Heirs

Propers: The Second Sunday in Lent, AD 2024 B

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.

I supposedly descend from Charlemagne: King of the Franks, Emperor of the West, and Father of Europe. Statistically, so do most all of you.

About a decade back, one of my brothers handed to each of his siblings a nice, fat binder compiling nearly a decade’s worth of genealogical research, a combination of DNA analyses and historical records of varying stripe and reliability. Here we had an 8000-person family tree, stretching back more than a millennium.

The trick, it seems, is to find some ancestor of minor nobility, and after that you’re off to the races, because the European aristocracy was so ridiculously inbred that a connection to one is a connection to darn near all of them. The nobility are overrepresented in historical records because they were the only folks with time and reason to prove their pedigree, their legitimacy to rule. Of course, if you have motive and means to establish your lineage, you also have motive and means to fake it.

Yet in taking a genealogical deep dive, I quickly discovered that the fun is not in certainty. The fun is in the stories. That’s what really matters: not blood, not genetics, but the story of it all: your place within the story of your family, and your family’s place within the story of humanity. That’s what people really want to know. Who are we? Whence come we? What have I inherited, and what can I pass on?

Michael Chrichton famously said that if a man doesn’t know his history, he doesn’t know anything. He’s a leaf that doesn’t realize it’s part of a tree. Are we really descended from Somerled, from Charlemagne, from Caesar? The better question might be, do we want to be? Do we become part of their stories by making them part of ours? Go back far enough, and all of us are related. Whose stories then shall we claim?

Abraham remains perhaps the unlikeliest of all the Bible’s protagonists. And that is saying something, for they are a motley crew. He lived some 4000 years ago, as long before the birth of Christ as Christ is before us. And when we first encounter him in the book of Genesis, he is already elderly by the standards of his day: 75 years old and childless; in the words of St Paul, “as good as dead.”

This was a great source of shame back then, when family, clan, and tribe were everything, when your success in life was measured by the number of your descendants. And God appears to Abraham—not just any god, mind you, some scraggly desert deity, but Yahweh, the Creator of all worlds—and He says to this childless old man, “You shall be my people and I shall be your God.”

And then He launches into this absurd series of superabundant promises: “I shall make of you a family, and of that family a people, and of that people a nation, and that nation shall be a blessing to all the families of the earth! Your descendants shall be as the stars in the sky and the sands on the beach, and your very name shall mean the father of a multitude of nations!”

This is a lot to take in. Abraham just wanted an heir, someone to carry on his lineage and name. Here he is promised the stars, the sea, and all of history. And really, what has he to lose? So he trusts in this God. He believes in the promises, has faith that they will be fulfilled. And that faith, that trust, in the promise of our God is reckoned unto him as righteousness.

Here at the end of a long and full life, we discover that his story has begun. In a world in which all of our heroes are typically teenagers or twentysomethings, here’s an old man sent off to start his great adventure. He migrates to the Promised Land, he and his wife and their household. He finds fantastic success, and makes fantastic mistakes. And decades later, when he hits an even hundred, the child of the promise comes at last.

Yahweh is the God who gives life to the dead, and calls into existence the things that do not exist. At one point Abraham is confident that even should he kill his son, God would bring him back—for not even death can break the promise of God.

Abraham wasn’t righteous because he was good. The man made colossal mistakes. Abraham wasn’t righteous because he followed religious law. He lived centuries before Moses, and did some very unkosher things. Abraham was held to be righteous simply because of faith: not faith in the sense of adherence regarding certain propositions, but simple, trusting, childlike faith in the faithfulness of God. That’s all faith is: trust in God’s faithfulness, trust in God’s promises.

Abraham was righteous as a gift. Abraham was righteous by God’s grace. And that faith saw him through a lifetime of disappointments, misadventures, conflicts, tragedies, losses, and sins. It was a rocky road he trod. But he never walked it alone.

Some people seem to think that bad things wouldn’t happen to us if we would just be good. Those people haven’t read the Bible. Bad things happen to good people all the time. Indeed, we chose to inflict the worst death that we could think of upon history’s only sinless human being. But to trust that God is good, that He is working in love to save us, that He does not will us harm, that He suffers with us, within us, and for us, and that in the Resurrection He will right our every wrong—such is the faith of Abraham, which overcomes aging and death.

Tallying up religious adherents has been problematic since the biblical book of Numbers. But by most estimates there are today nearly 16 million Jews, two billion Muslims, and two-and-a-half billion Christians. That doesn’t include Samaritans, Druze, Baháʼí, Mandeans, Rastafari, and possibly even the Sikhs, all of whom have one thing in common: these are the Abrahamic faiths. Well over half the population of the planet claims Abraham as our forebear, the father of us all.

That’s quite a turnaround. A childless centenarian ends up with a family of four billions within 4000 years: a ridiculous promise, ridiculously fulfilled. And we aren’t children of Abraham because of blood or lineage or even ethnic identity. We are his children by his faith, billions of us carrying on his legacy, his story, and his name.

Have faith that God is good. Have faith He keeps His promise. Have faith that He is with us. He is our God, and we are His people, every man jack one of us. And we shall be reckoned as righteous, for righteousness is the gift and the grace of our God.

Ultimately, of course, one greater than Abraham came, the one who fulfills every promise, the one who blesses every family of this earth. Jesus was not the Christ whom we wanted, the violent Christ, the warlord Christ, oppressor of all our oppressors. No, He came as one as good as dead, nailed to a Cross, buried in a Tomb. He came as one who saw neither tribe nor clan, neither Gentile nor Jew, but all the human family, united in His Body and His Spirit, all of us people of God, and God as the God of us all.

“Theology of the Cross,” we call it: God finding us in the last place where we would expect to find Him. Who would’ve expected Abraham? Who would’ve expected this Christ? And so, at the edges, God meets us, where we do not think to find Him, in aging and suffering and disappointment and death. And there He raises us up. There He gives us new life.

Such is the promise of God. And God does not break promises.

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

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