drudgery, hardship and often fear. But in the kingdom of God, the ordinary
things of life, even its darkest, middle-of-the-night moments, can be
transformed into places of delight, when we learn to see God at work in them,
God who wants nothing more than our company.
It’s
not always easy to trust that and to learn to look for that, of course. Anxiety
, fear comes far more easily and far more naturally to most of us than trust.
In our Old Testament Reading we discover that Abram longs for a child. God has
promised that he will be the father of a multitude, but right now he’s not even
father of one, and according to the Bible he’s almost a hundred years old, and
married to a woman who is well beyond child-bearing age herself. He’s set out
into the wilderness, enticed by God’s promise, to a new land that God has said
his descendants will fill, but there are no descendants, and Abram is starting
to despair, quite understandably. It looks as if all he has will eventually go
to a distant relative Eliezer, and what of God’s promise then? Abram is no hero. In the middle of this
existential dread, as he fears being forgotten – children were all that preserved
your memory in his time – trust doesn’t come easily to him. He tries all sorts
of tricks of his own to achieve his aim in life. Twice he gives his wife away
to others, to save his own skin. He fathers a child with Sarah’s slave girl,
Hagar, at Sarah’s suggestion – perhaps that’s the way to create descendants
they think – but that ends in disaster. Poor Hagar and her son, who have done
nothing to deserve it, are cast out in the wilderness, where they have to be
rescued by God. As I said, Abram is no hero. Like most of us, it’s a huge
struggle for him to trust in the generosity and faithfulness of God, to see
life as a gift, rather than as something he must negotiate through by his own
anxious striving.
But
the message to him, and to us, is that God does stick with us. He reassures him
again and again when he struggles. Look
towards the heavens says God on this occasion, taking him outside his tent.
Count the stars if you can! Of course, he can’t – it would be hard enough
in our light–polluted skies, but impossible in the star-filled darkness of the
desert. So shall your descendants be! And
so it turns out. Eventually his son Isaac is born, and he goes on to have
children of his own and soon it is as God has promised. Abraham is the father of a multitude, despite
this inauspicious beginning.
What
we see, as we follow his story, is someone who is slowly, painfully, through
many ups and downs, learning to trust God’s generous heart, rather than his own
abilities and strengths. His story is an encouragement to us to keep going when
times are tough, to keep daring to trust that we are in God’s hands, even if we
have no idea what he is up to or where he is leading us.
Do not be afraid, little
flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
To
be honest, if we know that, we know everything we need to know. This is one of
the most comforting and encouraging verses in scripture, and one which we
should all have graven on our hearts, so we can find it easily in dark or
desperate moments. There are many things to be afraid of in life. We live in a
scary world, at a scary time. But so did Abraham, and so did Jesus’ audience. Fear
is real, and ever present, but so is the generous presence of God.
It’s
not just that God grudgingly thinks he ought to look after us, now we
are here, says Jesus. There’s nothing conditional about it, no qualifications;
we don’t have to know anything, do anything, figure anything out. He doesn’t
say that he’ll give us the kingdom if we are good, or say the right prayers or
live the right way. Giving us the kingdom, life in all its fullness, is
something which is in his nature to do, his good pleasure, his delight, and we
can find it all around us – in the love of others or the wonder of the world –
if we learn to look for it.
I pray today that we will all come to know the
generosity of God, that we will know that we are gifts of God, that life is a
gift of God, that everything is a gift of God, and that we will show that in
the way we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world we have been given.
Like those slaves in Jesus’ parable, we are invited to sit down and eat with
God, in the company of all the rest of the world. The bread and wine we share in
this service is a demonstration of that. The word “Eucharist” means to give
thanks. It reminds to look for God within the whole of life, in scary times as
much as in good times.
If we can learn to do that, we will find that we
have what we most deeply need. No one is immune to fear, but if we know that
God is with us in the midst of it, we’ll have found a purse that never wears
out, a treasure that never fails, which is greater than all our fears and can take us
through them to the peace which is his will for us and for all his creation.
Amen
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