sermon excerpts: "Faith as a Legacy"

(Genesis 18: 1-15; Matthew 9:35-10:8)
Abraham and Sarah had no children. This was the ultimate insult for a successful family who obeyed God, uprooting their lives on a divine say-so. There was no one to pass the torch to, if you don’t count Ishmael, Abraham’s son that he had with Sarah’s maid, Hagar.
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The spotlight shifts to Sarah; yes, even on Father’s Day, we need to acknowledge the mothers. If anyone felt the stigma of being childless, it was her. After all, it was her body that was barren, she was the one to blame. She’d already lived a full life and settled firmly into her golden years. It is outrageous to think that now, finally, she would have a child. Presuming she and her baby would survive the ordeal, because birth was a literal life and death situation, but you don’t question the Lord about these things.

God had promised them this truth and three chapters of Genesis later, Isaac was born. From this family came the Jewish faith and relationship to God, YHWH, and its great people. Fast forward a few centuries and Jesus, as one born into this identity, seeks out the lost people of his faith.

Jesus sends out the twelve to the lost people of Israel, those who claim Jewish faith but were not part of the community – because of illness or hardship or social exclusion. This was Christ bringing faith to the people where they were, not waiting for the people to come to him.

It’s a good lesson for our church. We need to take the good work that we do to those who are in need and go out beyond ourselves, instead of waiting for them to come to our building and fit into our set routine of praying and singing, sitting and standing.

Compare and contrast the approaches of Abraham and Jesus: do we sit and wait for God to come us, or do we get out into the world and find the divine by doing God’s work? Both methods work to a degree, but is there a way to combine them?

One of the measures of church success is to see what people unconnected to the church think of or know about your ministry. The mark that Christ made is the legacy that we follow and that we ourselves leave. Just as we have to recognize that the memory of fathers may include abuse and neglect and more harm that good, we also have to admit that the work of our faith has not always been good or pleasant.

This past week, the apology to the First Nations for the racist philosophy and abusive reality of residential schools serves as another reminder of this unfortunate fact. ... Just because we were not directly involved with the residential schools, as teachers or administrators, doesn’t mean that we are exempt. Just like people used to grumble, and still do, in the United Church around the time we made our apology about the residential schools. I’ve heard many debates about why they, as individual members, have to apologize for something the United Church did as a policy.

It is individual members and supporters of the local United Church congregations that bearing the brunt of criticism and questions from neighbours and friends and other churches in town when it’s reported that the moderator said he doesn’t believe in that Jesus is God, when same sex marriages are permitted by the United Church. We are the ones who live with the reality and consequences of such statements.

But these are part of our legacy as a denomination; this is the work of our ancestors, mothers and fathers of faith who wanted to leave an honest and justice-seeking church for their children, biological or spiritual. It is not for lack of effort or vision that our churches are suffering – maybe we’re trying too hard, or not delivering what people want, or not recognizing that the world has changed too much for our way of being a faith community. Like many parents, the church is scratching its collective head, trying to figure out what it is with kids and young people these days.

... So yes, we know that something has to change or be different. As a church we wonder what the future holds, what the particular legacy of our involvement in the congregation might be. This past week, I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to my own mortality, wondering how a young and healthy father can suddenly die. But in the end, what we have is not going to last. What we teach and share with those around us, who we are, will persist and live on.

As Christians who came from the Jewish tradition that owes its birth to Abraham, the story of faith continues in us. That same spirit is what calls us to want better things for the world. Even if the expression of how that might happen has been locked up into pulpits and pews for the past few centuries. We go forth from this moment as people of hope, possibility and faith.