June 15, 2008 | 8:00 a.m.

No Bounds

Alice M. Trowbridge
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 116:1–2, 12–19
Genesis 18:1–15

“Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”

Genesis 18:14 (NRSV)

There is a place where the town ends, and the fields begin.
It’s not marked but the feet know it,
also the heart that is longing for refreshment and, equally, for repose.
Someday we’ll live in the sky.
Meanwhile, the house of our lives is this green world.
The fields, the ponds, the birds. The thick black oaks—
surely they are the invention of something wonderful.
And the tiger lilies.
And the runaway honeysuckle that no one will ever trim again.
Where is it? I ask, and then my feet know it.
One jump, and I’m home.

Mary Oliver
“Boundaries”
Red Bird

In a week where lives have been changed in a moment through the powerful
forces of nature, we come this morning with hearts in grief and in gratitude—
grieving for those whom this world has suddenly lost and grateful for lives well lived.
We are more aware than everof the fragility of life—the preciousness of every moment.
Bring us into your truth for us this day, O Lord, and teach us how to live
as your faithful disciples. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

Today is Father’s Day, and if we are lucky, we have a story to remember today, a defining moment in our development when a father, or a father figure, or mother, or mother figure, or any parental figure, believed in us. And I think about the power of that love, that belief in us—it is a catalyst for all sorts of possibilities. It builds up our sense of self, and we can overcome our doubts, our fears, our ideas that we are bound to a certain way, so that we can literally jump into the unknown and feel perfectly secure and free. When we know, from as early as we can remember, that we are dearly loved, that has powerful possibilities for our lives.

On this Father’s Day, I’ve been struck by the story of Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon in his mid-forties, who was asked to give a “last lecture,” an opportunity for professors to speak to what matters most to them. In Randy’s case, he knew it would be his last, since he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer last fall. The lecture he gave wasn’t about dying, though. It was about achieving your childhood dreams; about the importance of overcoming obstacles and breaking through barriers; about seizing every moment, because, as Randy put it, “time is all you really have . . . and you may find one day that you have less than you think.” Randy’s story has piqued the interest of millions. You can go to YouTube and watch the entire lecture, which, by the way, is well worth doing. At the end of the talk, Randy tells the packed lecture hall that all this time they thought he was giving a lecture for them, but the truth is, all the life lessons that he distilled down, all the pearls of wisdom, all of it, was for his three young children so that after he is gone, they will always know how dearly he loved them.

What I’ve always loved about visiting with people at end stages of life is the no-nonsense aspect to everything. It’s as if they are free—to say what they really think and feel, to ask the deep questions, to laugh and love and pray and say the things they want to say to loved ones. Randy does not have a lot of time; in fact he has said he is preparing now to die. Looking actively at his living days with that perspective actually sets him free.

Today’s text is about another father, the father of our faith, Abraham, and his wife, Sarah, and it too is a story about waiting, but in the case of Abraham and Sarah, they have waited a long time. We find them in old age. Now we know that Abraham embraced the call from God. But here in today’s text, in this central narrative, which is more or less a birth announcement, when Abraham and Sarah learn they will become parents, the promise is not so readily embraced. God and the angels come to Abraham and Sarah. God comes and meets them where they are: literally to their tent in the wilderness by the oak trees of Mamre in the heat of the day, but also God comes to their “barrenness” and meets them where they are—at the place where spiritually they had long since given up hope, and God proclaims a promise of something new.

Barrenness was a real sore point for Abraham and Sarah, since their culture measured prosperity, among other things, by the number of offspring in the household. And so Abraham and Sarah had long since known of their situation and somehow got through most of their lives without starting a family of their own. And here comes this figure, who we know is YHWH, who tells them that even though they have given up on having a child, that was precisely what God was there to promise them. Well, this news defied human logic and reason. It made no sense. Abraham and Sarah had adjusted to their walk in life. They were fine as they were, fulfilled just the same, and yet here was the word of promise of something new.

And so Abraham and Sarah are presented with the question that is a central focus of this scripture for today and is a theme that surfaces throughout the entire Bible, the question that we all must answer in our faith journey: “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”

It is a good thing that God’s work in us is not dependent upon our readiness. To God’s plan, Abraham had nothing to say. And Sarah, she laughs incredulously. She is resistant, doubtful, and she laughs—and then denies laughing.

In this world where pain and suffering are rampant, in a time when forces of nature have displaced millions across the globe, and after a week in which tornadoes and flooding displaced thousands here in the Midwest and took the lives of promising young ones, after one of the most accomplished voices in broadcast journalism was abruptly silenced, we know that God can’t spare us such suffering. We also know that time and time together is precious indeed.

This story of Abraham and Sarah shows what a difficulty a life of faith is. Walter Brueggemann, in his commentary on this story, is helpful. He says,

The promise of the gospel is not a conventional piece of wisdom that is easily accommodated to everything else. Embrace of this radical gospel requires discontinuity. . . . The gospel promise does not meet Abraham and Sarah in receptive hopefulness but in resistant hopelessness. Indeed, if no new thing can intrude, if newness must be conjured from present resources, the promise announced here truly is nonsensical.” (Interpretation Series: Genesis, pp. 158–159)

The gospel in this text teaches beyond our frame of reference and reaches beyond the neat boundaries we have placed around our lives and our futures. The gospel in this ancient text breaks open those boundaries into the wide open horizon, where God’s work lies beyond what we can think or see or imagine in our mortal life. Reason, wisdom, and common sense are set aside.

But let us be clear: Abraham and Sarah endured a long, painful waiting period before receiving this news.

To leave this text with an easy belief that everything is possible is to fall short of a fuller meaning. Possibilities with God are not painless and free of sorrow or despair. Faith does not get us a free pass for the journey, with no obstacles. But this is our good news: Brueggemann again, “Because of the character of God, and because of the saving love of Jesus Christ, everything is possible, nothing is too wonderful for the Lord, but we have to be willing to stay through the dark night of our barrenness with God” (Interpretation Series: Genesis, p. 161). Like Abraham and Sarah, we might be in for a long, long wait before something new happens.

On this Father’s Day, we think of the families of those young promising Boy Scouts; the families of those who lost their lives in Iraq; those whom we know whose diagnoses require extensive surgery, life-altering adjustments, and in some cases, where illness is terminal, palliative care. In each of these scenarios, those involved are well acquainted with the long, dark night of the soul.

If our story today illustrates anything useful for the life of faith, it is certainly the human temptation to resist the gospel just when we need it the most.

On this Father’s Day, if we are lucky, we have good memories of our own fathers or father figures in our lives. Today we think about all who have given us life, all who have loved us and nurtured us and prepared us for life in the world. Those who believed in us before we were old enough to realize how precious that is. But here in this sacred place, we are not limited by the family construct into which we were born, for we all have something in common. We are all children of one great parent—Father and Mother of us all, in whose embrace we are eternally held.

We gather this morning with hungry hearts, and many of us are waiting, whether we realize it or not. We are holding vigil by someone’s bedside or giving care to an aging parent or a child in need; we are struggling to keep a job or we are struggling to find one or holding down two or more to make ends meet. We are looking for meaning, and we can look in places that are not life giving, in behaviors that sap the life from us and lifestyles that grow dark and isolated. Fear and shame and denial can have a hold on us, and we are weary. Some are stuck in the holding pattern of a boundary-laden life.

Shortly we will approach the Lord’s Table, and when we do, we cross a threshold of sorts: where there was once a self-constructed boundary that closed us off from the life-giving love of the One Parent of us all, here at this table we are reminded that God’s love knows no bounds. In the word of a great poet of our time, Mary Oliver, whose words are on the cover of the bulletin this morning, “we belong to a place only the heart can take us. It is like a returning to home. It is a place where the longing heart comes for refreshment and repose.” (“Boundaries,” Red Bird) So come, whether you are waiting or in the midst of a long night or wherever you may be in the journey of faith, come and gaze upon the vast horizon of eternity. One step . . . your feet know the way . . . and all the saints who have gone before us with us in spirit.

And as children of God, the Great Parent of us all, may we abide in God’s love and remember and trust that God companions us in every circumstance, every trial. Come to this table and know that nothing is too wonderful for God, that because of the saving love of our Lord we can trust that just like Abraham and Sarah, God is coming to you and me with something new.

With gratitude for the preciousness of time and time together, whether we are in a waiting time or a long night of the soul, today we are reminded that without a word, out of God’s great love, God brings us something new; with strength and courage and hope beyond our own, that even when we have strayed from God, when we turn back, we realize that we have, all the while, never been beyond the hollow of God’s hand, held by a love that will never let us go. Thanks be to God. Amen.