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It’s the holiday season – and what kind of holiday person are
you? A camper or a planner? Do you like to have it all sorted before you
go, or to take off and be spontaneous? Do you want to go somewhere familiar,
or venture into the unknown? And what do you take with you: the kitchen
sink, a pacamac, and a year’s supply of toilet paper? Or one change
of underclothes and some washing powder? Do you travel light – or
heavy?
Religious people are often planners and heavy travellers: they are more
conservative; they like what they know, routine and tradition and order.
Change is stressful, after all, and we want as stress-free an existence
as possible. Our ideal holiday destination would be somewhere Gothic with
comfortable beds and gourmet cooking. After all, you can’t just uproot
a church building and move it around.
But: our role model, the man who started it all off some 4000 years ago,
was not a man who was into Gothic architecture. Abraham was a successful
stock-breeder who lived in a well-established city, who left it behind
because God called him to go into the unknown and start a new life and
a new people. Abraham travels with his nephew Lot: and when they get to
Palestine, Lot chooses to go and live in the apparent security of the
city of Sodom, while Abraham goes and camps in the wilderness. But it’s
Abraham who is safe when the city of Sodom is ruined – even though
Lot is living in an owner-occupied solid house and Abraham only has a
tent.
In our reading this morning, the writer of the book of Hebrews uses Abraham
as his prime example of how to be a person of faith: someone who looks
beyond what is, to what God will bring into being, and who shapes their
life according to that vision. And the writer uses the image of the city
of God, God’s heavenly country, as the vision that inspires Abraham
and other faithful people: that there is more to the world than what we
see, and God will bring us in the end to our eternal home. And that may
mean leaving the earthly city, leaving the solid things that we see as
home, in order to follow the call of the heavenly things which we will
have for ever.
That all sounds a bit abstract: if like me you’re a concrete thinker
– what does it mean? Well, there’s been a tension in religious
life throughout the ages in how we should live in this world. Some religious
people have treated the world as if it were a terrible place, an obstacle
between us and God, and have lived very other-worldly lives, giving up
on the world and retreating from it. A modern example is that of many
conservative Christians in America and elsewhere who believe that the
world is about to end in nuclear war and social breakdown, and so Christians
should stockpile arms and supplies to defend themselves, and in the meantime
carry on taking as much oil and other natural resources as they can, heedless
of global warming, because the whole globe is going to go up in flames
soon anyway. Yes, there really are people who think this, and they help
to vote for the next president of the USA – it’s all a bit frightening.
These are people, like Islamicist and Zionist fanatics, for whom a vision
of God’s future has blotted out any thought of God in the present,
and taken their humanity with it.
On the other hand, many people, and some religious people among them,
have restricted their horizons to this world: it’s a small fragile
place and we are responsible for it, and so we must sort it out and make
it a better place. And to a large extent of course that’s true: though
the junk mail I got this week urging me to give a wildlife organisation
£4 a month so that it can save the planet seemed to me the triumph
of wishful thinking over reality. We have a great deal of power to make
the world better, though we often make it worse too: but we mustn’t
get deluded into thinking that we actually control the world and can do
anything and everything.
The story of Abraham reminds us of two things. The first is that we have
to live with our own weakness and vulnerability. Abraham lived in a tent,
vulnerable to the weather; his nephew Lot went to live in a city, which
was destroyed by a volcanic eruption. Global warming may be humanly induced,
but climate change is nothing new: we might influence, but we cannot control.
And the human heart, including our own hearts, will in our weakness find
ways to corrupt and destroy, whatever good things we may do in the world.
When we go on holiday, we make ourselves more vulnerable, however good
our holiday insurance may be, however good our plans are. To go out, to
move on, always has risks; it will bring loss and pain as well as joy.
Bu to live without going on a journey is scarcely to live at all.
The second thing to learn from Abraham is the power of God’s vision.
Abraham saw a different future, and it happened because he listened to
God and changed what he did. He and the other people of faith that the
writer of the Hebrews speaks of helped to change this world because they
had a vision of the next. And that’s how to resolve the tension between
being other-worldly and having the idea that we can control the world.
God gives us a vision of the future, of the city of God, where justice
and peace and love will reign, where there are no more tears and pain
and sorrow. And because we have that vision, we can’t be at home
in this world any more. Home is where your heart is: as Jesus said, where
your treasure is, there will your heart be also. But we are also called
to make this world more like our true home, to help this world be a foretaste
of God’s future, for the city of God to be glimpsed here on earth
even though we can never fully achieve it.
There are times when we can catch a foretaste of the heavenly city, when
our lives are touched by God’s vision of the future. For those of
you who knew her: Angela’s life and death has been one such window
onto the future: a remarkable time around her bedside, or love and hope
and even laughter, where her confidence in her heavenly calling infected
those around her with joy and love, not darkness and despair. We will,
and we should, always feel divine discontent at the state of the world,
which should encourage us to do what we can to change it, and yet look
again to God who alone can lead us through our weaknesses into the hope
of that heavenly city.
Whenever and if you go, have a good holiday: and let’s all live light
together, ready like Abraham to let go of what we have now so that we
may find a foretaste here of what awaits us in the future, together with
all people of true faith: for ‘God is not ashamed to be called their
God; indeed he has prepared a city for them.’
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