Called to Live as Creatures of Hope

 

                                                                Craig Anderson

 

Genesis 15                                                                                                             March 11, 2001

 

Are the Bible’s stories true?  This account from Genesis about the creation of a covenant between Sarah, Abraham and God provides a perfect case study.  It is, I would argue, a true story, but dubious history.  At the level of human experience, the story is brilliantly true.  Judged by historical standards, however, it is probable that nothing like this ever took place.  The story never happened.  The story still happens.

 

Superficial readings mistakenly conclude this is history: the history of Israel’s origins in God’s promise to Sarah and Abraham that their descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky.  But now scholars wonder if Sarah and Abraham ever existed.  Most likely they were legendary figures from pre-history.  There are no archaeological finds to confirm any part of their story which extends for 14 chapters in Genesis.  And the story itself appears to have been written a thousand years after the events it purports to describe.  Nevertheless Sarah’s and Abraham’s experience is a central feature of your existence and mine.  The story is not so much historically true and reliable, as it is experientially true and reliable.

 

Let’s jump to the 21^st century.  Sociologist Wade Clark Roof studies the Baby Boom generation, whose worldview, he has discovered, differs markedly from earlier generations.  A hundred years ago, belief in progress was a cardinal characteristic of the age.  History was thought to be a straight-line matter moving toward a presumed destination.  For boomers however this script has changed.  “In today’s emerging world, (Roof writes), an acceptance of ongoing change is replacing progress.  Linear, straight-line conceptions of life collapse in the face of life’s messiness and discontinuities.”  What summarizes the Boomers’ worldview says Roof, is an acute consciousness of “Not knowing what’s going to happen next...”

 

Has your life been an unbroken march toward goals you set when you were 18 or 20, 30 or 40?  Does the world at the beginning of the 21^st century look exactly like what you thought it would in 1980 before the collapse of communism; the rise of fundamentalisms world-wide; the population changes in Morris County; before Microsoft and e-mail; prior to AIDS and Mad Cow disease?   And who knows what’s going to happen next?  Which of course is precisely a boomer’s point of view, and to return to scripture, Abraham and Sarah’s anxiety as well.

 

A consistent theme in the Abraham-Sarah saga is that they set out from their homeland in ancient Haran, without having any idea where they were going.  Promised by God that a new people would originate with them, they wandered childless for years.  By the time today’s story unfolds Abraham is in despair.  His only heir is a slave.  But God’s counsel remains, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.”  So Abraham and Sarah, not knowing what was going to happen next, continued on, “believing the Lord,” as the story reports, “and the LORD reckoned it to (them) as righteousness.”

 

How does one go on not knowing what is going to happen next?  To paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr, how can we survey the chaos of the present and the peril of the future and NOT sink into despair?  The words which Sarah and Abraham heard, were, “Do not be afraid...”  They trusted and went on in faith.  Indeed so deep was their trust, that they have been held up ever since as models of faith.  Paul especially, in his letters to the churches in Rome and Galatia, instructs those of us with no idea about what’s going to happen next, to take Sarah and Abraham as our guides.

 

“Hoping against hope,” Paul writes to the church in Rome, Abraham “believed that he would become “the father of many nations.  He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.  No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith... being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.  Therefore his faith ‘was reckoned to him as righteousness.’    (Romans 4)

 

Reflecting on Sarah and Abraham, Martin Luther concluded that “Faith is the readiness to enter confidently into the darkness of the future.”  500 years later perhaps we would say faith is a matter of entering confidently into the uncertainty of the future.  The confidence of faith is not that all will be well:  that we, because of our faith will be spared the agonies and sufferings of existence.  The confidence of faith is that we needn’t bear these trials and sorrows alone.  It is to affirm that God is here, not causing, but caring; not here pulling the strings, but empowering us to endure with dignity, to face challenges with courage, knowing we are not alone.  “Wait upon the Lord,” wrote the Psalmist, “be strong, and let your heart take courage.  Wait upon the Lord.”

 

If Abraham and Sarah are not historical figures, then how did their story originate, and why is it cited continually across the centuries of our tradition?  In the first place it is a story of national origins.  “Where did we come from?” Israelite children asked, and their elders told them legendary stories about their ancestors.  But more, consider the historical dilemmas of the people who originated the stories and then kept on telling them.  It is now thought that the book of Genesis was compiled and edited during Israel’s exile in Babylon.  Their homeland had been shattered; Jerusalem and the Temple utterly destroyed.  Their future as a people was worse than dark, it seemed non-existent.  So, in the apt words of Phyllis Trible, they appropriated the past for the sake of the present.  The old promise of descendants provided new rays of hope.  Tales of Sarah and Abraham wandering from Haran to Canaan “mirrored the return of the exiles.”  This epic of origins shaped and sustained Israel in a dark and hopeless hour. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or consider Paul’s retelling of the story and Martin Luther’s appeal to Abraham and Sarah.  Already by mid first century, challenges confronted the tiny Jewish-Christian community.  Persecution was just around the corner.  Tensions surfaced over the strategy of including gentiles at table: for many, there to seemed to be no future in that.  Martin Luther lived great stretches of his life under the twin shadows of threat and trial.  He was leading hoards of people, they knew not where, into a strange new world no longer dominated by Popes and Princes.  There is no mistaking the courage it took for them to embark upon their journey.  In each of these instances, once again, tales of the past were appropriated for the sake of courage in the present.

 

To return again to the 21^st century, I have had, in just a month’s time, three remarkable conversations with recovering alcoholics.  I came away from those conversations with enormous appreciation for their struggles, their recoveries; and not least for their testimonies of faith.   Living one day at a time; trusting in a higher power; depending on that higher power more than on their own faulty will-power, these three, with countless thousands of others, have put the pieces of their lives back together, and moved on into the uncertain future.  The difference between before and after, is that on the journey away from an alcoholic past, they sensed they were no longer alone, but traveling in the empowering presence of the holy.  Again we hear echoes of Sarah and Abraham and the profound truth of their story.

 

Like Sarah and Abraham, we too are “called to live as creatures of hope,” to borrow Walter Brueggemann’s poetic expression.  We do not know what is going to happen next.  The future is uncertain and dark.  The present is none too inspiring either.  Abraham and Sarah’s had filled a servant’s name into their last will and testament.  There were no children to carry on family name or divine promise.  Our world is scourged by a virus, which only now, after millions of deaths, are we finding the conscience and courage to treat among the poorest of the world’s poor in Africa.  Young people in our nation, whose privileges in comparison to most in our world are enormous, settle schoolyard scores with deadly effect, and we wonder why.  Indonesia has sunk into anarchy and chaos.  Wholesale corruption and piracy have replaced communism in the fragments left of the eastern bloc.  The poor Brits don’t even have the solace of overcooked roast beef.  How are we to survey the chaos of our present or the peril of the future, without sinking into despair, unless we have a faith-inspired hope?  Perhaps their actual history never was, but Sarah’s and Abraham’s story ever is.  Their experience could be our experience, if only we had faith; if only we trusted in an empowering holy presence which imparts courage and strength.  Wait upon the Lord.  Be strong and take courage.  Your faith could also be counted as righteousness.