The Faith of Abraham

Genesis 12:1-4; Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

Please Click Here for Sermon Video

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.

What Faith Looks Like

John 3:1-17; Romans 4:1-17

The words “belief, believe, and believing” are on my “bad word” list when it comes to trying to understand the biblical concept of faith.  “Belief, believe, and believing”, they fit well with Western Culture’s philosophical assumption that matters pertaining to God are simply ideas to be accepted or discarded according to personal whim.  Religions have beliefs and we choose to believe them.  Religions also place demands on our conduct and we call that believing.

For example, I can say that I believe that in love God created everything.  I can live like I believe that in love God created everything.  I’m sure you folks have seen many destructive farming practices based purely in a belief in profit.  I’m sure you’ve also noticed that farmers who believe that in love God created everything treat their land and animals a bit differently.  What we believe does have profound effect on how we live.

But, biblical faith is even different than simply believing ideas about God and living accordingly – fundamentally different.  Abraham believed in God and I’m sure he had his religious practises too.  So what?  Everybody back then believed in gods of some sort or another. Abraham is not called faithful and the father of the faithful until when according to God’s promise he left everything to go to the land God would show him where God would make a great nation from him, and through this people God would deliver his creation from its bondage to sin and death.

Faith is basically being faithful in a relationship.  Faith is the basis of marriage.  Marriage is a covenantal relationship that requires faithfulness for it to be a marriage.  One of the reasons so many people simply cohabitate rather than marry and why so many marriages fail is that our culture has relegated marriage to the realm of belief.  People believe in marriage.  They accept the idea of it, but when it comes to being faithful, well that’s hard work at which we fail miserably and then it’s so easy yet quite expensive to say, “well, it was a good idea that I don’t believe in anymore.”

Biblical faith as Abraham demonstrates is active participation in the covenant relationship through which God is putting things right in his creation that he loves.  It is living in the new reality that God is bringing about by bringing all things under the Lordship of Jesus Christ by uniting all things to Jesus by the Holy Spirit.  The end result this work of God’s is the renewal and healing of his creation.  And like marriage it is all about relationship.

Looking at John 3:16, when Jesus there talks about believing “in him” it helps to think of the “in him” as a place; as the sphere of reality in which we are in relationship with him through the Holy Spirit sharing in his relationship with the Father.  This is what Jesus calls “eternal life”.  At John 17:3 Jesus says as much.  It reads, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”  This means that eternal life is not going to heaven when I die.  It is rather knowing, being in relationship with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and to one another and the rest of creation accordingly.

John 3:16 does not say, “In this way God loved the world: he gave his only Son so that all who believe the right things about him won’t go to Hell but will go to Heaven when they die.”  That’s the way it so often gets preached but that is not what it means.  John 3:16 rather means: “In this way God loved the world: he gave his only Son with the result that all those who are participating in a covenantal relationship with him in him are absolutely not perishing according to this world’s futility but are rather experiencing eternal life, i.e., communion with the Father through Jesus the Son in the Holy Spirit now and forever.”

So what are we to have faith in?  Well, at the beginning of his Gospel John says that Jesus is the Word of God become flesh.  This means that Jesus is the becoming human flesh and blood of that which God spoke to create the universe and give it order.  To say that in a simply more complicated way, human being was and is supposed to look like God the Son in-fleshed in the creation.  That’s what Jesus is and in him is where this reality is coming into being.  When Jesus died on the cross he opened up an entirely new reality that is free of sin and death that his resurrection was the first act and glimpse of, and this reality will come in its fullness when he returns and Creation is made new.  When Jesus says “all who believe in me” that’s what he means.  The new reality, the new humanity, he has opened up in his very self by passing through death and now included us in by the gift of the Holy Spirit.

We are sharing the Lord’s Supper this morning.  This meal points towards this reality in Jesus.  It is a sign and foretaste of it.  We have been accustomed thinking of Holy Communion as this solemn ritual when we “believe” we should reflect on our own sinfulness and how unworthy as we are Jesus died for me so that I can go to Heaven and I’m supposed to be overwhelmed with thankfulness, but…we wind up not feeling it, not so much. 

Let’s try picturing this meal a bit differently.  Picture it as faithful participation in the new creation reality he has opened up in his self.  This meal is what faith looks like.  Jesus is here.  This Bread and this Wine are the signs of his life given for us and to us by which we are fed and nourished in this new life he has given us in the Holy Spirit until he comes and on that day we will feast.  But for now, little by little he is feeding and nourishing us with his very self and like Israel in the wilderness we are coming to know and to depend on him.  This meal is the sign and symbol of the life-giving relationship that the Trinity has given us in Christ Jesus.  God’s people gathered around this table, sharing this meal of new life in Christ Jesus, bound together by the Holy Spirit, and mysteriously being made new – this is what faith looks like.  Amen.