Children of God

It’s all so easy, isn’t it?

Grow up.

Go to school.

Graduate.

Go to school again.

Graduate again.

Go to school again.

Graduate.

Get a job.

Think, maybe I should go back to school.

Earn a wage.

Enjoy that wage.

Settle down.

First apartment.

Find a someone you love.

Settle down some more.

Kids arrive.

Still earning wages.

Living life.

Etc.

It all seems so straightforward.

Faith too.

Born into the church.

Get baptized.

Go to Sunday school.

Learn about God.

Go to confirmation classes.

Learn about God some more.

Get confirmed.

Get married to the one you love most of all, (in the church.)

Go to church.

Have faith.

Live a happy life.

Love God.

Go to Heaven.

It’s. All. So. Easy.

John says have faith by quoting Jesus: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Paul says, have faith by referencing Abraham: “For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.”

So easy.

Just believe and you will receive the fruits of Israel.

Just believe and you will realize the love of God.

Have faith in Jesus and all will be made right.

Yet looking at the world as it is we realize that though Jesus gave his life for it, there are still many and immense difficulties to confront.

And when we see Abraham as but the father of God’s people, we miss a lot of the picture that Abraham’s journey to that place of honor was not exactly a straight line.

Let us look at what happened before God made Abraham a great nation.

Let us look at his struggles.

Abraham was born Abram and Abram’s father was Terah.

Terah became the father of Abram and his two brothers, Nahor and Haran, at the age of seventy.

Haran was the father of Lot but he died early, before the death of his father.

Abram married Sarai.

Nahor married Milcah.

Milcah was also the widow of Haran.

Abram and Sarai soon realized they would be unable to have children of their own.

Soon enough, Terah, along with Abram, Sarai, and Lot, left their homeland of Ur and headed for a land called Canaan.

Before arriving in Canaan though, the family stopped in another place called, strangely enough, Haran.

And there they settled for a while where after a number of years Terah died in Haran leaving Abram, Sarai, and Lot.

Imagine the heartache of Abram.

He watched his brother die.

He learned he and his wife would not conceive.

He was with his father when Terah died.

This is not a straight line.

This is not sunshine and roses.

This is not the ideal.

And still, Abraham’s faith persevered.

There is difficulty within faith, there are struggles on our faith journeys.

We may even run from our faith, but the constancy of God’s love remains.

And here enters Nicodemus, so curious, so wondering about what this all means.

Perhaps Nicodemus’ path, once of the straight and narrow variety, the path where A leads to B and B leads to C etc., now seems to have gone a bit, well, cattywampus.

So he questions Jesus under the cover of night, away from the scrutinizing eyes of his colleagues, at a time when perhaps his absence would not be noticed as much.

Enter Nicodemus:

Jesus, I’ve seen you. I have seen your miracles. I have seen your signs. You must be from God for no one could perform these acts without being from God and in the presence of God.

You are right. No one could do these things with out being born from above.

Born from above?

Right.

What of being born from my mother? Is that not good enough?

Yes, but you also must have faith. Faith is faith and flesh is flesh. You must be born of your parent and also born through water.

How can this be true?

How are you a teacher of Israel and you do not understand? You’ve seen me perform these miracles, and you know I cannot perform them without God, yet you do not believe what I say about other things?

And I can almost hear the gears turning in the mind of Nicodemus.

And if I am projecting too much on Nicodemus here, I apologize, but I get it.

Because this isn’t easy.

None of this is easy.

Nothing is a straight line.

Have faith, yes, but what of that faith in difficulty?

What of that faith when it seems so fantastically wonderful as to challenge our very understanding of the world as it should be.

What of faith when we are Nicodemus and are confronting something so strange, so enticing as to question the very foundations on which we have built our current realities.

What of faith when it is hard?

When we watch our friends and family die outside what should be the natural order of things?

When we are confronted with the news we won’t be able to conceive a child though that is our fondest desire?

When we turn on the tv and see story after story of strife and mayhem?

What happens when none of this makes sense?

When God seems far away?

Yet then, faith is not the issue, is it?

We can have faith and frustration with that faith.

Just as we are born of the parent who birthed us, so are we born of the water with which we are baptized.

We can sometimes not get along with our parents, our relationships with them can be rocky and fraught.

Our relationships might even be broken, nonexistent even.

Yet we cannot question our very birth.

And perhaps our faith is the same.

We can question our faith.

We can wonder where God is in tragedy.

We can fail to conceive of God’s presence when experience that tragedy.

Yet from our baptisms, via our births by water, we cannot deny God’s love.

Yes, I’ve tried.

I have my own path with my own history of atheism and agnosticism.

I certainly tried to convince others that God did not exist.

Yet like Nicodemus in the night, I returned.

I returned to church.

I returned to faith.

I returned to God who was there all along.

It is perfectly okay to wonder about our faith.

It is not a sin to wonder aloud where God is in any of this in the midst of our suffering.

It was Jesus who cried out from the cross in tortuous pain, “Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani.”

My God my God why have you forsaken me.

The Son of God asked this.

You too might ask the same.

But know also, God is not forsaking you.

In your heartache, God is with you.

In your grief, God is with you.

In your hurt and pain, God is with you.

God is with you.

And God, will be with us.

For this is for us a promised land, a land of Canaan when the kingdom will arrive.

And still, in this in between time, between the imperfections of now and a perfect earth reconceived when that kingdom arrives, God is with us.

We are children of God.

Though our path might sometimes be crooked on our way to salvation, still we are children of God.

Amen.