The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
February 28, 2010
Vol. 13 no. 09
The season of Lent is not a gentle time of year. It typically snows more during late February and March and Easter Sunday is rarely a sunny spring day, often rainy and windy, making weak attempts at melting the last piles of snow. April is the cruelest month, T. S. Eliot observed - a perfect season, therefore, to slog through the empty wilderness of temptation.
That’s enough gloom for one day, perhaps for all of Lent. The scriptures for today drive home that Lent is not a simple journey that can be accomplished in one forty-day stretch. Forty years of wandering in the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land is more the norm.
Abraham has the Promise reasserted to him in a very solemn ceremony (a dead heifer, goat and two birds create a certain atmosphere). The future of the great nation of Israel is depicted before him as numerous as the stars in the sky, which God figures is beyond Abraham’s ability to count. God is right - as God usually is! The challenge for Abraham is that there infinitely more stars out there beyond the ones he could actually see. The observable universe is estimated to have 3-7 x 1022 stars, in other words, 30 to 70 sextillion stars. I did not know that there was a number sextillion and I am pretty sure Abraham didn’t either. There have been a lot of sons and daughters of Abraham, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, but there are more stars than there have been people (~ 106 billion latest estimate).
Abraham had only one number in mind: he had no children (zero wasn’t invented yet), making God’s Promise difficult to believe. He began the journey again, nevertheless, knowing he would never get there himself. Sort of like this year’s Lent: we take one step at a time not knowing where we will end up. Yet it is intriguing what we see along the way.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan