Blessed to Be a Blessing
June 15, 2008
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Genesis 16:1-16, 18:1-15
It’s a funny thing, that Abraham is held up to us as a paragon of faithfulness – and I guess it’s an oddly comforting thing, too. After all, the stories we had last week really showed Abram at his best: God called him to leave Haran and he did; God showed him the stars and promised him numerous descendents, and although he and Sarai were already quite elderly, he believed. In last week’s stories, Abram is the model of trust.
This week, it’s a little different – Abram and Sarai seem to have more questions. In the selection that Jean read to us, they have begun to wonder if they are supposed to do something to bring God’s promise to fruition. And we have to get some perspective on this…years have passed since the making of the promise. For us it is only a week, or in the next chapter if we are reading the story all at once. But the passage from Genesis 16 occurs after Abram and Sarai had been living in Canaan for 10 years, and they departed for Canaan when Abram was 75 years old.
So Sarai suggests to Abram that since no child has come to them, perhaps they are supposed to take more initiative – maybe Abram should have a child with the slave woman Hagar. Here is a perfect example of why we have to understand a little of the historical context. However appalling such a solution may seem to us, we know from other passages in the Bible that such a solution was within the bounds of accepted morality at the time. The problem with this for the people originally hearing the story is not that Abram is begetting a child by someone other than his wife. The problem within the context of the norms of the story is that Abram and Sarai appear to have given up on God keeping the promise, and have decided to create their own solution. But they grow dissatisfied with this solution and send Hagar and Ishmael away.
If there is an infidelity issue in this story, it is not between Abram and Sarai – it is between God and Abram. But despite Abram having given up on God…God does not give up on Abram. In chapter 17, which we didn’t read, God reaffirms the covenant with Abram. More time has passed. Abram was 75 when they left Haran, he was 86 when Ishmael was born, and in Chapter 17, Abram was 99 years old when God reaffirms the covenant with him. We shouldn’t get hung up on the improbability of this, although that is part of the point of the story. What we need to notice is that within this story, 24 years have passed from chapter 12, when Abram left Haran, until chapter 17, when God reaffirms the covenant – in that story, he changes Abram’s name to Abraham, and Sarai’s to Sarah, and he promises again that Sarah will bear a child, and God introduces circumcision as a sign of the covenant.
And that brings us to the second reading this morning. In this reading, Abraham and Sarah are visited by three strangers. Hospitality was a strong value in Middle Eastern ancient culture – perhaps because survival often depended on it. In a world where so much lay outside people’s control, it was important to be able to depend on strangers as well as friends. As the anonymous author of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews reminds us, referencing this episode, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
And Abraham and Sarah are living out the hospitality ethic – they prepare a special meal for their guests, and that’s when they hear the promise reaffirmed…again. Roughly 24 years after the first promise, God promises a child…and now God gets specific: by this time next year, Sarah will have given birth to a son. Is it any wonder Sarah laughs? Actually, under the circumstances, it seems like a polite response. And God responds to this laughter with the question “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”
And with this question, we are ushered into a different dimension – the Kingdom of God, where the usual rules don’t apply. And the key here is that the real departure from the normal way of life is not so much that a 90 year old woman has a son…although it’s easy to get stuck on that. No, the real altered reality here is that God was faithful, even when Abraham and Sarah weren’t.
No one is criticizing them for their letting go of trust, giving up on hope. It would be the reasonable response – who would believe, 24 years after the promise is made, when Abraham and Sarah are both in their 90’s, who would hang onto the expectation that a baby was on the way? The only reasonable response is to give up on this project.
But we learn a couple of things in this saga – the first is that God isn’t reasonable (and we will see that theme played out again and again in the stories of the Bible), and that his gifts to us don’t always depend on us – they’re gifts, we don’t earn them, we receive them. God doesn’t even chew them out first – he just reminds them of the promise, and reiterates that it’s still in force. Sarah will have a baby.
As Walter Brueggemann says in his commentary on Genesis, “Once again, this story shows what a scandal and difficulty faith is. Faith is not a reasonable act which fits into the normal scheme of life and perception. The promise of the gospel is not a conventional piece of wisdom that easily accommodated to everything else. Embrace of this radical gospel requires shattering and discontinuity. Abraham and Sarah have by this time become accustomed to their barrenness…..The gospel promise does not meet them in receptive hopefulness but in resistant hopelessness.” God is asking them to give up their resignation, to risk disappointment, to acknowledge that all is not as it should be – God is asking them to open their hearts to hope again.
This is an interesting challenge to us in the postmodern era – our culture has long ago given up on hope. Hope is hopelessly out of fashion in our era – cynicism has replaced it.
Even among people of faith, conversations about hope are often met with a response of what is called “realism”. As in, “Sure the non-violent teachings of Jesus look good, but as a nation, we have to live in the real world.” It seems to me that the Bible, from these early chapters in Genesis on through the Gospels and beyond, is urging us to live in the alternate reality of God’s world instead. God’s people were never urged to be unfamiliar with this world, or unaware of this world – Jesus says, as he sends out his disciples “See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” But the Bible argues again and again for a different worldview – one that is founded on justice, forged in faith, fueled on hope, and followed by peace.
In this foundational story in the Bible, Abraham is a model of faithful living – and that is tremendously good news to us, because Abraham is a lot like us. On some days, when he has a particularly strong experience of God, he is able to be faithful, to trust, to hope. But as the experience fades, he falls back onto the norms of his culture. For Abraham, this model of faith, as for so many others in the Bible, faith is something he grows in by fits and starts. Abraham was blessed as a father, and became a blessing to countless generations, but perhaps the greatest blessing is the legacy of honestly struggling with trust. We do better by Abraham, by God and by ourselves if we note that Abraham didn’t stake out a position of faith and then stand there forever. He was a lot like us – he wondered what about his role in God’s promised future. He tried to solve problems using the best wisdom of his day. But God didn’t just love Abraham when he was faithful, he loved him into faithfulness.
And so our own faith journeys don’t look so strange, so frail – many of us may think about ourselves that we are not the disciples we would like to be. Perhaps we lack the certainty we think faithful people have, perhaps our habits lack the constancy – we don’t pray with the same regularity we would like to. Maybe we aren’t caring for the least of our world as we believe we should. And perhaps we no longer feel confident in hope.
What are the things we would hope for if we dared to hope? A slower lifestyle? A vibrant local economy? International relationships based upon mutual respect and care instead of mutual assured destruction? A world where a child doesn’t die every 7 seconds from hunger? An end to discrimination based on race or sex or relationships? Perhaps we would hope for family relationships that don’t fray at the edges. Maybe we would hope for an inner peace that is more resistant to anxiety. Maybe the miracle that seems as distant for us as a baby was for Sarah is a change of habit or a change of heart. As hard as it seems to change the world, sometimes changing ourselves is even harder.
Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? It seems that God is asking Abraham and Sarah to live in hope. And as amazing as the gift of the child will be, the gift of the hope may be an equal miracle. Living in hope carries with it a very present blessing as well – for living in God’s hope, seeing with Kingdom eyes, is living out of a larger center than our own hungers.
When Abraham and Sarah live in hope, they base their lives on the promises and generosity of God, and already, before the child arrives, they are blessed – as they exercise hospitality, they entertain the divine, and Sarah’s bitterness of the preceding chapter is turned to laughter. Even though she doesn’t experience trust, the hope blesses her with a lighter heart than she had before.
Living in hope, seeing with Kingdom eyes, means that we can take time for others, we can tend to the hurts of the world, we can nurture the hopes of our hearts, because we know that we are part of a greater whole in which love is never wasted. We can be generous, we can extend ourselves for others, we can take time to relax, because we can trust God’s care – we know that we are loved. When we are not confident in that love, the world is a more fearful than hopeful place, and we aren’t able to be a blessing to others because we are too busy trying to secure our own care.
Living in hope, seeing with Kingdom eyes means that we can be blessed to be a blessing – we can see that God isn’t standing by to punish every shortcoming, to count up every worry and debit them against our moments of trust. We can see that God indeed blesses us as we bless others – we can work toward the hopes of our hearts knowing that although, as for Abraham and Sarah, the realization of our dreams may seem a world away, by being willing to hope for that world, to work for that world, it comes closer. And that God works through ordinary people who waver, who wonder, who don’t always count ourselves among the faithful, but who in our better moments, work for the Kingdom, and stake our lives on the alternate reality we often see only dimly, and hope that indeed nothing is too wonderful for the Lord. Amen..
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Genesis 16:1-16, 18:1-15
It’s a funny thing, that Abraham is held up to us as a paragon of faithfulness – and I guess it’s an oddly comforting thing, too. After all, the stories we had last week really showed Abram at his best: God called him to leave Haran and he did; God showed him the stars and promised him numerous descendents, and although he and Sarai were already quite elderly, he believed. In last week’s stories, Abram is the model of trust.
This week, it’s a little different – Abram and Sarai seem to have more questions. In the selection that Jean read to us, they have begun to wonder if they are supposed to do something to bring God’s promise to fruition. And we have to get some perspective on this…years have passed since the making of the promise. For us it is only a week, or in the next chapter if we are reading the story all at once. But the passage from Genesis 16 occurs after Abram and Sarai had been living in Canaan for 10 years, and they departed for Canaan when Abram was 75 years old.
So Sarai suggests to Abram that since no child has come to them, perhaps they are supposed to take more initiative – maybe Abram should have a child with the slave woman Hagar. Here is a perfect example of why we have to understand a little of the historical context. However appalling such a solution may seem to us, we know from other passages in the Bible that such a solution was within the bounds of accepted morality at the time. The problem with this for the people originally hearing the story is not that Abram is begetting a child by someone other than his wife. The problem within the context of the norms of the story is that Abram and Sarai appear to have given up on God keeping the promise, and have decided to create their own solution. But they grow dissatisfied with this solution and send Hagar and Ishmael away.
If there is an infidelity issue in this story, it is not between Abram and Sarai – it is between God and Abram. But despite Abram having given up on God…God does not give up on Abram. In chapter 17, which we didn’t read, God reaffirms the covenant with Abram. More time has passed. Abram was 75 when they left Haran, he was 86 when Ishmael was born, and in Chapter 17, Abram was 99 years old when God reaffirms the covenant with him. We shouldn’t get hung up on the improbability of this, although that is part of the point of the story. What we need to notice is that within this story, 24 years have passed from chapter 12, when Abram left Haran, until chapter 17, when God reaffirms the covenant – in that story, he changes Abram’s name to Abraham, and Sarai’s to Sarah, and he promises again that Sarah will bear a child, and God introduces circumcision as a sign of the covenant.
And that brings us to the second reading this morning. In this reading, Abraham and Sarah are visited by three strangers. Hospitality was a strong value in Middle Eastern ancient culture – perhaps because survival often depended on it. In a world where so much lay outside people’s control, it was important to be able to depend on strangers as well as friends. As the anonymous author of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews reminds us, referencing this episode, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
And Abraham and Sarah are living out the hospitality ethic – they prepare a special meal for their guests, and that’s when they hear the promise reaffirmed…again. Roughly 24 years after the first promise, God promises a child…and now God gets specific: by this time next year, Sarah will have given birth to a son. Is it any wonder Sarah laughs? Actually, under the circumstances, it seems like a polite response. And God responds to this laughter with the question “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”
And with this question, we are ushered into a different dimension – the Kingdom of God, where the usual rules don’t apply. And the key here is that the real departure from the normal way of life is not so much that a 90 year old woman has a son…although it’s easy to get stuck on that. No, the real altered reality here is that God was faithful, even when Abraham and Sarah weren’t.
No one is criticizing them for their letting go of trust, giving up on hope. It would be the reasonable response – who would believe, 24 years after the promise is made, when Abraham and Sarah are both in their 90’s, who would hang onto the expectation that a baby was on the way? The only reasonable response is to give up on this project.
But we learn a couple of things in this saga – the first is that God isn’t reasonable (and we will see that theme played out again and again in the stories of the Bible), and that his gifts to us don’t always depend on us – they’re gifts, we don’t earn them, we receive them. God doesn’t even chew them out first – he just reminds them of the promise, and reiterates that it’s still in force. Sarah will have a baby.
As Walter Brueggemann says in his commentary on Genesis, “Once again, this story shows what a scandal and difficulty faith is. Faith is not a reasonable act which fits into the normal scheme of life and perception. The promise of the gospel is not a conventional piece of wisdom that easily accommodated to everything else. Embrace of this radical gospel requires shattering and discontinuity. Abraham and Sarah have by this time become accustomed to their barrenness…..The gospel promise does not meet them in receptive hopefulness but in resistant hopelessness.” God is asking them to give up their resignation, to risk disappointment, to acknowledge that all is not as it should be – God is asking them to open their hearts to hope again.
This is an interesting challenge to us in the postmodern era – our culture has long ago given up on hope. Hope is hopelessly out of fashion in our era – cynicism has replaced it.
Even among people of faith, conversations about hope are often met with a response of what is called “realism”. As in, “Sure the non-violent teachings of Jesus look good, but as a nation, we have to live in the real world.” It seems to me that the Bible, from these early chapters in Genesis on through the Gospels and beyond, is urging us to live in the alternate reality of God’s world instead. God’s people were never urged to be unfamiliar with this world, or unaware of this world – Jesus says, as he sends out his disciples “See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” But the Bible argues again and again for a different worldview – one that is founded on justice, forged in faith, fueled on hope, and followed by peace.
In this foundational story in the Bible, Abraham is a model of faithful living – and that is tremendously good news to us, because Abraham is a lot like us. On some days, when he has a particularly strong experience of God, he is able to be faithful, to trust, to hope. But as the experience fades, he falls back onto the norms of his culture. For Abraham, this model of faith, as for so many others in the Bible, faith is something he grows in by fits and starts. Abraham was blessed as a father, and became a blessing to countless generations, but perhaps the greatest blessing is the legacy of honestly struggling with trust. We do better by Abraham, by God and by ourselves if we note that Abraham didn’t stake out a position of faith and then stand there forever. He was a lot like us – he wondered what about his role in God’s promised future. He tried to solve problems using the best wisdom of his day. But God didn’t just love Abraham when he was faithful, he loved him into faithfulness.
And so our own faith journeys don’t look so strange, so frail – many of us may think about ourselves that we are not the disciples we would like to be. Perhaps we lack the certainty we think faithful people have, perhaps our habits lack the constancy – we don’t pray with the same regularity we would like to. Maybe we aren’t caring for the least of our world as we believe we should. And perhaps we no longer feel confident in hope.
What are the things we would hope for if we dared to hope? A slower lifestyle? A vibrant local economy? International relationships based upon mutual respect and care instead of mutual assured destruction? A world where a child doesn’t die every 7 seconds from hunger? An end to discrimination based on race or sex or relationships? Perhaps we would hope for family relationships that don’t fray at the edges. Maybe we would hope for an inner peace that is more resistant to anxiety. Maybe the miracle that seems as distant for us as a baby was for Sarah is a change of habit or a change of heart. As hard as it seems to change the world, sometimes changing ourselves is even harder.
Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? It seems that God is asking Abraham and Sarah to live in hope. And as amazing as the gift of the child will be, the gift of the hope may be an equal miracle. Living in hope carries with it a very present blessing as well – for living in God’s hope, seeing with Kingdom eyes, is living out of a larger center than our own hungers.
When Abraham and Sarah live in hope, they base their lives on the promises and generosity of God, and already, before the child arrives, they are blessed – as they exercise hospitality, they entertain the divine, and Sarah’s bitterness of the preceding chapter is turned to laughter. Even though she doesn’t experience trust, the hope blesses her with a lighter heart than she had before.
Living in hope, seeing with Kingdom eyes, means that we can take time for others, we can tend to the hurts of the world, we can nurture the hopes of our hearts, because we know that we are part of a greater whole in which love is never wasted. We can be generous, we can extend ourselves for others, we can take time to relax, because we can trust God’s care – we know that we are loved. When we are not confident in that love, the world is a more fearful than hopeful place, and we aren’t able to be a blessing to others because we are too busy trying to secure our own care.
Living in hope, seeing with Kingdom eyes means that we can be blessed to be a blessing – we can see that God isn’t standing by to punish every shortcoming, to count up every worry and debit them against our moments of trust. We can see that God indeed blesses us as we bless others – we can work toward the hopes of our hearts knowing that although, as for Abraham and Sarah, the realization of our dreams may seem a world away, by being willing to hope for that world, to work for that world, it comes closer. And that God works through ordinary people who waver, who wonder, who don’t always count ourselves among the faithful, but who in our better moments, work for the Kingdom, and stake our lives on the alternate reality we often see only dimly, and hope that indeed nothing is too wonderful for the Lord. Amen..