05.06.05 - Journeying

Some years ago I was at a lunch with a group of people from the parish and the conversation, aided as it was with some nice wine, got around to things Scottish. The conversation flowed enthusiastically. I looked around the group and realised I might be the only person there with absolutely no claim to any Scots ancestry whatsoever. So, not being one to let an opportunity pass, I called for a toast, held my glass up and said, "Here??s to the English." There was an ominous silence ?± well, there was a silence. Saying it was ominous makes the story more interesting. I went on to say something like this, "If it weren??t for the English and their policies which drove countless Scots to leave their homeland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States would not be the countries they are today."

And it??s true. The colonial and the twentieth century history of New Zealand owes an enormous amount ?± I suspect a disproportionate amount compared with the number of English people who settled here ?± to people of Scots ancestry. The same goes for Australia and Canada and possibly the United States.

The human history of New Zealand is based upon people who came here from somewhere else. As we well know, until less than a thousand years ago when Polynesian explorers first came here, this was a land without people. It was the last habitable landmass on earth to be peopled, first by those early migrations from the Pacific, and then some hundreds of years later by migrations primarily from the United Kingdom but also other parts of Europe, and more recently new migrations from the Pacific and then from Asia. For all the human inhabitants, the story of our land is a story that begins with journeys. Each of our personal stories as people of this land begins with a journey ?± either our own, or a parent, or someone further back, who made a choice to come here. Very few people ever came here by accident. Just about everybody here is here because of someone??s decision to make a journey.

The stories of three great religions which have spread around the world begin with a journey. Now the Lord said to Abram, ?´Go?ñ?? So Abram went, as the Lord had told him. The beginnings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are found in Abram??s response to that command. The three faiths each trace their origins back to Abraham and that journey from the land in Mesopotamia that is now called Iraq, up and around the fertile crescent through Syria and southern Turkey, and down into Canaan, the land now known partly as Israel and partly as Palestine.

A journey begins with faith. Whether it is Abraham setting out from Haran to journey to a land he did not yet know, or whether it is my great grandfather setting out to make a new life on the other side of the world, a journey begins with faith. No journey can be undertaken without some degree of trust that there is a destination to be reached and that it is possible to reach that destination. A journey cannot happen without some degree of openness to the new and the unexpected. Without openness we would never leave home base; we would instead live safely, seeking to secure what little gains we have made. When we choose not to have faith and not to live with openness and trust, we make a choice instead, of being closed; we choose dullness, listlessness, flatness and fatness.

To be trusting, to be open, means risking learning something from someone else, then having to do something with that new insight. It is finding new information, other ways of looking at life, at God, at ourselves. It is like being called into a new country, as Abraham was called into a new country. Being trusting and open to other human beings means taking the risk of letting them love us, and taking the risk of loving them, knowing that things may never be the same again if we do. Being trusting and open towards God means taking the risk of letting God love us, and also taking the risk of our loving God, knowing that things may never be the same again.

A journey begins with faith, faith begins with a journey. Faith is a journey. Faith is never static; it moves, it explores, it goes to the boundaries to see what is beyond; it is challenged by what it encounters and sometimes is enriched by that. Faith is nourished and grown by the journeys we take ?± physical or metaphorical. We like to think there is some degree of permanence about our lives. But in our most mature moments we know that we are only passing through. Our life philosophies and value systems are always in a state of change ?± if they are not, then there is something seriously wrong with us. The institutions we belong to are not permanent structures ?± they too change with time and with changing people. I felt that last night when on TV I watched Paul McCartney in concert in Red Square in front of the Kremlin and beside Lenin??s tomb. The audience went wild when McCartney sang "Back to the USSR" ?± but few if any would have actually wanted to go back to that failed institution.

To be people of faith is to live always questioning, always thinking, always wondering, and not expecting to find final answers or final solutions. To be a person of faith is to never rest uncritically with the status quo, for people of faith are lured by a vision and goaded by a divine discontent. The Lord said to Abram, ?´Go?ñ?? So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.

"Are we there yet?" Bart Simpson irritatingly keeps asking when the family goes somewhere in the car. "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" The biblical story of Abraham??s journey into the land of Canaan doesn??t end by reaching "there". One of the most ominous set of words in the Bible is found in two verses, one following the other, of this narrative when Abraham reaches "there". At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, "To your offspring I will give this land."

Father Elias Chacour is a Palestinian Christian priest. His parish is currently, I think, in Nazareth. He serves on a number of international committees and has many international speaking engagements, and each time he flies out of or into Israel, he is needlessly harassed by the Israeli security services. On one such occasion when his luggage was once again being painstakingly searched piece by piece, he asked the inspector who was supervising this why they kept doing it when they knew he was a man of peace. "Because this is our land," said the inspector, "and we will do what we wish." "Do you remember the story," Chacour asked him, "of when your ancestor Abraham first came to this land, and was thirsty." "Yes," said the inspector. "Well," said Chacour, "it was my ancestor who gave him water."

At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." "Are we there yet?"

Of course, the story of Father Chacour's ancestor giving the police inspector??s ancestor water is not literally true, but then neither is the biblical narrative of Abraham. The narrative is a saga, a heroic tale of an archetypal ancestor, a foundational myth for a people, a culture, and a faith. But the words, "To your offspring I will give this land," are taken as literally true. I would imagine that many of you who are old enough were as touched as I was by the movie Exodus when it came out in 1960. It was a thrilling story of displaced Jewish people from all around Europe, having survived the holocaust and the war, making their way by whatever means possible to Palestine to their ancestral homeland. Jewish settlement in Palestine had been promoted following the First World War along with the slogan, "A land without people for a people without land." "A land without people?ñ" ?± they weren??t talking about pre-second millennium New Zealand. They were talking about a land which was already occupied. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Or, in this case, the Palestinians who Father Chacour, maybe correctly or maybe with a sense of poetry, said were the descendants of the Canaanites deep in the shadows of the past. Both he and the inspector knew where ?´there?? was, and each knew he belonged there.

Faith is a journey; a journey begins with faith ?± sometimes faith in a promise, or sometimes just in the trust that there is a ?´there?? to arrive at. But as this ancient biblical myth demonstrates, faith is not always straight-forward. There was a promise, and there was a ?´there?? for eventual arrival. But it was no more a land without a people than it was in the second half of the nineteen forties. Maybe this is why some people prefer not to journey, not to opt for faith, because the outcomes can be ambiguous. Things are rarely ever what they were made out to be or what we hoped they would be. Journeying in faith means learning to live with ambiguities, learning that ?´there?? might not be there at all but still lies ahead of us. Or we learn that what we hoped and trusted would be, can never entirely be that because of the needs and the rights of others. For all their faithfulness to the God of their ancestor Abraham, this is something the State of Israel doesn??t yet seem to have realised. Nor do some of the other descendants of Abraham, the Arab Palestinian people. Neither seem to have learned that faith frequently calls us to sharing, and to being mindful of the needs and rights of others and not just of our own.

Faith begins with a journey, a journey begins with faith. One of the most important journeys any of us ever makes is taken without any trust or decision at all on our own part. It is that short but momentous journey down the birth canal from, or in the case of caesarean births that sudden removal from the safety and security of the womb into all the risk and uncertainties of life in this world. In many ways, it is nothing short of a miracle that any of us survive that journey at all. But we do, and through it we learn trust and can discover faith. The image of a baby held tenderly by a parent is the image of learning trust, of discovering faith. The image of the child being given over to a servant of the church is another picture of faith. "What we are about to do," I say to each infant given to me to be baptised, "is the sign that God loves you and claims you as God??s own. What we are about to do marks you, in childhood and adulthood, as God??s for ever. And, little child, you know nothing of what any of this means. All this demonstrates the words of the apostle, ?´We love God, because God first loved us.??"

It is in that love, Christians claim, that we begin and continue the journey that is each of our lives. It is with trust in that love, with faith in that God, that we can make our life-journeys despite the ambiguities we encounter, despite the many times we have to change our understandings and perspectives, despite finding that every time we think we have arrived ?´there?? is around another corner or over another hill.

The origin and the goal of all our journeying is God. Abraham, the legendary patriarch of three world faith systems, is the archetypal image of faith, or trust, of setting out not knowing where ?´there?? is and finding that ?´there?? was never going to be an easy option when he got there. The God of our journeys variously challenges and nourishes and sustains and goads us, knowing that it is the journeying and not the arriving that matters most. And we can journey trusting that because God first loved us, we are never alone and need never be without hope in the One who is at our beginnings and at our endings, who is our origin and our destination.