If you’ve had anything to do with young children in the last decade or so, you will know the phrase “Let it go” from a song in the Disney movie Frozen. It is ubiquitous in tamariki-themed waiting rooms, restaurants, and childcare facilities. In a Disney-esque style the song is about self-acceptance and liberation, where the soloist (Queen Elsa) is casting off the crushing weight of fear, societal expectations, and hidden shame to fully embrace her true identity and potential. It’s an anthem of female, rangatahi, empowerment. It emphasises gain rather than loss.

In the spiritual world though ‘let it go’, or in Greek, kenosis, has a different though related meaning. It is about voluntarily putting aside one’s presumptions, privilege, even power; and putting them aside in a way that is hard to take them back; and then going into an uncertain unknown future.

Instead, it’s more like the poem by Constantine P. Cavafy called “The God Abandons Anthony”, where the Roman general Mark Anthony, on the night before his army loses the city of Alexandria, Egypt, has a mystical experience of the god Bacchus deserting him. Sometimes in the spiritual life the God we have known deserts us.

Leonard Cohen then came along decades later to leverage Cavafy’s poem for his song Leaving Alexandra, and instead of the subject being a Roman general it’s a heartbroken narrator losing a lover. The loss of a loved one, regardless of the circumstances, is a spiritual loss.

And then the theologian and former Primus of Scotland, Richard Holloway, playing on both Cohen and Cavafy, titled his memoir of faith and doubt, Leaving Alexandria. Which raises the question of whether God is leaving Alexandria or, if God is fixed there, whether Holloway is. Richard’s faith led him to the very boundaries, and to those who dwell at the boundaries.

In life, just as we have relationships we rely on, in which we give, receive, and reciprocate love, so too do we have structures and systems, metaphysical and mythical, grand narratives and assumptions that we rely on. Foundations you might call them. But then like Anthony’s God, or Cohen’s lover, or Holloway’s faith they leave. Or die. Or crumble. Or become meaningless for us. And there is loss. Much loss.

In the Christian world we have creeds. ‘We believe’ statements. And faith was said to be assenting to these beliefs. Our current PCANZ moderator is big on this stuff.

The first Creeds were developed in the 3^rd century to determine who was in and who was out, what was truth and what was heresy. So, creeds in a worships ervice today, even modern creeds, can still act as markers of who is in and out. If we wish to be inclusive, we need to be careful with creeds.

Here at St Luke’s by not reciting an authorized creed each Sunday, we are implicitly saying that on the spiritual journey beliefs can evolve and change. Beliefs at best are cairns on the trail, not the trail’s destination. For faith takes us on a journey.

‘Let it go’ then is about leaving the certainty of inherited fixed beliefs that inherently say “All will be well if you just stay here, believe this, and do as we say”. And when we leave, as many of us have felt compelled to do (and it often hasn’t been easy to leave) we venture into the unknown. Faith is about moving on. Leaving and loss.

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The story that inspires me when I think about such journeying, leaving what we know for what we don’t, is the Abrahamic saga (chapters 12-25 of the Book of Genesis)

Abraham is a significant figure in three world religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. His story is that he risked letting go of what was in order to open himself to what might be. Abraham felt a divine call to pack and leave, while not sure where he was going. He chose insecurity over security. He packed up his family, along with slaves and cattle, and headed out from his home in Ur, Mesopotamia(modern day Iraq). Importantly, in a culture where land was life Abraham gave up his.  

That call, which Abraham came to believe was divine, was an insistence. A haunting disturbance. A whisper in the dark of night.

Abraham’s is the first significant journey story in the Bible. And it tells us what faith is – leaving the known for the unknown, leaving without the surety of knowing where one is going, giving up with no return in sight. Following that whisper.

Abraham also gave up his gods. That divine insistence, that call, did not come from any local Mesopotamian deity. Indeed, Abraham did not know its source. It did not come from one of the gods he knew. All that he knew was that he was compelled to leave. Which must have been frightening.

When Abraham arrived in Canaan (modern day Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Southern Lebanon and Syria), this land where he felt called to, he did not try to impose his Mesopotamian beliefs on his new Canaanite neighbours.  Rather he engaged with the culture and gods of the place. He seemed to worship the local high God, El.  Continually on the move Abraham encountered El at the traditional sacred sites of Canaan. The land had to reveal its own peculiar sacredness to Abraham, and he came to respect this alien piety.

It is of note that two of the names of the Jewish God in the Torah are Elohim and El Shaddai. It is as if the spirituality of the land shaped the evolution of Abraham’s spirituality, his understanding of God, and then the spirituality of his descendants. Syncretism, much maligned by those of a fundamentalist persuasion, has been in our faith history from the very beginning.

The quote from Eckhart, “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me,” infers that God is not a being or force separate from us, a transcendent deity. Rather Eckhart understands us to be in God. Similarly, holy ground is not one unique place, but every place. Similarly, there isn’t just one temple, but every person is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Everything is connected, woven.

Faith for Abraham was not easy or comforting. His fears are ever-present and from time to time would lead him to make bad decisions. There was much loss for Abraham. He never, for example, regained land like he’d had in Mesopotamia. When he died, all he owned was a burial plot. Faith was a radical break with the past. And faith was not then rewarded with surety. Rather faith continued to be a process of facing fears, trying to find courage, and then acting with that courage. Or failing to.

So, when Abraham, as per our story of the Oaks of Mamre (chapter 18), was sitting in the shade of his tent in the middle of the day, he was a stranger in a strange land. When the visitors came, he did not know who they were, but they certainly weren’t family or neighbours from his childhood in Iraq. And it was likely they we re not of the same religion or race as he.

The text also gives us no indication that Abraham quickly had them pegged as divine messengers. They were simply strangers. Later he would think of them as angels. Much later Christian theologians anxious to find evidence of a trinitarian understanding of God in the scriptures imposed a theology on this text that it can’t sustain. These strangers were simply human beings.

It was to these strangers that Abraham and Sarah (who seems to have done a fair bit of the work) extended significant hospitality, treating them gracefully and respectfully, without any idea of who they were or where they were from.  

Sarah and their servants made a lot of bread. Three measures (22 kgs) of flour worth. The inference is that this is hyperbole. Deliberate hyperbole to underscore the extent of the hospitable welcome. And slaughtering a precious animal likewise.

And although the text has Abraham giving orders and telling his wife and servants to make haste to feed the visitors, it is plain that this wasn’t achieved in 10 minutes or 60. I suspect the visitors sat under that tree, out of the heat, for most of the day.

The strangers gave to Abraham and Sarah a blessing. Was this blessing a result of Abraham’s faith, journeying into the unknown? Was this blessing a result of the generous hospitality offered to strangers in this strange land? Or was blessing not the result of anything, but one of those things that happens no matter what we’ve done? Not everything has a reason.

And was this a blessing at the time just a joke, a throwaway line, that later came to be seen as a Word of God?

The blessing was that one of the strangers predicted that Sarah, though past child-bearing age would have a son. In a patriarchal culture having a male heir was all important. It meant your life would live on. Your name, your mantle. Having heirs and producing heirs was all-important. And yet Sarah had not been able to conceive.

Although Abraham had given up much to follow the leaning of his heart and to journey into the unknown, the absence of an heir was one fear – a destructive fear - that he would not overcome. So, a large part of the Abrahamic saga is about Abraham trying to rectify this situation, making a mess of it, and a mess of his family relationships. Sarah conceiving did not help rectify the mess. Abraham’s first two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, were seriously at odds with each other, both seriously damaged by their father, and both destined to pass on serious animosity and familial dysfunction. Later, ironically, Abraham would have another six sons by another wife, Keturah.

So, the story this morning is about being a stranger in a strange land, acting generously and hospitably towards visitors, hearing – despite the impossibility of it – the joy of a child-to-be, and thinking that this child would be the bearer of his immortality (when Abraham already had a son and heir, Ishmael). A braham had great faith and a great fear. Some beliefs, like Abraham with immortality, are hard to let go of. Yet letting go is the path we must walk

‘Letting go’ is another way of talking about faith. Letting go not just of cherished ideas and beliefs, hopes and dreams, but letting go of pride, of ambition, of control. Letting those you love find their own course in life, not the one you think is best.

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