Can you believe in spite of? It s a tough calling, but it s the. heart of all true faith. To believe in the goodness of God when the

Transcription

1 Year 1, Narrative Lectionary, 09/18/2016, Greeneville, Tennessee 1 Can you believe in spite of? It s a tough calling, but it s the heart of all true faith. To believe in the goodness of God when the evidence is shaky. To trust that God is leading though it feels like we re going around in circles. To give yourself to hope even after many dreams have died. Can you believe in spite of? Abraham was having a hard time. He was tired of waiting. God had sworn back in the 12 th chapter of Genesis that Abraham and his wife, Sarah, would give birth to a great nation. That new people would be different. They would have a special relationship with God and thereby live out God s goodness among all other peoples. Through them, God would bless the whole shattered earth. And it would all start with Abraham and Sarah, an old couple who had giving up on having babies a long time ago. Come, God said, follow me, and I ll show you the land your descendants will call home. Surprisingly, the old, barren couple loaded up their camels and left their rocking chairs and everything they knew, not knowing where they were going or how long it would take to get there. You have to admire their courage. But by the 15 th chapter of Genesis, Abraham was beginning to lose heart. It hadn t been all bad since they struck out with God. The couple had acquired a lot of wealth - many servants and abundant livestock. But they were still traveling like gypsies and no sounds were coming from

2 Year 1, Narrative Lectionary, 09/18/2016, Greeneville, Tennessee 2 the nursery. So after a long time in and out of Egypt during a famine and a war waged that Abraham hadn t asked for, he was beginning to doubt the promise. Had he been a fool to roll the dice, to take a gamble on God? God said, Do not be afraid, Abraham. I am your shield; your reward shall be very great. At that point, Abraham confronted God with the facts. He still had no offspring, and if the trend continued, one of his servants would receive his inheritance. What about the promise of heirs? What about the great nation that would touch the earth with grace? Where was the gift that had tantalized him out of his sedentary life? Like Abraham, we live in the time between promise given and promise fulfilled. God s promise takes many forms, but whatever the form, the promise hasn t come to pass, not completely anyway. And we find ourselves wondering and waiting. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; neither shall they learn war anymore. Great promise: a permanent cease fire in Syria, an end to soldiers shipped home in boxes. But when? God shall wipe every tear from their eyes; mourning, crying and pain shall be no more. Sounds wonderful: an end to grief and sorrow. How much longer? They shall come from east and west, north and south and sit down

3 Year 1, Narrative Lectionary, 09/18/2016, Greeneville, Tennessee 3 at table in God s kingdom. Deepest hungers fed, unity among diversity, fellowship divine, I m ready. But still people are starving, division turns hard and ugly, and there are a lot of empty seats at the table. At the heart of our faith is a promise from God not yet kept. Who isn t tired of waiting for God s dream to come true? To comfort ourselves, we might say the promise won t come true until we all get to heaven. The most dangerous part of that statement is the truth in it. God s promise is so big that it won t reach fulfillment until the consummation of all things. Those who have gone on before us know the promise in God s eternity in ways that we can t and won t until our end or the end of time, whichever comes first. But it s a mistake to push God s promise out of the here and now. We can t leave Abraham and Sarah all alone with the thin comfort that God s promise wasn t about their place and their time. Clearly it was. Land and babies. It doesn t get much more immediate and down to earth than that. God s promise is for this world, our world. It may resolve an uncomfortable tension for us to move God s promise to the other side of death, but it puts our hopes for new life now in park. At the heart of our tradition is a promise from God for our time and place not yet kept. When Abraham had suffered about all the delays he thought he could stand, he expressed his doubt to

4 Year 1, Narrative Lectionary, 09/18/2016, Greeneville, Tennessee 4 God. And do you know what God did? God didn t strike Abraham with lightning, or blast him with condemnation from on high. God took Abraham to the stars. Look, God told him, count them, if you can. So shall your descendants be, like the number of stars in the sky. God had said something like this to Abraham many times. It wasn t the newness of the words that captivated him, but the one who was speaking. The One speaking of the stars was also the maker of them. The promise giver had some credence. He wasn t an evangelist who would soon ask for money, or an elected official telling Abraham what he wanted to hear. The promise maker was the very one who created everything, the one with strong and tender hands who held the whole universe together every halfsecond of every day. Trust me, God said, more or less, to Abraham. It was the same old call that got Abraham s stiff knees moving the first time. And I can t tell you why exactly, but Abraham believed. He had staked his life on this promise giver earlier, and he did it again, in spite of the many days since the promise was first given; in spite of no signs of pregnancy in Sarah; in spite of the comfort of retirement pulling at his heart. And then God did a strange thing. God bound God s self to Abraham and Sarah in a covenant. The details sound so strange to us, and in some ways they were strange to Abraham. How could it

5 Year 1, Narrative Lectionary, 09/18/2016, Greeneville, Tennessee 5 not be strange on the day God decides to marry a people? Abraham asked for a sign for assurance, and boy, did he get it, God walking down the aisle for Abraham in dark half sleep after all the birds had gone to their nests. As best we know, all those details about cutting animals in half have their roots in ancient treaty making. The half carcasses lined up and set opposite each other made a lane to walk through. Once an agreement was reached, the two parties passed through it, binding themselves to the terms of the agreement. Well, as you may have noticed, Abraham did not walk down the aisle, but God did. In the symbol of fire and smoke, God passed through, binding himself unconditionally to this family. It was as if God said, I pledge myself to you. I m yours and shall not be diverted. You are mine. So, as one commentator puts it, between promise given and promised fulfilled, we have covenant, God s binding vow to dwell with Abraham and Sarah, God s people, however they faltered, however they succeeded, wherever they were. And that covenant must have took, because in ways Abraham and Sarah could not envision, the promise has been fulfilled. We are their promised fulfilled, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah by faith. When Abraham pointed his arthritic finger at the sky, the stars he tried to number were us, the lineage that would include even the Gentiles. The promise was so big it

6 Year 1, Narrative Lectionary, 09/18/2016, Greeneville, Tennessee 6 didn t all happen before the old couple died. Even after they died, the promise was threatened by slavery in Egypt, corruption within the Promised Land, exile in Babylon, and the worst thing of all, a cross fashioned for Jesus Christ by those who should have known better. But in all of it, God held to the promise and created descendants like the stars for Abraham and Sarah, us and others like us who share the roots of their faith, now populating the whole earth. Amazing. Now it s our turn to believe against the odds. God comes fresh to every generation, calling us to turn toward the future and to trust the promise. I doubt there s much new in the promise. We ve heard most of the contents already. Peace on earth; reconciliation across all the old boundaries of gender, race, class and creed; everyone well and having what they need to flourish; true communion with God; an end to useless suffering; love and forgiveness in every heart; an eternal quality to life; all the things Jesus talked about and worked for and died for and still advocates for now that he s risen to God s right hand. There are a thousand good reasons for us not to believe in any of these things. But God, the star maker who holds the whole created order in his hands, invites us, as God does with every generation, to believe that his promise someday will come true.

7 Year 1, Narrative Lectionary, 09/18/2016, Greeneville, Tennessee 7 If we do, if we trust that God will keep the vow, then it will be our rest from anxiety. We will find freedom from our striving and straining to make the world like we want it to be. I m fairly sure that s the definition of futility, trying to impose our will, even our good will, onto the situations we encounter. The promise doesn t depend on how well we plan, orchestrate and manipulate. It depends on the promise keeper who makes covenant to be with us. We can rest because God will get it done. But the promise is also our energy. It got Sarah and Abraham up and going, and it cures our paralysis as well. Precisely because the promise is God s promise, we go to work for the kind of world God wants with confidence, blessing this time and place with our gifts and effort. The promise shapes our doing and being, but we don t worry too much about the outcome, which is always in God s hands. So we are light hearted in our work, and even in our work, we find rest. It s our turn to venture forth with God. But if we don t, we will not be neutral. It seems no one can be neutral. Choosing to go only with the evidence on the ground, to not trust God s dream, means we will put our hopes in other things, things that promise more immediate satisfactions like money, or sports, or fame, or human ingenuity. To believe in and pursue these lesser gods makes sense, but doesn t make us alive.

8 Year 1, Narrative Lectionary, 09/18/2016, Greeneville, Tennessee 8 At the heart of the faith is a promise from God not yet kept. So inevitably we have our doubts. Will this broken, tired world ever become God s world? God answers with a covenant to be with us however we falter, wherever we fall; and invites us again to believe in something against the odds. Can you? Will you? I have a vague memory of visiting a church, perhaps in London, a Greek Orthodox Church that wasn t on the list of churches one must see on such trips. But it was beautiful. Blue and gold mosaic tiles rose from the floor half way up the sanctuary walls. Icons surrounded us like a communion of saints. And high above on the domed ceiling, Jesus was looking down on us, his fingers in the shape of a blessing, giving us a benediction, And all around him, all above us, stars, asking for us to believe.