Expecting the Promise to Be Fulfilled / A Sermon
Expecting the Promise to Be Fulfilled
Genesis 15: 1-18/ Psalm 27/ Luke 13: 31-35
2nd Sunday of Lent/ Year C/ Feb. 28, 2010
Has anyone made a promise to you and then didn’t keep it? In our story from Genesis today, Abram is instructed to God to leave his homeland and go to a land flowing with milk and honey that God would show him. God has made a promise to Abram, now some ten or fifteen years later, when Abram eighty-five and Sarai is seventy-five, Abram begins to question the promise, feeling that God has reneged on the promise. “It is unclear to me, God, how you are going to work this out. There are some pretty big obstacles in the way. I’d like to have just a little more information. How can this be, I do not have a child, and Eliezar will be my heir.” In spite of everything up to this point- possessions, and wealth, new land to settle in and victory over his enemies- Abram does not trust God. Distrust seems to be the way we as human beings respond to the gifts of God. Although God is good we do not trust God, especially when things are not going well or the way we think they should. Like Abram, we know we are not all that good and we wonder how God can be so generous to us, to bless us beyond measure.
Too often we find divine generosity so overwhelming that we dispute it. It is no surprise, then, that Abram questions God, that he quarrels with God, questioning God’s promise of a child. At Abram’s age, time is precious. He lives daily with doubt and anxiety, he wants, demands a sign that what God has promised will happen, that all that God has said is true. While God is patient, Abram is not. He seeks assurance peace of mind. “Are you going to give me what I really want, a son? Or is a slave going to be my heir? I want a legitimate son!” Can a person who questions and complains also be model of faith?
What is the character or faithfulness? So often when we as human being face perplexing questions, when we fell the anxiety of doubt and uncertainty, when we struggle with frustration and disappointment we think of it as a crisis of faith. And we throw up our hands and ask “what’s the use?” We are tempted to think of faith only as unquestioning acceptance or silent submission to something we cannot understand. But faith is more than this. Faith involves struggle with, challenges to, and questions about God and God’s intentions for us and for our world.
In a world teeming with broken relationships, personal disappointments, public scandals, political games and partisanship, cultural disrespect, prejudice, misunderstanding, hate, and increased terrorist threats, trust is difficult. We who are the faithful know bitter disappointment and crushing pain. We know the feeling of people and events moving against us. We all at one time or another know the feeling of abandonment or the feeling that God has turned away from us. Yet the Psalmist proclaims that God is the light and salvation, Abram trusts in God’s promise . What is it that helps the Psalmist, helps Abram place their trust “the goodness of the Lord?”
Psalm 27 speaks to the person who has faced difficulty and yet knows the easing of initial pain. While perhaps callous for one in the throes of grief, and insufficiently challenging for someone too comfortable to the point of needing reminder that hope lies in God, not in the self. Psalm 27 offers friendship, guidance to those of us who are scared or uncertain about the future. Whether we are surviving cancer, navigating a twelve-step program while being tempted by old adversaries, or returning from military to civilian life still dueling with the demons of PSTD, the Psalm shows the way of honesty. We do not accept every thing “Carte Blanc.” Psalm 27 shows the balance between radical trust and faithful questioning. To struggle with God is a part of the faith. It is in the struggle that we find truth.
Does Abram completely understand how God will fulfill what God has promised? Does Abram have all the answers to his questions? It is unlikely. But what is clear for both Abram and the Psalmist believe that God to be faithful and true. Theirs is a questioning faithfulness, pleading with God for more information, more clarity, more courage, more commitment as they stumble along trying to follow in the steps that God called them to in their lives. Ours, too, is a questioning faith. We have questions that will not be silenced as we to try to walk in faithfulness to God. Vigorous faith and animated doubt both insist that we take God seriously, asking God serious questions and depending on God in tangible ways. Examined doubts refine our understanding and illuminate our experience of God. We are called to filter our beliefs through our experience, sifting out wishful thinking, discarding childish images of a white bearded grandfatherly God, defying the blind unquestioning attitudes of dogma. We must hold fear and faith, trust and doubt together. We are called to form communities where people are allowed and taught to talk honestly about life and the questions we have in living that life in this topsy-turvy world. Patient seeing, seeking, searching is what makes faith meaningful. They give us the time, skills, and hope to navigate the pain, learn through experiences of life, and learning to see the world differently.
When we cultivate this attitude of faith we see the world differently, turning a corner and seeing abundance instead of scarcity, in the midst of grief finding grace and solace instead of loss. Rejecting the self fulfillment attitudes of culture that says we must live in fear, scarcity, self-loathing, we recognize our responsibility and placing our hope in the one who give life and abundance beyond measure.
