Has anyone yet seen the film “Twelve Years a Slave”? It won some well-deserved awards at the Oscars, and tells a true story of a free man from New York being kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south, where he had to hide his true free and educated identity to stay alive under the abuse of his slavers. The film follows him to the point where he is reunited with his family, and the endnotes tell us that he spent the rest of his life working in the abolitionist movement.
Why do I bring this up? Well, tomorrow is Saint Patrick’s day, and Patrick was also taken from his homeland and sold into slavery. Imagine then, what it meant for him to escape that slavery, return home to Britain, and then, once he became a public leader in the church, he returned to the country that had kept him as a slave. Patrick was a Bishop and saint to the very people who had taken away his freedom by force. Talk about love. Talk about mystery. This is the sort of hero whose power came from beyond himself. And now, centuries later, we celebrate a day with his name on it and make it a bit more glamorous than it probably was in reality. As we tend to do with saints.
Take Abram, for example. In the Genesis reading this morning we have a very unglamorous call story. He lived a good life, he and his wife had no children, they presumably were getting ready to retire, and God uprooted them to send them on the first bits of a road trip, without a clear map, without any clear plans or certain expectations, but with a very vague sort of promise: “I will bless you so that you will be a blessing.” Sort of like what Patrick must have felt when he went back to Ireland after escaping slavery.
Sometimes God tells us what to do and our first response can only be either to laugh or to be very confused. Yet for some reason we keep asking God for advice and direction.
We have wide open pasture in this wilderness of Lent. Plenty of space to explore, from worship spaces in our mid-week services, to spiritual practices for the season, to driver’s education for some of our young people, to navigating new relationships and new jobs, to figuring out the way this particular parish might meet the needs of this particular neighborhood in our own particular way. It would sure be nice to have a direct word from God, wouldn’t it? To know for certain that what we’re doing is what God wants us to do, that these plans and works of ours line up with God’s desire for us and for this area.
So we get that word from God and it’s just as clear to us as it was to Abram, or to Patrick: “I will bless you to be a blessing.” And we thank God for that good word and still wonder at what it means, how to live it out.
What it means is that God has not forgotten us in this wilderness. Abram and Sarai were childless and their only security was in staying connected to their ancestral home - so God took them from that home, uprooted them from that land, and God was their security. Far more fertile, that chasing after God’s voice, than it would have been had they dug in their heels and refused to budge.
What it means, that we are blessed to be a blessing, is that God is not done with us. Abram and Sarai were childless and wandering and living on a promise they did not see come to fruition for many many years. Their names had to be changed. Their wanderings took them through uncertain times and potentially dangerous neighborhoods. But God was not finished with them just because they appeared to be barren.
God blessed us to be a blessing, too. It’s the real trickle-down effect, the way the cycles of nature feed each other, and our faith has sprung forth from Abram and Sarai to feed generations before us just as this love of God will, through us, continue to feed generations to come.
It’s miraculous. It’s mysterious. It’s a little bit crazy, to think of a people born out of such wandering in their golden years. But it’s a promise made by a God who is faithful. A promise made and kept by a God who came in person to see to it. It’s a promise we still carry, and we carry it in faith that God is faithful. We do not wander in the wilderness chasing after our own plans and desires for success, for success as the world measures it changes more quickly than technology. We wander in the wilderness chasing after our God who goes before us, following wherever faith calls us, even when it seems pretty crazy, and we have known the blessings of these leaps of faith.
Patrick could well have escaped slavery in Ireland and been done with the place, never returned, and with good reason. But in Christ he was always living in freedom, just as each and all of us live in freedom through Christ. Secure in his freedom he was able to follow God’s call to be a blessing to Ireland and the generations who followed after him.
Abram followed that ridiculous, unwise, wasteful call to leave behind his homeland, too. And his offspring outnumbered the stars of heaven. The whole of the cosmos, even. That great expansive cosmos that God loves enough to live in and to die in and to be resurrected in. Brothers and sisters, we are blessed to be a blessing, as Abram and Sarai were, as Patrick was. Which means God has not forgotten us. God is not finished with us. God is still loving us in and through the wilderness. In and through the cosmos. In and through the mundane bits of bread and wine offered at this and, yes, every, table. Nothing much special, it seems. Yet when God gets involved, speaks a word, makes a promise, it’s miraculous. It’s mysterious. It’s love poured out for the whole of the world.
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