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Land and Lineage: The Second Covenant
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 2, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 15:1-21 Romans 4:13-25
Who among us could have imagined how prescient a sermon on Noah’s flood would turn out to be two weeks hence? Watching the coverage of rising waters in Trenton and Wilkes Barre, seeing Yardley, New Hope and Manayunk submerged, venturing onto Kelly Drive the night the Sckukyll crested to behold how equal the river suddenly was to her banks: as people whose lives are interpreted by this story in all of its mythic truth, most of us remembered God’s promise to Noah, remembered the first covenant, the only covenant in the Old Testament proffered by God to all of God’s creatures: “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” Tell that to the merchants of Manayunk! Mention that to the families exiled even now from their homes in Trenton…or better yet declare God’s promise to the inhabitants of the Gulf Coast still living in trailers on the cusp of another hurricane season. “Acts of God” these natural disasters are named by the so-called insurers of our lives lest they be expected to redeem what they believe God has wrought. Technically, of course, God’s promise has held, even as the levies and the banks along the rivers have not: all flesh has not been cut off by the waters of a flood. We are sober witnesses to that fact. But when near neighbors are submerged beneath the rising waters, who can stand on technicalities? From the perspective of a household that has lost everything—for the second or third time in a year--the promise rings hollow unless it is kept locally. Though more to the point of our story this morning, how without evidence, how when faced with a hopeless situation are any of us to trust God’s promises? That is Abraham’s question as we encounter him in the 15th chapter of Genesis even as it is the question posed to God by so many who wake without a tangible future. But we are getting ahead of the thickening plot. To wit, between Noah and Abraham there was, as they say, much water over the dam! Noah, it turns out, was not a sailor but a man of the soil, a tender of vineyards, the maker, I suspect, of a mean Merlot. Well at least Noah was fond of it! Found drunk and naked by his youngest son Ham, you can hear him cursing his last born between swigs with a curse that apparently did not diminish Ham’s own reproductive capacity. In short order Ham, along with his two brothers, managed to repopulate the earth, giving God and humankind a second go at a better relationship in spite of old Noah’s besotted start. Of course it takes only a few verses beyond the Noah story to realize that even as the waters have subsided, there is nothing new under the sun. History simply begins repeating itself. Sin--the turn from covenant existence, from having daily to do with the Living God—now holds sway in the settled city of Babel as surely as it did in the Garden of Eden. In the beginning, you remember, the temptation was to know good and evil instead of God. Given a second chance after the flood, the descendants of ’adam immediately set out “to make a name for themselves by building a city and tower with its top in the heavens.” Notice that the verb “to make” had only before been used in relation to the God who made the heavens and the earth. Clearly the inhabitants of Babel were setting out to “make” just like God had made. Same song, second verse! Like God they would inhabit the heavens. According to social philosopher Leon Kass, human behavior in both the garden and the city issued in the same disobedience: “in Adam’s individual case autonomy—choosing for yourself—is the opposite of obedience; in the builders’ case, independent self-re-creation-—making yourself-—is the opposite of obedient dependence, in relation to God or anything else. The road from Adam to the builders of the city,” says Kass, “is straight and true…” a road leading them away from the One who has promised. Or to put it the other way around and in the context of our own lives, “covenanted existence contradicts [our] current temptation to self-groundedness …to believe that our life springs from us, that we generate our own power and vitality and that within us can be found the sources of wholeness and well-being” says Walter Brueggemann. Lest any might have missed that point on the way to the top, God deepens the divide Down East of Eden, confusing human language and confounding human control. Enter Abram, son of Terah, husband of Sarai “who was barren; she had no child.” That is to say, after all of these things, from the beginning in the garden through the flood and now after Babel, the line and lineage of the preceding story has come to an end. This time infertility rather than a flood is the cause. “There is no foreseeable future…no human power to invent a future. But,” we are reminded by Brueggemann, barrenness constitutes “not only the condition of hopeless humanity. The marvel of biblical faith is that barrenness is the arena of God’s life-giving action,” the cross and grave being the supreme case in point. What the detail of barrenness tells us--if we missed the point of Babel--is that any new life and promising future is God’s doing, not our own. So in response to the detail of Sarai’s barrenness, God speaks. God’s word is the way of God’s creation. “This God speaks a word which no empire has been able to administer and no ideology has been able to co-opt,” says Brueggemann. “I will make of you a great nation,” God announces. “I will bless you and [I will] make your name great.” God’s word stands in direct contradiction to the words spoken by the builders of Babel—past and present! Furthermore, God now puts flesh on the promise spoken to Noah: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Therefore Abram and Sarai set out with the promise not knowing where they are going. When they reach Shechem, God speaks again, this time promising lineage and land: “To your offspring I will give the land.” Notice that all these promises obligate God alone. We are dealing in our first two stories with what is called a suzerainty covenant, a promise in which the terms are imposed only upon one of the parties. “Strikingly,” notes David Noel Freedman, one of the giants in Old Testament theology, “it is the suzerain who is obliged, not the vassal….In other words, the maintenance of the Covenant does not depend upon Abraham’s performance but on God’s. He and his descendents are simply the beneficiaries of the divine commitment.” So Abram and Sarai set out again with seeming confidence. However, when we meet them next in our lesson for the morning, God immediately senses a chill in the air. Like an announcing angel, God says preemptively to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid!” But Abram is afraid, full of doubt, impatient, fed-up. What has he to go on? Only God…and God has yet to deliver on this one sided deal. You can imagine how Abram may have longed for something he could do to bring about the promised future—he will soon attempt just that with his maidservant Hagar! But for now, Abram knows that without an heir there also will be no land. Abram knows that without God, he is hopeless and helpless. We know as much too. “Why and how does one continue to trust solely in the promise,” asks Brueggemann, “when the evidence against the promise is all around?” Bracketing the “why” for a moment, the “how” unfolds in these verses before us. In the first place, you and I continue to trust solely in the One who has promised as we dare the sometimes hushed but more honestly cantankerous conversation we have learned to call prayer. Here in the 15th chapter, Abram quits his quiet submission and gives God a piece of his mind. “In the face of the covenanting God,” says our Old Testament mentor on this matter, “it is faithful human action to rage and protest… [because to] accept blame for everything is not to take God seriously.” In his rage Abram “trusts himself utterly to this covenantal partner.” Surely we have known the same rage in relation to near-at-hand partners of promise! Yet Abram’s rage is itself “a form of trust and an acknowledgment that finally one must come to terms with this One in whom we are grounded.” Second, we come to trust solely in the One who has promised as we listen and through the hearing of God’s word look around. Responding directly to Abram’s protest, God counters the conclusions Abram has drawn from the evidence at hand. God word does the same in our lives. Then God’s word turns Abram to see in a radically new way. God brings Abram outside (of himself, we might add) and turns his eyes toward the heavens. Without God’s word, Abram had seen only stars. But as he listened for God’s address in the dark, Abram received the assurance of a future vouchsafed to him by the God who had promised. In Brueggemann’s words, Abram “has permitted God to be not a hypothesis about the future, but the voice around which his life [and future are] organized.” You and I have been given this same word, this same story, this holy Other voice on page after page directly countering the evidence at hand. If we listen, really listen, Scripture will turn us to see human history in a radically new way, to see the disparate facts of our lives in relation to the One who ‘brought Abram from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give his offspring this land to possess’. And then if we keep listening, I tell you we will even see the disparate fact of our death in relation to the One in whose life, death and resurrection we have been brought out of our bondage to no future for eternal life. Finally we continue to trust solely in the promise when the evidence against the promise is all around precisely because the future is not in our control. In spite of the stars, we are told that a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon Abram this same night. It is the terrifying darkness known only to those who have “relinquished control of the present for the sake of a Genesis.” It is the deep darkness in which people walk who wait for a dream deferred by a history that will not yield to God’s purposes. It is finally the deep and terrifying darkness which is the underside of God’s terrible grace, known only by those who understand that this relationship, this covenant is all God’s doing. “To your descendants I give this land,” God says at the end of the night, marking its boundaries. The promise is unconditional, a one-sided commitment which begs no allegiance. In a word, it is a promise of pure grace. We know this promise as those who have come late in time to the God who said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” We know this promise unconditionally in Jesus Christ. Bracketing all of the “hows”, He is the “why” we continue to trust solely in the promise when the evidence against the promise is all around. More than the stars in the heavens or the sands on the seashore, we look to him. For with him by our side we may endure the deep waters; with him going before us in all things, we may set out not knowing where we are going. With him waiting for our return from a far country, we are promised a home forever. “For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants…to those that share the faith of Abraham.” Thanks be to God! |