What in the world is God doing? Some people would say there is no God and so the question is moot. Others would say there may be a God but there is no evidence that God cares or that God is involved in the world, and so again, the question is more or less useless. But some people—people like yourselves, for instance—say there is a God and that God is very much alive and well and actually doing something in the sphere of existence that you and I understand as reality. The question is what? Very few headlines in the morning paper and very few taglines on the evening news and very few email alerts on your BlackBerry network will ever report, “This is what God did yesterday and what God might do tomorrow.” Nevertheless, we Christians believe—even in the midst of our doubts, perhaps—that God is up to something. We believe that our yearning for a better life and our aching for a meaning that transcends everything else we know is a sign that there is someone out there whom we call God. We believe that there is some kind of truth in all those reports over the years of this God appearing in the lives of individual people to reveal himself, and perhaps we’ve had such an experience ourselves. We believe that there is a God and that this God is doing something in our world, that there is an intersection, if you will, between heaven and earth.

Folks like you and me who are on the long journey of learning the Christian faith know that our question about what God is doing in the world today has to be answered from the vantage point of what God was doing in the world yesterday, and yesterday goes all the way back to long ago and far away when God began a great project in the desert. God’s great project was not building the Suez Canal or the Aswan Dam. It was not constructing the pyramids of Egypt or a modern city like Dubai. You and I give a single name to God’s project. We call it “Israel.”

Our Jewish brothers and sisters, whether in the nation of Israel or scattered around the world, are in the midst of some of their most important celebrations. They have just celebrated Rosh Hashanah which is something like a New Year’s celebration and also a celebration of the birthday of the world, which they believe occurred when God created everything during this season of the year. And tomorrow is Yom Kippur, their highest holy day, the Day of Atonement, when they seek God’s forgiveness and start over with their lives. All of us have some smattering of knowledge about the historic and modern nation and people of Israel. But we have to remember about the beginnings of Israel in order to understand it today, beginnings spoken of in the famous story of Genesis 12, when God appeared to Abram and said, "Go from your country. I will make a nation from you. I will bless you. And I will bless the families of the earth through you.”

We have to understand God’s announcement to Abram, later called Abraham, in the context of the whole story of Genesis. The first 11 chapters tell us about the Creation and the Fall and the Decline of the world that God made to be good but that humanity corrupted. God erased the slate clean in a great Flood, but still humanity persisted in polluting God’s world. It got so bad that people decided they could be God if only they could build a tower tall enough to reach to heaven, but the Babel Development Project didn’t work. The people couldn’t even talk to each other in a common language anymore. The great human family became a dysfunctional mess. They—and we—were and are cursed because of our sin. And so God took a different approach. He came to one man and one woman and said, “I have a plan for your life. I have a plan for my world.”

The creation of the world had gone amuck and so God planned for the creation of a nation, the people of Israel. Israel was designed to be God’s great project in the desert, God’s great Bailout from the Blowup of Babel, God’s great plan of redemption and salvation, to use the theological terms of scripture. The rest of the story of the Old Testament is the story of how the plan played out. God arranged for the building of his nation on a plot of ground called Canaan. He gave his nation leaders called judges and eventually ramped it up all the way to a monarchy, with great kings like David and Solomon. He gave them a piece of his mind when he chatted with Moses up on the mountain and gave him the Law, nothing more and nothing less than the secrets about how to successfully live a human life. He gave them a special place where they could worship him and remember him and his great project, a place called a Temple. He gave them a whole procession of prophets, preachers of truth who pointed out the fact that God was not only the Creator but also the Re-Creator, the One who was about the business of making creation all clean and right and new again.

If you think that this great project went off without a hitch, you are wrong. There were all sorts of detours and delays and disasters. Sometimes the people that God chose to play special roles didn’t perform up to standards and even began to work against the grand plan. Sometimes other nations got in the way and derailed things for a time with their own schemes and dreams of glory. More than once the whole enterprise hung by a thread, with only a few faithful people hanging on to the memory of Abraham, especially when the nation was enslaved in Egypt or hauled off to captivity in Babylon or occupied by the mighty Roman Empire. Throughout the seventeen-hundred years or so between the time that God appeared to Abraham and then appeared to a young woman named Mary, who lived in Nazareth, in the time of the Roman Occupation, God never gave up on his great project. But what, specifically, was God’s great project all about? What in the world was God doing?

There are two ways I want to answer that question. They are both ways of understanding what God meant when he told Abraham that he would “bless” Abraham and “bless” the whole world through him. The first way is to look at what was going on in the very complex and very human story of the history of Israel. Throughout the Old Testament we encounter five major ways in which the people of Israel experienced and understood God and the intersection, the interface, between God and our world.i Sometimes God would simply come and be present with his people, like with Moses and the Burning Bush, or Jacob and the Ladder to Heaven, or Isaiah and Daniel and their prophetic visions. God left with Moses a permanent record of his will for the world in the Law, called the Torah, which began with the Ten Commandments and was then expanded to include a whole host of prescriptions for successful life. God gave his another form of permanent record in the words of Scripture that told of the sacred history, and through that sacred history revealed how God’s Word, God’s Mind and Genius, was working in the world. That Word of God took on a more specific form in the Wisdom Literature, what you and I read in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, words of wisdom for living the good life. And then, finally, we see the intersection between God and us in the gift of God’s Spirit, an enlivening presence that inspired David to write the Psalms, or inspired Joshua to lead the people into the Promised Land, or inspired the great reforms of Nehemiah when the exiles from Babylon returned to start the nation all over again.

And so, the first way to say what God was doing in the world to bless the world is to look at the amazing story of Israel as told in the Old Testament. It is a story that gives us many glimpses of how God makes himself known to us and how we can begin to step into that special place where heaven and earth come together. But there is a second way to understand what God meant when he spoke to Abraham, which actually is no less than the culmination of the whole story, the climax of the drama, the whole point of it all. But you have to turn the page of the Bible from one Testament to another, to reach this ultimate point. One of Abraham and Sarah’s descendants, a thoroughly Jewish man, a man whose own history was the same history as all of Israel’s history, came to a synagogue on the Sabbath day. It was his custom we are told, which is no surprise, because that is what all good Jewish men did on the Sabbath day. He unrolled a scroll and began to read from Isaiah, again, no surprise there. The synagogue was like an outpost of the Temple, where God dwelled, and the words of Isaiah were believed to be the very words of God himself. This simple Jewish man read these words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” These words are words that Abraham could have related to. They are words about God’s blessing, words of release, recovery, freedom, favor. This distant descendant of Abraham read the ancient words of Isaiah, sat down, and said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

In the tiny little synagogue in the tiny town of Nazareth, Jesus said he was “anointed,” which means that he was made the Messiah. And Jesus said the blessing of God had arrived. No longer was it the distant dream of the people of Israel. No longer was it the blessing that was just around the corner. It was here. It was now. God’s great project in the desert was being finished in and through Jesus, of Nazareth. You and I cannot understand Jesus or know Jesus unless we know Abraham, and Sarah, and the whole story of Israel. In the next couple of Sunday’s we are going to spend some time with Jesus so that we can get a better handle on what Jesus means in the whole scheme of God’s work in the world. For today, what we need to absorb into our souls is this one thought: that we can know nothing about God and the intersection of God with our world unless we learn the story of Israel, the story that begins with Abraham and Sarah.

But we cannot lose ourselves and our own little lives in this huge and complex and long story of Israel. We cannot just say, “We’ll that’s the big picture and maybe I’m in there somewhere, but I’m too tiny to see, too small to count. God may have his great project in the desert, but I’m just one nail in a wall somewhere, or one drop of glue somewhere, or a simple sliver of wood or stone off in a corner somewhere.” No, let’s set aside the huge picture of what God is doing in the world and focus very specifically on you and me. Let’s go back to the human scale that we find in the tale about Abraham and Sarah. You cannot make a big picture without little pictures. You cannot build a big project without little pieces. You cannot build a whole human race without individual human beings. You cannot have an entire creation without each and every creature.

“Now the Lord said to Abram.” The whole story of scripture is also the story of how God comes into the lives of individual people and invites them, one by one, to enter the big picture of what God is doing in the world. And I would propose to you that what God is doing in the whole world is of no consequence unless you participate in what God wants to do in your world. Abraham was living a prosperous, successful, happy, settled life when God interrupted. Abraham had all the little boxes on his “life’s to do list” checked off, with the exception of the one about having children. And let’s not forget Sarah. Sarah was just as much part of this whole enterprise as was Abraham. This happy little couple had life all figured out, but along comes God with a plan, a plan that was completely dependent on the one thing happening in their lives that they were absolutely certain would not and could not happen—having a child. But God is not easily discouraged. God said to Abraham and Sarah, “Get up, set out, leave behind your settled life in this place, and go somewhere else, do something else, start completely over again, believe me when I say that you can do something that previously you have believed cannot be done.” And they did it. Maybe the miracle here is not that God showed up, but that Abraham and Sarah obeyed.

God’s great project in the desert started with one man, who was willing to share the news of God’s plan with his wife. God’s great project started with one willing couple, who stepped out in faith to do what God told them to do. God blessed the world through them. And that’s the way God works. God works through people like Abraham and Sarah, people like you and me. God will not work any other way. What if Abe and Sarah had said, “No.” What if Moses had said, “No.” What if Paul and Lydia and John and Mary said, “No.” What if Jesus had said, “No.” What if you and I say, “No.” God created the world without us. But God is re-creating the world through us. God’s great project is not in the desert anymore. God’s great project is inside the human soul, inside you and me, inviting us to step out of our settled little lives, or to step out of our messy little lives, and step into a life that begins to bless other people and bless the whole world as we create heaven on earth by following Jesus. Jesus took the final step which was also the first step, and we follow, in our own way and in our own day, to “bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” How is God’s project going in your life today?

Amen.