Into the Unknown
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on 20th September 2009 by Rev Dr Jamie Walker
Readings: Genesis 12:1-9 and Hebrews 11:8-15
You have arrived! Welcome! Great to have you! And great to have parents and friends here too.
I wonder what you felt before coming? If you are a student - excitement? An adventure? Stepping out into the unknown? Maybe also some trepidation, some anxiety - but foremost is anticipation of what lies in front. Maybe even, 'At last I am off on my own, out of my family house, off to a point where they cannot visit me every week even if they wanted to!'
If you are a parent or guardian or friend, there will be, no doubt, turmoil in your feelings. There will be pride, excitement, relief - but also probably anxiety, a concern of how your child will make out. Indeed you may be mighty glad to have them off your hands, at least for a bit! Freedom at home!
Soon next of kin will be heading off, and the student staying. But at least there are phones and emails. For all here there is a stepping into the unknown. For students it is into a new place, a new scene, into new studies, new friendships, greater independence, an excellent University, nearly 600 years young.
Behind you lie all the decisions about which university to attend, being offered a place, planning the journey, travelling by train or car or air, finding your room, throwing yourself into freshers week. Now at last you are on the verge of the beginning of classes, a new future.
For staff too there is that feeling of the unknown, a new term, new students. For many staff there is not the travelling from one place to another, but there is still the sense of what lies in front, the as yet undetermined, the unmapped. A buzz returns to St Andrews as the students arrive. Off we go again, launched into yet another year.
Exciting yes, but for all that, daunting too. Uncertainties! For new students especially - 'What will it be like? Will I make friends? Will I be liked? Will I discover others much cleverer than I am? Will I stick out like a sore thumb? Will my own problems return just when I am about to make a new start?' At least I can keep in touch with home, phone, send an email.'
Contrast all this now with Abram. The Lord said to Abram, 'Go from your country and your kindred, and your father's house to the land I will show you' and a couple of verses later, 'So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.'
Not, for Abram or for Sarah, his wife, a flight or train journey over hundreds of miles, or short car journey. Not for them a telephone call to say they had arrived. Not for them an email, a conversation on MSN, or Facebook. In fact, for people in their day, for anyone to leave the home and break the ancestral bonds was to tackle almost the impossible. People just did not do it - well, only rarely!
Their journey would take months. Family would never be seen again - now some of you might be happy at such a prospect, especially at the beginning of term - freedom at last! But just wait until the money begins to run out, and I am sure that if family can be tapped for funds they will be! For Abram, however, there was no chance of a family loan or a bank loan. His going meant breaking family ties. There might never be any news of home again. No family gossip, no pint with old friends in the local.
I wonder if we can catch some of the enormity of what Abram and Sarah did, travelling over hundreds of miles, leaving the University city of Ur ... well, for what? They did not have a clue! No idea at all! Not an earthly. All they had was God saying, 'Go to a place I will show you!' No clue from photographs, no TV pictures, no searching the web, no prior visit - nothing. The astonishing thing is that they went!
And, again astonishingly, there is no psychological description of how they might have been feeling. I can imagine if I had been in that situation, my thoughts would have gone something like this. 'What's that, Lord? What are you on about? 'Go', you said, if I heard you aright? Go where? Come off it, Lord, I need more than that. I must have a clue. It is not enough to say, go!, you must fill me in a bit more. I need more input, more data. A map reference at least. Is it north or south or east or west? Do I walk towards the sun or away from it? How many days' journey?
'And what's this? Leave all family ties? Cut the links. Lord, I am going to need an awful lot of persuading that I am hearing you aright. Maybe I am just mishearing, have had a pint too much.'
Some of that would be running through my mind, but there is no record of anything like that in the Biblical text. The text just says, 'so Abram went as the Lord had told him'. The majestic simplicity of those words somehow does justice to the momentous nature of this event.
Here we catch a glimpse of 'faith', of what faith is all about - putting trust in God, taking God at his word, staking all on God's promise. How Abram and Sarah knew that it was God who was calling them, I do not know - any more that I can tell how God calls any of us, but he does.
As Abram and Sarah went they became a kind of model. The writer of Genesis almost throws his hands up, 'Phew, now that is what I call faith!' - if the Genesis writer does not quite wax lyrical, the writer to the Hebrews certainly does. He exclaims, 'By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called ... he set out, not knowing where he was going'. That, says the writer, is faith!
This tiny little step, of one family among a host of families, became momentous! It became the ultimate model of faith in the whole of the Bible. It had repercussions way beyond the lives of Sarah and Abram - their descendants latched on to it. They saw that little step of faith not just as something in their earliest history. It was much more than that. They saw it as defining their very existence before God, as giving meaning and direction to who they really were. They saw themselves as being led on a special road whose plan and goal lay completely within God's hand. Israel saw herself within Abram's story.
But that is not an end of it - the story is not limited to one group of people. The Genesis writer sees this story as reaching out to embrace the world. He sees peoples from all over the world identifying with this story, with this faith. He sees them being blessed by God too.
We here today are in this story, into this faith, of which Abram and Sarah are such startling examples. We are invited to make this faith perspective our own!
You may say to me however - 'I never had any sense of God saying 'Go from your home to St Andrews University''. You may say 'I have never even ever considered that God is leading my life!', or 'I am not sure about this God-story at all'.
Nevertheless for all of us, we are invited to see what Abram and Sarah did as a model for ourselves also. We are invited, with the utmost seriousness by God, to see our time here in St Andrews as the call of God. We are invited into this faith perspective, which, as we take our place within it, we find a blessing more than anything we can imagine. We are invited to say, 'OK, God, I take your point. I am willing to give it a go - no matter what anyone else might say.'
'No matter what anyone else might say!' I can just hear Abram's and Sarah's friends in their home town - 'Do not be daft! Going on off on a faith trip at God's command - get real. Stay here, live life to the full. You have had your joke, Abram and Sarah - good on you! - you had us believing for a moment that you meant what you said. What a laugh! Packing and pretending you are actually going, and all the time taking the mickey. Hey, the joke's over, you can unpack now. Look, you are fooling, aren't you? Aren't you taking all this faith business too far, becoming a fanatic? What, actually heading off? Soon you will be back, we will give you 24 hours, three days at the max.'
Let me ask this question. And I ask it of a wonderful mix of people here today - some of you have perhaps never been in a church before in your lives - some of you maybe gave up church after reaching teenage years - some of you perhaps are puzzled about faith but have come along because it is part of the St Andrews University experience, especially the pier walk - some of you are already asking faith questions - some are further along the road in terms of faith.
The question for us all, for you and me, is 'What part will faith play in all our lives? What part will God play in our thoughts and our actions.' Mockery will come from some, as I imagine Abram and Sarah got it. Yet they persisted, and so there developed a wonderful model of faith, into which we are invited.
But what is into which we are invited? What is 'the blessing' that we might find?
Abram and Sarah found God at their side in all their journeying. They had such a sense of God saying - 'I am there to guide and lead you. I am there to befriend and help you. You may go through times when you think I am not around, your faith may not be as strong as it is now, your faith may disappear for a bit. That may be true, but never forget this - I will always be your constant companion, I will never ever leave you.'
For Abram and Sarah this was so real, but they also wanted a daily reminder once they reached their destination. And so they, as the Bible says, 'built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord.' They set up a stone, a pillar, a reminder, so that every time they saw it, every time they passed they remembered God.
This chapel is like that, a reminder to all of us, as we pass perhaps daily or come to worship Sunday by Sunday - a reminder of God, of God's many gifts to us, of faith. As Abram and Sarah called on the name of God in special places I invite you to make this chapel your regular place of calling on God, or if not this chapel another Church in town. Reminders keep faith alive.
Into the unknown! None of us knows the future. But we are called to live by faith, by trust - often stumbling, for sure - often making mistakes and taking wrong turnings - but still we hear God saying, 'I will always be there', and in that we can begin and continue in the life of faith. I hope you have a wonderful time, wonderful in faith too, in St Andrews.