Descendants

Midweek Evensong

The Week of Holy Trinity

A Reading from the Book of Genesis:

Now the Lord said to Abram, "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."

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother's son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan.

When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, "To your offspring I will give this land." So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

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.

More than half the people on this planet—some four billion souls alive today—claim descent, spiritual or otherwise, from a man who lived in Mesopotamia 4000 years ago. That, in and of itself, is astonishing. Genghis Khan has sixteen million descendants throughout Asia. Charlemagne sired most everyone in modern Europe. But all of that pales in comparison to Abraham. Abraham truly is the father of us all.

Hence the delicious irony of his story. For Abraham was a man who had no children.

It’s funny that in most of our modern myths, teenagers are so often called to save or to conquer the world. We imagine we were heroes in our youth. The Hebrew Bible speaks of God’s desire to form for Himself a people in whom His Spirit so obviously and eminently dwells that the world cannot help but take notice. God seeks to call us home in Him, and to do so through one another, to save humanity through humanity. And for that He needs a hero. For that we need a savior.

And the person whom God calls to fill this role is the least likely candidate whom we can imagine. Seriously, if you were putting together a character sketch of everything you would want in a champion, Abraham would be the exact opposite of all that. He is old. By rights, the start of his story ought to be the end of his life. When first we meet him, he’s already 75, “as good as dead,” in the words of St Paul. I know that today 75 ain’t so bad, but back in the Bronze Age it was awfully long in the tooth.

And Abraham, so far as we can tell, had done nothing of significance with his life, nothing impactful enough to have been written down. He had no children, which meant that he had no heirs, no line, no legacy, no-one to remember him. This was a great shame in the Ancient Near East. He had a wife, but only one, so he couldn’t have been all that wealthy. He was soon to die and be forgotten.

But then comes the Word of the Lord: “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 in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Man, I wish we had context for this. I wish we had more of the story. Was Abraham familiar with this God? Had he maintained the faith of Noah, the faith of Adam? Did he understand that Yahweh was Lord of All, or just another desert deity?

It hardly seems to matter; in the end, he had nothing to lose. Abraham takes the promise on faith and sets out with his household—his wife, his nephew, their servants—on a long and winding trek from the ancient city of Ur to the Promised Land of Canaan: about 1400 miles, then another 1600 down to Egypt and back. Abraham left everything behind, everything he’d known, to become a homeless migrant.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever had to leave your hometown to answer the calling of God. I can tell you it isn’t easy. Many more, I’m sure, have had to move for jobs and education. It uproots you, tears you up, eliminates your safety net. Faith is an act of letting go, of radical trust in the Lord. We are never promised that bad things will not happen on the way; in fact, we’re assured that they will. But we are promised that God is with us on every step of our journey, come what may—and that those who care for such migrants are closest to the heart of the Lord

In many ways, I read the story of Abraham as a cautionary tale, or perhaps a clarion call to expect the unexpected. God will not act in the way that we would have Him. His thoughts are not our thoughts, His ways not our ways. We would dismiss the elderly, the homeless, the childless, the immigrant. We would overlook those whose lives we have not deemed worthy of our note. For us, they are as good as dead. But God will overturn our assumptions.

He will not act through the rich, the strong, the powerful, the famous. He will not, in general, call emperors and conquerors to lead His people forth. He will call the broken and the mourning, the sinful and enslaved. He will heal the forgotten, the outcast, the alien. He arrives like a thief in the night. And no matter how He warns us, in successive generations, to keep alert, keep awake, we never quite manage to see Him coming. God always catches us by surprise.

God has come to turn our world upside-down, to welcome the last, the lost, the little, and the least, that they might be first in His Kingdom. He has chosen His champion from those we cast aside, and through him shall all peoples be blessed. Our reading this evening is but the beginning of Abraham’s story. Through many messy twists and turns, betrayals and mistakes, the family of Abraham shall nonetheless endure, and even thrive—not because they’re unique or special or better than anyone else, but simply because God forever keeps His Word.

Abraham’s story is the story of us all. None of us are quite the heroes we expected ourselves to be. None of us live lives of great note throughout the world. Yet all of us are loved by God, called by God, chosen by God, to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. All of us walk by faith; haltingly, stumblingly, yet ever onward, never alone; for the faith by which we walk is the faithfulness of God.

We may fail Him, but He shall never fail us. He loves us to the end, all the way to hell and back. This is the promise to Abraham fulfilled in Jesus Christ. We are the children of Abraham; we are the children of God. He is always and ever calling us forward, calling us home in Him. He Himself is our journey, our destination, and our companion for every step along the way. Walk by faith, O children of promise, and you shall never be alone.

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

 

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