Sermons
September 22, 2024 (Proper 20)
I meant what I said.
Genesis 15:1-18
Preaching every Sunday reminds me of how most of us used to watch television.
Nowadays if you watch something on a streaming service, like Netflix, you can get every episode of a series and watch them one after another, for hours. And I admit that I do it from time to time, on my day off when I’ve got nothing else pressing to do. Even shows on regular channels can be recorded and then you can watch a bunch of them when you’ve got time. We don’t have to do it the old-fashioned way, one episode at a time with a week’s break in between.
But that’s still how we get sermons.
It’s hard for me to imagine anybody binge-watching a preacher, collecting several Sundays’ worth of sermons and devoting a whole afternoon to listening to them. Well, maybe a great preacher like Fred Craddock, but otherwise, probably not.
Those of us who preach from the Revised Common Lectionary have four Scripture readings to choose from each week, and oftentimes we skip around—so it’s like having several seasons of a series available to you and watching the episodes in no particular order. You can do that with something like the original Star Trek series, because they’re each pretty self-contained, without any storyline or even subplot that develops from one episode to another. But in other cases, you really do have to watch them in order, or you miss something.
The Narrative Lectionary is more like that, because we go sequentially through the Bible, from creation to the New Testament epistles. The goal is to help us understand how the story of God’s people moves from creation to Pentecost, and then beyond—so we can then figure out how the story continues with us.
But in order to get from Creation to Pentecost and beyond each year—and the Narrative Lectionary runs from the Sunday after Labor Day through Pentecost, and then takes the summer off—we do have to skip quite a lot. That means it’s like watching a series on TV but skipping a bunch of episodes.
This is our second Sunday in the Narrative Lectionary this year. Last week we were in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve when everything went wrong, and today we find ourselves several chapters into the story of our ancestors Abraham and Sarah. So I think we need to do a recap before we get to today’s reading, and then we’ll look a ways out from today’s reading.
Previously, in Genesis…
Adam and Eve were sent out of the garden because it suddenly occurred to God that, after they had eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they just might have a taste of the fruit from the tree of life, and end up living forever with the immature and incomplete knowledge they’d gained from eating the fruit from that first tree.
They started having children, and their two oldest sons found themselves in conflict over the sacrifices they brought to God. One of them ended up dead and the other was banished.[1]
Adam and Eve had other children, and grandchildren, and the earth was well-populated—but with the spread of humanity came the spread of wickedness, to the point that God wished he’d never created anything, and decided to wipe the earth clean and start over. He saved one righteous family, headed up by a man named Noah, and charged them with preserving a remnant of all the animals of the earth in a boat, so that once the flood was over the earth could be repopulated.[2]
After the flood, the people again began to be fruitful and multiply (as God again commanded, just like he had in the first chapter of Genesis), but instead of filling the earth they all settled down on the plain of Shinar, where they decided to build a tower all the way up to heaven. But God wasn’t having any of that, so he confused the language of the people so they’d have no choice but to separate, and go back to filling the earth, like they were supposed to be doing.[3]
There is a short genealogy that connects the story of the Tower of Babel to the family of Abram; and then in Genesis 12 we begin what scholars call the Saga of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, which makes up the rest of the book.
The saga[4] begins with Abram and Sarai in the place where his father Terah had settled, a place called Haran. Abram and Sarai (whose names were eventually changed to Abraham and Sarah; for simplicity’s sake I’m going to start using those names now) were advanced in age, and childless, when God called them to leave the dead-end street on which they lived and head out on an unknown road.
God promised to make of them a great nation that would be a blessing to the whole world. Both of them were well into senior citizenship—Abraham was 75 and Sarah 65—when this promise was made.
How do two people become the ancestors of a great nation when they have reached old age without ever having so much as one child? But they trusted God, and set out on their journey.
Abraham and Sarah traveled to the Negev, a green land south of the Dead Sea, but famine forces them into Egypt for a time. They come back out of Egypt, and have a dispute with their nephew Lot, who had traveled with them since the beginning.
They and Lot go their separate ways; but Lot gets caught in the crossfire of a war among various kings in the land and taken prisoner. Abraham raises a small army and goes to rescue Lot, defeating the kings who had captured him; then he meets the king of Salem, Melchizedek, a priest of God Most High, who gives him his blessing, along with bread and wine. Abraham, in turn, gives Melchizedek a tenth of the spoils he had gained in the fight to rescue Lot.
That’s where we take up the story today, in a time of peace, with Abraham and Sarah settled in Hebron, and Lot settled in Sodom and raising a family. By this point Abraham and Sarah have been on this long, strange trip for quite awhile. But the promise God gave them when they left Haran has not yet been fulfilled.
The whole thing was impossible to begin with: even now with our modern medical technology, while a man can sometimes still father children in his seventies, women in their sixties just don’t generally get pregnant and have babies.
Abraham has named one of his servants, a certain Eliezer[5] of Damascus, to be the heir of his household, just so somebody would have the ability to handle Abraham’s estate after he died—and take care of Sarah if Abraham died first. But this isn’t what God had promised.
So one day Abraham has a vision. The word of the Lord came to Abraham in this vision. It doesn’t just say, like it did back in chapter 12, “Now the Lord said to Abraham…” And that’s actually significant: This is language we see more often in the books of the prophets, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, than in Genesis.
This is prophecy, not just a conversation.
Something interesting about Abraham, though: he questions the word of the Lord. “I am your shield; your reward shall be very great,” God says. But Abraham says, “What reward can you give me that will do me any good—after all, by this point Abraham is pretty wealthy—“when I still have no offspring, even after you said we would be the ancestors of a great nation?” He asks this twice. It’s a big deal.
The word of the Lord again comes to Abraham, and God tells him that he has not forgotten that part of the promise. Then God takes Abraham outside to look at the stars, and repeats—expansively—the original promise: “Try to count them, if you can. This is how many descendants you will have.”
And then comes the key verse of the whole thing—not just in my opinion, but in that of Paul, James, and the author of Hebrews. “And [Abraham] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” There you go, Paul would say, and Martin Luther would say: Abraham is justified by faith alone; and so shall we all be.
But we need to examine both halves of this statement more closely in order to understand it fully.
We’ll start with the second half: “…and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” In our English translation it sounds as though God put a pair of glasses on that made Abraham look righteous, even though he may not necessarily have been. But it’s not just an overlay, a set of lenses that allows God to see something that isn’t necessarily there.
The Hebrew language here indicates that God judged Abraham to be righteous—in a right relationship with God—because of his faith. God took a clear-eyed look at this man, and said, “We’re good.” And the reason is because of Abraham’s faith.
So let’s look at the first part of the verse. “And [Abraham] believed the Lord…”
What does it mean to believe? Does it mean somebody gives us a list of statements, and we agree with them? Does it mean that we have our own set of facts, even if nobody else shares them, and we deal with life on the basis of them? Does it mean, in a statement we used to see on t-shirts and bumper stickers and laugh at: “Don’t confuse me with the facts; I’ve already made up my mind”?
Does it mean that we have utterly lost touch with reality, and have chosen in stead, in Lewis Carroll’s words, to believe six impossible things before breakfast, no matter how silly those things might be? That doesn’t make us righteous; it makes us delusional. (There are an awful lot of folks out there who seem to equate being religious with being delusional, but if we agreed with them, none of us would be here, would we?)
No, belief means something completely different in the Bible. It’s not about intellectually deciding we agree with a set of statements, and it isn’t a delusion. Believing in something, like when Abraham believed God’s promise, means trusting in it, even when it seems impossible. It means committing ourselves to that idea, or that person, or that way of life. It means setting our heart on it.[6]
People in the Bible do a lot of this, you know. Abraham and Sarah trust in God’s promise to make of them a great nation, even though they were both well past childbearing age when the promise was first made—and even though it was another 25 years before their son Isaac was born. Mary trusts God when God’s angel, Gabriel, comes and tells her she’s going to have a baby, Jesus, even though she’s unmarried and still a virgin, and even though being pregnant without first being married could, in those days, have gotten her into quite a bit of trouble. The early church trusts God to guide them and provide for them, even when they were living with, and dying from, opposition and persecution.
So Abraham trusted in God’s promise, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it had not and probably would not be fulfilled. And God declared him to be righteous as a result. But Abraham’s faith was not a blind or unquestioning faith. When God’s word came to him in this vision, he said, “Wait a second.” He asked questions.
It wasn’t the only time Abraham questioned, even argued with, God—we see it when God tells him about the upcoming destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; but then there’s one time we don’t see it but really wish we did: when Abraham hears God telling him to take Isaac up to the mountain and offer him as a sacrifice.[7]
If we were to read on in the story we’d discover that Abraham’s trust in God sometimes wavered. In the very next chapter of Genesis, Abraham and Sarah get tired of waiting for God’s promise to be fulfilled, and Sarah gets the bright idea to send her Egyptian servant, Hagar, in to Abraham so she can be a surrogate mother for Sarah. It does not go well.
And then, when God again comes to Abraham to reiterate the promise, Abraham falls on his face laughing![8] Sarah does the very same thing a bit later when God comes to Abraham to tell him the promise is finally going to be fulfilled.[9]
Abraham believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness. Abraham believed, but he also doubted. Abraham trusted God, but occasionally took matters into his own hands—generally with less-than-ideal results.[10] Abraham remained committed to following God, but he continually questioned God, even argued with God. But God judged him righteous.
It seems that a right relationship with God does not have to be based on blind, unquestioning obedience. God leaves room for us to commit to living God’s way, while also sometimes doubting, sometimes questioning, always seeking greater understanding. And even if we sometimes mess up, God remains committed to the promises God has made to us.
[1] Genesis 4:1-16
[2] The story of Noah is in Genesis 6—9.
[3] Genesis 11:1-9
[4] In literary terms, a saga is a story that spans multiple generations. If you watched the series Vikings on the History Channel a few years back, you’ll have seen a saga; that series is based on the Norse Saga of Ragnar Loðbrok.
[5] Eliezer means “God is my helper”; it’s the Hebrew version of the Greek name Lazarus.
[6] The Latin word for belief is credo, from which we get the word creed. It literally means to set one’s heart on something.
[7] Genesis 22 says God tested Abraham by commanding him to take Isaac and sacrifice him. Some of the rabbis argue that Abraham failed the test by not arguing with God for the life of his son, as he had argued for the lives of possible righteous people living in Sodom and Gomorrah.
[8] See Genesis 17:1-22; this is also the point where Abram and Sarai become Abraham and Sarah.
[9] Genesis 18:1-15
[10] See, for instance, the story of the couple’s sojourn in Egypt, in which Abraham, out of fear, passed Sarah off as his sister and let her become part of Pharaoh’s harem (Genesis 12:10-20)—right after God had called the two of them to leave Haran and travel to the land God would show them!