Who are these strange people? They are .... the called. And the first step of God's call is being called away. We are called away from our former lives: away from the pursuit of pleasure, away from the drive for material security. God calls us away. Ask the man who ignored God, whose life lay entirely in accumulating and counting his wealth. He would put up new barns as a monument to his material security .... until he heard a voice calling: "Thou, fool! This night thy soul shall be required of thee!"   (Lu 12:20).

Make no mistake. No one eludes God's call .... not finally.

We are called away from worldly culture signified by the great cities: Nineveh, Babylon, Jerusalem, and Luxor, which would inspire our word, luxury. We, too, are called away from city life and ways. For the city represents a counter-proposal to Creation, a man-made world filled with the idols of his materialism. Look at a map of the U.S. (we have seen so many during this season of the Wuhan Virus and political elections). But this time, color-code it depicting belief in God and godly life or the lack of it. It will not take long to see the pattern: urban areas (and the states where wealthy city dwellers migrate) tend toward atheism. And places that have never been developed tend toward faith. Abortion rights, promoting lifestyles incompatible with God's Laws and holy ways, censuring of religious speech .... these are city values. Just this morning, a priest sent me an email disclosing that a new piece of legislation had been introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives to abolish the words mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter .... or any other word that might offend a "gender neutral person." Values of the city — a counter-proposal to God's Creation and order.

When God calls, He calls us to a wilderness. Its name is simply away — away from the cities, away from the settle places. This is the story of Abram and Sarai. They are called away. They are not told why, only that they will be the father and mother to a countless multitude. To the sharp city dweller, accustomed to driving hard bargains, this would have been a surprising calculation: children at age seventy. But the conditions for the deal would have been seen to be even more incredible. For to obtain this, you must abandon everything you own and leave everything you know, for (we surmise) the city is no fit place to begin the family that God has in mind. The place God has in mind is to start a new world with this child, away from the city of man. If this all-important point was not clear to us at the moment of the initial conversation, then surely God underlines this detail with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

We might easily imagine Sarai, a woman of the city, a sophisticated woman, pondering, after some years, the bargain her husband had struck. She has now lived in wilderness after wilderness. Gone is every security, gone every comfort. Is it far-fetched to imagine the following interchange:

When they do receive the blessing of God's visitation into their tents, and Sarai hears more talk of mothering a great multitude, (famously) she laughs.

What a crossroads Noah faced! Down one path he sees the ever-present imperative to survive. He looks down the other path with eyes of faith and sees that no one will survive. Which path shall he choose? Survive in the world and die? Or die to the world and survive? God's understanding of the riddle runs precisely opposite to man's. We today would know the obvioius choice, the one everyone would make. The people of Noah's time ridiculed him. He was held up to be a general figure of derision.

It is true that we are not in Noah's situation. No Flood is imminent that we know of (though we do live on a tiny island in the middle of a vast ocean). But we do face his crossroads. Blaise Pascal termed this crossroads, "The Wager," one of many thought experiments he gathered in a collection called Ponderings / Pensées (1560s). His thought experiment goes like this: professional gamblers ferret out every detail, whether it be counting cards or handicapping race horses. The higher the stakes, the more determined the gambler is to dig out every angle. Now, imagine a gambler who is offered this proposition: you will gain eternal life if you win, and you need risk nothing. Your bet is that God's exists. On the other hand, you must put everything at risk, even your eternal life, if you take the opposite bet: that God does not exist. Even an atheist might say, "If God does not exist, I have lost nothing. I am right back where I started." But if God does exist, then he will have gained his life .... and more.

Nothing is risked, and everything is to be gained. To believe in God is all upside and no downside. To reject God is all downside and no upside. No upside .... isn't that the most interesting detail? So why is it the case, Pascal asked in his age of Empiricism, that so many people should reject God? Why is it that in this most dire wager, so few people will risk even their belief? The answer, of course, is pride, intellectual pride .... above the things of God.

Being called away marks the first stage of the journey towards God. St. Paul famously compares this to the death of a former life, which he styles "the old man," and the birth into a new life, called "the new man." What is this new life? It is life with God, Who is life. And everything that is not God is death.

The story of the Scriptures is a simple one. God gave us life. This was the important Tree in the Garden. But we rejected life. In our pridefulness, we had a different idea, above God's ideas. The whole remainder of human history has to do with God calling us away from our vain imaginings. All imaginings that are not of God, are necessarily of death for God alone is life. This is not a penalty that God has imposed; it is simply a fact. God is life. Everything else is death. The choice is ours .... at no risk.

Some people attempt to find a middle way between worldly life and spiritual life. But the Son of God, Who taught in parables and riddles and mysteries, was crystal-clear on this subject:

What is required? Nothing. You see, it is a process not of addition or accumulation, but of subtraction — a stripping back to the original, to the natural. Like the wilderness, the theme is absence, yet mysteriously this absence is the only Presence that matters. This is the nothing which is everything.

That people wandering in sheepskins and goatskins — called destitute and afflicted — should be held up to us as role models and examplars makes no sense to our consumerist, upwardly-mobile society. It turns "American Dream" values — teaching the young to "get ahead," to acquire, to be on top — on its head. And I should pause to say the Greek original behind this word destitute means "no longer in the race" ..... We would say, "the rat race." Through the lens of acquisitive, materialist society, we know well enough what the successful man looks like. He dines al fresco in his own courtyard behind splendid gates. Place beside him a beggar covered with sores, and the better man will be obvious to us .... until they are both seen through the Lord's eyes in the Bosom of Abraham. For in this perspective, the beggar has indeed become first while the rich man suffers in scorching heat and flames (Lu 16:23). But which is the true perspective, the stable reality? God's view? Or the world's? We get to choose.

It is sobering to consider how many people make their most important decisions from inside the topsy-turvy world, how many settle their eternal fate from inside the Mad Hatter's tea party, reveling with the wrong party-goers and drinking the wrong tea.

You see, we all face the same crossroads. We are all aware of two perspectives. Some of us are leaving the world, stripping ourselves back to nothing while others luxuriate in the world, acquiring ever more of everything. The question before us all is a simple one: which finally will matter? This nothing or this everything?

In this, our final meditation before Christmas, we meet a goodly assemblage of pilgrims on the road dressed in the attire of Eden. They are following a star. They are seeking a Child. For here on this cold, December night, having stripped themselves of life's clutter, they see clearly in the crisp, winter air. They are refugees, exiles from a Garden. And they know a certain truth. They kneel before a crib far from the revels at a nearby inn. Here where angels have gathered is the One who can unlock the Garden, Who can reopen to them this new life.

He will forgive us our ruinous sins. He will open to us His marvelous gift of life. And He calls to us. He calls to us in the wintry night. Will we answer?

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.