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Tag: Abraham

  • New Life Requires Risk and Trust

    The readings for this Sunday are filled with images of renewal – new birth, new life, new creation. These images imply that God’s promise for new life entails God’s gift of a fresh start, freed from the restrictions of our past lives in order to enter a new relationship with God through the power of the Holy Spirit.

    Lent is a time for engaging our new life in Christ more deeply, risking new levels of trust. The purpose of Lent is not to dwell on suffering, or to spend forty days bewailing our manifold sins and wickedness for the sake of feeling our pain. Lent is about engaging in the ongoing process of renewal, regeneration, and new birth; it is about encouraging us to trust and to risk going forth and being sent out with the promise of new life.

    Lent may require us to “think outside the box” of piety and religiosity, just as Abram and Sarai had to break with their past, and the Pharisees Saul and Nicodemus with theirs. The promises of God bear not only upon the future of our individual lives in relationship to God, but also upon the future of our parish, our diocese, and our Church as a whole

    To respond to the promise for new life means we have to be ready to redraw and rename the places on the journey. When the ancient ones told the story of Abram and Sarai, they were also inscribing new place names and creating a new social geography on the territories of their migrations in company with God.

    God may be inviting us to rethink how we do Church in light of the socio-geographies of the times we live in. When Saul the Pharisee became Paul the Apostle as we know him, he brought new words, images, and new community structures into being, “calling into existence things which do not exist,” by trustfully following Jesus into new life.

    Lent is for listening to that call in our own lives. In the words of James Russell Lowell, “New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth.” Lent is for careful thinking about how to step into the as-yet-unmapped future, to deepen our relationship to God, to trust the picture of new life in Christ, and for identifying the breaks with the past that we need to make in order to respond to the promises of God.

    I'll see you in Church!

    Ron Short Blue Sig Cropped

     

     

     

     

    The Very Rev'd Ron Pogue
    Interim Rector
    St. Martin-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church
    Keller, Texas

  • What’s that strange ceremony all about?

    The covenant narrative found in Genesis 15:1-18 gives us a rare glimpse into some of the liturgical practices of the ancient patriarchs and an insight into how they understood their relationship to God. The story describing a covenant and the ceremony that sealed it was passed down through oral tradition for several generations before it was written in the form we read today.

    Gen15The story begins with a visit from God to Abram. The patriarch's name has not yet been changed to Abraham. The encounter is set in the context of a vision and later a deep sleep. God tells Abram that he is favored and will receive a great reward. Abram is concerned because he does not have a natural heir. Nevertheless, God promises Abram that he will not remain childless and that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars.

    Abram trusted God's promises (“believed the LORD”) and because of that he was considered to be in a right relationship with God (“righteous”). St. Paul later uses Abram as an example in his explanation of "justification by faith" in Romans 4:3. In fact, for Paul, Abraham is the paradigm of justification.

    The verses that follow deal, not with sacrifice, but with an obscure covenant ceremony called the “cutting of the covenant.” Animals were killed and their carcasses were split in half. The person or persons involved in the ritual would walk between them and curses were called down if the covenant was not honored. The images of a flaming torch and a smoking fire pot are symbols of the divine presence, reinforcing the belief that God was confirming the covenant.

    God always initiates the covenant and our role is one of response. A covenant differs from a contract in that both parties to a covenant are bound to uphold their promises even if the other party does not. The story of the People of God is the story of God's faithfulness in the face of our unfaithfulness. Instead of cursing us, God comes to us and calls us back into a right and just relationship.

    Ultimately, God's most profound act was to make covenant with the world through Jesus, though St. Paul makes it clear in Romans 9-11 that the new covenant does not take the place of the old one – it expands it. The Abrahamic Covenant was initiated for the benefit of Abraham and his descendants, who would be used by God to bring blessings to others. It is still valid. “For the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). The Christ Covenant was initiated for the world and for all people, including you and me.

    We don't carve up animals and pass through the carcasses with smoking fire pot and flaming torch. Instead, the covenant ceremony for us is Holy Baptism, in which we are joined to Christ in his death and resurrection, sealed by the Holy Spirit, and “marked as Christ's own for ever.”

    I hope this reflection will help us prepare for the renewal of the Baptismal Covenant at the Great Vigil of Easter.

    I’ll see you in Church!

    Ron Short Sig Blue

     

     

  • Sermon at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Hole ~ March 1, 2015

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    The Second Sunday in Lent

    Listen to the Sermon for March 1,  2015

    Read the Sermon for March 1, 2015

     

     

     

     

  • The Phenomenon of Faith

    Christian faith means hearing and responding with trust in God when God reaches out to us, offering a promise, wooing us, and calling us into a living redemptive relationship. There is an historic pattern to the phenomenon of faith: God calls, promising to use our lives for God's high purposes. The recipient of the call expresses fear, doubt, or anxiety. Then comes divine reassurance. Finally, there is a faithful response. We see it in the life of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Jeremiah, Mary and Joseph, the Apostles, and others through the ages.

    We also see it in the life of Jesus. In his Baptism and Transfiguration there is the call. In the wilderness there is the question and divine reassurance. In the cross there is the faithful response. He does not allow the warning of friends nor the threat of foes deter him from what God has called him to do and the promise before him.

    In his book, Living Faith While Holding Doubt, Martin Copenhaver writes, “There are times when we must make a 100% commitment to something about which we are only 51% certain.”

    But faith is not a momentary phenomenon, an act at one point in time. Faith is a long-term trust, a committed, continuous response to God’s promises. Out of real doubts and deep questions, Abram ventures forth with God. The venturing forth does not erase those doubts and questions. Rather, he gathers up his doubts and stumbles on trusting God into a future on the basis of nothing but the promise.

    God told Abraham that he and his descendants would be a blessing to all the people of the earth and that the promise would last forever. The old Rabbis said that when God promised Abraham that his descendants would be like the dust, he was referring not only to numbers but to the fact that they would outlast those who trampled upon them. Given the way some in the three great Abrahamic faiths have fought one another for centuries, it is a wonder we have survived thus far.

    St. Paul tells us that all who trust God like Abraham are his descendants, not just those who have his genes (Romans 4:13-25). Jesus shows us that the way of the cross is the way of faith. “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).

    When God calls, how do you answer? With doubts, anxieties, fears? You are not alone! But can you listen beyond those obstacles to God's reassuring voice, calling you to trust him to lead you through them, perhaps even to use those obstacles as bridges into the future where he is trying to get you to go with him? Can you say, I'm 51% sure, Lord, but I'll trust you with the other 49%?

    There is a beautiful prayer by Thomas a’ Kempis that expresses the heart’s desire to live with faith in God:

    Write thy blessed name, O Lord, upon my heart, there to remain so indelibly engraven, that no prosperity, no adversity shall ever move me from thy love. Be thou to me a strong tower of defense, a comforter in tribulation, a deliverer in distress, a very present help in trouble, and a guide to heaven through the many temptations and dangers of this life. Amen.

    In our Lenten journey together with our Savior, let this prayer be on our lips and learn from him what it truly means to trust in God.

    I’ll see you in Church!

    Ron Short Sig Blue

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Sermon at Christ Church Cranbrook ~ June 29, 2014

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    The Third Sunday After Pentecost

    Listen to the Sermon for June 29, 2014

    Genesis 22:1-14

     

  • Sermon at Christ Church Cranbrook ~ February 24, 2013

    The Second Sunday in Lent

     

    Listen to the Sermon for February 24, 2013

    Read the Sermon for February 24, 2013