Pilgrims
Hebrews 11: 8 – 19
November 24, 2024
Nineteen years ago I took my one and only Sabbatical. It was three months of wandering around the country searching for where God might be calling me in the next phase of my life. Along the way I met so many amazing people.
Two of those people were a couple in their late seventies.
Dave and Ellie Castle had planned to move into a continuum of care retirement community in Philadelphia when they retired, but there weren’t any openings just yet when they retired at age 70. Instead, they bought a popup camper and traveled through the south during the winter that year. They had a great time, but their thoughts were mostly on settling down into that nice retirement community in Pennsylvania. Their daughter lived close by there. They’d get to spend more time with the grandkids.
Dave and Ellie worked hard all their lives. They were ready to settle down and enjoy retirement.
Let me tell you about another couple settling down and enjoying retirement. We find them in our Scripture today: Abram and Sarah.
Abram and Sarah lived for many years in Haran. They worked hard which made it possible to purchase a nice home. They developed many close friendships with the people there.
When Abram retired at the age of 70, he and Sarah looked forward to settling down and living out their retirement years in Haran.
But a different wind began to blow when Abram’s father died.
Listen to the next part of this story as told by Naomi Rosenblatt:
“Abram rises from his bed and roams through the rooms of their house, one of the finest in all Haran. But for him it has come to feel like a mausoleum. Ever since his father died, Abram senses his own mortality hovering before him like a darkened vault. It isn’t the end of life that frightens him so much as the hollowness of all that he’s got: a grand house, servants, livestock – in short, everything a man of means could desire. But …Abram hungers to leave behind him something larger and more alive than the mere things he claims as his own.
Awake before dawn in his sleeping household, Abram feels terribly alone in his life. Gazing upward from his courtyard at the blank gray sky above, Abraham strains to see, to hear something, anything that would lead him out of this…
The Lord sees Abram, lost in his life and God speaks to him:
‘Leave your country, your family, and your father’s home for a land that I will show you. I’ll make you a great nation and bless you. I’ll make you famous; you’ll be a blessing. I’ll bless those who bless you; those who curse you I’ll curse. All the families of the Earth will be blessed through you.’
Abram stands motionless, yearning to hear more. But now there are only the domestic sounds of his household stirring awake in the new day.
Soon Sarah listens patiently as her husband repeats over and over the promise he’s heard, as if to ratify the pledge by giving it voice. ‘I’ll make you a great nation and bless you. All the families of the Earth will be blessed through you.’
That evening Abram is still going on about the voice. ‘Leave your country, your family, and your father’s home for a land that I will show you.’
Abram doesn’t seem the least bit troubled by the vagueness of the promise. Abram speaks boldly about the great future that suddenly lies before them:
“The wondrous journey we’ll make… The new horizons that are opening on our lives. We’ll be a blessing to the entire world.”
Listening to her husband, Sarah can sense the hope growing in him. And she feels it taking root in herself like some long-buried, half-forgotten seed stirring in the earth.
The next day, Abram is intensely focused: making lists of things to take, dispatching servants in search of maps of every charted territory from the Euphrates to the Nile. Sarah hasn’t seen him this alive with purpose since their courtship. It’s contagious.”
“Where are we going, Abram?”
“We’re traveling home, Sarah. We’re traveling home.”
So much for Abram and Sarah settling down into a comfortable, peaceful retirement!
Dave and Ellie Castle were looking forward to settling down into a comfortable, peaceful retirement. They were 70 years old. They traveled that winter through the south in their popup camper. One place they wanted to visit was Plains, Georgia. They heard that you could see former President Jimmy Carter teach his Sunday School class there.
Dave and Ellie went through the town of Americus on the way to Plains. Here they saw the Habitat for Humanity headquarters. They also decided to stop at a place called Koinonia Farm, which is just outside of Americus.
At Koinonia Farm they got a tour showing the farm operations and the ministries they’re doing in the community. They also watched a video presentation on the history of Koinonia Farm.
Koinonia Farm was started in 1942 by Clarence Jordan. Clarence was a pastor/scholar/farmer who wrote some books, which eventually became a musical entitled: The Cotton Patch Gospel.
Clarence started the farm as a way of bringing whites and blacks together in one Christian community. This was radical, especially in the Deep South of Georgia. Clarence and the Koinonia Farm survived many bombings, shootings, and KKK rallies during the fifties and sixties.
In the late sixties, a wealthy businessman gave up all his money and joined Koinonia Farm. His name was Millard Fuller. Fuller led Koinonia Farm in building affordable houses for the needy of the community. Fuller later went on to start the Habitat for Humanity organization, which continues building houses around the world and around here.
Dave and Ellie discovered that Koinonia Farm continues its ministry of racial reconciliation and assisting the needy of the community. In addition, Koinonia Farm was always looking for volunteers to help them in their ministry. Dave and Ellie decided to stay for a month and volunteer with some other snowbirds.
The following year they put up their Iowa farmhouse for sale, assuming it would probably take years to sell. It sold in less than a month. Unfortunately, there was still not any opening yet at the retirement home in Philadelphia. So they temporarily moved to Koinonia Farm, just until their name came up in Philadelphia.
Over the next few months, Dave and Ellie heard the call of God. God let them know that neither Iowa nor Philadelphia was to be their home. Dave and Ellie felt led to live permanently at Koinonia Farm in Georgia.
Ellie told me, “It has to be a God – thing. I never thought I’d live in an intentional Christian community like this. Our name’s come up three times at that place in Philadelphia, but here we are- going on seven years at Koinonia Farm. I think we flunked retirement. We’re still working forty hours a week – at age 78. And we plan to do it as long as our health holds up.”
I first met Dave and Ellie when I was in Chautauqua, New York at the beginning of my sabbatical. They invited me to come to Koinonia Farm later that fall.
What a privilege it was to worship and pray with them three times a day in the chapel, to listen to an African American woman sing “Amazing Grace” after lunch, to help sort pecans for their farm mail order business, and to see the location of some of their community ministries.
So much for Dave and Ellie Castle settling down into a comfortable, peaceful retirement.
Instead, God called Dave and Ellie to travel to a new home.
So much for Abram and Sarah settling down into a comfortable, peaceful retirement!
Instead, God called Abram and Sarah to start traveling home.
The author of Hebrews says, “Abraham had faith and obeyed God. He was told to go to the land that God had said would be his, and he left for a country he had never seen. Because Abraham had faith, he lived as a stranger in the Promised Land. He lived there in a tent, and so did Isaac and Jacob, who were later given the same promise. Abraham did this because he was waiting for the eternal city that God had planned and built.”
So much for Abram and Sarah settling down into a comfortable, peaceful retirement! Instead, God called Abram and Sarah to start traveling home.
Abraham lived as a stranger even when he got to the Promised Land. He lived in a tent, never a house. He lived as a pilgrim, always traveling.
This week we celebrate other pilgrims traveling to a new home. 35 Puritan Separatists left Holland in 1620 to take the Gospel to the new world. They were joined by 80 English in London on the ship, the Mayflower. Two months later they arrived in Massachusetts.
The next year, 1621, my own ancestor, Thomas Tupper, traveled from England to the West Indies. Three years after that Thomas Tupper traveled to Massachusetts and joined the Pilgrims. Thomas eventually moved south a few miles and settled the first town on Cape Cod: Sandwich, Massachusetts. So you can say that I’ve got a bit of Pilgrim blood in me.
They were traveling home: the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, Thomas Tupper settling in Massachusetts, Dave and Ellie Castle moving to Koinonia Farm, Abraham and Sarah traveling to the promised land. All of them – traveling home.
Could it be true that as Christians we’re always traveling home?
Could it be true that we all have some pilgrim blood?
Could it be true that we’ll not arrive home until we cross over to the other side?
As the author of Hebrews says, “Every one of those people died. But they still had faith, even though they had not received what they had been promised. They were glad just to see these things from far away, and they agreed that they were only strangers and foreigners on this earth.”
Could it be true that Christians are only strangers and foreigners on this earth?
Years ago I read a book entitled Resident Aliens. The authors describe Christians as resident aliens – “strangers in a strange land, aliens trying to stake out a living on someone else’s turf.”
Could it be true that Christians are resident aliens?
As followers of Jesus Christ, do we have a different culture and a different goal than those who live around us?
The authors describe the church as “colony of heaven. A colony is a beachhead, an outpost, an island of one culture in the middle of another, a place where the values of home are reiterated and passed on to the young, a place where the distinctive language and lifestyle of the resident aliens are lovingly nurtured and reinforced.”
Is the church to be a colony of heaven, a counter-cultural outpost in our community?
What do you think?
I’ve come to believe the biggest challenge that American Christianity faces today is our accommodation to the culture around us. Sometimes we see ourselves as citizens of Coloma, of Michigan, of the United States, of the world, of our consumer society. Instead, God invites us to see ourselves as citizens of heaven, resident aliens in this world.
This was what I was looking for as I traveled around the country on my Sabbatical: outposts of heaven, colonies of God’s kindom, places where resident aliens lived. I found this as I visited intentional Christian communities like Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia.
So much for Dave and Ellie Castle settling down into a comfortable, peaceful retirement.
Instead, God called Dave and Ellie to start traveling home, to travel through Koinonia Farm on the way to their eternal home.
So much for Abram and Sarah settling down into a comfortable, peaceful retirement!
Instead, God called Abram and Sarah to start traveling home, to travel through the Promised Land to God’s heaven.
So much for us American Christians settling down into a comfortable, peaceful accommodation to the culture around us.
Instead, God calls us to travel home. God calls us to travel as resident aliens to our eternal home. God calls us to travel in groups, in counter-cultural colonies of heaven. God calls us to God’s kindom home of love.
We’re all pilgrims, traveling home.
As that hymn says, “Guide me, O my great Redeemer, pilgrim through this barren land.”
Let’s sing that hymn: #18
