One time I drove all the way from here to the Pacific Ocean.
Another time I drove from here to North Dakota.
One time I drove across Nebraska.
Leaving home, leaving the familiar, I was able to see and notice what I had taken for granted, the land, the sky, the people, the plants the animals the insects were all so different.
When I came home, everything looked different, or I was seeing things and people that I normally didn’t notice. My eyes had grown so use to being wide open and paying attention to new things that I came home with new eyes that were full of attention, for a little while at least.
Leaving what we know.
Going someplace where we have never been.
On the way we change, the changing landscape wakes up something inside us that was asleep, that was dormant.
Faith.
Having faith in particular in God, the God who can be trusted, God who bids us to leave behind our own country to travel into a foreign and holy place.
It is interesting how the great stories of faith involve not just an inward journey, not just inward dispositions, but always an outward journey across actual physical landscape, leaving one place in particular and going somewhere else in particular.
There is no division or separation between the physical and the spiritual. It is all the same place.
Think about it.
Noah’s ark.
Moses and the people of Israel in the wilderness.
Jesus in the wilderness for 40 days.
The journey through physical death to the resurrection of the body.
Paul’s missionary journeys
Even the seven days of creation were a physical journey for God, making something that has never been before. Creating is a tremendous act of faith, ask any artisan or artist, or anyone who has ever done something new, you set out not sure what will happen.
Geography and landscape is where the encounter with God happens and faith bids us go onward.
It brings a whole other meaning to the term holy land. The land is holy, because this is where we meet God.
Abraham’s journey of faith is what we hear today.
Leaving his home, leaving his country and kindred and his fathers house to an unkown land that God will show, and along the way Abraham will become a blessing to all peoples, and he will become the father of a mighty nation.
But he had to leave what he knew.
Faith isn’t usually a very comfortable or comforting thing, usually it is like a deer caught in the head lights as something unknown bears down upon us.
Have faith at the approach of death.
Have faith during loss and grief.
Have faith in times of fear and danger.
Have faith in giving birth to a knew life.
Have faith when the familiar is gone and all that is left is new and foreign.
The physical circumstances of life are the stuff that our relationship with God is made of.
Faith always demands physical action.
Crossing a boundary.
Leaving a familiar and comfortable place and going somewhere else.
It could be as far as the other side of the world or as near as across the street, or the other side of the bed.
Faith draws us out of our selves and into the world and into relationships where God is met, and our eyes are filled with attention and we wake up and we are able to offer up praise and blessing to someone else.
Faith.
In faith we leave home.
In faith we find home for the first time.
It is a holy landscape that we live in and journey across.
God keeps knocking on the door, asking us to come out and play.