First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Genesis 12 and Romans 4

“Dead Reckoning”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

February 17, 2008

It’s been a year since my wife, Kathy, went on a short-term mission trip to Mississippi. It was this time of year and it was a great trip. I know it was a welcomed change to the chaos of Mexico that is fifty people in airports and boarder crossings. She reveled in the idea of helping folks in the US, a good road trip, and ten people. I assured her the boys and I would be fine. I don’t count our daughters in this mix, as they tend to be better without my “help.”

Little did I know when she departed just what I had signed up for. It wasn’t minutes after her departure that the house turned on me. All of sudden the home I love turned into a kind of beast oozing messes. A room would be clean and tidy, the phone would ring, and then by the time I returned it was as if a hurricane came through. Knowing that Kathy was heading down for hurricane relief, I wondered if the gods were trying to create a similar experience for me, some sort of disaster solidarity.

Day after day there was never a break. The phone would ring, a child would need to be picked up, the milk would run dry- all eight gallons I had purchased per Kathy’s direction. And the dogs. The dogs never let a moment go by it would seem without some sort of demand, some sort of barking fiasco, need for water, and then the inevitable need to go outside once the water had been consumed. By seven o’clock each night I was a cranky parent/zombie looking for wine.

All of sudden my life that seemed so challenging before she left, reappeared before me like a mirage, an oasis in a desert of domestic angst. My office, which might be punctuated with moments of crisis or strife, seemed to shimmer as a kind of dream long forgotten. Gathering myself together before self-pity held complete sway, I tried to be myself: to read, to write, to ponder, to pray. Each time though as a book was opened, the computer turned on, or a gift of silence emerged the house would betray me. Something would be spilled, something would be tracked in, something smelly needed to be thrown out, a call would come in and, alas, Sue, was not screening my calls and all the telemarketers were getting through.

It was at one such moment, and there were many, that Kathy called to check in. She had left me with only one direction. Before she left, she gave me a kiss, told me she loved me and then looked very stern and said, don’t forget to feed the boys. Luckily when she called I had remembered, that night at least. She asked how things were going, what was new, and other chitchat. And then, I couldn’t help it; I blurted it out. “It is terrible being you. How can you stand this?”

There was a moment of pause, a gentle laugh, and then she explained that it takes some time to get a handle on the whole house, kids, dogs, mail, etc. She was kind enough not to mention that not only did she handle these but she also kept me to the straight and narrow as much as was humanly possible. No easy task this.

This trip and my suffering came fresh to mind recently. In the last few months I have been doing a fair amount of reading on what is involved with making a pilgrimage. The fun part of the reading is that we are coming to see that what the medieval Christians sought in relics and sites where saints were slain is very close, very similar to what we hope to find and accomplish on short-term mission trips. It is most uncanny how they parallel each other. Kathy was heading to Mississippi to find a blessing, to bring a blessing, to join in the unfolding of the church. It would appear that our medieval counter parts took to the road to Rome, to Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compestella on the coast of Spain for the very same thing.

A pilgrimage, according to tradition, is an act of devotion and sacrifice where you leave your everyday life behind, journey beyond what is known and familiar, and engage in acts of devotion or sacrifice, mainly with the hope of bringing blessings to others. When I take a definition like that and put it upon the intent and actions of our teams heading to Mississippi, Mexico, or Malawi it is really, really close. In fact the more I read about medieval pilgrims the more I understand my own experiences in mission.

Kathy ventured out for a week. She headed south. Her daily life was put aside. All the schedules, the routines, the familiar markers, and demands were set down and she focused purely on the path before her. There were no bedtime stories, no fits about broccoli, and there were no dogs- something I came to appreciate vividly as a key aspect of her day. And this is different from a vacation. Instead of time being her own, it was set by the demands and challenges of a journey. And as there always seems to be there were problems to endure without people to blame or to fix them. Our Mississippi team headed to the Gulf States via New Jersey because of snow, just a bit of a detour.

But even this became a treat as she stopped by our all time favorite pizza restaurant, Red Moon. This, it turns out, is a key part of every pilgrimage according to our medieval brothers and sisters. Every pilgrimage has a labyrinth, a time of being waylaid or stuck. How you handle the labyrinth often times determines whether you venture in vain or with the grace of the intended blessing.

Once in Mississippi they engaged in acts of devotion: they offered themselves for the benefit of others. This gift was a kind of prayer in motion. Swinging hammers, clearing away debris, all these things culminated in symbols of hope and a greater compassion for victims of Hurricane Katrina. These are similar to the way the Medievals made gifts, prayed for those who couldn’t venture to the sight of saint, or humbled themselves with some form of physical hardship that was intended to signify how much they believed.

Reading over a more recent appraisal of pilgrimage, one that has more modern examples like Graceland on its list of sites, I couldn’t help but be struck that during Kathy’s mission trip down South I was engaged in one in my own home. The author of The Art of Pilgrimage suggested, a pilgrimage need not take you so far away from home as I was used to going. In the pages of this recent book comparing the journeys of many centuries I realized: I need not go to Africa to leave my every day behind.

Lost in the saliva and chaos of a house full of children and pets, I was indeed on a pilgrimage of my own. Reading the modern account of pilgrims I couldn’t help but wonder if mine was not a pilgrimage of devotion, but one of penance, a very popular form in the Middle Ages. For with each passing day I was mindful of how often I had grumbled over a heap of coats, but failed to see that a wall of laundry had been done that day; how often I had groused about the absence of a second side dish without recognizing how much effort it takes to get everyone around the table at one moment.

Exploring the word reckoning in our text, I found an intriguing way of looking at this experience. Amidst the epiphanies, moments of revelation, I found myself in a new place, a place to work from in order to move ahead. Such a place is what sailors call a dead reckoning. Dead reckoning is when you use a fixed point to figure out your place in the sea. A live reckoning is when you use the stars, something that is moving. A dead reckoning is a lighthouse, an island, anything that is fixed and is counted from and to another fixed point. Sitting in the house, overseeing the damage and the ever-increasing pile of clothes that just took over the laundry room like a prison riot, I found a fixed point. There was a dead reckoning as it were: I am here and I was there and I want to go forward to my office in four days time. No.

Where I wanted to go was unto a better way of being a husband and father. That is really what I heard in my heart: be better, do better. At the very least I wanted to keep my head down and endure. Truly at that moment I could see where I had been, where I was, and where I wanted to go. In nautical terms, given that these were fixed points, I had achieved a dead reckoning. It is fair to qualify this by saying, while the house wasn’t moving, it did seem to be oozing dirty clothes and disarray like a volcano yields lava.

Abraham was reckoned as righteous. He is for all intents and purposes one of our fixed points. He was a bit of a failure as a husband, he did seek to offer his wife to a few kings, after all his efforts he ended his life owning only one piece of land, a burial plot, and depending how you interpret the sacrifice of Isaac, a bit of a fanatic. But he reached a point where he ventured out believing and trusting God without fixed points.

God said I want you to head out and I will show you where. That, my friends, is faith. I reach a place of domestic turbulence, my daily routine is shuffled and confused, an epiphany occurs, and I call this faith (well, faith born of penance at least). Abraham wakes up one day and God says venture out into the unknown and he goes. There were times during Kathy’s absence I didn’t want to go downstairs let alone leave Eastern Turkey and head to Israel.

I am no Abraham. Never have I read his story and felt a kinship with him. Jacob . . . yes. I am with his grandson, but not with him. Not with Abraham. Yet, never have I read his story and not felt like I have a marker to work from. He is a fixed point. Paul says he was reckoned righteous. This is great for us; this was not great for Abraham. He got to wait until he was in his nineties to be given the son he was promised and then forced to send a son to die in the desert in order to insure the younger would survive. He was deemed as righteous because in spite of it all he believed. Somehow he believed until the end.

For this he is reckoned righteous- a fixed point from which we are to measure. In the epiphany of too much to do in a day, too many barking dogs, too many suggestions that spaghetti was only fun two nights a week not five I see a glimmer of Abraham, like a land far off, I see the man who believed in moments of much greater challenge; I see this man and I believe because of him.

This is what it means to me that he is reckoned righteous. For everything he did it was for a promise of the future, not the present.

On her final day about nine hours before she was to arrive, Kathy called me from the road. “We made really great time. We will be in Watertown in an hour.” I really didn’t know what to say, so I just said, “There was a great amount of cleaning that was going to happen in the next five hours. You are going to be sorely disappointed.” In the end I think it would have been better had Kathy returned a day late. But she came home almost half a day early. I know because I rounded up 9 to twelve.

It would have been better but it did drive home the point, the reckoning, the dead reckoning. I knew, really knew, where I was, where I had been, and where I needed/wanted to be.

Here is the thing: Abraham is one of these fixed points for us. We can find them in our day or when our day slips away. Yet no matter what, he is the lighthouse, the island, the fixed point from which to work. He is a way of understanding where we started and how far we are from where we want to be. We may not want to have his life, his lot- all pun intended; we do though want his verdict, his standing with God- his reckoning. We want Jesus to look at us and say, there is a believer; there is some one who followed me. In the end, we too want to be a fixed place of faith, even if our life never seems to stop moving.

Even though Abraham lived long ago, we should be looking ahead with him. We should be looking around and being made ready for the unfolding of the journey, the voyage as it were.

What is it that needs to be better in our hearts? What do you want to be made right? Can you see a fixed point to work from and toward? What is it that eludes your faith, the point where you can’t believe? What is the moment where we pull away from sacrifice and say, too costly?

Whatever it is, it always begins with the same impulse, the same prayer: make me right. To be reckoned as righteous started with Abraham, just as it will start with us, a simple moment of belief, a moment of faith, that it is only in God’s grace and mercy are we made right. Do you want to be made right?

God of Abraham, infuse our hearts and minds with the longing to be made right, to be reckoned righteous. Let it become for us a light, a way unto freedom and hope. Amen.