Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother William Bennett, n/OHC
BCP – Pentecost 14 C - Sunday 08 August 2004
The story of Abraham and Sarah is central for all who profess the faith of Israel. Our parents, Abraham and Sarah, then called Abram and Sarai, were originally residents of Ur, in the southern part of what is now Iraq, very near Kuwait. Sometime around 4,000 years ago, Abraham received the call from God to go forth to a new land, the land of the promise, and to take Sarah and together they would become the parents of a great nation.
And they went. They left everything behind and went. They faced a long trek of many miles. Through the journey and it hardships, through warfare and peacemaking, they believed the promise and they waited, waited for it to be fulfilled. And as they waited, they grew older. And as they grew older, they feared that the promise would not be fulfilled, could not be fulfilled. How could the promise of new life, new life lasting to many generations take root from the tired old flesh and bones of Abraham and Sarah. How could two old people produce an heir? At best it seemed they would have to rely upon one of their slaves to inherit their flocks and herds and, most important of all, see to their burials.
Today's lesson from Genesis enters the story at this point of despair. Abraham has just emerged victorious in a battle over an alliance of four kings. In a vision God comes to remind Abraham once again that God is his protection and shield and that Abraham's reward, his future, will be very great.
But Abraham's despair wells up. And his despair leads him to protest. Where is the future? How can the future of the promise be fulfilled? He remains childless. His only heir, if that term could be used, was a slave. A slave is not the sign of the future. A slave is the sign of the past or, at best, of the maintenance of the present. The child is the sign of all that is new, of all that is coming, of all that is promised.
God responds with the assurance that the slave will not be his heir, but that Abraham and Sarah's own child will be. And then God takes him outside to look at the stars and says that the descendants of Abraham and Sarah will be as numberless as the stars of the sky.
It is a strange argument put forth by God. God does not try to persuade Abraham or to get him to understand how the promise might be fulfilled. God simply restates the promise that two old people will have their own child to be an heir. And then there is the sign of the stars of the sky. Perhaps Abraham was able to deduce that the God who could create the numberless stars, indeed all of the universe, could be relied upon to keep this simple, single promise to two people.
We don't know what happened within the heart and mind of Abraham, but he accepts the truth, the reality, of God's promise. The text says he believed, he accepted as the truth. The text uses an interesting word here, from which our word at the conclusion of prayers, AMEN, is derived. Amen is the word of acceptance and of hope. It means truly, verily, or we believe it to be so. Abraham said amen to the promise, and God judged it to him as righteousness.
"Abraham believed the Lord and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness." For Christians, this is the pivotal verse of Genesis, if not of the entire Old Testament. From the time of St. Paul and the writer of Hebrews down to the present, Christian theologians have focused on this verse.
Why is it so important? First, righteousness (zadekah in Hebrew) is overwhelmingly an attribute of God. To be righteous is to be just completely and without fail forever, to act always with justice and faithfulness. Only God is able truly to be righteous. But when Abraham accepts the promise it is reckoned as righteousness. That is to say: God imputes to Abraham a divine characteristic. God sees Abraham in divine terms. In other words, God chooses to see in Abraham, at this moment, a new Adam who is restored to the Eden, where for this moment, Abraham is once again the full image of the God who is righteous, as all humanity was created to be.
Because for that moment Abraham was able to align himself, his will, his hope with the will of God as expressed in an unbelievable promise. He trusted the promise, more especially he trusted the speaker of the promise. He did not try to understand, to manage, to manipulate. Doing those things would have been not an expression of faith but of what we might call ‘functional atheism', saying that we believe in God but acting otherwise—relying upon our own actions as a cover for our doubt in the fulfillment of the promise given by God. We go ahead and strike out on our own acting as if we believe that all the responsibility is on us, that we'll have to do it (whatever it may be) by ourselves because God won't, or can't, at least hasn't so far, fulfilled the promise.
Rather, Abraham was willing to wait, to wait until God's time came to its fullness and the promise came to birth. He believed the promise. All of this is important to us. We, too, share in the divine promise first made to Abraham. It is a promise of new creation, of all made new and restored to the righteousness of the first creation---before we lost our head and broke that righteousness. It is a promise of a future, the future of the Kingdom of God. At times, as Abraham and Sarah will do later in the story (in the next chapter actually) when they arranged for him to father a child by her handmaid Hagar, we may attempt to take charge and fulfill the promise on our own terms. More often we will join Abraham in his protest over the impossibility of the promise of the length of the delay.
Even Mary on the Day of Annunciation, when confronted with another unbelievable promise, protested, "How can this be"….before she said Amen, "Be it unto me according to your word." That Word spoken to Abraham and Sarah, spoken to Mary, and spoken to countless others in our story, now calls us to trust him, to faith in him, to believe, to say "Amen" to even as the Word's promise remains beyond our sight, beyond the horizon.
All too often, however, our response gets mired in futility, in the burden of all that we have to do. Like Abraham our despair wells up, for the problems seem insurmountable: financial disarray and mounting needs, the fallout from visionless leadership, discord and warfare. We experience these problems globally, nationally, in our families, in this monastery even. And we think that we must solve them ourselves. We display our functional atheism, our belief in ourselves, rather than believing God, the giver of the promise of new creation and abundant life. Believing that God will keep the promises does not do away with our responsibility to act, but often it seems to me than our actions (or our immobility and inability to act) are, in fact, a substitute for believing God, a smokescreen hiding from view the fact that we do not really believe God will keep the promises.
Abraham believed God would keep the promise and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.
And God will do the same for us. God will reckon to us his own righteousness. God will see us as his very image (even when we can't). God even does it when we persist in our unbelief.
And the sign to us that the promise is true, that God will pour out his own righteousness over us, the sign that all of this is true is Jesus the Christ. He lived the righteousness only reckoned to Abraham. He is the new Creation in history and for whom we look as the fulfillment of the promise. He is the new Adam who restored – recapitulated -- the creation to its Glory, literally by giving it back its head.
And like God who pointed out the stars to Abraham as a sign of the promise, Jesus gives us tangible signs of his presence as we make our pilgrimage forward into the promised future to greet him.
He gives us the water of baptism, in which we are reborn into his image, united in his obedience unto his death and restored to the glory of creation in the new life of resurrection.
He gives us his Body and Blood, he entrusts himself to us, to remember his death and resurrection until he comes again, to feed us on our journey into the promise.
And above all he gives us each other, to journey and to wait together, sharing in a common life which gives us the strength to say daily to God with Abraham and Sarah and Mary: We trust you, we believe that you will keep the promise and so we say, Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
