The Promise of the Future
I remember being seventeen and gathered with a handful of friends one Friday night, a couple of us leaning on the trunk of a car, others sitting on the curb in a neighborhood cul-de-sac not far off Pump Road. We had been playing video games to pass the time, but it seemed that video games could not hold our attention when there was something much bigger looming ahead of us all.
The sky that night was as flush with stars as our hearts were with the future. College was less than a year away. It felt as though a cosmic-sized door were about to open, spilling before us untold possibilities–the careers we might pursue, the people we might meet, the places we might go.
I don’t remember a single word spoken that night. It’s just as well. We were all shooting in the dark. What I remember was the feeling of promise. As much as we had enjoyed our lives so far–and, the drama of a teenager’s existence notwithstanding, I imagine we’d all mostly enjoyed our lives–it felt somehow as though life was only now beginning.
An Unlikely Dreamer
At eighty-five, Abraham (we’ll call him by his eventual name) is long past any youthful sense of possibility and promise. Whatever doors had once been open to him, they have one by one been shut–just as it seems, for example, that his own wife’s womb has been shut. Abraham is now an old man without child, an immigrant far from home, at the mercy of foreign rulers and their policies, dependent each year on a good harvest. Abraham is on the bottom rung of the ladder, and at this stage he is too weak to climb.
All of this to say, Abraham is worlds away from where I was that night when I was seventeen. It is true that he has received promises from God, promises of land, descendants, and blessing. But as an eighty-five year-old nobody in a strange land, these promises seem more and more like a pipe dream, and Abraham is honest enough to say so. If we are to praise Abraham for his faith, as we so often do, it seems imperative that we also appreciate his honest doubts, because they are what immediately precede his legendary show of faith. They are the unlikely road to faith. In today’s passage, he twice voices his misgivings, one after the other without any space for God to respond in between. The impression of this eruption is of pent-up grievance no longer able to contain itself.
When God can finally get a word in, God responds with neither an explanation nor proof of power. Instead God simply invites Abraham outside and says, “Look up at the stars” (cf. Gen 16:5). And somehow, suddenly, Abraham is standing beneath the same sky that I stood beneath when I was seventeen. His heart is flush with the future. However many doors had been shut, that many more had suddenly opened up.
A Model of Faith
In his letter to the Romans, Paul holds up Abraham as the original model of faith (cf. Rom 4). Abraham’s “own body,” he says, “was already as good as dead” (Rom 4:19); yet Abraham believed in the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom 4:17). According to the example of Abraham, then, faith is not the natural feeling of promise and possibility that a privileged teenager feels when the world’s doors open wide before them. Faith, rather, is seeing a world of closed doors and trusting that God can open new ones. Faith is sitting beneath a night sky of stars as an eighty-five year old…and feeling like you’re seventeen, like life is just beginning. (Perhaps this is what the Psalmist means when he says the Lord regularly renews our youth [Ps 103:5]?)
But the incredible thing about Abraham’s faith is that it sees promise not only on the horizon of his own future. His faith concerns the fate of the world. God had promised that all the families of the earth will be blessed through Abraham and his family. To put this more simply: Abraham is the beginning of God’s grand reconciliation project. Paul says in his letter to the Galatians that the blessing God had promised Abraham finds its fulfillment in Christ (Gal 3:14, 16), which is another way of saying that Abraham’s faith is a precursor of Christ’s. When Abraham gazes up in wonder at the stars, he catches a glimpse of what Christ sees in its entirety, namely the promise of the kingdom of God. This is why Paul says (and John the Baptizer says it too!) that to be a true child of Abraham is not a matter of blood but a matter of seeing God’s promise, a matter of having faith in what God is doing (cf. Rom 4:16-18; Luke 3:8).
Becoming the Blessing
In Abraham, we see the beginning of what God is doing in Christ. What God is doing in all of us who have faith. It is no more a mistake or coincidence that Abraham is a nobody in the backwaters of the ancient world than that Jesus is an itinerant, homeless rabbi and an eventual criminal convicted and executed by the Roman Empire. This is how God works. This is how God’s grand project of reconciliation happens, believe it or not. Not with force from above. Not through the halls of power. God’s power is not of the sword but of the cross. It is not force but faith. It spreads not through edict but through example.
This is the meaning of God’s promise to Abraham in its most basic form: “I will bless you…so that you will be a blessing” (Gen 12:2)–or as it might be more literally translated, “I will bless you…now be a blessing.” Abraham will not be a mighty man who makes things happen. He will be a model–or what Jesus calls “salt” and “light” (Matt 5:13-16). God does not talk about what Abraham will do or accomplish but about who he will be. “You will be a blessing.” It’s not on Abraham to make things happen. We might say that at eighty-five-year-old in a strange land, that ship has sailed. It’s only on Abraham to be faithful to God, to trust God and follow God’s guidance. That, our scripture concludes, is what God considers “righteousness,” a word elsewhere translated as “justice.” Abraham’s faith, his faithful way of being, is God’s justice. It is how God is reconnecting the world, making it a better place.
In Abraham, we catch a glimpse of the peculiar truth of Christ that the end is not achieved through some other means–for example, that peace is not achieved through violence, or that love is not bought with gifts or secured through beauty. The peculiar truth of Christ is that the end is itself the means. (Peace is achieved only through peace. Love is achieved only through the selfless commitment of love.) In other words, Christ does not announce the kingdom of God and then say, “Here are the means we need to bring it to earth: lobby the nearest senator, get Caesar on God’s side, maybe sharpen your swords, and then we can employ the wealth and force of empire to establish God’s justice on earth.” No, Christ announces the kingdom of God and then begins to live the kingdom of God. By his way of being, Christ shows us the kingdom of God.
In the same way, at the very beginning of God’s reconciliation project, God calls Abraham: “Now be a blessing.”
Old Age: A Blessing or a Curse?
For some people, old age is a curse. The loss of control, right?
But for others, like Abraham, old age contains an invaluable blessing. For Abraham, the loss of control becomes an invitation to trust. With a body “as good as dead” (as Paul puts it so decorously!), Abraham puts his faith in the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom 4:17). And so it is that Abraham could stand under the stars as an eighty-five-year-old and feel like a seventeen year old–except that instead of imagining all the things that could happen to him, he is now trusting in what God will do through him.
Prayer
Holy God,
Who calls into existence the things that do not exist:
Lead us in the footsteps of Abraham,
Who was honest about his feelings and his doubts;
Who let go of control;
Who trusted your insistence
That blessing spreads through our way of being.
Lead us into the life and faith of Christ,
Whom we seek to follow,
In whose kingdom we seek to live,
And in whose spirit we pray: Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment