| Hoping
Against Hope Sermon by Brigid A. Boyle October 20, 2002, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 15:1-6 "Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become "the father of many nations," according to what was said, 'So numerous shall your descendants be.'" Abraham, the father of many nations, the great patriarch of the Hebrew Bible, the forefather of the New Testament, the shared ancestor of three monotheistic faiths. Abraham, the one who "believed the Lord and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness." Abraham, the model for so many of trust in God's faithfulness. Abraham, you remember, was a hearty 75 years of age, when he heard the voice of God calling to him. Residing with Sarah in the land of Haran, he heard this voice bidding him pack up his goods to head toward a new and still unrevealed land. He heard this voice promising him not only land, but descendants as numerous as the stars and a relationship with God that would leave all families of the earth blessed. It was no small promise considering the situation in which Abraham stood when first he heard it, old, weary and childless. It was no small risk to leave behind all he knew in order to follow this word, abandoning security of home and all that was known for a journey with no directions save for guidance delivered from a voice on high. And it was no meager faith with which Abraham set out for the Promised Land on that day so many years ago. The logical question for us, then, on this day when the situations in which we find ourselves (individually and collectively) leave us hard-pressed to believe in a promise which still seems so far away, has to do with how the likes of you and I live as children of God and descendants of Abraham. Much has happened since Abraham heard God's beckoning voice and much has been revealed of God's faithfulness in Jesus Christ, but still God's promises are not small considering all that would seem to stand in their way. Still the risk of acting on belief in his promises is not small considering all that they call us to do. And still believing requires no meager faith for such a time as this. For we who would seek to be faithful to the God of Abraham, it seems we would do well to ask ourselves, then, in the midst of our undeniable wrestling and struggling even with faith itself, what there might be to learn from old Abraham. How might his exercise of trust in God's faithfulness inform our own? Most generally, most obviously, Abraham's faithfulness took shape as he held to the conviction that what God had promised him, God would accomplish. This would happen in spite of any tangible evidence and in spite of any tangible signs of hope. As their story began, Abraham's wife Sarah was barren. With no heir apparent there would be no land to pass on, and the branches of a family tree would wither and die. There was little hope for a new generation, a genesis, in the life of this childless couple. Into the context of that hopelessness, came the promise of God that would say something other; into that hopelessness came the promise of children, of a land to pass on to their offspring, of blessing after so many years of feeling under a curse. Abraham had no evidence at all that this promise was worth its salt and no proof that this promise giver was either. All he had was a word of spoken, a word of something where there was nothing. By grace, for Abraham, that was enough. His faith, to be clear, was anything but easily won, and his frustration at the slow moving process of the Almighty was real, "O Lord God, what will you give me," cries Abraham even after the promise was first spoken, "for I continue childless … You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir." But still, even so, he believed and "the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness." "Barrenness is the way of human history," writes Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggeman. "It is an effective metaphor for hopelessness. There is no foreseeable future. There is no human power to invent a future … but barrenness," he goes on, "is not only the condition of hopeless humanity. The marvel of biblical faith is that barrenness is the arena of God's life-giving action." God's life-giving action came, for Abraham, in the form of a great promise of hope inserted into what seemed the greatest of hopelessness. So it is for us, I do believe, that God's life-giving action still does the same. Even for us, still it seems all but impossible to believe that what God will do has promised he will do, because there is still so much evidence to the contrary. I think of the promise that one day "old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem … and the streets shall again be full of boys and girls playing the streets." And then I think of the streets of Jerusalem today and the streets of so many other places, emptied of children and adults by fear of another bomb's detonation or another bullet's launch from the barrel of a sniper's rifle. I think of promises spoken of dwelling secure in the land, of lambs resting beside lions, of justice rolling down like waters, of all being satisfied. There are so many. You know and you no doubt notice the lack of tangible evidence in their truth as much as I. It seems but wishful thinking to hitch our wagons to such distant stars. But, I tell you, if we let it be so, now more than ever are those promises life-giving, now more than ever do they offer us a future, and now more than ever do they set us out on a journey pressing on toward the day when promise will by grace become reality. What Abraham has to teach us then, in the first and most simple place, is that trust in God requires believing in what we cannot see. But, to make a point, that kind of trust is not and cannot simply be based on remembrance of the goodness that has met us in life heretofore, present circumstances excluded. Deep and abiding faith is not about counting our blessings one by one and convincing ourselves that because we have been given so much blessing even with bane- family, friend, livelihood, opportunity- then God must be good. It is easy to do that and it is good to give thanks, but it not possible, in the end, to ground or trust here, because there are so many, my friends, who do not have the much that we do and because, if we are honest, there is still much more for which we wait and long. The kind of trust to which we, like Abraham, are called is rather a more difficult reception of the goodness of God in spite of the world around us and a more challenging hope in his promise in spite of the despair around us. That does not come absent of grace. That does not come without another temptation by its side. The other temptation, to which I and probably you over and over again fall victim, is that we, in distrust rather than trust, attempt to do ourselves, even with the most noble of intentions and often in God's name, what we assume God cannot or will not accomplish himself. The temptation is to take the promise into our own hands. For Abraham, it meant seeking, with Sarah's imagination and guidance, an alternate means of bringing the promise of offspring to reality. (this is a part of the story we did not read.) Trying to move the promise on his timeline and to assuage his, and likely other's, doubt, Abraham fathered his first-born son Ishmael with his slave Hagar. Abraham (and Sarah) you see tried to do what they assumed God could not or would not, promise set momentarily aside. So much time had gone by, so many days had passed and still there was no sign of one child, much less as many descendants as the stars in the sky. Abraham and Sarah felt it their responsibility, in some sense, to accomplish what clearly God himself was not accomplishing. God's promise for Sarah was laughable so Hagar would have to do. In the end, you know, God did indeed make good on even so laughable a promise with the birth of Isaac to Sarah and Abraham. Nevertheless, in them, in Abraham, we again find ourselves. For much like Abraham, we grow weary of waiting and watching for something that seems so far out of reach. And much like Abraham, we are wont to put it all onto ourselves, trying to do ourselves all those things which we fear God just might not get to. Consider the countless occasions when we- as individuals, as the church, as a country- would choose to be God rather than bow down before God. We take it upon ourselves to save the most lost of souls, to separate the sheep from the goats and even to claim sovereignty over the world. Now I do not mean to say that faith in God requires that we toss our hands in the air and do nothing but sit back and wait until God gets to work. The call to trust God is not a call to quietism, but a call to do what needs doing- feeding the hungry, working for justice and peace, caring for those in distress- out of gratitude and within the greater framework of trust in the God who makes and keeps promises, and who has made and kept promises in Jesus Christ. What that means is doing good things and doing the work of the kingdom, by all means, but not because we think it is our job as if God has forgotten or as if God has bailed out or as if God is not capable. What we have to learn about the exercise of trust in God's faithfulness from Abraham, in the second place, is as much lesson in what to do as what not to do. Trust in God requires abandoning our attempts to accomplish what God has promised he would do. It requires doing something, yes, but also knowing that whatever we do is finite and fallible. Faith brings with it the hard challenge of letting God be God and letting God do something, too. The struggle is no doubt a part of faith; I think Paul knew that, for even in spite of Abraham's self-determined efforts, still Paul would consider him most faithful and most unwavering. It was this kind of trust, Abraham's kind of trust that, at the end of the day, let God be God and let God be in charge of bringing his own promises about, that made right his relationship with God (that is what this phrase about it being "reckoned to him as righteousness" means) and so set the course for ours as well. But finally, it is not human faith, practice, or exercise of trust in God, which makes right our relationship with God and gives us a future where there is none. For as much as Abraham is in so many ways a model of faith, for as much as we would hold him up to ourselves and to our children as exemplary, and for as much as Paul would do the same, still we must confess that it was not Abraham's assurance of things hoped for in spite of the odds, or his unwavering trust or his full conviction that God was able to do what God had promised, which laid the foundation for God's relationship with him and with all of his offspring. Likewise, it is not our ability to set aside all doubt successfully or to put out of our minds completely all that seems to fly in the face of God's promises, nor is it our success at relinquishing control or our skill in leaving God's job to God, that makes the difference. You see, we do not make the difference. It is God who makes the difference, and his grace alone that stirs in us, each one, faith and trust enough to believe. "For by grace you have been saved through faith and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God." Justified by grace then, Abraham first was and so now, thank God, are we. Such grace has been revealed to us, of course, in Jesus Christ, the promised one born under the same stars into which Abraham gazed, the promised one who "was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification," the promised one who is, for us, tangible sign that God is able to work wonders of hope and goodness when all else would seem to say otherwise. May we then, looking into that starry sky or into the faces of one another, counted among the many descendants as we are, know such grace and be granted faith enough to trust the greatest of promises and greatest of the promise givers, even Jesus Christ, that together we might risk the journey to which he calls us. Thanks be to God. Amen. |