Our Life’s Journeys: God Still Calls

Gracious God, from whom every good gift comes, send your Spirit into our lives. And by the flame of your wisdom, open the horizons of our minds, loosen our tongues to sing your praise in words, and to go beyond speech, praising you in the silence deep within our hearts. Amen.

This morning, I invite you to join me in reflecting on some of the transformative journeys of your life, those times when you’ve experienced great personal growth, something new, something that perhaps changed the arc of your life. We are in the season of Lent, which is often referred to as the Lenten journey, not a trip. It’s not like going to the dentist!

I’m inviting you to reflect on something truly deep. Last Sunday, my dear friend and colleague Rose Duncan preached a powerful sermon inviting us into the wilderness with Jesus, where we too encounter the tempter and temptations. We’re called not to take shortcuts—the things that are convenient, the things that might tempt us—but to follow the Light which is the love of God. The reflection I’m challenging you to consider is solely to open your minds up a bit. If there’s a throughline in the scriptures you heard today, I could make a good case that it’s about journey. Some were self-initiated, some not.

We start with Abram, who’s called by God to depart to some unnamed place and to leave behind everything he’s ever known—leave his kindred, leave his father’s house—and go. Scripture tells us he went. I’ll have more to say about that a little later.

Next, there’s Psalm 121, one of the most beloved. It’s an ascent psalm, a psalm that pilgrims would have sung as they were making their way up to Jerusalem for major occasions like Passover.

I lift up my eyes to the hills;
from where is my help to come?
My help comes from the Lord,
the maker of heaven and earth.

Then in the gospel lesson, we encounter the Pharisee Nicodemus. If he isn’t on a spiritual journey, I don’t know who would be. Now, he may have chosen to sneak into it in the dark of night, but that’s a sermon for another time.

What’s your story? What are some of your journeys?

I want to offer up just a few of my own—not to talk about myself—but I’m hoping that something in them will resonate with you. Perhaps you’ve had some of the same experiences, and hearing mine will help you to explore more deeply how God was with you and to notice that you may have started the journey in one place but ended someplace very different from what you had imagined.

The first transformative journey that I remember vividly was when I was sixteen. Many of you know that I grew up in a little tiny town in South Texas, and I was invited to be the first high school student from little Refugio, Texas, to participate in a national program that was very similar to the Close Up program, if you’re familiar with it, whereby students from across the country and some international students came to Washington to see firsthand how government works. It worked back then. Don’t laugh!

Well, it was the first time I’d ever even been on a commercial airplane. When I landed and looked at Washington, it took my breath away. It was one of the most beautiful cities I’d ever seen. I believe the same today. We went to the White House, to the Supreme Court, to Capitol Hill, and to the State Department. I was mesmerized—not by the power, but by the power of the possibilities that people in public service dedicated to the public good could actually make a difference. I vowed as sixteen year olds might be prone to do that someday, I would go back to Washington and do public service for public good.

It took me a few years, but when I was twenty-four, I decided that the time had arrived. I quit my perfectly good job, much to my parents’ horror. I didn’t have a job to go to, but I knew this was my time. I knew it was my journey to take, and I packed up my worldly goods in my little Subaru. And if you can believe it, this was a time before GPS. I used an actual map, like a paper map, and I drove to Washington, and eventually I did make my way to public service.

My idea at the time was that I would be here a few years to do public service and then go home. Well, obviously I never left. So often I’ve thought how different my life would have been if I’d stayed in Texas. That sixteen year old’s journey absolutely changed the arc of my life.

Fast forward twenty years. I was humming along, I was married, I had my own business. I was on corporate boards, nonprofit boards. I was doing the Washington thing. And then I learned I had breast cancer. I hadn’t planned on that journey. That was not intentional. There’s something about facing your own mortality that makes you a lot more intentional about your prayer life. That journey forced me to slow down and to pray— deeply pray. And it was in that stillness, literally, when I was getting radiation treatment, that my call to ordained ministry came. I’d never thought about this. I was, you know, in church and all of that, but I’d never thought about ordained ministry. And it’s one of the greatest blessings of my life.

You see, I believe God was in every single one of those journeys, bit by bit by bit. So too, God is in every one of our journeys, and part of our call in Lent is to stay open to the new thing that God may be calling you to.

Going back to Abram, just to put it in context: Abram was seventy-five years old when he got that call from God. He’s told by God: I’m going to show you where to go. Leave your kindred. Leave your father’s house. Leave everything you’ve known, and you will be the father of many nations. Now, there are a few little quirks in that instruction. Let’s start with Abram’s age of seventy-five. His wife Sarai, who, by the way, is not mentioned at all in this whole proposition, is long past childbearing years. If I’d been Abram, I would have had a few questions. I already told you, I like maps. I like to know where I’m going and have a sense of what’s going to happen along the way. Wouldn’t Abram wonder: how is it that I’m going to be the father of many nations? And, as we read on in the passage, with descendants more numerous than the stars? Exactly how’s that going to happen? Scripture doesn’t tell us. Yet Abram went. Talk about faith and trust in God!

It’s amazing if you think about it. Doris Betts puts it this way, that “Faith is not synonymous with certainty, but it’s a decision to keep your eyes open.”¹ I’m inviting you to keep your eyes open and your spirit open. There’s no telling what God has in store for you and me. Walter Brueggemann, writing about this part of Genesis, says that “You are a God who makes promises with no evidence at hand or in sight. You are a God powerful in purpose, hidden in performance, faithful over time.”²

That’s our God: the one we follow, the one who leads us and shows us the way: how to live a life of meaning that matters and makes a difference. We may not have all the details spelled out, but this is a season to reflect on our lives, not just the ways in which we’ve been separated from God and one another, but to open ourselves up to new possibilities, new ways of being, new ways of being in this hurting and broken world.

Heaven knows we need some light and life and love in the world we see today. So, I ask you this: what might God be calling you and me to do that requires us to step out in faith when we can’t make the evidence at hand or in sight square with that call? And when God calls, what will your response be? Amen.

¹ Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace, (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 169.
² Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching: Old Testament, “Genesis” by Walter Brueggemann, (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982).