Faith and blessing

Lent 2a

March 16, 2014

Genesis 12:1-4a

Imagine if you will, growing up on your father’s farm here in town.  You play a vital role in the family business, managing the crops and the herds, learning everything you know from your father.  You and your spouse have a happy life together but have been unable to have children.  This causes tension in your family because there will be no one to carry on your lineage.  But regardless, your life is enjoyable, your work rewarding, etc. etc. etc.

Then one day, you hear a voice from God telling you to leave your country, your family, and the house that you’ve lived in all your life, and go somewhere that you’ve never been and no destination is actually named.  There is only the promise that you will become a great nation and will be blessed so that you can bless others. 

Raise your hand if you would go. 

If you would, why?

If you wouldn’t why not?

Another question – having pondered whether or not you yourselves would leave home and go to an unknown location…what are your thoughts on Abraham picking up and leaving home?

When I asked the confirmation youth this question back in the fall, most of them said they wouldn’t go.  They thought it didn’t make sense…especially when you consider that there was no final location disclosed, nor a time disclosed in which the destination would be revealed.  It’s just not logical. 

However, given that all we know about Abram at this point in the story is his ancestry, is marital and parental status (married to Sarai, no kids…not by choice) and their geographical location (Canaan), there are some guesses we could make.  And since Hollywood is busy getting creative with biblical stories, why not try out our hand at it.

Before we start this conversation, forget everything that you know about Abram…or Abraham.  Pretend you are hearing Genesis for the very first time and this is a stopping point. So you’ve heard the story of the creation, the story of the fall, the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, the story of the flood followed by that of a drunken Noah, and the Tower of Babel. That is all you know. 

What are some reasons that it would have made sense for Abram to leave home?

What are some of the reasons that it did not make sense?

On the whole, given what we know and our context today, if someone in this room stood up one morning during announcements and told us that they were leaving because God told him or her that they were being sent by God to a land that God would show them…but they didn’t know exactly where God was pointing to, we would probably think that they were pretty crazy…maybe a little irrational, even. 

But that’s the funny thing about faith…it’s not the most rational of forces that we fall back on.  In fact, faith in and of itself defies rational thought…it’s actually unrational, which I know sounds like a word I made up, but think about it.  As people of faith, we believe in a God whom we cannot see face to face, we are followers of a man whom none of us have never met in person, and we do our best to live in his example according to what his early followers have written about him, with some help, of course.  And, in times of trouble, we lean in on a promise that there is something better waiting for us when this earthly life ends.  The faith that we possess as a gift from God, is something that causes us to do things that don’t make sense.  Who else eats bread and drinks wine under the promise that Christ’s body and blood are present in them?  Who else takes infants, children and adults, and enacts a symbolic drowning in order to join them to the community in Christ, meanwhile proclaiming that that person has died and been given new life in Christ?  

It’s not normal. We’re not normal…no offense…but we’re not.  Abram wasn’t either.

Abram, upon hearing the voice of God, picked up, left home, and traveled to the place that God was going to point out to him.  And as people who know Abram’s entire story, we know that it was place, it turned out, that Abram, Sarai, and Lot had to leave shortly after they arrived because of a drought and famine.  Abram got in trouble with multiple people on multiple occasions for playing Sarai off as Abram’s sister.  He pled with God on behalf of the people in Sodom and Gomorrah, though sadly there were fewer decent people in those villages than he bargained for. As a sign of his covenant with God, he circumcised himself and all the men in his family. And he trusted for years and years and years that God was going to provide him with a son and that his descendants would number the stars in the sky and the grains of sand in the desert. And when he was 86, his son Ishmael was born to Sarai’s maidservant, Haggar.  But this was not the son that God had promised.  It wasn’t until Abram was Abraham and he was 99 years old…24 years after God told him to leave home, that Sarah gave birth to Isaac…the one who laughs…because, honestly – if, in your 90’s, you are told you are going to get pregnant and give birth to a child…how else do you respond?

But I wonder if this faith of Abram, faith that led him to listen to the voice and follow to a land he had never seen before, points to something bigger. 

Because, if you think about it, the story of the call of Abram just as much about why Abram listened as it is why God called.  We laud Abram for his faith. It is, in fact, so important to the story of God’s people that the writer of Hebrew’s chose to Abraham as the prime example of what faith is about.  But have you ever wondered why this whole thing got started in the first place. 

The stories that lead up to the call of Abram speak of a very lost and sinful population.  Beginning in the garden when Adam and Eve chose to bite into a piece of fruit, to Cain who killed his brother out of jealousy, to a world that was so sinful that God was sorry that he had created humanity.  So he sent the flood…and while sin survived the flood, God changed.  Before the flood, God always protected and forgave, clothing Adam and Eve, protecting Cain from retribution, etc.  But after the flood, God modified things a bit.  And Abram was the starting point. 

In the call of Abram, we see God’s first attempt reconstitute a broken world.  And we see in the story of God’s people after Abram, the persistence of God in trying to bring folks back to be in a good relationship with him.  When sin got in the way, God was always trying something new.  When the Israelites lost their way in the wilderness, he gave them judges, when judges didn’t work God gave kings, when kings didn’t work, God gave prophets, when prophets didn’t work, God put on flesh and came to earth to experience life as we know it.  From birth to death to new life. 

And the crazy part is that it wasn’t for God’s sake that he did all this, but for ours…so that WE could be blessed.  Because that’s the funny thing about love – the pure, unadulterated kind, it knows that it cannot force anyone to love in return.  Or do anything else for that matter. But what it can do is bless, it can bless without restraint.  And that’s what God did for Abram and what God does for us.  God makes good on his promises.  God made good on his promise to bless Abram and make him a great nation, and God made good on his promise to be with us always by putting on flesh and entering into our world not to condemn it, but to save it.  And if that’s not a blessing, I don’t know what is.