When I meet with engaged couples in preparation for their wedding day, I often share Wendell Berry’s words about marriage from one of his beautiful essays. He says in marriage we must understand that we’re not just joining ourselves to another; “We can join one another only by joining the unknown…What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you—and marriage, time, life, history and the world—will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.”1
I.
And of course, this is not only true for married people. None of us knows the road through life, married, single, or otherwise. We don’t know what challenges or obstacles we’ll face or even what joys we’ll know. The most we can ever hope to do is commit ourselves to a way of living—a posture to take, a rhythm to walk, an approach to meeting those challenges and living into those joys.
And so it is with the life of faith.
When you follow the call of faith, you don’t know the road ahead of you, or where exactly it will lead, or what you’ll have to pass through to get there. It’s telling, I think, that the gospels agree Jesus was sent out to the wilderness to encounter his demons immediately after his baptism. In living a life of faith, we commit ourselves not to an evenly paved road, but to a way. A way led not by your own wants and needs and desires, but by God’s call, which is to say we’ve committed ourselves to the unknown. This is how it must be, for scripture tells us the unknown is where God is.
In fact, before it came to be known as the church, the earliest followers of Jesus were known as “people of the way.” Or simply “the Way.” (We should note this is also well before Star Wars and the mines of Mandalore, too, for all of you Grogu fans out there.)
In fact, this approach to life and faith dates back much further than the early church or even Jesus himself. It begins all the way back in our lesson this morning, in the twelfth chapter of Genesis, with the call of Abram and Sarai. It’s the call to faith that the rest of the biblical story will refer back to and repeat over and over again. God says to Abram seemingly out of the blue, Go. Go from the country of your kinfolk and your father’s house, to the land that I will show you. And I will bless you and all people through you.
It is an invitation to leave what we know and journey into the unknown. To let go of what is settled, what is familiar and comfortable, and to open ourselves to an undefined future, trusting that some kind of blessing awaits. It is risky, and costly, and yet as Jesus will put it generations later, “Whoever would save his life must lose it.” And it’s a call that each of us will hear at some point.
II.
At some point each of us will hear the call to leave what we know, to leave “the country of our kinfolk and our father’s house,” and enter into the unknown.
From the start we are told that faith requires movement. It’s like water; if it stands still for too long it grows stale, stagnant, and not suited for life or growth. In the biblical story, faith is not understood to be an event. It is not confined to one decision we make or a single plunge into baptismal waters, any more than a marriage is confined to the wedding day. The life of faith is a story that is always unfolding; it is a path we can make only by walking.
Now, this doesn’t mean we all must literally pick up and leave home to make this spiritual journey. But it is often true that it is easier to confront the unknown when we are dislodged from the patterns of home.
Several years ago, in the summer of 2012, I had the opportunity to travel to Israel and Palestine with a combined group from the church I served at the time, and a local Reformed Jewish Temple with whom we were close—sound familiar? We saw and experienced many things while we were there, but I’ve recently been thinking about a Palestinian Christian organization we met with in Bethlehem, Palestine, called Musalaha, which is Arabic for “reconciliation.” They work with Israeli and Palestinian youth to heal the divide between their people.
They learned in their work that the first step toward reconciliation is perhaps the hardest: sitting down to talk to people on the other side. At first, they tried to bring the youth from both sides together in classrooms or other settings in their hometowns, but they found that even if they could get these kids together in the same room—which was difficult enough—they wouldn’t engage with each other. They were too close to home, too close to their friends, their parents, and all the other voices from so many directions that closed their minds and their hearts to each other.
So, several years ago, Musalaha started a program they call “Desert Encounters.” They take a group of Israeli and Palestinian youth on a journey into the desert toward the Dead Sea, a short drive from where they live but a spatially distant place where they can be free from the distractions and patterns of life at home.
Their mode of transportation is camels—what else. They ride two-by-two, paired with someone from the other side. I remember they told us there’s usually some friction at first, and occasionally even aggression. But as these kids get further and further away from “their country and their kindred,” they approach the limits of what they know and, in the desert’s literal openness and the vulnerability that comes with it, they find that they have quietly entered the “land that God has shown them.”
III.
It goes without saying that our “home country and kindred” are not altogether bad, and neither is what we’ve been taught or what’s been passed down to us somehow invalid or untrue.
But I believe it’s the case that these things will, in time, be found insufficient.
They will become insufficient because we cannot accept someone else’s call. We must hear our own call. This is as true generationally as it is individually. Others can help us hear it—our home, our family, our tradition—we can be given a way to walk, but we must walk it for ourselves, invariably adding our own cadence. A time will come for each of us, maybe many times, when we have to take our own path; when we will have to find our way through our own wilderness. Very often this will be a wilderness we did not choose, and have been thrust into. But we must enter it and find our way through.
Or maybe we should say that God has a land to show each of us. A land of understanding, a land of purpose. Not that we have to always go it alone—in fact, if scripture is clear about anything, it is that we never need go it alone. But we do have to go. Trusting that some murky blessing waits for us in this undefined future—which is simply to say “the future.”
And we must understand that this blessing is not merely for us; in the biblical promise of blessing in this future and in the land God imagines, we are always meant to be a blessing to others.
In fact, that may be how we know it is truly the land God has promised when we get there.
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1 Wendell Berry, “On Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms,” found in Standing By Words.