Grandma Moses
When is the right time to begin a career? For many people, it is after a time of study and preparation. In more recent history, people have sought degrees or some sort of professional credentials in the field of their anticipated profession. In the older model, folks would seek an apprenticeship with a master in the field and would learn on the job. In either case, the “right time” to begin a career is after a period of preparation and practice. Only after we have proven ourselves to some degree, only after we have demonstrated the requisite knowledge and control do we cross the stage and enter into the profession. And there is a certain logic in this sequence. I don’t know about you, but I would not submit to a surgery performed by a surgeon whose only qualification is reading a book, but who’d never prepared or practiced for surgery, who’d never actually wielded a knife.
And yet, history is filled with counterexamples in which people have wandered into a career late in life and with little or no formal preparation. I remember learning about Grandma Moses in grade school. I was fascinated to learn that she took up painting in her eighties and without any serious schooling. Earlier in life, she had been a quilter. But when her arthritis advanced in old age and made embroidery painful, she took up painting. She didn’t have all of the proper materials, but that didn’t stop her. When she needed to depict tiny details, like mouths or eyes, she used pins or matches. She wasn’t bothered by proper technique either. When her right hand began hurting, she just switched hands and painted with her left.
The lack of artistic knowledge and control did not stop Grandma Moses, as it certainly would have for me. (How often do I say, “Not yet. Not until I’m more prepared.”) Grandma Moses could paint because she was not concerned with results or achievements. She could paint because she did not care what the art critics said.
But perhaps the greatest basis for Grandma Moses’ painting was her trust that there was always more life. Quilting was too painful? No matter, there must be something else….Why not paint?
“The Time of Life”
Today’s scripture is not unlike the story of Grandma Moses. To begin, it is covered in the creases and wrinkles of old age. It is attuned to the meaning of time, namely the loss of ability and control that, after a certain point, we all suffer with each passing day. When the divine messengers inform Abraham that his wife Sarah will have a child soon, the storyteller reminds us that they are both “old, advanced in age” (Gen 18:11). Sarah is ninety. Abraham is ninety-nine. Sarah starts laughing. “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” (Gen 18:12). That word “pleasure,” by the way, is ednah, which comes from the same root as Eden, as in “the garden of Eden.” Eden seems so distant from this world, Sarah says; yet the divine messengers suggest it is not. Jesus himself would later insist, “The kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21).
The story of unlikely birth is a firm favorite of the Old Testament. In Genesis alone, it happens on four different occasions. Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Tamar all face impossible odds in their quest to have a child (Gen 11:30; 25:21; 29:31; 38:11). Yet in each case, life prevails. They beat the odds with the help of God’s invisible power. I choose to believe that the underlying message of these unlikely births is not literal. The Old Testament is not saying that God is the one who will guarantee the conception and birth of children. I know too many couples who have prayed for decades and tried every possible means and have not had children, and I cannot believe that they are somehow lacking in faith or God has rejected their prayers. Instead, I think the underlying message of these unlikely births is more universal. Life prevails. At the moment when life seems past us, God’s invisible power is at work to raise us to new life.
In their announcement to Abraham, the divine messengers use a curious turn of phrase: Sarah will have a son “in due season,” ka‘et chayyah (Gen 18:10, 14). Literally, “at the time of life.” What does that mean? Some scholars suggest it is a euphemism for the period of gestation. Others suggest it is a poetic reference to springtime. But I wonder if it is not simply a reminder of God’s strange, roundabout timing. Sarah thinks life and Eden have past her by. For her, this is the time of creases and wrinkles, the time of loss and deterioration. But the divine messengers say otherwise. For them, now is “the time of life.”
“Forcing Things”
Versus Trust
In one of the other lectionary scriptures for today, Paul marvels at God’s strange, roundabout timing. “While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly….While we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:6, 8). From Paul’s perspective, the wonder of God’s care is that it comes to us when we seem to deserve it least: “while we were still weak,” “while we still were sinners.” The logic of our world is that we must first have our lives in order, we must first demonstrate the requisite knowledge and control before we receive the gifts of life. But God confounds the logic of our world. “At the right time Christ died…” The “right time” for God is the precise moment when we realize that we are weak and not in control, the moment when life seems to have past us by.
Faith is not getting our lives in order as much as it is learning to trust in God’s care. For Sarah in today’s scripture, it is learning to trust that now is not only the time of wrinkles and creases, the time of loss and diminishing, but also “the time of life.” For Grandma Moses, it was trusting that, even as she lost the ability to quilt, there was yet more life.
A little earlier in Genesis, Sarah senses her old age and in desperation tries to force things. She essentially opts for a surrogate pregnancy through her Egyptian maidservant, Hagar. But when Hagar becomes pregnant, Sarah feels even more worthless—“less than” her own maidservant. So, she “deals harshly” with Hagar (Gen 16:6). She mistreats her until Hagar runs away into the wilderness.
Commentators have long criticized Sarah for choosing surrogate motherhood. She did not have faith in God, they say. But I have some sympathy for her. She was seventy-five at the time. She herself had not heard any promise from God that she would bear children. So, after years of waiting, she took some initiative. One could even say she did trust that now is “the time of life”; she had not given up hope for a child. But where she loses faith, I think—where she goes astray—is in the employment of force upon her maidservant, first in the unilateral demand that Hagar conceive for her, and then certainly in the physical abuse that results in Hagar’s flight into the desert. The early followers of Christ were unequivocal in their condemnation of force. “Compulsion is not God’s way of working,” writes the author of the Epistle to Diognetus. God “does not use violent means to obtain what he desires,” writes Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon. My favorite comes from Clement of Alexandra, who writes, “God does not compel, since force is hateful to God, but He provides for those who seek.”[1]
All of this is to say, the “right time” for God is not the moment when I’m in control and have everything in order, but the moment when I acknowledge that I’m not in control and instead seek God’s provision. It is only when Sarah has given up designs on the future that God’s care reveals itself in a surprising way. It is only when Grandma Moses relinquishes quilting that she discovers the joy of painting. The good news of today’s scriptures is that God’s timing is not correlated to our ability, but to our inability. When we cannot do it on our own, is “the right time” for God, the “time of life.” It is the moment when we are invited to trust in the invisible care of God, which manifests in new life that we could not foresee.
Prayer
Whose timing often confounds
Our expectations and plans,
Sometimes slowing us down when we’re in a hurry,
Sometimes surprising us when we’ve given up,
Always renewing us when we acknowledge
Our lack of control
…
Help us to know
That “now” is the time of life;
That we are right where we are supposed to be;
And that the kingdom of God is near.
In Christ, who died while we were still weak: Amen.
[1] Alan
Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of
Christianity in the Roman Empire (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016), 119.
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