I have a pretty diverse musical taste. I like hard rock, heavy metal, dubstep, electronic dance music, the blues, big band, dixieland, world music, bluegrass and bluegrass gospel music…you can’t want to learn to play the banjo and not have an appreciation for it. And you know I too would love to sing it sometimes in church. People often, OFTEN wonder why we don’t have some of those “good old songs” in our books. I think the answer is avoidance out of fear. Many of those songs were written in very hard times. People were longing to be set free. They were yearning for a better time, for victory, for reward, for gloryland and heaven. Because of suffering, thoughts turned inward and simply became about it all being over and better and this was reflected in the hymn writing.. People longed for escape, people wanted to fast forward. We’ve talked about theologies of glory before and how they pass over the mission of Christ. It’s not wrong to look forward to the other side, but the fear is that the inclusion of songs with such a solitary focus will lead to a misshaped theology. If we live for tomorrow we will miss out on today and the mission that Christ gave his followers. There’s a movie that strikes fear into my heart. It’s not a horror movie, well I guess in so far as we tend to define them. It makes me very uncomfortable and seeing it once was enough for me. The movie was Adam Sandler’s Click. The main character is frustrated with the unpleasant, boring, unimportant, unexciting, frustrating, difficult or sad parts of life. He gets a magic remote control and can click or fast forward through those parts, but he soon finds that he misses a whole lot of other things in the midst of the “clicks”. He misses his life and the lives of his family. Destinations do matter, reaching rewards do matter, but what about the journey? This life matters. The lives of others matter. In the creation story, God calls it all good, yet so many are in such a hurry to get this part over with. We’ve talked about Jesus having gone through our struggles. Did he go through this struggle? I would say so. How did he handle it? Luke 9:51 says, “As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem.” His journey takes 10 chapters and all along he is serving and healing and that’s about half of the book of Luke. Jesus moved from moment to moment, taking time and spending time with those in need, sharing his light, sharing his love, Journeying, not ignoring the present for the future. I believe that we are called to confidently live in The Eternal Now. It’s the only time that we have any dominion. We can’t change the past and if we live for the future, we like the click guy miss what’s before us, God’s good creation, our family, our friends, our neighbor that we are called to love. Living In the moment sharing the light and love of Christ right then. It’s what Jesus was doing. He did not miss opportunities, he didn’t skip people and he didn’t click. He was traveling the most important journey ever, but he moved deliberately in the moment. How can we do it? How can we have the faith, courage and confidence? Let’s look at our other lesson. The scene would look pretty weird and kind of scary to modern-day people—five bloody animal carcasses on the ground, three of them split in half, with the halves separated a short distance from each other. But in Abraham’s time it would not have been so menacing. The arrangement of divided animal carcasses would have been instantly recognized as the set-up for making a blood covenant. When God called Abraham out of his hometown and away from all things familiar, He gave Abraham some promises. A covenant is a kind of promise, a contract, a binding agreement between two parties. The fifteenth chapter of Genesis reiterates the covenant God had made with Abraham at his calling. Except this time, God graciously reassures His promise with a visual of His presence. He asks Abraham to find and kill a heifer, a ram, a goat, a dove, and a pigeon. Then, Abraham was to cut them in half (except the birds) and lay the pieces in two rows, leaving a path through the center. In ancient Near Eastern royal land grant treaties, this type of ritual was done to “seal” the promises made. Through this blood covenant, God was confirming primarily three promises He had made to Abraham: the promise of heirs, of land, and of blessings. A blood covenant communicated what is called a self-maledictory oath. (Remember: Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.) It invokes harm on yourself if you break the promise. The parties involved would walk the path between the slaughtered animals essentially saying, “May this be done to me if I do not keep my oath.” Jeremiah also talks about this type of oath-making. However, there was an important difference in the blood oath that God made with Abraham in Genesis 15. When the evening came, God appeared in the form of a “smoking fire pot and flaming torch [that] passed between the pieces” . But Abraham had fallen “into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him” Therefore, God alone passed through the pieces of dead animals, and the covenant was sealed by God alone. Nothing depended on Abraham. Everything depended on God, who promised to be faithful to His covenant. “When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself” . Abraham and his descendants could trust, count on, and believe in everything God promised. Wow, what a promise. What Grace! Right there present since the OT. A promise that is sure, super sure. But humankind still didn’t get it. We seem to have no confidence in God’s promises. God is faithful and we wander off seeking to do it on our own and for ourselves. But God calls us into community, into relationships with him and with one another. Jesus longs to gather us together and protect us. The hen, Christ, the good news ..frees us from that longing…it’s sure, it’s done..our destination is assured. We can be so sure because Jesus made a new covenant with us, in his blood. Instead of walking through figurative or illustrations Jesus sealed it all up front, not with an IF the covenant is broken but a BECAUSE I love you so much and I want to show you, he gave his life and blood upfront. His arms outstretched on the cross can be seen as him reaching out to gather us in sacrificing himself to the predators to protect us like a hen gathers her flock. One of the women in our video ties this all together nicely as she speaks about a chicken raising project in rural Kentucky. “We don’t know how long this ministry will last, but at this moment we are making a difference in people’s lives.” I think it’s really cool that they are making that difference with chickens on the Chicken or “hen” Gospel day.
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