Father of Us All

Propers: The Second Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Abraham—for he is the father of us all.”

What a thing to say. What do you suppose St Paul means when he writes that? How could Abraham be the father of us all? Is he Noah? Is he Adam? Are we all descended from his seed?

Abraham is, of course, the literal father of many nations. His son Isaac would go on to be the patriarch of the Twelve Tribes of Israel and of the Jewish people; while his other son, Ishmael, would be claimed as ancestor by the Arabian tribes and hence the many nations of Islam. But Paul, in writing to the Christians at Rome, is not limiting his audience to Arabs and to Jews. Though he is himself a descendant of Abraham through Isaac and Israel, nevertheless, the community to which Paul writes is made up of Greeks, Romans, North Africans—all the gentile nations to be found in the great urban centers of the ancient world.

When God cut the covenant with Abraham, promising him descendants as numerous as the sands of the beach and the stars of the sky, it didn’t have anything to do with something Abraham had offered or done. God did not choose Abraham out of all the peoples of the earth because he was strong or wise or wealthy in human terms. Quite the opposite: Abraham was an old man, “as good as dead,” called to leave behind his people and his country, to wander childless and friendless in a hostile foreign land.

It’s almost as though God picked the least likely person on the planet, someone of little to no worth in the eyes of the world, to be His secret weapon, His stealth champion for the salvation of the cosmos. And God promised this old homeless Abraham that he and his wife Sarah would be God’s people, and that He would be their God. He would make of them a family, and of that family a people, and of that people a nation, and of that nation a blessing for all the peoples of the earth!

These were wild, impossible, outlandish promises—and Abraham believed them. Abraham had faith. And God reckoned that faith unto him as righteousness.

In other words, what pleased God about Abraham was not his pedigree or his pocketbook or even his personal character. It was none of the things that Abraham might be able to do or to say or to benefit the Lord. Rather, what mattered to God was that Abraham trusted in God, believed in God, had faith in God’s promises even when those promises seemed so ridiculous as to cause Sarah (the more sensible of the two) to burst out laughing in His face.

So you see, writes Paul, that the all the promises God gave to Abraham were inherited not by the flesh, not by blood, but by faith, pure and simple. And so the true descendants of Abraham, the true children who inherit his promise, are not limited to those who share in the blood of Abraham, but include all those who share in the faith of Abraham.

And keep in mind what St Paul means here by faith. Faith doesn’t mean that we hold the proper opinion on given dogmas or doctrines. Faith isn’t something that one produces through sheer force of will or strength of character. Faith means simply that we trust in God, come what may: we trust that God loves us, God sees us, and God will never abandon us. This doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen. They will, just as they happened to Abraham before us. But through it all, God is with us, God suffers with us, and God will see us through.

To have faith in a promise, after all, is really to have faith in the One who makes the promise. And not even death can stop the promises of God. As God reckoned Abraham’s faith as righteousness, writes Paul, so too shall God reckon it “to us who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.” We are children of Abraham who inherit the promises of Abraham, not through our flesh but through our faith. And even this is not some work or credit of our own, but is the gracious outpouring of the Holy Spirit within our bodies and our souls.

We trust in God, and God does not disappoint. All others may break their promises, we may well break them ourselves, yet God never breaks His. This is our faith.

So then, Abraham is the father of Christians by faith. All well and good.

But that’s still not what Paul says. Paul doesn’t say that Abraham is the father of some by flesh and of others by faith. He pushes it farther than that. Paul writes that Abraham “is the father of us all.” As it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations,” and in Greek “many” is often an idiom for “all,” which is how Paul here explicitly takes it: Abraham is the father of us all. And that should give us pause, for I do not think St Paul writes such things lightly.

The Bible, brothers and sisters, contains within it many passages of judgment, of fire and brimstone, of the wrath of God poured out upon the wicked. Some of these leave us wondering if many people, at all, will be saved. Yet there are other passages perhaps more scandalous in that they seem to promise universal restoration, the eventual salvation of all mankind and of all Creation. And these latter verses outnumber the former by quite a stretch.

Paul is at pains to express to us that Jesus Christ, in His life, death, and Resurrection, has overthrown the corrupted powers of the cosmos, and restored the rightful rule of God throughout the whole of Creation. He believes that there will be a judgment. He believes that some will be saved “as through fire.” Yet Paul also believes that the victory of Christ will someday come in full, when He will hand over the Kingdom to His Father and God at last will be all in all.

These visions are not contradictory. We need not choose the one or the other. Many of the wisest and most faithful men and women of the Christian tradition have seen the two as one: that the wrathful judgment of God and the merciful salvation of God are in fact one and the same truth experienced differently. We must all answer for what we have done, every cruel action, every careless word. There is a punishment for sin, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” But the punishment is also the mercy, in that our sentence is the removal of that sin, the purification of our souls.

God would not be just (in any way that we can understand) if He granted some unmerited eternal bliss and others eternal torment. Nor would God be merciful if He admitted us to Heaven still twisted and broken in our sin. In the words of George MacDonald, “There is no heaven with a little of hell in it—no place to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.”

That’s what God wants for us: wholeness, life, and glory. Remember what he said to Abraham at the beginning: “I am God Almighty; walk before Me and be blameless.” The Lord did not say this because Abraham was already blameless and therefore fit to walk before God. Rather, He said this because God Himself, in His mercy and His justice, would make Abraham blameless, would cleanse him of his sin.

Look, despite numerous claims to the contrary, the clergy have no comprehensive blueprint for the mechanics of salvation. God did not pass down to us on golden plates an Illustrated Atlas of Heaven and Hell. What we have is a promise—the same promise given to Abraham—that God loves us, forgives us, and claims us as His own. God and Man are reconciled in the person of the Risen Christ.

We put our faith not in esoteric doctrines dissecting the afterlife but in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who died for our sins and rose for our salvation. That’s how much God loves you: all the way to hell and back. That’s how much he loves all of us. It may well be that at the last all come to faith in Christ; all are made one with God in Him.

Thus would Abraham truly be, without exception, the father of us all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.