If you look on your weekly reading schedule, you will notice that we are entering a long journey to fall, void of holidays which some churches call “Ordinary Time.” Sounds exciting, eh? Fall and winter have days of expectation, looking towards Christmas, while spring has days of reflection and fasting leading up to our celebration of the Resurrection of Christ. But now, we enter back into the world of the ordinary…the world we have known during most of our lifetime. I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to get through “ordinary” times…I want something to strive towards. As we enter into ordinary time, we are presented with a story of expectation in the form of a promise. This promise brings hope in the midst of hopelessness, and in doing so, reveals Truth about God’s mission to save the world. This truth is what we need to cling to as we enter back into the world as we know it: the world of the ordinary.
In order to grasp what’s happening in this story, we must look back at Abram’s past. Abram is a man who abandons his home, his relatives and his inheritance in order to seek out a land that a foreign god has promised to him. Abram takes this god at his word, and sets out. Later on, Abram finds out that his wife, Sara, is unable to conceive a child. Thus, having abandoned his homeland, Abram must look to his nephew, Lot, to carry on his family name. Lot proves to be selfish and quarrelsome, and lo and behold, Lot and Abram decide to part ways. Are you beginning to see a theme? Even Abram arrives at the land promised to him…even as he conquers peoples and collects blessings and possessions…Abram has no one to carry on his legacy. If Abram were to die, then the story of his great trek across the world, and of all his victories…even the inheritance of a promised land…would vanish on the wind.
This story sets up Abram as a prophet of God, meaning that Abram is a point of contact between heaven and earth. The prophets most known to us tend to reveal God’s Word, although some reveal God to the world through certain actions. Here, procreation is Abram’s prophetic mission, carrying on God’s promise to fill a void world with life. The structure of the story follows other stories of prophetic call: Abram addresses God as “O Lord God”; Abram responds to God’s promise with a complication or concern; God responds with staggering reassurance. All of these details mirror other stories such as the calling of Gideon, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Abram belongs to a line of prophets, and God’s promise of procreation involves much more than simply providing an heir to the family empire. God wants to heal the earth through Abram…He wants to make a blessing out of a curse.
At the same time, Abram confronts one of the greatest perils facing humanity. We all face this conflict daily in our lives…this conflict is that: things change. When we take the time to learn about something…when we measure it, and study it, and reflect upon it…in time, we later find some new mystery that confounds our mind. When set out our plans…when we wait, and gather, and prepare…some new conflict arises to throw us off course. When we spend time getting to know someone…when we listen to them, and share with them, and invest in them…the situation changes, and we find ourselves having to adapt once again. The world is ever changing…the ancient philosopher Heraclitus once said that “you can never step into the same river twice”, because a river is constantly moving. Every time Abram found a secure foothold on this promise that God had made, the plan would change. New details would arise, and people would change their mind. Do we not face these problems daily in our lives? As this river of life keeps shifting…if everything we know and plan and invest in keeps moving and changing…how can we trust anything? How can we trust anyone?
And so, Abram responds to God’s promise with a borderline insult. Imagine the situation: Abram cannot have a son, so he chooses a nephew as his heir. This is not an ideal situation, but at least his acquired property and namesake will pass on into the future. Then, when Abram and Lot part ways, Abram can only imagine his inheritance passing on to his butler. This is somewhat of an embarrassment, and surely not what Abram imagined when God promised him so much at Abram’s calling. God has not promised a specific heir up to this point, so Abram has no idea what God has planned for him. Even Abram’s financial victories are lonely, as he cannot share his earnings with a child. All that Abram knows now is failure and abandonment, save for the persistent voice of this strange God who continually speaks.
However, without such hardship, Abram could not have mined the absolute depths of trust. Had he not abandoned his home…or if Sara’s womb had been fertile…or if his heir apparent had not abandoned him, Abram would not have felt his foundation shaken to its core. He would not have known how to trust, because he would have had no need to trust. It is this tension that we face as humans, the tension between brokenness and promise. Blaise Pascal describes the importance of this tension: “It is dangerous to show man too clearly how much alike he is to the beasts without showing him his greatness. It is also dangerous to show him too clearly his greatness without showing him his lowliness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both, but it is very advantageous to show him both.” The brokenness of humanity is hard for us to bear, but even in our depravity, God has found a way for this brokenness to bear His promise of salvation for the world…much in the same way that God still brings green growth from a cursed, famine-stricken land. The foundation of trust is a startling realization of our own need…that left to our own power, we are an abyss of nothingness.
And yet, God never fails us. When Paul interprets this passage, he reads verse 6 as crediting Abram with righteousness for his belief in God, and subsequently, the majority of Christians follow Paul’s reading of this passage. In talking with my friend Beef on this passage, he pointed me to an interpretation of verse 6, which reads something like, “the Lord reckoned it to Himself as righteousness.” Think about it for a second…that Abram places his full trust in God continually, he is passing judgment on God and saying, “You are righteous. You are worthy to be trusted.” Of course, God does not need this judgment…but Abram does. In trusting God, Abram begins to understand God’s identity on a personal level. Abram is not trusting in a promise…he is not focused on what he will gain out of this journey into foreign lands. Abram begins to trust God as a Person. He trusts the living God…and through this learning experience, Abram is becoming intimate with the Person of God. Living in covenant with God changes Abram…it changes the way he sees the world, and it changes the way he sees God.
Today, each one of us could stand up, walk out the front door of this building, and look out upon drought. We can each walk just down the road, knock on some doors and see famine. If we can strike up a conversation with several people on the corner of Weaver, or down Franklin, or at the intersection of 15-501 and Mt. Moriah at New Hope Commons…if you speak to enough people anywhere in this world…you can see brokenness. This is the world we live in…this is the ordinary. But when God looks into the ordinary, He sees promise. And if we spend enough time with Him…if we can reach a level of intimacy where we know Him, in the deep sense of that word, then we can see God in the ordinary. My friends, God is here. God is amongst us, and He is harvesting great promise from the driest plots of earth. He is giving Himself to fill empty stomachs the daily bread that He has promised. He is fixing the ruined beauty of His creation, just as He promised Noah as the baptismal waters of the Flood receded. God is everywhere in the land of the ordinary, because His promise to be with us endures at all times. He is with us, now and always, in special times, and ordinary. World without end. Amen.
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