THE SECOND SUNDAY in LENT

March 20, 2011

Text: Genesis 2:1-4a

Pastor Dale G. Bauer 

The father of our faith is Abram. In Hebrew, Abram means High Father, or my Father God is exulted. It is a play on words where God is exalted by this man Abram. When God makes a covenant with Abram, his name is changed to Abraham—the more familiar to us—which means father of a multitude of nations. You can find all this in Genesis 17.

The promise, the covenant, is that Abraham will have descendants and a land. God begins this process by giving Abraham and Sarah a son, Isaac.

But before this all happens, Abram must prove that he does exalt him, that he does trust him. So God asks Abram, who has done quite well financially, to uproot himself and head from his homeland to a new land. By sheer faith in the voice of God, Abram pulls up stakes, makes a move, and then moves again.

The promise comes true when the offspring of Abraham and Sarah become the twelve tribes, made of families, and they go into the land after a very long wait, the land known to us as Israel, the Promised Land.

Built into the very order of creation is community. Remember the words of God:

It is not good that man should be alone ...

From that day forward God has been building families and communities. In nature. In the human community.

Why? Because loneliness is deadly. Here’s a book that did pioneering research into the question of loneliness and heart disease. The title: The Broken Heart: the Medical Consequences of Loneliness. The thesis of the book is that isolation—loneliness—kills people through all kinds of disease, but especially heart disease. He jumps into it in his introduction:

If the scope of this book is complex, its purposed is simple: to demonstrate that human companionship does affect our hearts, and that there is reflected in our hearts a biological basis for our need for loving human relationships, which we fail to fulfill at our peril.

The book caught my attention—and still does.

When Jesus calls Peter the Rock and on this faith the church is founded, the word used by Jesus is ekklesia, a gathering. That’s the very root of the word “church.” The church is first and foremost a gathering of God’s people, done by the Spirit. Jesus started with a community of twelve. The apostle Paul ran around the entire Mediterranean basin establishing small communities. We have intentional small communities at Cross of Hope called Koinonia Groups, which take their job description from the small communities described in the book of Acts. This church avoids koinonia at its own peril.

Loneliness is different than being alone. On the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, the guy standing here is an I, an introvert at heart. I need time alone; it regenerates me. There are many times I just don’t want people around (you know what I mean). Jesus spends time alone in the wilderness; Paul spent three years in the wilderness preparing for his ministry. Time alone allows us the occasion to hear the very voice of God. Being alone is a positive thing, but loneliness is not a healthy thing.

Who you are is often because of where you are. This applies to stewardship. Good giving builds community. If you keep all you are given, the community suffers. If the community suffers, then health itself suffers. How does this work? On a small scale and a large scale. We have something here called the Good Samaritan Fund. It shares your abundance with others, exactly as God intended. For example, in 2010, someone’s car broke down; and to keep a job and a family together, you provided $1,600. To keep food on a family’s table, you provided $500. For scholarships to Financial Peace University to help people get out of debt, you provided $200. In Haiti, through Lutheran World Relief, you provided millions. As I speak, millions are headed to our missionaries in Japan to help as best we can. It is your giving that maintains Rainbow Trail Lutheran Camp, which has touched the lives of hundreds in this congregation alone.

Stewardship is more than making a commitment. Or giving money. Or sharing our gifts. It is about building community. It is our Togetherness Treasure.

Amen.