Los Alamos Church of Christ
Drawing Closer To
God
The
Altar of the Ordinary
Cow
or Abe?
I have always admired…cows. From the time I worked at McDonalds, as
a high schooler, I have always appreciated the sacrifice they make for me to
have delicious hamburgers. But, I
have learned another reason to admire cows. Cows are efficient. Have you ever noticed that in a pasture
of 100s of acres they travel from point A to point B the same say every
day? They travel the same 8 inch
trail from their favorite watering hole, to the tree with the most shade, to the
best places to graze. They lineup
and follow one another to their next destination the same way every day. They have obviously researched the most
calorie-saving path between each of their destinations. Once determined, rarely if ever, do the
cows deviate from their efficient trails.
I have a lot of admiration for cows. They are efficient. I like
efficient.
Now hold the “cows are efficient” thought for a moment while I tell a
brief OT story.
One could argue that God began our redemption with the call to
Abraham. God was forming a people
in whom the Messiah would be born.
A couple thousand years later Jesus was born into the descendants of
Abraham. The plan our salvation
began with the call to Abraham.
Genesis 12:1-4
The LORD had said to
Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to
the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless
you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed
through you." So Abram
left.
The Bible gives no reason for God’s choice of
Abraham… except his willingness to go.
Abram was not young. He
wasn’t all that smart. He certainly
had his glitches. All Abram really
had going for him was his willingness to set off on a divinely inspired trip
without a map or a
clue.
Because of this faith to wander off into the wherever, all the peoples of the earth
were blessed! What would have happened if Abraham had
said, “No, thanks. We will just
stay here at the house. ” We would
never have heard the name Abraham.
But, by saying yes—by consenting to the wherever—Abraham brought the blessing of redemption to the whole
world.
=======
Here is my dilemma; should I be a cow or an
Abraham?
The cows have a lot going for them. They are safe. They know where they are all the
time. Cows know where they are
going next. Cows know how to get
safely from point A to point B.
Life, for a cow, is organized.
Life is simple. Life is
under their control. Well, until it
is time to become hamburgers. But
even in becoming hamburgers, they have purpose. They have a destination to be a Happy
Meal. The cows are efficient with
the plan of their lives. I kind of
think I would like being a cow.
Whereas Abraham…
Genesis 12:4-10
So Abram left, as the LORD had told him; and Lot
went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran. 5 He took his wife Sarai, his
nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had
acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived
there. 6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the
site of the great tree of Moreh at
Shechem. At that time the
Canaanites were in the land. 7
The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring I will give this
land." So he built an altar there
to the LORD, who had appeared to him.
8 From there he
went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the
west and Ai on the east. There he
built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD. 9 Then Abram set out and
continued toward the Negev. 10 Now there was a famine in
the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because
the famine was severe.
Genesis 13:3
From the Negev he went from place
to place…
On and on the story continues with Abraham
bouncing from one place to the next.
Abraham became a wanderer; lived in a tent and never knew what was coming
next. God said go and he went. Do I want to be an
Abraham?
Cow or Abraham? Abraham or Cow? Cow or
Abraham?
=======
This year we are Drawing Closer to God. We are on a metaphorical cruise to
spiritual destinations. Currently
we are at The Altar of the Ordinary.
We have learned to wonder like a kid. Last week, we learned to take off our
shoes in reverence which grows from wonder. Once we slow down… to go see the
wonderful and be awed by the ordinary… we realize how ignorant we are… which
leads to reverence for the one who created it all. Our worship at the Altar is
growing.
Last week I gave you a homework assignment; 3
places… to learn reverence.
-Wonder at creation and allow that to move you
to reverence.
-Notice the godlikeness in another person. We are going to come back to this
thought next week. So, you may have
another chance to do this assignment.
-Organize, clean or do some
gardening.
How did that go? Did you feel any reverence in these
places?
As our worship at the Altar of the Ordinary
continues to grow, I want to advocate this morning that the next step in our
worship is to be a little more Abraham and a little less cow.
=======
In 1982 I went on my first Wilderness
Trek. I met Bobby Wood. Bobby Wood taught me to enjoy the
wilderness. He showed me how to
backpack, sort of. I learned from
him and my experiences on Trek to appreciate the mountains. Interestingly enough, I experienced this
tension between being a cow and being an Abraham… from Bobby Wood. There seems to be a paradox
here.
In July of 1982 I got on a bus in Texas one
evening and woke up the next morning in Crestone, Colorado. Here is where this cow/Abraham tension
began. Bobby allowed us to
experience the adventure of backpacking without many instructions. It was like God and Abraham. Bobby said, “Here is your pack. There is the trail.” We enjoyed the wonder of figuring it out
on our own.
So, when our packs didn’t work right, then he
would show us. When we got altitude
sickness then he would encourage us to drink more water. When we couldn’t figure out the Eureka
tents someone would help us. After
we blew our eyebrows off on the old B111 stove, one of his crew leaders would
show us how. When it pain we would
ask, “How far is it to camp?”
Bobby’s answer was always, “It is about 2 miles or 20 minutes.” Bobby Wood did not take away the wonder
of discovery. He let us learn faith
like God taught Abraham.
“Go…Discover…”
On the cow side he did teach us one thing, “You
are not lost if you are on a trail.
If you don’t know which way to go, sit down and I will come find
you.” Those words were a great
comfort. We are out in the
wilderness and we are going on an adventure, we were Abraham. But, if we got lost all we needed to do
was sit down on the trail and Bobby Wood would come find us. That was being a cow. As long as we stayed on the trail and
followed the person in front of us we knew we were safe.
The trail is security. We may not where the trail goes or how
long it would be to get there, but we knew where to take the next step. Being a cow on the trail was
nice.
=======
The tension between being a cow and being an
Abraham is where we live. We are
faced with 1,000s of decisions every day.
If we had to stop and decide every choice we could make at every moment of the day,
we would wear ourselves out with decision making before lunch. So…
-I sleep on the same side of the bed every
night.
-I eat the same breakfast most every
morning.
-I keep the same routine every
week.
-I do the same activities I have always
done.
-I watch the same TV shows, they are good
enough.
-I shop in the same
stores.
-I sit in the same seats on Sunday
morning.
So, much of my life is being a cow. And I kind of like it that way. There is security in staying on the 8
inch path. The cow’s life is
efficient.
But there is a price to pay for only living like a cow. Besides becoming a Happy Meal, we lose
our sense of wonder. I’ve seen it all. I have done it all. I’ve been there and got the T-Shirt and
did it again and got the same T-shirt again. There is little wonder on the 8 inch
path.
In order for us to worship at the Altar of the
Ordinary we need to do some things extra-ordinary, which means we need to
occasionally, override our cow-ness to be Abraham.
=======
Perhaps a reading from Barbara Brown Taylor
will explain…
Leaving the known path turns out to be such a boon to my
senses—such a remedy for my deadening habit of taking the safest, shortest route
to wherever I am (usually late) going—that I decide to get lost on my way home
from work. I turn left down a road
I have never followed before, though I have lived a dozen years in this small
county. The road leads me into the
ghost town of an old mill on the river, where the hulks of deserted buildings
perch at the edge of the river like a herd of petrified mastodons. Turning away from them, I follow the
winding road past an old softball diamond, complete with ramshackle bleachers,
where the mill workers must have played at one time. Before I know it, I am lost
in the lives of those people as well—living in mill houses, going to the mill
church, working for mill owners who paid them in chits they could use at the
mill store—which, like the softball diamond, has fallen into ruin.
But the road I have chosen to get lost on will not let me stay
there. Leading me past the
boundaries of the old mill town, it turns to dirt, taking me through a stretch
of woods before presenting me with a small neighborhood of consummate country
houses. One house has been added on
to so often that it looks like a dowager who has had too much cosmetic surgery.
Another has so many whirligigs in the yard that I do not register the house at
all. A third sits at an unfortunate
bend in the road, so that the porch, the windows, and the once-white siding are
all covered with fine red dust churned up by passing motorists. A hand-painted
sign in the front yard reads, “Slow Please”. By the time this unknown road dumps me
back onto a highway I know, my detour has cost me ten minutes—a fortune, at the
fevered pitch of my day—which I gladly pay for the liberating proof that I am
still able to leave the 8 inch paths I have worn with my frugal, fearful
hooves.
Here is our assignment for this
week:
Go somewhere you have never been
before.
-Pick a trail to hike or bike and go
wander.
-Get in your car and go the other way and
wander.
Override your cow-ness and worship at the Altar
of the Ordinary in wonder.
=======
So, Cow or Abe?
The cows have it right. They are safe. They are on the path. It is where we need to live, mostly. But wandering is where we learn reverence. When we get off the cow path and venture
into the unknown, even in small ways, we can be surprised by the wonderful. Reverence is learned off the cow path.
Genesis
13:1-4 So Abram went
up from Egypt to the Negev, with his wife and everything he had, and Lot went
with him. Abram had become very
wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold. From the Negev he went from place to
place until he came to Bethel, to the place between Bethel and Ai where his tent
had been earlier and where he had first built an altar. There Abram called on the name of the
LORD.
That is what I want. I want to be able to call upon the name
of the Lord in the reverence of wonder in my
wanderings.
s
