Readings for Sunday, March 1, 2010
The question for me, growing out of the Genesis reading for this week, is “What does it mean to live as though God is faithful?”
After all, Abraham had lots of reason not to trust in God. He received in a vision a bunch of outlandish promises about land and descendants, and in this passage we haven’t seen any of those promises fulfilled yet. On the basis of some sort of vision and hope, he picks up and leaves town, together with Sarai and his household, never to return. The promises he thought he had received wouldn’t be realized for generations after his death. Many of us who live in a society focussed around self-gratification and immediacy would probably consider him loony.
Maybe it’s loony to trust in a faithful God.
There’s certainly lots of evidence that trusting in God doesn’t always get you what you want. Trusting in a faithful God doesn’t mean that people don’t get cancer, or have marriage problems, or watch their kids die in Afghanistan. It doesn’t mean that couples who can’t conceive just haven’t prayed hard enough or trusted deeply enough. I suspect that lots of the Olympic athletes prayed to God before their event, but they certainly didn’t all end up on the podium. And for every story of “personal bests” and defeating the odds, there are many more (I’m sure) of “typical” performances, disappointments, missed opportunities, risks that didn’t pay off. Clearly trusting in a faithful God isn’t a magic talisman against misfortune or disappointment. And the best guarantee of success at the Olympics (or at life) seems to me to be a combination of hard work, good coaching, and just plain luck.
So what does it mean to trust in a faithful God?
What did it mean for Abraham? It meant that he chose to live as though there was more to life than being an ordinary land-owner in Ur. He chose to live as though being child-less didn’t mean that he had no future. He chose to live as though life were an adventure to be engaged in, rather than an experience to be endured. He chose to live as though the barriers and problems he encountered would not – could not – prevent God from doing what needed to be done in and through him.
That feels too simple – too poly-anna-ish: just behave like an optimist and the whole world will shine on you. Religion has to be more than just pop-psychology! And though there’s some truth to the idea that optimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, some optimists are so out of touch with “reality” that they don’t seem to live in the same world as the rest of us. I like Abraham because he wasn’t an eternal optimist; he didn’t pull his punches; he didn’t avoid the hard questions; he second-guessed his decisions several times. And yet, at the end of the day, we still tell his story because something about it still rings true for us.
The idea that ultimately God’s love and God’s purpose, and God’s blessing will prevail (all appearances to the contrary) is a remarkable statement of faith in Abraham’s world, and in ours. And yet isn’t it that sort of faith that drove Jesus to preach about the Kingdom of God in the midst of the brutality of the Roman Empire? Isn’t it that sort of faith that led Wilberforce to challenge the institution of slavery; that drove unionists to organize in the 19th century; that inspired Dickens to write stories about the social inequities of his time; that leads to social reform and declarations of human rights and champions of “justice” in every time and place. And at the end of the day, isn’t that the sort of mark that would be good to leave on the world?
Abraham caught a glimpse of a God that was more interested in blessing than in curse; more interested in overcoming barrenness than in imposing restrictions; more interested in possibility than in the world as we see it now. He became the patriarch for three of the world’s great religions – three traditions which, each in their own way, strive to continue the journey he began and live in the light of his experience that the world as we know it is not all there is or can be. It’s a vision that’s been tarnished by self-interest and clouded by hatred at times in all three of our traditions … and yet beneath the accumulations over the years there remains in all three of our traditions a sense that there is something true in the life of our ancestor which we need to both venerate and emulate as we look at the world we find ourselves in and wonder about what it might become.