Sermon for June 8, 2008

Genesis 12:1-9 June 8th 2008

12 Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
4 So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, 6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 Then the LORD appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the LORD, who had appeared to him. 8 From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the LORD and invoked the name of the LORD. 9 And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.


In the Name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel. Amen.


The problem with the way most of us hear scripture is that we hear it in little excerpts of just a few verses. On Sunday mornings we are given no context. This morning’s introduction of Abraham and Sarah is a case in point.
- The saga of these people is too great and too important to be heard in snippets, nine verses at a time. Abraham was a huge character who deserves a bigger stage, whose story needs to be told in a bigger sweep than any one lesson can contain.... so we’ll look beyond this morning’s text to reach a fuller understanding... I am grateful to my colleague Barbara Taylor for the way she tells a tale.

The people at the center of this story we know best as Abraham and Sarah, but as the story opens they are Abram and Sarai. We’ll get to how their names were changed in a few minutes.

In the story we just heard about Abram, this is the first time the old patriarch had actually heard the voice of God. Abram was 75 years old and he had traipsed up from Babylon into Syria with his father’s clan and with his own wife Sarai.

Then we are told that the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

And when they got to Canaan, God added, “To your offspring I will give this land.”

Now on the face of it - as we might casually hear it - that’s pretty neat. Abram’s kids are going to inherit quite an estate.
- The problem is that all we know about Abram and Sarai as this story opens is that Sarai is barren. No children. And that was about the worst thing that could happen to a couple in those days. To make matters worse, Abram was 75 while Sarai was 66. The prospects weren’t good; nonetheless, Abram built an altar in thanksgiving for the promise. And he began to hope.

Taking the story of Abram and Sarai beyond this morning’s reading, God popped up every few years and reiterated the promise. “To your descendants I will give this land.”
- But there was the same problem: no descendants.

Then there was a famine in the land so Abram’s household moved to Egypt which always had plenty of grain.

In Egypt, Abram didn’t show the best of his character. The Genesis writer tells us that Sarai was very beautiful and Abram was afraid that the Egyptians would kill him in order to claim Sarai, even though she was in her 70s. So Abram said she was his sister, at which point Pharaoh claimed her as a concubine. In return, Abram got status and servants and became rich. There is an unflattering term for men who do what Abram did.

Somehow when Pharaoh learned that he had been tricked he just kicked Abram and Sarai out when he really had just cause to kill Abram. But that would have spoiled the plot.

So Abram and his household returned to Canaan with his nephew Lot and his tribe. After arguments broke out between Abram’s herders and Lot’s herders, in order to avoid a blood feud they agreed to part company. Lot took his family into the land East of the Jordan River while Abram stayed in the hills to the West.

But still there was no child. They were 87 and 78 yet still there was no clear sign that God was going to keep the promise. So Sarai convinced Abram that he should hedge his bets. “Have a child with my servant Hagar,” Sarai suggested. So he did and the result was a son named Ishmael.

This is the first instance in the bible of a blended family, and it didn’t work too well. Sarai was jealous and Hagar was kind of smug. The years rolled by and it must have been difficult for everybody. Hagar feeling that she was not getting the respect she deserved, Sarai feeling like a failure.
Ishmael as an adolescent knowing he is viewed as second best, even though he is the heir apparent. And there was Abram. Abram who would go out into the sky bright night hoping to hear that voice again. Hoping to hear some detail of how things would unfold.

“What’s up?” Sarai would ask. “Nothing,” he’d reply, as he chewed on a stem of sage grass.

And then when Abram was 99 while Sarai was a spring chicken of only 90, the voice came again.

“I am God Almighty,” God said, though what he actually said was in Hebrew: “I am El Shaddai.”
- That was rather important. God had told Abram his name, El Shaddai. A few hundred years later he’d use a different name when he introduces himself to Moses. Then the name will be Yahweh. But for Abram it was El Shaddai. And El Shaddai said to Abram something that might sound like a small thing to us but it was a big deal to the patriarch. “You shall no longer be called Abram” God said. “Instead you will be called Abraham,” which means “father of a multitude.”

Throughout scripture people are given new names and it always signifies a changed relationship. God seems to be moving into a higher gear.
- “And your wife will no longer be Sarai but will be Sarah,” God adds. Than means “princess.”

That was a bit of a puzzle still, because Sarah was still childless, even with the new name.
- The puzzle seems just to be extended when three messengers come, apparently from God, and inform the couple that they are going to have a son. Abraham seems to have laughed in renewed hope while Sarah laughed in derision. She was, after all, as scripture tells us, “past the age of child bearing.”
- But it’s still all promise and no action. Sarah is yet to wake up sick one morning and realize that she has something important to tell her husband.

As you might understand, the mood in the camp was not always easy. Hagar apparently became rather snippy and refused to address “Princess” by her new name. Abraham's name of “Father of a Multitude” seemed like a cruel joke to everybody who loved him and like crazy arrogance to everybody else.

There are a few more memorable stories in the Abraham saga, like the departure of Hagar and Ishmael and when the patriarch almost killed the son he had only waited a century to get. And there was the incident at Sodom and Gomorra. But they will hold for other sermons.

Starting with this morning’s reading and extending for twenty-four years, all that Abraham and Sarah had to go on was a series of promises the realization of which only seemed to get less and less likely.
- But still they lived with hope.

That must have been really hard. It maybe feel a bit dumb to allow yourself to be that gullible.

What this whole story tells us is that it’s a hard thing to live by a promise - live by it day in and month out, year by year to be reminded of it by the night sky and by the murmur of your lover by your side and even by your own name that was given to you in a special moment.

It is hard to believe in a promise that you cannot make come true. You simply cannot wrap up this particular train set on behalf of Santa Claus.

Everything is future tense. Whenever God speaks, all the blessings are yet to come. You will receive the land; you will have a son; the world will be blessed through you. So what is there to live on right now we might ask.

Well, where might we look for such food for the spirit? What better way is there to live than to be shaped by a promise, and a divine one at that?
- This story is telling us that that’s a pretty good way to begin a day - wondering what foretaste of the promise might be waiting nearby.
- And so, we latter day Abrahams and Sarahs do not live with wistful backward glances, nor are we to complain about any present dysfunction. God calls us to look forward with hope.
- That is what we are called to here at Emmanuel Church. Whatever we know of old disappointments and present disagreements pails next to the promise that we are bound for glory.
- A couple of weeks ago Michael Summers joked about a plot he was hatching to make Emmanuel Parish, Keyser into the flagship parish of a revitalized Anglican Communion. That might be a little over the top, but it’s the right direction.
- Our task, it seems to me, is to set a course and then let God set the timetable.
- A life lived with such a focus could relax into appreciating every day as it passes. Every encounter, each moment, is a seed that can be nurtured to bear fruit - and it is all promise. The world itself is the voice of God, inviting us to live with hope, to be awake to the possibilities and to know that everything echoes the heartbeat of God, that everything is holy.

That is what Abraham and Sarah learned. For twenty-four years they lived with a hope that hung precariously from a promise from God. For a quarter of a century they tended their flocks, moved through famine and wealth, deception and mercy, family alienation and the sweet gentleness of old age, always with an awareness of God’s promise leading them forward. And apparently they enjoyed each other as husband and wife.

Then one spring morning as Abraham neared his 100th birthday and Sarah was 90, she awoke to a new queeziness in her belly. Her husband who had come in the previous night from gazing up into the countless stars as he often did, was sleeping softly beside her.
- She shook him gently. “Abraham,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”