Flyin’ By The Seat of His Pants
In 1938, Douglas Corrigan flew from the United States of America to Ireland without instruments… radios… or any of the navigational tools that today’s pilots take for granted. When his daring feat was reported in the Edwardsville Intelligencer on July 19, 1938, the headlines read: “Corrigan flies by the seat of his pants.” Two days earlier, Corrigan had submitted a flight plan to fly from Brooklyn, New York, to California. He had previously submitted a plan for a trans-Atlantic flight, only to have it rejected because it was thought that his aircraft was not adequate. His subsequent twenty-nine hour flight in that “inadequate aircraft” began in Brooklyn and ended in Dublin, Ireland. Rather than admit that he simply ignored the rejection of his earlier flight plan and deliberately flew east, he claimed that his compasses failed. By setting aside his plans and moving into uncharted waters… so to speak… he gave birth to the phrase “flyin’ by the seat of his pants”. More importantly, he set aside his fear of the unknown… a fear that haunts all of us… and carved a new path in the world of fight and opened new worlds for others. It was a move that was seen as daring by a few, but foolish by the majority. That dichotomy of responses is still captured in the phrase “flyin’ by the seat of his pants” today.
Our text today tells the story of God's call upon Abram's life, and it is a call repeated to each one of us… a call that pulls us from the carefully charted waters of our own lives into a new and very different place. This call from God subverts much conventional wisdom, and it can feel counter-intuitive, for it is a call to move beyond some very human… very powerful and deep-seated fears… fear of the unknown that we cannot control… fear of people and places that are different… and fear of personal powerlessness in the face of impossibilities.
First, God called Abram to leave his home… a geographic place he knew and everything that was familiar in his life. "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go…" So Abram gathered his family and possessions… left Haran… and "set out for the land of Canaan." This story is about more than a change of geography. In leaving Haran for Canaan, Abram left all that was familiar… all custom and comfort… family and friends… all regularity and rhythm of his life. This was a journey from present clarity into profound ignorance. Abram journeyed from what he had to what he did not have… from the known to the unknown… from everything that was familiar to all things strange. The writer of Hebrews captures the enormity of this action for us when he says: "By faith, Abraham, [whose name was changed by God… after his act of faith] when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith, he made his home in the Promised Land like a stranger in a foreign country" (Hebrews 11:8–9).
In his journey into the unknown, Abram embraced ignorance… relinquished control … and chose to live in God's promise to bless him in a new and strange place. But this required a second choice on his part. He had to leave not only his geographic place… but to live in a land that was filled with strangeness and strangers. He had to relinquish the tendency in all of us to exclude everything that is strange and different. He chose to live among those who ate different food… dressed in a different way… spoke a different language … and even worshipped different gods. For most of us, having just one person so different over to our house for dinner once a year is a stretch out of our comfort zone that we would rather not make. Try to imagine moving just what you could fit on the back of a donkey into a new and different place… not just for a few months or a few years… but forever. In September, we will have the opportunity to entertain a visitor from the Church of South India for ten days. For most of us, it will be a new and different experience… but nothing even close to the experience of any of us moving to South India and living there for the rest of our lives.
Why would anyone choose to do such a thing? Why did Abram make this decision? God gave a staggering promise to this obscure, Semitic nomad. In response to his obedience, God would make him the heir of all the world... and a blessing to all the world. Notice the simultaneous narrowing and expansion of God's action in history… a move from the particular to the universal. God called a single individual… Abram… and promised him that he would inherit the entire earth. The Apostle Paul captures the expansion of God's promise in his letter to the Romans. In Genesis, God vowed to make of Abram a "great nation." In his letter to the Romans, Paul describes Abraham as a father of "many nations" (Romans 4:17). In Genesis, we then read that "all peoples on earth will be blessed through you" (12:3). Once again, Paul expands on this when he writes that God made Abraham "the father of us all" (Romans 4:16–17). Today, three major world religions trace their origins back to this one man: Judaism… Christianity… and Islam. With 2.1 billion Christians… 1.5 billion Muslims… and 22 million Jews in the world today, Abram has certainly become the father of many nations… 55% of all of the people of the world. He may yet become… one day… the father of us all.
But Abraham was not the only one making counter-intuitive choices. If the enormity of the task of pulling all the peoples of the earth into one people were not enough of a challenge, God chose a couple that was definitely “over-the-hill.” Abram and his wife Sarai were both about seventy-five years old (Genesis 12:4) in a time when life expectancy was significantly less than that. While they might not have had our knowledge of the biology of human reproduction today, they knew full well that they were beyond their child-bearing years. Humanly-speaking, they faced an impossibility that brought them face to face with their own powerlessness to alter their circumstances. Biologically-speaking, barren Sarai and impotent Abram were "as good as dead." (Hebrews 11:12) Abraham’s first response to God could easily have been, “Are you kidding?” “Do you know what you’re dealing with here?” But, instead, Abraham believed that God had the power to do what God had promised. That is to say, Abraham moved beyond his fear of powerlessness to faith that God could, quite literally, make something out of nothing. We see the same faith in Matthew, who left his lucrative profession to follow Jesus, and in the woman who was healed of her hemorrhages by simply touching the fringe of Jesus’ cloak, believing that it would make her well. For Abram, it took awhile… more than twenty-five years, in fact,… for God’s promise to be fulfilled, but after a few false starts and flounderings, Isaac, the son of promise, was born.
When God called him, Abram made the counter-intuitive choice to set aside conventional wisdom and move beyond what might be considered three normal and very understandable human fears… ignorance… inclusion… and impotence. Instead of arguing with God about the impossibility of the vision that God presented to him in Haran, he embarked upon a journey into the unknown… settled in a land of strangeness and strangers… and gave himself to the promise of God's blessing for the whole earth. In doing so, he chose to “fly by the seat of his pants”… doing what a few thought was daring… but what the majority thought was foolish… to follow an unknown God into an unknown place for an impossible dream. He believed… and, by believing, he changed the world.
What is God calling you to do today? And what is it that you fear most about that call? Is it to go to a strange place… to be among strangers… to believe in an impossible dream? Remember, you go nowhere by accident. God is sending you there. Is it that you are too old… or past the prime of your life? Do not doubt what your God can do. Perhaps you, too, can be a blessing, if you allow God to lead you out of your comfort zone… into a new place. Let go… and let God. Amen.
Genesis 12:1-9