Year C
 Genesis 15:1-6
 Psalm 33:12-22
 Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
 Luke 12:32-40

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

We’re all familiar with giving children an allowance…  some mad money…  that they can use to buy…  depending on their ages…  some candy…  or maybe save up for a more costly video game…  an allowance…  perhaps as payment for them doing some chores…  when I was barely a teenager…  I got 60₵ a week… for keeping my room tidy…  and helping cook dinner…  and I liked to buy 45 RPM records…  and in 1965…  I bought Turn! Turn! Turn! by the Byrds…  a song based on Ecclesiastes 3:1-8…  and it seemed remarkable to me that someone set part of the Bible…  a Jewish part…  to music…  and these days…  there are some apps that help teach children responsibility…  by helping them earn money…  and keep track of it…  ]  and with varying degrees of parental control…  to get payouts…  ] in the British aristocracy…  an allowance was much more substantial…  and enabled those…  like the landed gentry…  to maintain an extravagant lifestyle…  often without doing anything…  but these discrepancies can set up some interesting dynamics…  some people come to believe that life is nothing but drudgery…  because you must work to survive…  and some people come to believe that they’re entitled to the luxurious lives they have…

When God asked Abram to look toward heaven and count the stars…  if he could…  to number his descendants…  in what was then and is mostly still now…  a dark and dry desert climate where viewing conditions are ideal…  even though he may have seen the sweep of what’s called the Milky Way…  which is located both towards the center of our galaxy…  and in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius…  as incomprehensible as the number of stars accessible to Abram’s old eyes were…  he could not have imagined the billions of galaxies and the sextillions of stars that the James Webb telescope has revealed…  and which lay behind what he could see…  and Abram believed…  he had faith…  we tend to think that this means that Abram was religious…  the NRSV translates the Hebrew word…  tze-da-qah…  as righteousness…  but it’s a word that’s related to the concept of justice…  the root of the word then…  tze-daq…  refers to an ethical…  moral standard…  and in the Jewish scriptures…  that standard is the very nature and will of God…  and so with nothing more than a visual aid to help him calculate promised offspring…  Abram drops his question…  and trusts God…  And thus you find…  observes an ancient midrash about this verse…  that our father Abraham inherited this world and the world–to–come…  as a reward for the faith that he had…  but in the Tanakh…  faith does not mean believing in spite of the evidence…  or lack thereof…  it means trusting profoundly in a person…  in this case the personal God…  who has just reaffirmed the promise…

I started talking about the difference between what we earn…  and that to which we feel entitled…  but there’s another possibility…  and it’s gift… and it’s expressed in what Jesus says in today’s Gospel…  Do not be afraid, little flock…  for it is your Father’s good pleasure… good pleasure…  to give you the kingdom…  that God has resolved…  because it is simply God’s very nature and will…  to give us the entire kingdom…  nothing that we can possibly earn…  and certainly nothing to which we are entitled…  and not just a parcel or two…  not just a fiefdom…  but the entire kingdom…

Do not be afraid… there are some lines in the science fiction novel Dune…  called the Litany Against Fear…  which Paul Atreides used to calm himself…  before being tested by the Rev. Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam…  a member of the Bene Gesserit…  Paul says…  I must not fear…  fear is the mind-killer…  fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration…  I will face my fear…  I will permit it to pass over me and through me…  and when it has gone past…  I will turn the inner eye to see its path…  when the fear has gone…  there will be nothing…  only I will remain…  it leads me to believe that the gift God offers us…  is nothing less than the boundless and great I AM…  and yet…  there are those who refuse it…  or who approach this gift with fear…

John Shea reminds us that today’s passage comes immediately after Jesus’ teaching about the ravens of the air…  and the lilies of the field…  fed and clothed as gift…  and Jesus’ little flock is encouraged to adopt this deeper awareness…  because the dominant cultural consciousness sees life as an anxious project for survival…  constantly concerned with food…  clothing…  and shelter…  and this alternative awareness suggests that we consider life…  as a gift given from beyond itself…  a gift which exists before our toil…  and which the Source of Life feeds…

But it can be difficult to cultivate this perspective…  we need to remain vigilant and aware…  and we find ourselves in an Advent-of-sorts…  waiting for the Master to come…  but there are special moments when we realize that the Master has arrived home…  but it’s not so much he has come from the wedding feast…  as it is that he brings the wedding feast with him…  and when we recognize…  that is re-cognize…  the imminent knock…  he fastens his belt…  and serves his servants by allowing his life and their lives to flow into each other…   like St. Teresa’s description of Divine Union…  which she said was like watching rain fall from the sky and into a river…  and when the drops fell…  you couldn’t tell the water from the sky…  from the water in the river…  and likewise…  in the Divine Union she described…  you and God can no longer tell each other apart…

Neither God…  nor the universe…  owes us anything…  and to think we earn what we have in a vacuum…  or believe that we’re entitled to it…  is to deceive ourselves…  it is all gift…    and as we’re increasingly able to establish that truth deep in our awareness…  it will become increasingly easier for us to not be attached to things…  and to share the gifts we’ve been given…

When we experience ourselves as attached to God in Christ…  through whom all things come into being…  we come to own the field of all possibilities…  it’s like what Jesus said in Matthew 13:44…  The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field…  which someone found and hid…  then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has…  and buys that field…  now that would be a field worth owning…

But to learn where the field is…  to learn about the treasure it contains…  and to do what’s needed to own it…  takes different kinds and different degrees of risk…  in her book… The Other Side of Silence… author Margaret Silf writes…  the question of risk… is really the question of faith… the journey into an unknown future is a journey for people of faith… but not necessarily people who have aligned themselves with a particular faith tradition… it’s people who are willing to trust in a power beyond themselves…

Unfortunately… for many… the word faith has become associated with certainty…  not risk…  and the world does not offer certainty…  if we construct a haven of certainty for ourselves…  we can be sure that we have constructed an illusion…  experience will almost always shake that haven apart…   just when we most need it…

The story goes…  that there was a daredevil who made a living by pushing a wheelbarrow…  across a high wire… suspended across an abyss…  the crowds came out in droves to watch him…  and cheer him on…  Do you believe I can do it?  he would yell…  Oh Yes! We believe you can do it…  they chorused back in acclamation…  and then he asked…  So who’s going to get into the wheelbarrow…  and their mouths were silenced…  they all believed in him… but none of them really trusted him enough…  to get into the wheelbarrow…

In our case…  the wheelbarrow is pushed by God…  so who’s willing to get in?