Unsettled by God
A Colonoscopy, a Call, and an Unsettled Life
The preacher William Sloane Coffin used to tell a story about Abraham. The story isn’t in the Bible, but “that’s okay,” Sloane Coffin would say, “because I know it.” The story takes place in Haran, where Abraham and his family have made a life for themselves, just after Abraham hears the call from God to go. Sloane Coffin liked to imagine the people of Haran trying to get Abraham to stay. They protest his leaving. He is a wise leader, trusted, his counsel is sought. Why would he head off into the wilderness, especially at his age?
We like a settled world.
Settled people.
Settled identities.
And yet God still calls us, unsettles us, asks us to imagine new ways of being.
Abraham is 75. The call is, frankly, unreasonable. The Bible wants us to see that. Abraham is an old man. I know 75 is the new 50, but the point stands. He is settled. He has responsibilities, friends, a good reputation. And he is going to leave it all behind, ignoring the good sense of his fellow citizens, to set off into the unknown.
There is a reason this man becomes the ancestor of three great religious traditions. Abraham has guts. Abraham also has an overactive imagination, the people of Haran would say. Abraham has an overactive imagination. Thank God.
A Healthy Colon and Ten Good Years
In the last months of my senior year of college, I attended a two week training for those who were about to be sent out as volunteers with the Episcopal Church. I was headed to Honduras. Others went to Taiwan, Brazil, Uganda. We went to serve in schools, in hospitals, in disaster relief organizations.
On the first day of our training, in an icebreaker, we were asked to describe how we had heard God call us. I don’t remember what I said. I do remember the story of a woman named Sarah. Sarah began, “Well, two things happened in quick succession. I retired after 35 years of teaching public school, and I got a colonoscopy.”
Sarah had our attention.
“The doctor said my colon was in great shape, and I didn’t have to come back for ten years. And I thought, I’ve got ten years. Ten years with a healthy colon. Ten good years. I better do something with them.”
Sarah headed off to teach English in a church school in China.
You really never know how God is going to speak. The leap between “you’ve got ten years before your next colonoscopy” and teaching in China is a pretty big one. I would say my friend Sarah’s leap is almost as big as Abraham’s. Leaps like this take faith, but they also take imagination.
The God Beyond “God”
Imagination is sometimes maligned in our society. We are people who like facts. We like science and reason and proof. We like to be able to get our minds around things, to hold them, measure them, make sense of them. The people in Abraham’s Haran are not all that different. In Abraham’s time the gods were made of clay. Literally clay. The primary way of accessing the gods was to have a small statue in your home, something you could touch and see and control.
Today we call those idols. But I understand the impulse. It is comforting to believe that God can be contained. It is comforting to think we have God figured out. A good number of Christians still act like they have God under control.
But Abraham sees things differently. For Abraham, to use the words of Paul Tillich, there is a God out there beyond “god.” The God who calls Abraham is not confined to a clay vessel, not something you can control or pin down.
Remember, the journey Abraham starts will not be easy. It will find him out in the desert, pleading with God, “Where are the offspring you promised?” And God will take him out under the darkest, clearest sky and say, “Look. Imagine. Your children will be like the stars.”
Matthew the Collaborator
Which brings us to Jesus and Matthew.
Matthew is sitting at his tax booth. That is where Jesus finds him. It is important that we understand what that means. Matthew is not just a sinner in some humdrum sense. Matthew is a collaborator. Matthew is working for the corrupt government, collecting taxes for Caesar.
To call him a tax collector is to say something political. It is to say something about power and allegiance. Matthew has made certain decisions about who he will be. He has profited off his own people and given power to their oppressors.
And Jesus walks up to him and says, “Follow me.”
And Matthew gets up.
It would be easy to turn Matthew’s story into a story about personal transformation. But the Gospel is more complex, and less personal than American Christianity often lets on. Because the next thing that happens is that Jesus sits down at table with Matthew and all of his friends. Other tax collectors. Other sinners. People whose lives are tangled up in the same exploitative systems.
And the religious authorities are scandalized.
“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
It is a fair question. Because table fellowship is not a small thing. It is about belonging. It is about who counts. It is about who is inside and who is outside.
And Jesus answers, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.”
Jesus does not deny that something is wrong. But he refuses to give up on Matthew. He refuses to let even this kind of collaboration be the final word about who Matthew will be.
Who Belongs
We are living in a moment when those questions are not abstract.
Not far from here, a Muslim community is trying to build a place to pray. And they are being told, in ways both subtle and direct, that they do not belong. That they do not fit. That they are not welcome in Albuquerque’s North Valley.
Earlier this week, a local synagogue and the Jewish Community Center were vandalized.
This is also Pride Month, and many of us who are part of the LGBTQ+ community are feeling a shift in the air. A tightening. A sense that the space we thought we could inhabit is being questioned again. That our belonging is not as secure as we had hoped.
These are not separate issues. They come from the same imagination. An imagination that sees the world as small. That believes safety comes from drawing the circle tighter and tighter.
And systems like that do not run on their own. They require participation. They require people who are willing to go along. To benefit from oppression. To enforce boundaries.
That is Matthew’s world. It is our world.
An Unsettling God
Jesus flips those tables.
He does not stand at a distance and condemn Matthew. He refuses to stay at a distance. He walks right up to him, calls him, and then sits down at the table with him and his friends.
Because Jesus is not interested in preserving the boundaries that fear builds. Jesus takes us out beyond the walls.
We want a settled faith, in a settled world, with settled answers.
But the living God keeps unsettling us…
until we become who we are meant to be.
It takes an imagination as vast as the stars to believe that someone can be more than the worst thing they have been part of. It takes that kind of imagination to believe that communities can be wider, not narrower.
It takes imagination, and guts.
Guts like old Abraham.
Who Will You Be
Abraham left behind a world where everything seemed settled and defined. Where the gods could be managed. Where the future could be predicted. And he took his family out into a world where God could not be controlled, where the desert winds blew with both possibility and danger, where he had to learn a new story about who he could be.
Matthew had to leave too. Not geographically, but in terms of identity. Not just a job, but a way of being in the world that was tied to power and separation.
And Jesus says to him, and to us, follow me.
Follow me into a world where the table is wider, and you will eat with an unsettling collection of people.
Follow me into a life where the wideness of God’s love matters more than theological purity.
Follow me into a neighborhood where we do not give up on one another, where we do not hide behind arguments to keep one another out.
Follow me into a community that builds relationships across lines we were told could not be crossed.
Maybe the question for us today is not, will you go teach in China? or Will you volunteer at our food pantry?
Maybe the question is deeper.
Maybe the question is: who will you be?
Who will you be when the world feels so fraught?
Who will you be when lines are drawn more sharply?
Who will you be when someone else’s belonging is called into question?
Who will you be? How will you show up?
Because God is still calling.
And God’s call still often seems unreasonable.
Will you have the guts to imagine a community with room enough for all,
and to keep walking until we get there?