Abraham — Andy James

a sermon on Genesis 12:1-9 and Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
preached on March 16, 2014, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s an old song I learned back in Sunday school:

Father Abraham had many sons,
many sons had Father Abraham.
I am one of them, and so are you,
so let’s just praise the Lord.

Now we are clearly not all “sons” of Abraham—some of us are daughters of Abraham, after all!—but this simple song reminds us that Abraham is one of the most important characters in the Old Testament. His story is an important part of our story. His story defines us, too.

Abraham started out as the man named Abram in our reading from Genesis this morning. Abram seemed to be a pretty average older fellow, seventy-five years old, who had no children or grandchildren. For some unknown reason, God reached out to Abram at his advanced age and made him quite an offer:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing… In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

There’s no clear reason for why God chose Abram. He wasn’t exactly in the prime of life to make a long journey, let alone father a great nation. His family at that point consisted of a wife who was unable to bear children, a nephew who seemed to stand at the center of controversy wherever he went, and the women and men who were his property. And Abram was pretty well settled in his home and life at that point, with extensive possessions and people around him, so there was no reason for him to go anywhere. All in all, Abram wouldn’t have been my first choice to receive the great fullness of God’s blessing, so it’s almost as if several others had been approached and turned it all down! Yet for whatever reason, God chose Abram to receive this promise of something new.

But nearly as important as God’s choice in all this was Abram’s response. After God gave him this command, Abram picked up his possessions, his small family, his slaves, and his animals, and set out on this journey. It was a pretty crazy move. Nowadays, people think very little of moving across the country, away from family and friends, but even one hundred years ago, a journey of 400 miles as Abram made would have been very difficult. First off, long-distance travel was not easy. The roads were focused on commerce, so a family on the move would have been very much out of place and would have faced some real danger along the road. But once they got “to the place that [God showed them],” it didn’t get any easier. The place wasn’t empty— “the Canaanites were in the land,” and Abram and his family couldn’t just buy it up with the proceeds from the land they had left. But Abram didn’t turn back—he built an altar to the Lord there at his first stop, then traveled on further, pitched his tent, and built another altar to the Lord as he “journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.”

That of course is not the end of Abram’s story. God continues to work in his life to keep changing things for him. His journeys take him a little further, into Egypt, before he finally settles back in Canaan. He receives a new name, Abraham, that indicates how God’s promises are taking hold in his life. And he and his beloved wife finally bear a son in their old age who is the firstborn of the promised great nation. In the end, Abraham’s journey covers hundreds of miles and many, many years, but it ultimately reflects the deep and wide promises that God offered to him and that carry through the centuries of Judaism and Christianity.

Abraham’s story matters for us in a wide variety of ways. Now there are certainly some elements of it that are more problematic, such as the promise of land in Genesis 14 that continues to inflame relations between Israelis and Palestinians today, the truly shameful way in which Abram tossed out his slave Hagar and their son Ishmael, and the disturbing tale of how Abraham followed God’s instructions so carefully and so far that very nearly he offered his beloved son as a human sacrifice to God. But the broader story of God’s promise to Abraham and Abraham’s subsequent response is one of the great defining stories of faith for us even today. It gives us three particular gifts for our own day and age, for our own walk of faith in this world.

First, God’s promise to Abraham shows us how God’s transformation can take hold in our world. Things do not have to remain as they are now, even if we don’t quite know how they will change or where we are going. We like Abraham can listen for God’s call and journey forth into a new and different way of life. We can encounter something deeper and greater than what we have known before. We can stop being defined by what has come before and instead trust that God will unfold a new future for us.

That new future holds the second great gift of Abraham for our lives of faith today, the gift of the journey. On this journey of Lent, I’ve been paying particular attention to the daily devotional that we’ve been sharing, Too Deep for Words. This past Tuesday, it offered a beautiful reflection on the gift of Abraham’s journey. First it lifted up the simple prayer of modern monk and mystic Thomas Merton:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself…. I hope that I will never do anything apart from [my] desire [to please you]. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. (Thoughts in Solitude)

Then the writer for the day looked further at this how this journey affects us:

However the Spirit spoke to Abraham, he followed the voice on an unlikely journey to a place he’d never seen, trusting God’s promise that blessing would come if he’d only follow. I doubt he saw many cairns, trail markers, as he trudged along looking for his new home, but his life is a cairn for us, showing us the right way, the way of faith. He did not know what each day would bring or where he was going. He simply put one foot ahead of the other, trusting that God was guiding him and would fulfill the promise, even on days it didn’t seem likely. (David L. Miller, Too Deep for Words: Reflections for Lent 2014, p. 17)

So Abraham gifts us with the possibility of a journey in our own lives, following God into unknown places, trusting a new and different way, looking for signs and markers of God’s presence, and filled with confidence that we are not the first to journey this new way.

But strangely and wonderfully, we are more than just people of promise and journey. Abraham’s third gift to us is family. We are people defined so well by that strange little song about Father Abraham, united by this common parent, linked with one another and all the families of the earth as we live out God’s blessing. Again, our Lenten devotional put it so beautifully:

Centuries separate us from Abraham, but we are all his children. Our situation is the same. We go our way trusting the great heart who launched us on life’s journey, joined with others who help us keep the faith when we waver. (David L. Miller, Too Deep for Words: Reflections for Lent 2014, p. 19)

All of these gifts are signified so well in today’s service as we ordain and install our ruling elders and deacons. In this strange and wonderful moment, we watch as God’s promises take hold in our midst as new leaders step forward and are set apart. Like Abraham, we trust that God’s call in our lives is enough to carry us through to places that we have not yet seen. And in this strange act of the laying on of hands, we are bound together with Abraham and so many other saints to know God’s continuing presence as we go forth on this journey of service and life together.

It is a gift and a challenge to walk in these ways, the gift of God’s grace and the challenge of God’s love to go forth into something new, but we can trust always that we will not journey this way alone, that Abraham and so many others have gone this way before us and that God will go with us just as God has gone with them. So may we trust the gift and challenge of God’s grace and mercy to be like Abraham, to trust that God’s promises for us are real, to step out and journey into that something new, and to remember that there are always companions with us on that journey. Thanks be to God! Amen.

a sermon on Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 for the Second Sunday in Lent
preached on February 24, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Last Sunday was the first Sunday in Lent—but perhaps more importantly to some people, it was the last night of the third season of the British drama Downton Abbey. For those of you who don’t know the show, it tells the story of the Crawley family, great lords and ladies of the English countryside, all centered around their beautiful estate, Downton Abbey. The story begins with the sinking of the Titanic—and with it the closest heirs for the Crawley family fortune, title, and home. In those days, none of Robert Crawley’s three daughters could inherit the estate, so the family soon learned that the home and title would be passed on to a middle-class lawyer from Manchester. I won’t give away any more of the plot, but the plight of the Crawleys seems much like that faced by Abram in our reading from Genesis today.

Abram, too, was lacking a direct heir—but he and his wife Sarai had no daughters or sons, and his heir was set to be a slave born in his house. By the time of our story today, God had offered him two promises of something more that he already was. First, God told the childless Abram:

I will make of you a great nation.

Then later, God promised Abram,

All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever.

These first two times, Abram believed God right away and followed God’s instructions. Still, though, he was childless. God again came to him with words of promise.

Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.

But after all that he had been through, after two promises that seemed no closer to reality after all this time, after confrontations with kings and rulers in the land that God had supposedly given to him, Abram was much more skeptical:

O Lord God, what will you give me,
for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?
You have given me no offspring,
and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.

As the Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey might say, at least it wasn’t going to be a solicitor from Manchester!

Abram’s frustration made sense. He had done everything that God had asked of him. He had left his home and his family to wander around the desert, following God’s promise of land and offspring. All he had to show for it was a still-barren wife, some unpleasant encounters with rulers who didn’t welcome an outsider’s claims on their land, and one brief blessing from Melchizedek, a priest of “God Most High” of ancient Canaan.

After Abram voiced his frustration with God’s timetable for fulfilling these promises, God didn’t leave him out in the cold. Instead, God took him outside and told him,

Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.
So shall your descendants be.

God didn’t offer him any new sort of word, and Abram didn’t have any sort of grand epiphany. Yet when God addressed Abram’s frustrations directly, something shifted. Abram finally understood the nature of this promise, and God finally got through to Abram. As scholar Walter Brueggemann puts it:

The new promise for his life is not any expectation of flesh and blood. Rather, [Abram] has come to rely on the promise speaker. He has now permitted God to be not a hypothesis about the future, but the voice around which his life is organized… He did not move from protest to confession by knowledge or by persuasion but by the power of God who reveals and causes [this] revelation to be accepted. The new pilgrimage of [Abram] is not grounded in the old flesh of [his wife Sarai] nor the tired bones of [Abram], but in the disclosing word of God. (Genesis, Interpretation Commentary Series, p. 144, 145)

In this third promise, then, God recognizes how Abram is changing in response to all these promises, so God names Abram as pleasing in God’s sight.

Even with this critical turning point, this is not the end of this moment of God’s promise with Abram. God again promised land to Abram, and Abram again asked for a simple sign to make everything clear. Once again God responded with honesty and hope, telling Abram in the verses we skipped in our reading that his descendants would face trials amidst their rejoicing, while still assuring him that his descendants would possess a great land stretching across much of today’s Middle East.

These extravagant promises and Abram’s trusting response set the stage for the rest of the incredible story of God’s people that unfolds throughout the Old Testament into the life of Jesus and all the way into the church today. While these promises may seem to be many thousands of miles and many millennia away from us—even more distant than the world of Downton Abbey!—they are actually still pretty important today. This promise of land to Abram and his descendants has shaped millennia of conflict over the land now known as the Holy Land to three religious traditions. The difficulty of many couples to have children is an unspoken challenge for many families in this day and age, even if we long emphasize a male heir quite as much as Abram or the Crawley family did. And we Christians often rightly wonder how these promises first given to Abram make sense in our own tradition. So as we approach these words of promise, we carry all this history and hope with us—even as we too long for a new way of promise and new life.

Ultimately, though, God’s promises to Abram were less about the promises themselves but about the new life that promises can bring. Abram took up a new path in embracing these promises, not in doing something good and right and true but in embracing God’s call to a new and different way of life that affirmed that he was a righteous, beloved child of God and invited him to trust God’s future above anything that might have made him question the uncertainty around him. When Abram trusted God and gave up his confidence in and reliance on his own way, he stepped fully into the possibility of what we Christians have later named as the new creation, where we too give up control and trust that God will do something new and better and greater in us and through us and even sometimes in spite of us.

Ultimately, then, these promises are for us too—not the explicit promise of land and descendants but rather the promise of new life where we are beloved children of God and can trust that God will journey with us all along the way. Lent is as good a time as any to trust God’s promises so fully, so deeply, that we emerge as God’s new people, loving as God loves, trusting as God trusts, and living in faith as God lives in faith. Lent is a good time to look back on these promises anew, to ask good questions of God, to look for better signs and seals of these promises in our lives and our world, so that our faith might be deepened and we might, with Abram, have the depth of our faith reaffirmed by none less than God. It is a good time to wonder what these promises look like in our own time and place, to think together about what it means, as Walter Brueggemann again puts it, “to trust God’s future and to live assured of that future even in the deathly present.”

Next week, we will begin a series of conversations about just that as we welcome our congregational consultant Bill Weisenbach to preach and give us an overview of the assessment and discernment process that is before us in the next few months. So this Lent is a good time to work on letting go of the things that keep us from the way of life that God intends, to release the ties that keep us bound to the past, to trust the promises of God for the future, and to listen for the new word of promise for today and tomorrow and beyond so that we can be open to the new way that is emerging before us.

So as we walk these Lenten days together, as we remember all the promises of God to Abram and sort out the promises of God for our own day and time, may we know the presence of God with us on this journey and keep walking in faith, hope, and love until all things—even us!—are made new. Lord, come quickly! Amen.

The Stories That Define Us: Abraham

Promises, Promises