crossing over

Posted by: len hjalmarson
Church: Aylmer, Ontario Aylmer
Date: January 7th, 2011

“And he pitched his tent having Bethel on the west and Ai on the east:
and there he built an altar.” Genesis 12:8

Most of us started out as Jesus followers being told that we had to create a maximum distance between us and the world. We heard various reasons for this, but mostly it was based around fear – fear of corruption.

We had this idea that purity and passion for God could only come out of immersion in a completely separated world. We didn’t realize that this came with a whole bunch of assumptions about how God operates, as well as some assumptions about the world itself.

Eventually, most of us look at the life of Jesus and this complete separation of church and world and start to ask some questions.

• Why does Jesus seem more interested in hanging out with sinners than with saints?
• How come the religious ones always give Jesus so much trouble for this?
• And what does it mean to follow Jesus in the way I live not just what I believe?

What once looked like wisdom starts to look like fear and a lack of faithfulness.  And we begin to form a new idea of how Church and World should be related.

Or as one pundit put it looking at John 3:16 –

What if God really loves the world?

Bethel is the symbol of communion with God; Ai is the symbol of the world. Abraham pitched his tent between the two. We can learn at least a couple of things from this.

First, we can reflect that God’s love for the world meant that God radically entered the world. In Jesus we see that God made himself vulnerable and of no reputation. Most of us choose to play it safe in our relating to the world – Jesus did not.

The challenge to us was coined by Erwin McManus:“If those who are in church leadership are looking for the safe place, who will lead the church into the dangerous places?”

Second, we learn that our presence in the world will always be in tension. And it really is a tension. We find ourselves constantly falling off one side or the other of the tension: too busy and no time for God, or too much time in religious pursuits and no time for the lost. Or worse, we mistake all our religious activity for devotion, when God wants us to also learn to simply spend time in rest, soaking in his goodness.

Third, we learn that the gospel has very little to do with either safety or success in this life.

In the tradition of pilgrimage … hardships are not accidental but integral to the journey itself. Treacherous terrain, bad weather, taking a fall, getting lost — challenges of that sort, largely beyond our control, can strip us of the illusion that we are in control.

Only then do we learn dependence on God.

Remember Israel at the end of their wandering. We figure after forty years they must know how to trust God. We think, if we had been there we would do it right.

When Israel is poised to enter the Promised Land they send out spies. Two different reports come back. The majority opinion is that the territory is unsuitable and threatening, being occupied by [giants].

Caleb and Joshua disagree. They describe it as a “rich and fertile land,” which will be easily conquered with the Lord’s help. But the people want none of it..

The result.. is that the Israelites back off from the borders of the new land. They spend another forty years wandering in the wilderness..

Today we stand poised at the fringes of radically new terrain. Many are frightened by what they see; concerned for their safety and the preservation of the community.

Reading the story of the spies, I believe faithfulness requires that we cross over.

The truth is we cannot preserve what we had. The past is past. The only way to walk in God’s blessing is to go forward.