Kingdom of Promise

Propers: The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 18), AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

Faith is trust. It is not, as some would so often assert, a belief without any evidence. And neither is it naiveté, a willful blindness to the brokenness of the world around us. Faith is trust—that God is good, that God is with us, and that God will see us through.

And the more faith we have, the more trust we place in God, the less room we find for fear. Faith pushes out fear. Not because bad things won’t happen; they will. But if God is with us, and God is for us, then we are never truly alone, never truly lost. The terrible things that happen, the fears and disappointments and trauma which haunt us, are progressively revealed to be impotent. They shall pass away. They shall dissipate like smoke. And all that will be left for us shall be the love of God.

Understand what I’m saying. Faith doesn’t mean that life becomes all roses and sweet cream and rainbows. Quite the contrary: the life of faith is hard. It ends with a cross. But it does mean that God will not let evil have the final word. There is a healing beyond all pain, a forgiveness beyond all sin, a life beyond all death. It is the Father’s pleasure to give you this Kingdom, which is of course Himself.

God will draw you home at last, where He will heal every wound and dry every tear and set right every wrong which has ever befallen this world. This He has promised us, time and again, throughout all of human history, and sealed it with His Blood. He is the God of promise. And if you have faith—if you have deep and abiding trust in the promise of one who loves you—then the Kingdom is already ours, already and not yet. We have it and we hope for it, with one foot in time and one in eternity.

And so we are freed to live here and now beyond fear, beyond death, as children of the promise. Do you know God, do you trust God, do you love God? More importantly, do you know that God loves you? If so then you have faith; and with faith, eternal life.

Such is the model of Father Abraham, the progenitor of us all.

According to the book of Genesis, Abraham lived in Mesopotamia some 4,000 years ago. And his was something of a peripatetic life. He had religious visions—or perhaps auditions, as he appears to have been hearing more than seeing—and he trusted in them. Like Socrates, he had faith in the divine voice which spoke to him. Maybe today we’d think he was crazy. But then, he would almost certainly find most of what we do today to be certifiably insane.

Regardless, it worked out well for him. The voice of his god—which in time he understood to be the God, Creator of everything and everyone—guided him faithfully to prosperity and protection. Abraham started out in the story as a homeless old man. He ended up wealthy, powerful, propertied, and respected. He had everything, except the one thing he really truly wanted. God had promised Abraham that he would have a family; that this family would become a great nation; and that through this nation, God would bless all the families of the earth.

Yet Abraham began this journey already as good as dead, well past the life expectancy of his day or of ours. And as the years passed—five years, 10 years, 15—he still had no child, still had no family. He was a man with everything, and nothing. He kept getting older, his wife beyond menopausal. But God kept promising, and Abraham kept trusting. He had faith, not because he was stupid or naïve, but because he had come to trust in the God who had first loved him.

“I have no offspring,” quoth Abraham in our reading for this morning. “A slave will inherit everything I have.” No, says the Lord: “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be.” And Abraham believed the Lord; he trusted in His promise. And God reckoned this unto him as righteousness; not because he’d checked a box of belief; not because he adhered to the proper formulation of the creed; but because He trusted in God. He had faith that God will always keep His promise.

I hope you know the story. If not, I highly recommend you read it. Eventually Abraham and his wife Sarah do become parents; they have an only son, Isaac. And at one point Abraham trusts God so much that he is willing to offer Isaac unto death. And this shocks us, as it should, for is this not the son, the only son, the beloved son, for whom Abraham has longed and pined for all his livelong life? How could he give him up? But what Abraham was really doing was trusting that God is good.

He trusted that God would not do evil. He trusted that God would not break His promise. He trusted that even death and the grave cannot stop the purposes of God, that life should somehow outlive death. And he was right! He was right to trust in God. God did not demand the life of his son; indeed, He forbade the then-common practice of human sacrifice, child sacrifice, a deep and abiding taboo ever since. We may not think that Abraham should win father of the year. But he trusted his son to God. And God did not disappoint.

The moral of the story is not that we should be willing to commit violent acts for our faith. Rather, the point is that if God is good, if God is faithful, if God in fact is God, then He would never demand such a thing from us in the first place. God calls us to faith beyond violence. God calls us to live our faith, never to kill for it. And that takes trust. In a world of fear and firearms, nonviolence needs faith.

That’s why Abraham is the father of us all; not because we are descended from him according to the flesh—though perhaps some here have that honor—but because we are the children of his faith, of his trust, in the promise of his God. Just as God stayed with Abraham through thick and thin, triumph and tragedy, so does God stand with us in all our woes, all our doubts, all our failings and our failures. Abraham wasn’t perfect, and neither are we. But God was, and God is.

And so our faith is in Him rather than in ourselves. Beware, in fact, of placing your faith in your own faith; in thinking that you are saved because you trusted better than anyone else, and that’s what allowed God to save you. Sin is such a twisty thing, is it not? No, we have faith that even when our faith fails God is still faithful to us. He will keep His promise, even when we don’t believe it.

Why? Because it is our Father’s good pleasure to give us the Kingdom, which is of course Himself. That’s where our treasure is. That’s what we trust in. Everything else will fail. We ourselves will fail. Jesus never will. Nothing and no-one can take us from Him: not death, not hell, not sin; not even when we nail Him to the Cross. Nothing can stop Him from loving you, forgiving you, and raising you up from the dead. And you’d best square with that.

So be dressed and ready for action. Keep your lamps trimmed and burning. You know not when the Master will come. You know that He will, that He keeps all His promises, and that in eternity the whole of our faith already is fulfilled. So live as though the promise were true; as though eternity could break into time at each and every moment; assuming that we will be called without warning to live for the Kingdom, to give it to others, to share the sure promise that makes us alive.

For the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. And this is the source of our joy.

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