Genesis 12:1-4; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
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As you may have guessed from the reading today this sermon is going to be about Abraham and his faithful response to God’s call. I question the appropriateness of this kind of sermon for the congregations to which I preach. The topic is more fitting for groups of younger people who are looking forward in life with career choices and starting a family etc. and encouraging them to seek out what God is calling them to. I think for the congregations to which I minister it would be more context appropriate to preach on the story of Abraham and Sarah childless for decades then suddenly getting pregnant when he was 99 and she was in her late 80’s in fulfillment of God’s promise to make their descendants into a great nation. With that passage I could preach that regardless of age, energy, health even, God still is involved in our lives taking us somewhere. There’s always room for growth.
We encounter this story of God’s call to Abraham differently in our later years than when we are young. The older we get the more we tend to look back on our lives. Looking back, we are more apt to be asking “Did I do what God called me to do? Did I go where God was sending me?” To avoid being presumptive, I’ll speak for myself. I’m 60 and I’m a minister. I’ve got four major life events coming up. When to and where to retire, what to do in retirement, preparing for when I won’t be able to care for myself, and death and all within the realization that at any point death could make any or all of those events into moot points. And in the midst of all that, continuing to be the best father I can be.
Reflecting on Abraham’s story I can’t help but look back over the last 40-odd years from when I first sensed the call. Being a minister, I’m reasonably sure I’ve thus far gone where the Lord has sent me and done what he sent me to do as best as I could do it. I have avoided to the best of my ability the Frank Sinatra “I did it my way” approach to life. I learned at age 19 that life lived my way wasn’t something I could pull off nor was it worth the pain, and so I said “Jesus, I’m yours.” Ever since, God has been faithful. He’s made a home for me everywhere I went among good, solid, caring, kind people who’ve been a blessing to me and me, a blessing to them. Life has still been life. There have been hurts along the way, but Jesus himself has been with me and I’ve done my best to handle the hurts and setbacks as faithful to Jesus and the others involved as I could discern what is the faithful thing to do.
Looking back over the last 40 years I have learned God is faithful. I just need to listen, go, and live, and not worry. As the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 8:28 God truly does work all things for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose. I would add to Paul, even when the feathers have hit the fan and even when it’s “my own damn fault”, to add a little Jimmy Buffet. I’ve learned it is better to be loyal and to serve than to simply look out for myself, trying to make a name for myself, getting for myself, increasing myself. It is better to be a blessing than, quite literally, a curse.
Well, I guess I should deal with this passage a bit. God called Abraham by telling him “Go!” I like the way this command is written and sounds in the Hebrew language. It’s a command, the imperative form for the verb “to go” in Hebrew is “Lek” and there’s a prepositional phrase tacked on to it: leKah – le meaning “for” and Kah meaning “you yourself” in the sense of being to one’s advantage. All together it’s “Lek-leKah” meaning “Go! For what’s best for you.” It’s like if you’re laying in bed awake at night and hear a voice say “Lek-leKah”, you better get up and get on with it because it’s going to be good.”
And notice this isn’t a conditional statement where God is saying “If you go, I will bless you.” I’m very inclined here to say that Abraham did not have a choice here. What God wanted Abraham to do was going to happen. I learned from years of marriage that if your spouse says “I need you to (I don’t know) LISTEN!”, you listen because if you fail to, the fabric of spacetime begins to disintegrate. So it is when God speaks. Like on the first day of creation in Genesis God spoke to the primordial chaos of darkness and water saying “Let there be light.” Then, there was light. God would have made it so that Abraham and his descendants made it to that land to become that great nation and be a blessing.
Something else to note here, Abraham was in essence just going with the flow. He was the oldest of three sons of a man named Terah. They lived in a place called Ur which was where the Euphrates River ran into the Persian Gulf in what is Kuwait today. As a family they packed up and became part of a huge migration of people traveling up the Euphrates River to Syria and then heading down through Israel to Egypt. Terah had them stop in northern Syria to settle. God’s call to Abraham was that he needed to go further. Against the social convention that the oldest son stayed close to the father to take over the family when the father died, Abraham went against his family and moved a little further down the line to what God had in mind for him. He went through Israel down to Egypt then turned around and came back to Israel to settle. All along the way God blessed him and his family and he was a blessing to the nations around him. Abraham was not out to make a name for himself. God did that for him and he was well respected. Abraham just wanted what God wanted for him.
The faith of Abraham, or rather the faithfulness for there’s no such thing as faith without faithfulness – the faithfulness of Abraham was to listen, go, and live and God would work things to the good. God is faithful. God blessed him and made him to be a blessing. Being a blessing is found in being loyal and serving God and others. Loyalty and serving is what love is. There is no such thing as love if it is not expressed daily in fidelity and putting oneself aside to serve. It’s when people, ourselves included, get selfish that things go bad. Wars are not caused by religions or ideologies. They’re caused by selfish idiots deluding people with religion and ideology so that the selfish can get power and wealth for themselves. Marriages don’t fall apart because a couple was expressing their love for one another through loyalty and serving one another, i.e., being a blessing to each other. They fall apart because somebody got selfish.
To end up where I started with speaking about how the story of Abraham’s call is heard differently by us depending on our age, whether we are young and starting out, in midlife re-evaluating, or elderly and looking back the question of blessing applies to us all. If you’re young and looking forward, strive to be a blessing and make choices about work and marriage and family that will help you be that. In the middle of life and re-evaluating, same thing except you may have some amends to make for when you chose poorly. Elderly and looking back, same thing but don’t let looking back consume the responsibility you still have to be a blessing. Age robs us of darn near everything. Don’t let pain and grief narrow your vision down to seeing only your own suffering. God has not abandoned you. Continue to be a blessing. Amen.
