June 22, 2008

I'm game. Kama has been preaching the lectionary the past couple of weeks, which is in the Old Testament on this lectionary cycle, right at the start, in the Book of Genesis. We are in the Abraham track, which is where it begins, our faith, that is, with "Father Abraham."

Kama has covered the call of Abraham, as well as the announcement that Sarah is to give birth to a child. This news is delivered in the person of three men, as Abraham hosts angels unaware.

Last week's message.

Most always happy news, in this case it comes across as a joke, even a cruel joke, as Abraham and Sarah are about 99 and 90 years old respectively. So they laugh, incredulously, and perhaps nervously.

The birth is not yet. Abraham and Sarah are in that long 39 week wait, when God reappears and reconfirms his covenant with Abraham, as covered in our text for this morning, and which offers us an opportunity to review the Abraham story and the start of our faith.

Stories themselves are important. Stories can wrap around truths that otherwise are beyond our comprehension. Stories can communicate in ways proofs and postulates cannot, enabling us to get beyond the cover of the book and into the pages of life.

Stories allow for journey and adventure. Ask any child. Or, better yet, try to deprive the child of his/her bedtime story ritual, and hear the wails of protestation. Father's Day past, I think back to when JJ was a child, and Cathy - not me -would read his bedtime stories.

I can still hear JJ's protestations at Cathy's pronouncement that this was positively the last story, "no, no, no, no, one more, one more..." like withholding a bottle from a hungry infant. Or in JJ's case suggesting he go to sleep, which he never needed much of anyway.

For a thousand years the Hebrew people told their sacred stories, perhaps to their children at bedtime, certainly as they sat around the campfires by night and while tending their sheep by day. Telling their stories, orally, long before writing them down.

These stories presented if not explained their questions about life: creation, evil, human purpose, tragedy, God, and most importantly God's salvation from their sinfulness.

So wherever they wandered they told their stories, making sure each succeeding generation memorized them so they could retell them to their children. This was school back then. The stories told them who they were and whose they were. In other words, the stories defined them.

Actually shaped them as clans and community. We can appreciate they considered these stories

sacred.

Sometime after the Hebrew people wandered out of the wilderness and settled in the Promised Land, actually resettled in the Promised Land, they wrote their stories down, beginning around 1000 B.C. Now that they were no longer on the road they could afford the burden of books. Remember, books back then were humongous scrolls made of animal skins, if not tablets of stone. Not convenient for camping trips.

It took them a few hundred years to put the book in order, but they faithfully preserved their stories. When the ancient equivalents to Harper & Row put the book in its final Torah form around 450 B.C., they started with "Genesis." Sensibly enough, for Genesis means "beginning." They began with some of their all-time favorite stories, of Creation, Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, Noah & the Ark, the Tower of Babel. Our favorites, too, for sure enough, year after year, the Bible is a "best seller." It always has been.

These early stories, told in Genesis chapter 1-11, were for the Hebrew people descriptive of the human condition. The stories were the prelude to their unique Hebrew story. The prelude does not paint a pretty picture, but at least it was honest. They could deal with this for they had good news to tell. Indeed, this is what the book is about. Telling the good news that greater than themselves is God, a God so great, that God will not allow their failure and folly to be the final chapter of God's book.

This is what the Hebrew people record. God's saving action in their history as represented in the covenant. No wonder the book is holy.

The telling of their story as a Jewish people begins with Abraham. This is where their unique Hebrew history begins, in Genesis, Chapter 12. Some of you heard Kama preach this two weeks ago, the call of Abraham. But let's back up a bit and tie the two together, the prelude (chapters 1-11) and the Hebrew story (chapter 12ff).

Let's rewind to Noah, who has three sons: Ham, Japheth and Shem. From whom the three great races of humanity, white, yellow and black, are fathered, according to Hebrew legend.

Eight generations down from Shem is a man named Terah. Terah lives in the lush city of Ur of the Chaldeons, located at the southern end of the fertile Tigris-Euphrates Valley, seedbed of ancient civilization. Ur, not far from Babylon, is a thriving commercial center along the Euphrates River, south of modern day Baghdad and north of the Persian Gulf, geography of which we have only in recent years become aware.

Worship in Ur in 2000 B.C. is polytheistic; as people pray to a pantheon of gods, take your pick, according to your needs, the sun god, the moon god, the rain god, the fertility god...

Moreover, people make idols, creation of their own hands, and then set them up and worship them, if you can believe it, asking questions like "How much horsepower does it have?" "How many megabytes of ram?"

Terah is a successful farmer. Sowing good oats, he is also a successful father. Terah has three sons: Abraham (the oldest), Nahor and Haran. Which means inevitably his family outgrows his land.

So like the early pioneers of this nation, Terah rounds up the wagons and heads west, or actually northwest, up the river valley, looking for more land for his growing family. He leaves Nahor behind, to tend the Ur estate, and takes Abraham with him, who is now grown and married to Sarah, as well as Lot, who is the son of Terah's son, Haran, who is deceased.

About 600 miles up the Fertile Crescent, Terah homesteads property in what is south-eastern Turkey today. He names the place after his deceased son, Haran, and again succeeds in farming, dying at the ripe old age of 205.

Abraham, as the first born son, inherits it all. He has got it made in the shade. Abraham, himself, is 75, and can look forward to a comfortable retirement life. The story should end here happily enough. But instead it begins. The Bible tells us so.

Around 1900 B.C., God calls Abraham: "Go forth from your country and your kindred and your father's house, and go to a land I will show you..." (Genesis 12:1-3) We have no idea Abraham's personal thoughts on the matter. Surely he must think this a little late in life to start over. Clearly he has no economic incentive to do so. He is pleasantly retired, collecting social security and hanging out at the Senior Citizen's Center.

Surely Abraham finds this incredibly inconvenient, disconcerting and considerably crazy.

We do not know. Furthermore we do not know God's call to Abraham to be unique. Who knows how many times, to how many people God called? What is absolutely unique is Abraham's response. As the story tells it, "Abraham went, as the Lord told him, ?Go.' " (12:4)

On a prayer and a promise Abraham packs it up. He gathers Sarah and his orphaned nephew, Lot, their favorite household belongings and their livestock, and they journey again to a land God promises them.

And thus begins the history of the Hebrew people. Abraham becomes the first of the "chosen people." That is, he chooses to live his life in awareness of and in response to the One God. Not man, nor mammon, nor other material things, but to live in relationship to God.

Abraham says with his life, "Not my will, but thy will be done." It is a great moment in history.

But it is not easy. As the author of the Letter to the Hebrews puts it: "By faith Abraham obeyed, and he went out, not knowing where he was to go." (11:8)

We often assume things must have been easier for our spiritual ancestors. That their decisions were not as tough or sacrificial, bold or scary as ours today. Well, Abraham gave up a lot, including the grip of the polytheistic culture of Mesopotamia.

He said "no" to everything he had and everything he had known, and at age 75, "went out, not knowing where he was to go." You understand why we call him the "Father" of the faith.

In this moment our religious pilgrimage begins, a great theological leap forward, as Abraham renounces the primeval cults of his day, and embraces a faith in the one God, Yahweh, a God of history, who lives and dwells with God's people, active, present, calling, blessing, saving.

Abraham will need all of the above. It never gets easy for him. He must think it a joke when some nights later camped in Canaan God announces, "This is it. May I have your attention, Abraham? If you will be my people I will give you this land, and here you will become a great nation."

What kind of cruel covenant is this? The land is crummier than the land he left in Haran. Furthermore, the land is already occupied. The Canaanites live there. Is that a problem, ever after?

Not to mention to become a great nation Abraham needs an heir, and at his declining old age he has nary a son. Indeed, this God has a great sense of humor even if God is a little lean if not mean in the covenant department.

Yet Abraham accepts the covenant. It's an incredible story. Abraham keeps the faith. You can read about it in the rest of Genesis. A good summertime read for you.

I will tell you, things get so bad for Abraham in the Promised Land, he is unable to stay there, and he wanders on, from Schechem to Bethel to the wilderness of Judah to Egypt. Moving on, trying to stay ahead of the famine. No, it is not easy for Abraham. But he never gives up the faith. This is the story. He keeps the covenant.

Of course, the real bottom line of the Bible is God never gives up on Abraham. Wherever Abraham goes, God goes. No longer a god bound to a particular altar, tied to a temple, minimized as an idol, but a God who transcends time and place, and is present wherever God's people are through the thick and thin of history.

Does Abraham ever realize the promise? No, he never really realizes it. A great nation? He bears one son by Sarah. Inheritor of the Promised Land? Abraham in all his holy land wandering only ever owns one plot of land, the burial plot for his beloved wife, Sarah, the cave of Machpelah in Hebron.

Abraham never personally realizes the promise. As Hebrews puts it, "All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them." (11:13)

Yet we still tell his story today, four thousand years later. For Abraham is the "genesis" of our story. He is the first of the faith, leading his life not for himself, but leading his life in relationship to God and for those who would follow him in the distance. So it is in us that the promise to Abraham is fulfilled. We are that great nation and Abraham really is the father of our faith story.

So now it is our story to tell. To write and to tell. For what will we live? And die? For whom will we live? And die? What will our ink spot look like in the book of life?

The God of history has pen in hand poised for a journal entry. Will we keep the covenant to be God's people, and in this way help fulfill the promise? It will make a difference, for what we see in the distance is the future for our children. God bless you.

AMEN.