Wednesday June 20, 2011 - Great is Thy Faithfulness

The context for this sermon is an ecumenical Christian service of the word in the chapel of a large, high-acuity teaching hospital.

The Scripture is: Genesis 12:1-9

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Risk-taking faith

Today’s reading from Genesis is the story of the call of Abram and Sarai But, in pulling the story out of the bible as we do when we use passages for worship, we’re missing something important in this story. And that important thing is the context.

And I want to begin today’s reflection by reminding you of the context. Because this story of Abram’s and Sarai’s calling starts very abruptly with the words “God said to Abram, Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your parents’ house to a land that I will show you.” In the narrative as it’s presented in Genesis, there isn’t any preliminary build-up to this story.

Directly before God calls Abram and Sarai, we have the story of the Tower of Babel, Then a list of the descendents of Shem, of whom Abram is one of those descendents.

We have no other background information about Abram other than this genealogy. And, of course, we have no information about Sarai other than that she is Abram’s wife. And we have no previous information about Abram’s relationship with God, either. All we know is that, suddenly, God appears and tells Abram to get up and go from his parents’ house to an unknown land.

And I think that, because we are so used to hearing the story of Abram and his relationship with God and we know the end of the story…and because this verse is written poetically, it all sounds great and good and positive.

“Wow! God is going to make Abram and Sarai the Patriarch and Matriarch of God’s chosen people! Fantastic! Lucky Abram! Lucky Sarai”

But what would happen if we heard the story of today’s reading something like this: (Please excuse a bit of literary license)

"Suddenly, Abram heard a voice that he had never heard before claiming to be the God of all creation. He was afraid and thought he might be going crazy.

And the voice said to him, “You and your wife have got a pretty nice life here among your people, don’t you? You know everyone, your parents are here and life is pretty good, except that you have no children.

But if you and Sarai want to have children, if you want to leave behind your state of barrenness, you both are going to have to leave this land and this comfortable life and go to an unknown place that I’m going to direct you to.

I will give you descendents who will eventually become a great people. But you will also eventually despair of having an heir and you’re going to have to trust me on this one.

I will make your name great and your descendents will be a blessing to the world, but you personally won’t see any of the greatest blessings that I’m going to give them and you’re going to have to trust me on this one.

I will curse those who curse you, but the vindication you desire isn’t going to come in your lifetime and you’re going to have to trust me on this one.”

If we read the text in this way, it takes on a whole different slant. We see Abram and Sarai not as some lucky lottery winners who were unexpectedly and inexplicably given a jackpot. Rather, we see them as risk-takers who trusted in God. And we also see that some might call them fools. Maybe we would call someone a fool who behaves as Abram and Sarai did.

Call and Response

There is an ironic twist to this story because if Abram and Sarai stay in the safety of all that is familiar they will remain barren. In order to bear children and become the parents of God’s Chosen People, they have to step outside their comfort zone and take a risk in their old age.

If you wanted to translate this story into 21st century America, I could see one rendition of it where there is a con-artist somewhere in the background hoping to take advantage of a couple of senior citizens who she hopes might be befuddled.

After all, who ever heard of a couple starting a great dynasty when the woman is 65 and the man 75? And those who are familiar with Scripture know that Sarah (as she will then be known) won’t get pregnant until her 90th year.

Abram and Sarai are being called to abandon their families of origin, to renounce their former way of life and to set out on a journey that will be physically dangerous and to aim for a future that is logically impossible. But unless they take a risk and step out in faith, they will not bear fruit. God initiates the promise that God makes to them, but the choice as to whether or not to act on God’s promise is up to them.

And for me as a Methodist, that’s a great metaphor for what a life of faith is all about: God initiates and human beings respond to God’s plan. The life of faith, although initiated by God, is always a two-way street that requires the participation of both parties. True faith is not a matter of “cheap grace” where we accuse anyone who responds to God’s plan and calling as trying to earn God’s favor by human works.

Rather, faith acknowledges that everything in life is a gift from God, and that these gifts are given to us out of love in order that we might respond to them.

At the end of the day, faith is call-and-response. God calls and we respond.

God is Faithful

So - the story tells us - Abram and Sarai set out for the land of Canaan.

They set out in order that their descendents should become God’s chosen people……so that all nations and races and peoples would be blessed by them, and would be blessed as they were blessed.

But, for me, the most amazing and difficult part of this faith-journey was that neither Abram nor Sarai were going to live to see the fulfilling of the promise that God made to them. They were not going to see their descendents become a great nation. They were not going to see Isaac give birth to Jacob who was to become Israel and the father of God’s Chosen People through whom all peoples of the earth would be blessed.

At the end of the journey, at the end of their lives, Abraham and Sarah were still walking by faith rather than by sight. By rights, each of them could have gone to their grave saying something like: “God gave us something but God didn’t give us what we had been promised.”

But those of us who know the entire story know that God did, in fact, fulfill the promise made to Abram and Sarai. God remained faithful to Abraham and Sarah (as they would become), and through them to the people of Israel and through them, God remained faithful to all of humanity.

Even though Abraham and Sarah didn’t live to perceive the fulfillment of the blessing, it doesn’t diminish the fact that God came through as promised.

By responding to God’s call, Abram and Sarai stepped out of their barrenness and into a new future. And I find that both an inspiration and a challenge. Because it’s not always easy to have that kind of faith. It’s not always easy to trust in God’s faithfulness when events do not unfold as we expect and maybe when it even looks like God didn’t fulfill the promises that were made. It’s easy enough to say the words “God has the situation mapped out” but it’s not always easy to walk into the future when you feel that God has not given you a glimpse of that map.

And so, to encourage one another, we tell stories like this one of God’s faithfulness in the past and we remind each other that God continues to be faithful to us today. As people of faith, we remember that – as the author of Hebrews said – “we desire a better country”. Not just in “heaven” but also in the here and now.

Conclusion

For me, it is Good News that God is faithful and keeps God’s promises, even if I can’t perceive right now that those promises are being kept.

For me, it is Good News that other people of faith struggle with difficulties along their journey with God.

And for me, it is Good News that, as we step out in faith, that we are in a very real sense co-creators with God in the divine unfolding of history.

As we go from this place, I pray that the God of Abram and Sarai will bless each one of us as we take those initial steps out of our barren places into the unfolding of God’s creative endeavor.

I pray that we will be able to encourage other people of faith and to be encouraged by them.

And I pray that, whether or not we see the final result of God’s blessing on our lives that we will nevertheless be able to embrace God’s mysterious peace which surpasses all of our own human understanding. May the peace of God be with us always. Amen

Sunday 4 March 2007 - Trust In God

This is a two-part sermon based on Genesis 15:1-18 and Luke 13:31-35

Genesis 15:1-18

Faith without ‘results’

The theme of today’s readings, my commentaries reliably inform me, is “Trust in God” Today’s readings are about faith and trust and hope but neither of them are very comfortable readings.

Consider the Old Testament reading that we just heard. I expect that many of us are familiar with the story of God’s promise to Abram and Sarai (Abraham and Sarah) but I want to quickly put this particular reading from the 15th Chapter of Genesis into context.

It was way back in Chapter 12 when God told Abram that he would bless Abram and make him a great nation if Abram would set out on a journey toward the land that God was promising him.

By Chapter 15, when this reading takes place, much time has passed. Abram has seen Caanan and been told by God that his descendents will live there although he will not. He and Sarai had been forced into exile in Egypt, they have lived with and parted from Abram’s nephew Lot, and Abram has done battle with foreign kings.

We can assume that Sarai is already too old to bear children because in the very next chapter, Sarai tells Abram to conceive a child by her servant. Although Abram has received a promise from God, he and Sarai have arrived at the twilight of their lives with absolutely no concrete sign that God’s promise is going to be fulfilled.

Now, of course, we know the end of the story, but in order to appreciate this reading, we need to forget what we know. At the moment, the story is one of unfulfilled potential, of longing, pain, disappointment and probably even a sense of mourning for what might have been. The man who was arguably one of the greatest Patriarchs of the Judeo-Christian tradition is barren and, at the moment, he is forced to continue to live in a state of barrenness.

Even when the longing of Abraham and Sarah is fulfilled by the birth of their son Isaac, I don’t think it’s a case of a fairy-tale ending of the “they all lived happily ever after” type. Abraham dies without seeing his descendents living in the Promised Land so he dies not knowing whether God’s promise is ultimately fulfilled.

To be a person of faith is to trust in the future that God has promised. To be a person of faith is to live assured of that future even in a barren or deathly present.

This kind of faith can be really difficult. By our nature, human beings like to deal with tangible things. It often seems contrary to common sense to be told, like Abraham: no, your prayers have not yet been answered, and they may not be answered in your lifetime, but I have made my promise to you that hope does exist, that new life does exist and I give you my solemn pledge that everything I am doing is for a future of justice and righteousness and for the best interests of humankind.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m really honest with myself, there are many times in my life when I don’t want to live with the tension required by faith. I want to know with certainty how God intends to bring about the Kingdom, I want to know what that Kingdom is going to look like and I want to know when it’s going to happen. And most of all, I want to see people who I care about be young and healthy and prosperous forever, even though I know that this is not the way the world works.

I suspect that lots of people think this way. The reason that I think this is because, as human beings we seem to be constantly searching out magical solutions to the challenges of being human.

I’ve recently heard of a new movement in the US called ‘The Secret’; It started with a DVD which claims that there exists an ancient ‘secret’ of success that has been suppressed by the powers that be and – surprise, surprise – by the Roman Catholic church, of course. The advert for the DVD claims that all successful people have known ‘The Secret’ and that by unlocking ‘The Secret’, a person can have health, wealth and happiness and anything else that they want.
In the Christian Church we have these movements as well. If you just ‘do’ Christianity the ‘right way’ or have the right beliefs about healing ministry or speaking in tongues, or whatever, all your problems will be instantly healed and magically go away.

This all too human desire for easy solutions is not so much about faith as it is about finding faith difficult. The consolation is that we are in good company.

The great Patriarch Abraham also got tired of having faith. He also got tired of waiting. He did continue in his faith, but not without asking God: Where? How? How Long?

Luke 13:31-35

Seeing God in the Emptiness

Every now and then someone says to me “Well, of course, faith is a crutch for those who are not strong enough to face life on their own.” But I don’t actually think that faith is a crutch and I think you know by now that I don’t think it’s always the easy option.

There are times when people of faith are somehow given by God the courage to stand and face the looming empty spaces of human existence. Perhaps an emptiness of illness, fear of death, fear for a loved one, or the fear of hopelessness, whatever the emptiness consists of. Faith in God gives us the ability to stop and linger in that uncomfortable place and live in that uncomfortable place despite the fact that you don’t really want to be in there in the first place.

But our culture is very uncomfortable with this experience of emptiness. We immediately look to fill the empty places with activity, with words, but most of all with the “certainty” that everything will work out OK in the end. We create a lot of noise and busyness to distract ourselves. But it is sometimes during these times and in these places of emptiness that we are able to see God more clearly.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus stood and looked into the void and he chose to walk toward it rather than away from it. Today’s Gospel reading – perplexing as it may seem – is, I think, about Jesus making an intentional choice to walk towards his crucifixion.

Now the way that you might teach this to a young person might be to say that ‘Jesus had to die for our sins, so that we could be saved. So Jesus made the decision to go to Jerusalem where he knew that he would die.’

I just want to unpack this a bit for adult ears because I don’t think the scenario was that simple.
In making this decision to walk toward his crucifixion, I think that there was a lot of faith involved on Jesus’ part. Remember that he was fully human as well as fully divine.

I think that the significance of Jesus’ incredible faith was his ability to look into the gaping emptiness of his upcoming crucifixion and see God in that emptiness.

The emptiness he faced included not only his own death, but also all the sin and hopelessness of the entire cosmos: past, present and future. Jesus looked into the gaping void of eternal death, despair, depravity and destruction and in this void he had the faith to see God’s purposes for the future.

Ultimately, Jesus had to trust in the Resurrection. With no reason to do so other than God’s promise and covenant – the same covenant that God made with Abraham - Jesus had to trust that God’s purpose was ultimately a purpose for life rather than for death. And so do we.

Why does Jesus set his sights on Jerusalem? Quoting Psalm 118, Jesus says that he is going to Jerusalem because it is the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.

The Temple City of Jerusalem, which is supposed to be the sign and the symbol of the Kingdom of God on Earth, is not. Jesus is going to tear down the Temple and rebuild it in three days. The presence of God on earth does not dwell in the Temple. The presence of God on earth will dwell in the Risen Christ.

The sacrifice of the Temple is going to be replaced once and for all by Jesus’ once and final sacrifice. This is a sacrifice of Love (with a capital L) and a sacrifice of Forgiveness (with a capital F).

The worship of God through laws and prohibitions, through sacrifices and rituals is going to be replaced by God’s love and forgiveness. This divine love and forgiveness is costly. If Christian love is self-giving love, the crucifixion is the ultimate self-giving.

Martin Luther said that Jesus defeated sin, death and the power of the devil. Earlier on, I said that Jesus gazed into the abyss of the sin and hopelessness of the entire cosmos and that he had the faith to believe that God’s purposes would prevail.

I suspect that there are no words on earth that are adequate to express what our salvation is about. In very crude terms this is the ultimate stand-off between good and evil, between God and ‘Satan’, between hope and despair.

What is the eternal meaning of existence? Is it death, despair and destruction? Or is it life, hope and creation? The Christian tradition has always affirmed that the external meaning of existence is life.

As Christians, we believe that the Christ Event is the fulfilment of the covenant promise that God made with the Patriarchs. The Abrahamic Covenant is particularly meaningful to us, because Christians see this covenant as being not just to the Jewish people but to all peoples and all nations.

Conclusion

I said earlier that the theme for today’s readings is “Trust in God”. Both Abraham and Jesus had their faith and their trust in God challenged in extreme circumstances.

God asked Abraham to have faith, against all apparent reason, that he would be the father of God’s people and indeed, the father of God’s covenant with all nations.

As part of his divine mission, Jesus was called to look into the abyss of eternal evil and have faith in God’s purposes for life, to have faith in the resurrection and thereby to BE the catalyst for eternal life: “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

On this second Sunday of Lent, I pray that we may be given the grace of faith both when faith comes easily and when it is difficult. I pray that when faith is difficult, that we may be inspired by the faith of Abraham but also take comfort in the fact that he too challenged and questioned God.

But most of all, I pray that we remember that it was Jesus’ faith in the love and forgiveness of God that brought salvation into the world.

During Lent, we examine our lives and our consciences, but we also look forward to Easter in the faith and the conviction that the eternal purpose of God is life, hope and creation. Amen