In our lesson from Genesis today we heard about the promise God makes to Abram. Let us take a moment and put our lesson from today in context. Abram and Sarai – who become father Abraham and mother Sarah are introduced in scripture a few chapters earlier toward the end of chapter 11 where it reads:
Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran was the father of Lot. Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans. Abram and Nahor took wives; the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah.
Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.
It is curious that aside from being Abram’s wife, the first thing we learn about Sarai is that she is childless. This stands out in a world where God had commanded the people to “be fruitful and multiply”
Shortly after we are told this about Sarai, Abram is told:
“Get up and Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 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. 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.
In the Hebrew, the first phrase that we often translate as “go” is an imperative. It can be translated “get up and go.”
And like you do when God commands, Abram and Sarai went. They went with the promise that God had spoken to Abram that God would make of him a great nation . They set forth to go to the land of Canaan. But they didn’t stop there, even though the Lord promised the land to Abram’s offspring. They went past Bethel and Ai, and continued on toward the Negev. There they encountered a famine, so they continued on to Egypt. After leaving Egypt, and separating from Lot at the plain of the Jordan river, Abram and Sarai settled in Canaan. While in Canaan, God came to Abram and said
“Raise your eyes now, and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward; for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever. I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth; so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. Rise up, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.”
So Abram moves his tent – which really means, he uprooted his family and flocks and all his possessions and moved to Hebron.
While living in Hebron, he receives news that his nephew Lot has been taken captive in Sodom. So he takes his men to go and rescue Lot. They are successful in their mission and based on what scripture tells us, we can extrapolate that they safely returned to the Oaks of Mamre in Hebron.
Let’s recap. God has commanded Abram to get up and go from his father’s house, to leave all that he has ever known and go to a new land and that God would make a great nation of him. Later, God reiterates the promise that Abram’s offspring would be a numerous as the dust of the earth.
God has repeated the promises that God has made twice. In return, Abram has obeyed and trusted and along the way has been blessed with material wealth, servants, flocks of animals, even as he and Sarai wait for God to provide a child of their own.
This brings us to where our scripture picks up in Genesis 15.
The first words are, “After these things” — which we can understand as “and after a really long time” — “the Lord spoke to Abram in a vision, saying – ‘Do not be afraid.’”
Those words “do not be afraid” (al-tira’ in Hebrew) mean “You are about to hear good news.” Over and over throughout the prophetic books and even into the New Testament, when a message from God starts with “do not be afraid” it means that good news is about to be heard.
(Correspondingly, when a message from God starts with “woe,” the message is not going to be good news).
God continues “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”
And here is where it gets interesting. Abram who has been faithful and done all that God has asked up to this point says “O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus? You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.”
When I read this, i can hear the frustration in Abram’s words. From his perspective, he has been faithful to God’s commands. He has done all that is asked of him – leaving behind everything he had known and traveling down into Egypt and back again. Lots of time has passed and Abram and Sarai are not young and they still don’t have the promised child. This isn’t just selfish where is my child, but this is a worry about the future. About how they will continue to live and pass on their traditions, stories, and continue the family. I believe that Abram’s words here are motivated by fear, not selfishness.
Hearing this God reassures and responds to Abram – This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.” He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be.”
Scriptures tells us that Abram believed the Lord God and it was counted to him as righteousness. It is interesting to note that the Hebrew word that we translate as “believed” can also be translated as “trusted”, which adds a fuller dimension to the relationship between God and Abram. It is more relational and less authoritarian.
“It was counted to him as Righteousness” Righteousness is most often defined as acting appropriately or justly within a relationship, but in this conversation with God, Abram has taken no action; He has trusted in the promise that God has made and it is his trust in God’s promises that constitutes his righteousness. It is his trust that puts him in a right relationship with God.
Immediately after this God declares “I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess”
Abram’s response is to believe, or trust, what God has said but still he questions. O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?”
Again, Abrams fear wins out over his trust. Here I think Abram echos the common refrain of all of humanity – “How can I be sure?”
In response God Commands Abram to “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon”
Abram then performs a ritual with the animals and falls into a deep slumber. While sleeping God tells him the future – telling Abram that his offspring will be slaves in Egypt for 400 years, but eventually, they will be freed. Then scriptures says that the sun went down and a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces and that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram.
In preparing for this sermon, I found that the rite described in these verses is a rite of self-obligation that commits the one passing between the halves of the animals to a promise and invoking a fate similar to that of the halved animals if the promise is not fulfilled. What is remarkable about this is that it is not Abram committing to this fate if the promise of broken, but God, as represented by the smoking fire pot and flaming torch passing between the animal halves, is the one undertaking the obligation of the ritual.
This is often read as a covenant text, but when reading verse 18 closely we might see that this is not quite a covenant in the strictest sense of the word. Verse 18 reads “On that day YHWH made a covenant with Abram,” In the true covenant form, each party has obligations on both sides of the agreement. In this case it is only God who is undertaking a promise—Abram is not obligating himself to do anything. The ceremony is rather a solemn promise by YHWH, reinforced by a ritual ceremony.
The dialogues of verses 1–6 and 7–21, including the somewhat gruesome rehearsal of consequences if God’s promises are broken, point to the seriousness of God in making the promises and also in keeping them. Abram can trust in those promises, and his trust puts him into the right relationship with the One who promises.
Although God is good to us, quite often, we do not trust God. Like most of us, Abram knows that he is not all that good or all that deserving. it is difficult for him to believe and accept that he might be blessed beyond measure. Yet God continues to bless Abram. However, in true human fashion Abram is uncooperative. Too often we find divine generosity so overwhelming that we dispute it .
Perhaps it is this incredible generosity that is so difficult for many of us to accept. We like to think of ourselves as being people who inherently trust God. Yet H. Richard Niebuhr, Sterling Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School, repeatedly maintained that the first response of humanity toward God is that of distrust.
Like many of us, Abram lives daily with doubt and anxiety. For Abram to keep the faith, God must powerfully and directly reconfirm the divine covenant. I believe that Abram is us. We have heard the promises of God. We are often blessed in ways large and small. Doubt creeps in and we start scheming and looking for ways where we might fulfill the promises that have been made to us, rather than accept that waiting is also part of the plan. God insists that Abram’s reward is great, but it is a future promise. Abram is willing to wait on God’s future promise of an heir, but he demands an immediate sign of the promise.
That demand for an immediate sign might be read as a lament to God.
“O Lord, How am i to know that you keep your promises?” Laments might also be characterized as complaints. I’m not saying that complaining is wrong or not justified, I believe we all complain to God. I know that I am guilty of this. A simple example is my own waiting and looking for a call. I trust that the call is there, but I must admit, i complain to God because it seems like i am continuing to wait. So i complain. And i lament.
Rolf Jacobson, professor of Hebrew Scriptures at Luther Seminary says that in lament or complaint to God – we do three things:
1: we make our problems into God’s problems. The act of telling God about our unmet hopes and our deepest hurts is to implicate God in those hurts and hopes.
2: complaining to God is an act of faith on our part. In the act of lamenting to God, we are showing that we have faith that God will hear us and has the power and ability to respond. We believe that God is faithful to both creation and to divine promises.
3: when complaining about those things about which God has promised, we are reminding God about those as of yet unmet promises.
As we can see from Abram’s story, as a response to lament and complaint about unmet promises, God doubles down on the promise to the point that God makes a ritual oath that the punishment will be on God’s own self if the promise is not kept.
Often we characterize our relationship with God as one of command and subservience this might be characterized as a patriarchal understanding of God – with God as head of household, or as a supreme leader or dictator who must be obeyed or we will suffer horrible consequences. Scholar Flora Keshgegian defines that patriarchal relationship in the following way “The right relationship we have with God is a formal one,” is is the relationship “of a subordinate to a superior, of a child to a formidable parent. God provides and we accept, gratefully and humbly.
She goes on to criticize this patriarchal understanding of God as limiting. She says “There is no room for reciprocity or mutuality or even closeness in such a relationship.” When looking at Abram and God’s relationship, Abram trusts and obeys, but when Abram questions, it is God’s actions in undertaking the ritual obligation that show that God will take the blame and suffer the consequences if the covenant is broken. God does not ask Abram for anything more than Abram has already provided.
Instead when faced with Abram’s questions, and I believe that when faced with our questions, God chooses to expand God’s promises. God does not ask us for more, rather God chooses to take the promise and obligations onto God’s own self.
For Abram, when the Lord passed between the halves of the goat, the sheep, the ram and between the dead birds, the Lord was saying to Abram, “I promise to give you both descendants and land. As a guarantee of that promise, I pledge my very life — the life of God. If I fail to keep this promise, let me be slain – just as the goat, the sheep and the ram were slain.”
I believe that in the promises God made to Abram, we see the lengths that God will go to in order to continue to be in right relationship with humanity. As followers of Christ, we believe that God is faithful – and that in order to be faithful to creation, to Abram and Sarai’s descendants, and to the promises made to David, ultimately God took on human flesh, walked down the lonely path, and died. God did all of these things so that we might have life and life abundantly.
As we continue our Lenten journey, and our understanding of the seriousness in which God undertakes God’s promises, let us both as individuals and as a community, consider how we can extend those promises and be in right relationship with our community, our neighbors, and even the rest of the world
Sisters and brothers in Christ, what do we believe?
We believe that in life and in death, we belong to God.
Matthew Messenger 