“Tarboro, the Negeb, and the Sending of God”
Christopher H. Edmonston, Howard Memorial Presbyterian Church
Genesis 12: 1 – 9
6/5/2005
I.
I don’t
remember the date. I can only tell you
the late winter or early spring of 1998.
I was living somewhere between Fishersville and
My next door neighbor was an aging woman named Juanita Pirkey who for years had run the cafeteria at the little elementary school in the country near her house. She was one of the sweetest souls I ever met, and while I knew her she was beginning a long, and slow, and painful decent into the dense fog of Alzheimer’s disease. I had no charge to care for her, but I kept a key to her home and on the many occasions that she either locked herself out or in the house I would get my key and right the situation.
One night, during that spring of 1998, I was taking a shower after a long run into the countryside and I came out of the bathroom to find, to my own shock and awe, Ms. Pirkey staring at me from the couch in the living room. Quickly bounding from her sight and behind a door jam I asked her why she was there, and she told me that it was 8 already and that the school children were no where to be found. I told her to wait and I would help her look, got dressed, walked her home and let her in with my key.
II.
It was about that time that time that I realized my life would be different. It didn’t upset me that my next door neighbor was in crisis. While momentarily disconcerting that I happened upon her after my shower, to me it was a strange opportunity to help someone who, at that moment, didn’t know a shower head from a from a rain shower. I knew that I was, at least in part, put in that place to help.
And so I don’t remember the date – only 1998. Perhaps it was that very night that Ms. Pirkey and I looked for the children around her house. But the Spirit of God wake me from my sleep and in the depths of night and I got on my knees next to the bed my grandmother had bought for me when I was a child and I told Jesus that I would follow where he would lead – reluctant at times and though prone to sin and error, I would be His for better or ill.
The Jesus whom the poet Francis Thompson called the “Hound of Heaven” had finally tracked me down, and imperfect though I am I stand before you today and every day as your pastor living out and fulfilling the promise I made on my knees in the dark.
III.
I went back to sleep, and that was the first night that I slept in the Negeb that God had prepared for me. The Negeb, Genesis 12 tells us is that place that Abram is journeying onto in stages. This “father of righteousness,” whose faith precedes the law of God as Paul tells us in Romans chapter 4, is moving toward the Negeb.
As I am
sure some of you are wondering where the Negeb is let’s just say that nobody
knows for absolute sure. We know that it
is the southern lands of Caanan – the southern part of what is now
Israel/Palestine. Unlike the northern
part of
We do know what the Negeb was though (it was both a geographical location and a promise): it was the land of milk and honey, it flowed with water, and its rolling hills fit the eye and warmed the heart. The Negeb was both literally and figuratively the promise of God. It was water for a parched body and promise for a parched soul – which is why the Psalmist in Psalm 126 entreats God with a shout of hope and desire – “Restore our fortunes like water in the Negeb!”
IV.
For Abram, and in a different way, for me the Negeb was proof that God was going to live up to His word. That God would provide even when everything around looked and felt and seemed to be a desert.
How often have our lives, our efforts, our best laid plans seemed to lead only deeper into the desert and farther from places and spaces of plenty and promise?
Perhaps this is why Abram’s faith is so amazing. So far in Genesis, in the first 11 chapters, God has been making promises and people have been largely ignorant of them or have chosen other paths – Adam and Eve, Cain and Able, Noah and his Sons and their families. Indeed the darkest moment of the Bible, perhaps even darker that the crucifixion itself, occurs in Genesis 6 verses 5 and 6 – “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was on evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth and it grieved Him in His heart.”
I personally can think of no worse thought than this….
And then, only 6 chapters later to find Abraham. Here God promises and someone finally lives up to the promise – 5 promises in three verses – I will make you a great nation, I will give you many children, I will bless the world for you – just Go to the Land I will show you. Go Abram! Go!
At verse 4 we then get the great moment of the first half of Genesis – “And Abram went!” Three words. God sent him and he went. God directed and Abram went. God said to go and he left. Abram, the father of nations, just follows God.
V.
Notice that there is little negotiation here. Abram doesn’t say, “God, sounds like a good offer but I need to let the folks down in legal look at the document and then they’ll call and we’ll do lunch and see where we go from there.”
One of the mistakes we make as people who are accustomed to choice is that we want to choose where God will send us and to how God will bless us in the most exact terms we can. But there is a problem with trying to negotiate with God – we don’t have anything to offer. It’s God across the table! And God has got all the chips – immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent – He’s got the whole world in His hands! Our 40 acres and new draperies just don’t stack up. Yet we try to negotiate because it is our nature.
Back in Seminary – I spent a lot of time negotiating with God – “OK Lord, if you send me to college to be a chaplain and let me work on PhD in Theological Ethics, then I will follow your Son Jesus and preach when called upon…or, Lord, if the church can look like this, then I will be a minister.”
It was only when I abandoned the negotiations, and changed both the nature of my approach to God and the nature of my prayer before the Almighty that I got any peace, that I slept on the soft and watered grassed of a peaceful soul instead of the rocky and dirty desert floor of one who would have rather wrestled with God than be sent someplace and follow no matter where the sending.
Perhaps that most quotable of all the really smart English people of this century, W.H. Auden once said, “No one can do properly what one is called upon to do in this life unless they can learn to forget the ego and act as an instrument of God.”
VI.
Of all the reasons that I love scripture, perhaps the greatest reason lies in its refusal to let the ego of any one man or woman dictate the direction of any story or be the affirmation of any calling. The quality that is most valued amongst all of the men and women who follow God or the Lord Jesus is their willingness to follow. To be sure, there are a few folk like David who are briefly described (e.g. we are told he was handsome and ruddy) and who let their ego get in the way (e.g. Bathsheba) – but for the most part scripture doesn’t care what you like, talk like, or usually act like. You might be a banker or a fisherman. A woman that sells fine cloth or a stay at home mom. A wallflower or a prom queen. You might be able to read, or maybe not. You might be one of the most beautiful people on the planet, or the best singer or dancer – or maybe you can list none of these qualities.
There is no physical description of Mary the mother of Jesus, of Abraham, of Jacob, of Peter, or even of Jesus himself. I can’t tell you if he was 5’ 9” tall or 10 feet tall. For in the sight of scripture it does not matter. The quality that is celebrated from Genesis to Revelation is the combination of a willingness to be sent and the faith to do the following.
Whether or not we want to admit it, we are always being sent by God to someone or to somewhere. We would just rather negotiate to a more convenient time.
Restless? – then try following instead of negotiating.
Want to sleep next to a stream of promise instead of in a desert of spiritual want? – then listen and discern where the Lord is leading and perhaps you will find your Negeb.
VII.
Today, as you have seen, we welcome Elizabeth Gabbard here with us in ministry for the summer. She is a young woman, far from home, sent to us by God. She is a young woman who is following the call that God has placed in her life. Now I am not sure that Tarboro is her Negeb – her final destination. Maybe, maybe not. But I am sure that she is on the way to the spiritual promises that God holds before her and that you and I have a part to play as she listens and she follows.
Want to know how to follow God – perhaps she can be of help. For it is not easy as a young woman to follow God to Seminary and then into churches near and far.
But, even though not very easy, it is extremely faithful and faithfulness is the key to finding the Negeb, to finding peace, to finding purpose, to finding the promises of God, to finding home.
Are you being sent anywhere? Do you have faith enough to listen and follow a God who is gracious and merciful enough to have called each of us His child in the first place?
Amen.