By The Rev. Edward Horstmann
Bill and Marilyn were members of a congregation I served. They were gracious, curious people with a vibrant sense of humor. Deeply devoted to their church they could always be counted upon to appear in their usual seats every Sunday. I believe everyone who knew them expected they would live out their days in the community they loved and served so well.
Then one day they moved.
The story of Abram and Sarai is told in the Biblical book of Genesis. They lived centuries before Bill and Marilyn and may also have been well settled in the community they called home. They were in their elder years, perhaps thinking they were set for life. Then God stopped by; a blessed intrusion that changed their lives in dramatic ways.
And so, one day they moved.
When I think of Bill and Marilyn, and Abram and Sarai, I think of the phrase ‘opportunity knocks.’ Sometimes the knock may come softly, as I think it did for Bill and Marilyn. At other times, opportunity knocks the door down. In the story of Abram and Sarai, the call to follow God was expressed in strong, urgent verbs: “Get up; get going!”
If I was confronted by a challenge to pack up everything just when I thought I had arranged all my stuff for the last time I might say, “Let me at least think about it.” Which could be my way of saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
But that’s not what Abram and Sarai said. In fact, it seemed to take them no time at all to say yes to a God they barely knew and set out on the journey of a lifetime. Does their rapid response indicate an inborn readiness to welcome the unexpected? “Wake up ready to learn!” said the writer, Anthony DeMello. Maybe Abram and Sarai were, as the saying goes, born ready.
When Bill and Marilyn packed up and moved to a different part of the country, they were responding to a call from their daughter who wanted them to move closer to her and her family, in the far west of the United States. That makes the move seem more understandable, but still, it was a big move. Yet they, too, seemed ready for it. Maybe they had a little of that get up and go spirit that inspired Abram and Sarai to say farewell to the familiar and move on down the road, following only the promises of God. Maybe all these people understood the truth of these words from the philosopher, Ashley Montagu: “The key to life is to die young as late as possible!”
We can cultivate a readiness to follow the movements of the Spirit, even when those subtle or not so subtle stirrings compel us to make massive transitions. In fact, here’s the job description of every community of faith: to help people figure out what God is up to, and then do what God is doing. Pope Francis said it this way: to stay close to God we need to know how to set out. And as we set out, we will discover the truth of who we are and who we are meant to be. The author, Liz Gilbert, once said that “if you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself… then truth will not be withheld from you.”
Ray Anderson was open to that kind of journey. He created Interface in the 1970’s to become one of the foremost manufacturers and distributors of carpet tile. Interface eventually employed seven thousand people and showed great profits. It all seemed like a great success. Except that when Ray Anderson thought about how to make his company more environmentally friendly, he faced uncomfortable truths. “For the first 21 years of our company’s existence,” he said, “I never gave one thought to what we were taking from the earth or doing to the earth except to be sure we were…keeping ourselves clean in a regulatory sense and obeying the law. We had very little environmental awareness until August 1994.” At that time Ray Anderson presented his company with a “new vision, that Interface would become the first name in industrial ecology, worldwide, through substance, not words.” By the year 2020, Interface had turned Anderson’s vision of sustainability into a dream come true.
To say yes when God, and truth, and compassion, come calling: that’s faith. And faith will open us to glorious possibilities and breathtaking demands. It will bring us closer to God as together we bring hope and healing to the world.
The Rev. Dr. Ed Horstmann is the Senior Pastor of Round Hill Community Church. He is also an artist and amateur questionologist.
