You know, when Michael asked me to do this piece on the theology of
Genesis chapters 12-50, I wanted to say no, no, not the Old Testament.
Unlike Mona, who is an Old Testament scholar, I completely feel lost in
the Old Testament, though I did some study of it in seminary. New
Testament studies is more my thing and my background, so I felt like I
was having to re-learn what little I did know over again--and then adding
a whole other layer to it. But a challenge is good for the soul, so we’re
going to plow through this one way or another.
And the way I want to begin is to just borrow everything Michael talked
about and expand it out just a little bit—hey, why do anything original
because I think he hit everything right on the nail. But this week we’re
going to look a little more deeply at the theology, the underlying
understanding of God that we find in these chapters. Last week Rev.
Piazza talked about the beginning of Israel and he shared with us the
beginning promise to Abraham that set something powerful in motion,
something new and challenging that would change the world. This
simple and yet complex promise to Abraham that we find in the first
couple of verses of Genesis 12 will define the relationship between God
and Israel for millennia, and it still does define who the people of Israel
are even today. And like Michael mentioned, the squabbling, the family
infighting that we see lived out in the three major religions—Christianity,
Islam, and Judaism—that trace their beginning to Abraham and Sarah is
rooted in each of those religion’s disagreement about how the initial
promise is to be worked out, and to whom it really applies to. Rev.
Piazza pointed out how truly connected how the three major religions are
connected, and yet we can’t seem to agree on whom this promise really
applies to, especially in this day and age.
And it is this Promise, which is often called a covenant, it is this idea of
covenant that defines the last 38 chapters of Genesis. The covenant,
the Promise that God makes with Abraham is the key to unlocking the
complex family history that we see played out in these incredible pages.
And this covenant haunts everything—and I would argue that haunts is
the right word here, because everything in these chapters are meant to
tell the beautiful and difficult relationship God has with the people that
God has chosen to covenant with. You know, I think we all have a few
relatives in our family tree that we wished were never there, and there
are probably episodes we can all share from our family histories that
would easily make the Jerry Springer Show. But I bet your family has
nothing, NOTHING on Abraham and his relatives! Talk about family
drama! But that’s what makes the stories so interesting and what makes
them so real—there’s so incredible, so fantastic, sometimes even funny,
and certainly dramatic, that they feel real, whether they or actually
history or not. These stories of Abraham and Sarah’s descendents is
just a incredible goldmine of great stories and important spiritual truth,
and even the stuff that just makes us so uncomfortable, like the story of
Abraham’s almost sacrifice of son, even stories like that hint at some
important, important spiritual truth.
And then what follows is a pattern, a pattern that you see in the chapters
we’re going to be studying tonight in Genesis, but also in the whole Old
Testament. The pattern goes like this—
The Promise is made
The Promise is threatened
The Promise is fulfilled
It is this rhythm that we see played out in these family stories—God
made the promise, something happens that threatens the promise—and
sometimes its human choices or outside forces, or even God—and then
ultimately the promise is fulfilled, even if it is on a limited basis, even on a
partial basis. We’ll look at that rhythm tonight, about how that promise
made in almost from the beginning is made, and re-made, and re-
committed, and then this Promise by God is threatened, is in danger, is
vulnerable, but then the Promise gets fulfilled, God comes through,
human beings live up to their side of the bargain. The great drama of
the Bible, and maybe even our own lives, gets played out in these early
chapters of Genesis.
PUT this on the screen behind me—THE PROMISE IS MADE for every
slide through this section.
So it is this Promise that begins the beginning—a Promise is made, and
everything flows out of this moment. I want us to hear it again, though I
know you all heard it last week. Let’s turn to beginning verses of chapter
12 and hear these words again
Now the Lord 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 blessings. 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
Now, I want to point out a couple of things about this moment, apart from
the actual promise itself, and I just want to point out something Michael
pointed out last week. Up until this moment, we have no idea who this
Abram guy is—a few verses earlier, we get a history of the family line,
but we have no idea of who this guy is or even WHY God chose this
person as opposed to some other person. God comes to this guy and a
promise made to him, a divine promise that he and Sarah will blessed,
and they will be blessed because a nation will come from them, and this
nation will be a blessing to the whole world. How incredible…but you
know what? Why? I mean, why Abraham and Sarah? Why not Bob and
Susan in the tent next door? Or maybe even Jones across the street, or
across the desert? Why did God choose Abraham and Sarah? Well,
Rev. Piazza told us why last week and that was because of their
willingness to wander, their willingness to hear a word from God and act
on it, to actually do it!
In fact, that willingness to wander in the desert for the sake of the
Promise seems to be the only thing that really recommends them,
especially Abraham. Abraham is the father of our faith—and the father
of the faith of Jews and Muslims as well—and so we have a tendency to
not look at him with clear eyes. But when we do, when we look at him for
who and what he was, it makes the selection, election, choice of
Abraham and Sarah even more incredible. What I mean is that Abraham
was no saint, I mean this guy was a real mixed bag. Certainly, his
greatest trait was a willingness to obey, to wander after God, but, boy,
did he ever have some negative personality traits! I mean this is guy
who is constantly skirting the edges of what it means to be ethical—here
is guy, if you’ve been reading the stories in Genesis who is constantly
selling off his wife. He’ll go to some country, and then get scared that he
will be killed because the rulers will want his beautiful wife, and then he
passes off poor Sarah as his sister, who then becomes part of some
household that eventually figures out that they have been deceived by
Abraham, and then they kick Abraham and Sarah out of the country.
This happens twice, once almost immediately after this promise is made
in Chapter 12, and then in chapter 20. Abraham is always looking out
for number 1, and sadly he tends to use his own wife to protect himself.
We have no sense from the text that she was a willing participant in all
these deceptions and lies—and we certainly know that he certainly
profited handsomely from his little scheme.
So, why bring this up? Well, I just wanted to point out that the Promise
was made to man and a woman who were not always…shall we say, the
most ethical or good people we’ve ever seen. They just weren’t the salt
of the earth, so to speak. At times, Abraham is simply no better than a
pimp, simply selling off his wife to the highest bidder. And yet, God
chooses him and his wife to give this incredible promise to—these folks
aren’t saints, they’re a lot like us—they’re not super humans, and I
suspect that they weren’t chosen by God for the Promise because they
were good people. All we really know is that they responded to the
Promise, to the covenant God was offering—they chose to wander after
God, and for some reason that was enough to satisfy God. You know,
the great thing is that this feels hopeful—I mean, really seeing how
incredibly human Abraham was, with all of his pettiness and selfishness
and his less than great character—it feels hopeful because I know that I
don’t have to be Super Christian to be given a great responsibility and a
great gift by God. People just like me and you, people like Abraham and
Sarah, are given awesome gifts and awesome responsibility, despite the
fact that aren’t necessarily the kind of people you might want to invite
over to dinner. And if you did invite them, just take anything Abraham
has to say with a grain of salt! But God’s choice of people is not always
the choice we would make—God choices the most incredibly ambiguous
people to do the most incredible work—people like you and me!
So, what it is that God promises to Abraham in the 12th chapter of
Genesis? Well, as I’ve said before, God offers a Promise, an incredible
promise to Abraham, his wife, and every generation that will follow him.
And it is more than a Promise: actually it is a covenant that God is
offering to Abraham and his descendants. It is a promise that requires a
response and Abraham responds by getting up and going, wandering in
the desert after the God who has called him and his family to be a
blessing to the whole world. And I know that many of us think of
covenants as being something similar to our modern understanding of
contracts, but that similarity doesn’t really capture the moment. Let me
explain: God offers a promise to Abraham and his family, but God doesn’
t offer a contract to them. A contract is something that is entered into by
two parties who don’t quite trust each other, and the terms are spelled in
ways that limit liability and make clear that if certain parts of the contract
are not fulfilled—like not making a payment—then the deal is off and the
folks can go there separate ways. Think about it: you don’t pay your
rent, you aren’t allowed to stay in that apartment any longer; you don’t
pay your phone bill, you don’t get phone service. But a covenant is not
like that—it’s a promise to be faithful even when the rent is not paid, a
promise to keep the phone on when you didn’t pay your bill.
You see, a contract is dependent on the other party to keep the contract
going, whereas a covenant is not dependent on the other party—a
covenant starts with me, it is a promise to you that I will act in a certain
way. That is why we call vows in marriage “covenant vows,” not “contract
vows” because, in the end, the only thing you can be held responsible
for in your marriage is your part in the relationship, the promise you
made to other person. And just because your partner hasn’t lived up to
their part of the covenant does not automatically mean dissolution, or an
end to the covenant—if that was the case, there would be no marriages,
because we always fail our covenants, in one way or another. Just
because your partner didn’t live up to their covenant with you doesn’t
means it over—it just means one of you failed to live up to your
Promises. I’ve never met anyone whose ALWAYS lived up to the vows,
the promises they’ve made to their spouse before me and God in a
marriage ceremony. God has offered a Promise to Abraham and his
descendants, not a contract, because if it was a contract, the deal would
have been off almost from the start—look at Abraham’s deceitfulness in
Genesis 12 with Sarah—he didn’t trust God to take care of him and so
he lied and put other people in danger. Thanks goodness that God
offered a covenant to Abraham and his descendants, or we wouldn’t be
around, you and I, talking about the difference between a covenant and
a contract!
The other interesting thing about this Promise, this covenant, is God’s
new strategy in giving away blessings to the world. It’s almost as if God
gets it, I mean, God gets that we humans learned much better by being
specific than general. It’s the same reason we love stories in sermons--
we need to see how to live out a general truth in a specific way. It’s the
same reason that I roll my eyes when I hear people tell me that they love
humanity, or they love everyone—to be honest, I am not interested in
hearing how you love everyone—I want to hear about how you love that
person in line the other day who really ticked you off, or how you are
loving that person at work who is undermining your job. I mean, don’t tell
me how you love humanity, that great amorphous crowd of faceless
people—tell me how you love your spouse, your brother, you mother,
your friend, your enemy. Real life is learned in the specifics, in the
details, not in the generalizations, and so we learn more in particular
moments with particular people than we do in the general statements we
make or the general beliefs we say we believe. It’s the message we find
in First John—don’t tell me about your love, do your love, practice your
love with real people!
So, God chooses to give the Promise to an individual, to a person, to a
specific clan and family—and through this particular and specific
relationship with Abraham and Sarah, ALL of the world will be blessed.
Don’t start with the big picture, start with the little picture, seems to be
God’s choice, God’s strategy. And it is a strategy that makes sense—
God tried the big picture in the first 11 chapters of Genesis and God is
going with something this time around. God started with the whole, the
big picture, the creation, the mass of humanity, and then God goes to
the one, the one man, the one family, Abraham and his descendants,
and that relationship, that specific relationship that we will see witnessed
throughout the rest of the Old Testament and even through the New
Testament, will then burst back into a blessing for all of humanity in
Christ Jesus! From the whole to the one back to the whole again. To
bless all the world, God blesses one man and one woman, Abraham and
Sarah, and because of that particular blessing to them, you and I are
here, heirs of that Promise, that covenant, made to these two wanders
willing to wander after God, imperfect as they were, imperfect like you
and I.
But the Promise is threatened almost from the moment it is uttered to
Abraham and he and Sarah and their family begin the lifelong task of
wandering for God, in search of the promised land God has promised
them. And the threat to the promise is that it won’t be fulfilled, that
Abraham and Sarah won’t, in fact, make it, that they won’t survive or that
they won’t have children so that there can be some descendants to bless
the world through. The threat is found in Abraham’s lack of courage and
his lack of integrity in dealing with Sarah and these foreign rulers; the
Promise is jeopardized when God again makes that promise to Abraham
in chapter 15, but by the 16th chapter, Abraham and Sarah have found
a scheme to get kids through a concubine, Hagar, and both eagerly go
forward with this pact, in spite of the fact that God promised Sarah her
own child. Disaster follows, of course, with poor Hagar and Ishmael, with
both of these individuals paying a heavy price for Abraham’s lack of trust
in God. And then in chapter 18 heavenly visitors come to them Abraham
and Sarah, and they tell them that Sarah, who is way past child-bearing
years, will have a son—and she laughs, the echo of that laughter still
haunting the story, and here she lies, saying she never laughed at the
Promise made by these heavenly visitors compromise and Sarah won’t
have the courage to trust God and stop the lying. But the lying and the
deception continue, with Isaac continuing the family tradition of lying, of
telling rulers that his wife is actually his sister in chapter 26, and then the
plot to deceive a dying and blind Isaac by Rebekah with the old
switcheroo of Jacob and Esau and who would get the blessing reserved
for the oldest son. And then comes Jacob’s dramatic reunion with Esau,
and you’re left wondering whether at the last minute, Esau will exact his
revenge on the scared and frightened Esau. And then again, the threat
remains, most of the sons of Jacob are a horrible lot, except this boy
Joseph, who is sold off because the jealousy of his despicable brothers.
Eventually, the end of Genesis sees a reunion of the family, but not
before Joseph is almost killed and his family is almost starved to death.
So, the Promise is constantly in danger of not being fulfilled and most of
the danger to that Promise is done by humans, by humans and their
choices that constantly put themselves, the heirs to the Promise, the
covenant, in danger of having no one to receive the blessings God had
promised. I guess it something about human nature that we humans don’
t know a good thing and that we’re incredibly self-destructive…but there
is another danger to the promise, a danger that comes from an
unexpected corner. We’ve seen how the human choices have almost
snuffed out the possibility of the Promise, the covenant from becoming a
reality, but what about the danger that seems to flow from God’s side of
the Promise? And when I say danger, I don’t mean that God was ever
going to break the divine side of the Promise…but it is clear that God
brings the heirs of the Promise to the very brink of destruction a few
times. There is the moment when God commands Abraham in chapter
22 to sacrifice his son. And though I am not sure I would say that I really
think God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, this story is fascinating
because it shows a complexity to the ancient Israeli understanding of
who God was and is and could be. The knife is at Isaac’s throat, the
moment is drenched with horror…and God stops it! The threat is no
more, the threat of a command to sacrifice Isaac that comes from God
which may end the possibility of the Promise, the covenant. And then
there is Jacob’s wresting with this mysterious man in the desert in
chapter 32. A danger from the desert, sent by God, and they wrestle
deep into the night, and Jacob gains the upper hand from this
mysterious stranger, but Jacob won’t let him go, and the stranger hits
him so hard that he knocks the hip out of its joint. Jacob has wrestled
with God, or someone sent from God, because he names the place
where it all took place as “the face of God” and Jacob is renamed “Israel”
because he has wrestled with God and prevailed.” It’s a stunning
moment, really. Its almost as if God, in a few instances, pushes back,
pushes the Promise to the brink, and then in a stunning move, snatches
back the Promise from that very brink. Maybe its God’s way of reminding
the people of Israel that God has a choice in whether or not to fulfill the
covenant, the Promise, as much as we humans do—the good news is
that God never chooses to let go of us and of the promise God made to
Abraham and Sarah thousands of years ago. But the threat remains,
the threat to the Promise, the threat to the Covenant, haunts the
Promise always, as we will see as we continue our journey through the
Old Testament. The people are always on the brink of being a people of
no Promise, of no Covenant, but God will not let go, and neither will the
people of Israel, even in their worst moments—something we probably
should think of when we feel let go of by God, or when we want to let go
of God.
But of course, the Promise remains, the everlasting, eternal Promise to
the people of Israel, of which we are part heirs, remains. And God will
always do what God has promised. The brink may be on the horizon, the
people of God may always on the edge, a wrong move may send them to
the end, but God pulls them in, securing the promise, making sure the
future has a future. Joseph and his family are secured by the end of
Genesis, they are safe. Abraham’s kin are safe and sound, but they will
face new challenges in Exodus, where their decision to stay in a land
other than the one that was promised to them earlier by God to Abraham
will get them in a lot of trouble for hundreds of years to come. The
promise, the covenant in its full completion has been long in coming to
pass. The promise is still there, the Promise by God to continue to bless
the entire world through this particular family. God has always hinted
that it would take time, and that God would do this work on God’s own
time. And certainly we continue to be blessed by God’s choice in
Abraham and Sarah—we are their children, people joined to their family
by your faith, not our blood, as Rev. Piazza pointed out to us in Paul’s
writings last week. The Promise is fulfilled, partially anyway, and its
guaranteed to continue to be a blessing to the world—we, here, are a
part of that blessings. May we always remember that truth, as we
continue to see the promise unfold before our eyes and in our very
lives. Amen.
