Since I have been preaching sermon reruns this summer, I thought today—on my 18^th anniversary as your pastor—I would repreach my first sermon at Wilshire. After I had committed myself, I reread that sermon.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, Kim found a videotape of it in our closet. Some things should never come out of the closet. The sanctuary was full—chairs in the aisles. A lot has changed aesthetically in the room since then. You should have seen Kim with that bow in her hair. And Rhett kept climbing up onto the Lord’s Supper table when we joined the church. Our little one, Jillian, has emerged now from the nursery to read scripture today. I used bigger words back then, but at least I have a bigger waistline now.

To make matters worse, we watched the tape with Sean and Jamie Allen and with Anne Jernberg and Brad Jernberg. Sean was encouraged by it. He is less worried now about his first sermon at his new church. Everyone agreed: I could have used a residency myself. Anyway, thank you for hanging in there with me all these years. What follows is a semblance of that sermon, more in spirit than in truth.

The crucial question the sermon turns on is this: How can we learn to trust the mysterious way of God’s working in the world and in our lives?

The story we are tracking in Genesis 24 today assumes that God is actively at work in our lives, but it also acknowledges that how God is at work is a mystery at every moment.

A mystery is not a riddle that can be solved by the clever. A mystery is not a math equation to be worked out by hard computation. A mystery is unsolvable by its very nature. And since God is THE mystery of the universe, that is a good thing. If we ever figured God out, we wouldn’t need God anymore. We would replace God with ourselves, which of course does nothing to change the stubborn fact that God will not be replaced.

The story of Abraham seeking a wife for his son of promise, Isaac, opens our imagination to the mystery. Abraham is a widower as the story begins. Sarah has passed, and he is no doubt thinking about his coming death as well. We might guess he had a hard time imagining his life without her. But remember, this was also the man God promised to bless with heirs so numerous that the sands of the seashore could not outnumber them. God had gotten him off to a good start, sparking life in his loins at 100 years old and stirring the life blood in Sarah at the same time.

The boy had now come of age, so to speak, and Ole Abe must have been wondering whether it was going to take another miracle to move the gene pool along. Isaac had to start thinking in a family way. Abraham was hardly in a waiting mood. He figured to arrange things for the boy to soothe his own soul and make sure the lad didn’t choose some Canaanite bride and mess things up with God for good.

So Abraham got to meddling, something I don’t recommend for parents today. Now, understand this story took place before E-Harmony.com. Before people could fill out questionnaires online and learn about potential mates prior to meeting. By the way, that has to be one of the greatest tools provided by the Internet. It solves a great problem of a highly urban and mobile society. But think back to Abraham’s time: how would he find a wife for the boy? Arranged marriages were the order of the day, as they still are in a few parts of the world. We think you ought to be able to fall in love for yourself, then marry and figure out how to put the families together. Arranged- marriage theory comes from logic that begins with the family’s wisdom and ends with the individual’s desires. Part of it is that the community of elders knows the young people better than they know themselves, and so they are better able to judge fitness than the kids. And they were usually just kids who were marrying back then, young people whose body chemistry had developed just enough to produce children of their own. And there were economic and safety considerations: nomadic families like Abraham’s needed security. Marrying kinfolk was a safer bet. And it kept the religion pure, even if the family tree resembled something from the mountains of West Virginia.

So Abraham sent his trusted servant out to find a wife for him from among his kinfolk. Now, if I were Isaac, I’m sure I would have grabbed the servant and slipped him a long list of things to look for that would have started out with what she looked like, don’t you know?! But we have no record of that. The servant got to make up a plan on his own as he set out. And as bizarre as the whole thing sounds, it started off well: He prayed.

If you are trying to discern the will and way of God in your life, the first thing is to throw yourself completely at the mercy of God. Every step you take, you take it reminding yourself that God is stepping out just ahead of you. Prayer trains your eye to spot God’s hidden hand when the signs are there. Prayer opens your ears to hear the rumblings of providence amid the white noise of life. Prayer authorizes God to take the lead, and it enlists you to follow.

Next, the servant set out following the explicit instructions of his master. He went to find a suitable match among a people that shared a similar view of the world. He then devised a plan at the well. The plan looked a little strange to modern people, but it all boiled down to hospitality. Would the woman care for a stranger? Would she do more than what was expected and make sure he was welcomed, along with his camels? Next, he determined to get a blessing and a release from those she would leave behind in order to join her new husband and begin a new chapter in the family’s life. And finally, Isaac would have to welcome her into his mother’s tent and begin a life together that might bear fruit for the future.

This, amazingly, is exactly what happened. And this, amazingly, I think, is something like what happened over 18 years ago here. A wonderful church in Dallas, Texas, had lost its beloved pastor to retirement. It looked honestly at itself and saw that it was getting older and needed to renew itself with young people coming into the family of faith. Would the adventure of faith that God gave birth to in the hearts of the founders in 1951 continue beyond their lifetimes?

And so they prayed. And they called together 12 servants to go and do their bidding and to find the right mate for their church. They weren’t exactly the 12 apostles, but they were apostolic in the literal sense of the word, which means sent ones.

They knew they could find a pastor somewhere in the large larva of Southern Baptists. But Southern Baptists had been changing. They felt that some Canaanite influence had slipped into the family, and they gave explicit instructions to go find someone with a kinship of Baptist spirit that could be trusted to keep the family moored to a particular way of being Baptist that was more open and hospitable to strangers. And one more thing they wanted: they wanted to make sure the new guy would honor, if not love, the old guy as they did.

Off they went, praying and plotting. They devised ways to learn about candidates. They wanted certain things and didn’t want certain things. They got it in their minds that God would give them clarity in due time. They didn’t go straight to Mobile, where I was at the time, but they made it there eventually. They found a church there that resembled Wilshire in miniature. And when they sat in the pews, they sensed a scaling up that was possible. Many, many conversations later and a few near setbacks along the way, they recommended me to be your next pastor. Well, not everyone on the committee agreed, but we are Baptists, after all. And those who weren’t sure supported those that were in just the Baptist way that put the health of the whole ahead of their own need to be right. I love them for that to this day.

Along the path of this odd courtship, we all confessed to feeling something of the presence of God’s guiding hand. We could have been mistaken. It could have been wishful thinking or a conspiracy of fools. But I think it was something like love instead.

You see, this is really the way it is with knowing the will of God. We think it is mostly something to be figured from the neck up, when more often it is felt all over—in the hairs that stand up on the back of your neck when you sense something holy, in the lump in the throat, in the heart beating faster, and in the joy that lights the way just enough for you to want to take another step and then another. And each step you take confirms each step you have taken, until you know there’s no turning back, and until there’s no wanting to turn back.

Faith is walking to the edge of all the light you have and taking one more step. Faith pays attention to facts. Abraham’s servant was careful and thoughtful. The search committee was careful and thoughtful. But at the end of the day, what draws us is a mystery of love that cannot be explained in words. It can be confirmed only in the commitment of the tent.

God most often leads by quiet invitation: a nudge here, a whisper there, a flash of recognition, a sense of rightness. God normally woos us according to our deepest joys and noblest desires. God’s hand can be discerned in slight glimpses, and usually then back over our shoulder.

Whether Isaac and Rebekah lived happily ever after, you will have to read between the lines to tell. Whether Wilshire and I have lived happily ever after requires the same kind of intuition. And it may depend on whom you talk to. But we know that Isaac and Rebekah begat Jacob and Esau. And Jacob became Israel with 12 sons that became the 12 tribes. There must have been something good and true about their love that brought on all that begetting.

Likewise, Wilshire, we have been in this tent together for 18 years now. We have some children to show for it. Young people have come to faith in Christ and joined the family. The place is a-fluttering with life. What’s more, we’ve begotten some young ministers who have gone out from among us to bless the world.

The veil has been lifted. We see each other more clearly now. We know each other more intimately. You are a still a beautiful church, Wilshire, and I love you very much. I also love loving you and being loved by you.

The way of mystery is not just history, though. It’s a story that continues. This is not just the story of Isaac and Rebekah. And it’s not just the story of a pastor and a people. It’s your story, too—whether you know it yet or not. It may be the story of how God is working to help you find a mate or find your calling or find yourself. It’s a mystery story, the central character being God; it all begins and ends with God. Thanks be to God.