Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 | Romans 4:13-25
Jeremy Richards
I love the pairing of our two scriptures today. In our reading from Genesis, we hear one of the accounts of God’s covenant with Abraham (there are actually a number of times in Genesis that God makes this covenant with Abraham, with slight variations), and then in Romans we hear Paul’s interpretation of this very story. Towards the end of our reading from Romans, Paul says explicitly that what was written centuries earlier about Abraham was written “not for [Abraham’s] sake alone, but for ours also.”
Paul says that the stories we read in scripture aren’t meant to simply tell us what happened at some point in history, but they are meant to be studied, meditated on, and prayed over, and their lessons are meant to be applied to our own lives, regardless of when and where we live. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul says that the scriptures were written to be “an example for us.” The stories and teachings of scripture intersect with our own lives. They’re practical and applicable today.
Of course, I’m not telling you anything new. This is what we do every Sunday, and every time we open our Bibles on our own time, or whenever we study scripture in a small group. We read a passage and we try to find the balance between the obvious differences in our lives and the lives of biblical characters, and the connections – the universal truths about what it means to be human, who God is, and how those two things are tied together, especially through the lens of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I just think there’s something very cool about instances like these in the New Testament when a New Testament writer interprets the Old Testament in light of Christ, and in light of the present reality in which they and their community live. Like, we get to see it all play out right in front of us. Hopefully, this inspires us to think creatively about how we might interpret scripture to address our own lives, our own contexts, our own challenges.
In this case, Paul is translating the story of God’s covenant with Abraham to make a point about faith to the churches that exist in Rome (as a side note, at this point Paul has never been to Rome and never met the community he is addressing, which is kind of interesting). Paul makes an argument about “righteousness” and guess what?! The word that is translated “righteousness” is again dikaiosyne, that same word from Matthew 6 that was translated “piety” a few weeks ago, the word that means “justice, equitableness, fairness, uprightness.” This word is used 90 times in the New Testament. So, if you read the word “righteousness” in the New Testament — a word that might previously had a kind of negative, overly religious connotation to you — I’d say it’s safe to assume it’s actually this word, dikaiosyne, which is a wonderful word.
Paul says our righteousness, which we could take to mean right relationship with God and with others, is not a result of following the law, but of faith. This is a truth that many in our present world would do well to acknowledge. I recently read that one of the attorneys of one of the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery has said that his client “acted within the law.” If acting within the law allows you to kill an innocent man while he’s out on a jog and get away with it, the law is not reliable. Of course, we hope the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery won’t get away with it, but we all know of people who have gotten away with similar things.
But this is always how it goes with the law. Laws are necessary, but there are always loop holes and work arounds in the law, especially for those with power, money, and influence. And on the flip side, those who are working for justice, righteousness, dikaiosyne in the world are often arrested for breaking the law — like Jesus, like the apostles, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, and many others. The law — an outside force that works through condemnation and punishment — doesn’t create righteousness. Righteousness is grown and cultivated in the heart. It’s spirit work. In 2 Corinthians Paul says, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
In our reading from Romans, Paul says righteousness comes not through the law but through faith. But that begs a few questions. Faith in what? What does faith even mean? Is faith a “statement of faith,” like some churches have? Is it adhering to certain doctrines, creeds, or confessions? And what is the nature of faith? Is it blind? And what does it mean to have faith? Can faith be quantified, so that it’s possible for one person to have more faith than another? And if so, what’s the benefit of having more faith? Is it transactional, like so many preachers of the prosperity gospel today say it is — If you have enough faith…you won’t get sick, or you won’t doubt, or you’ll make lots of money. Can you exchange a surplus of faith for worldly comforts?
Well, we find the answer, or at least the object, of faith toward the middle of our passage from Romans, in verse 17: the faith we share with Abraham is faith in “the presence of the God in whom [Abraham] believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” What a beautiful, almost startling description of God. The One who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” And this faith is not only in the existence of this One, the One Genesis calls “God Almighty,” El Shaddai, but in God’s presence. It’s not that God exists out there, but that God is present here and now, always, regardless of whether we’re talking about Abraham or the churches in Rome or Grant Park Church. God is present.
Basically, Paul is just reiterating what we talked about in the sermon series we just finished: that in order to get everything else in our lives right, we should focus first not on our actions (the law) or on trying to impress others, but on the living God – the one who is present here and now and always, and who “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” Paul says that our faith is simply faith in God’s faithfulness to us. God’s faithfulness to us precedes our faithfulness to God. God is always and already faithful. God is always and already present. In Genesis, God is the one who initiates the covenant with Abraham. God’s faithfulness comes first and is ultimate. Our faith — wavering as it may be — is simply a response to God’s faithfulness.
This description of God as the One who, “calls into existence the things that do not exist” is a fitting description of the God who covenants with Abraham and Sarah in our reading from Genesis, because in this passage, God promises — I think it’s for the third time — that Abraham and Sarah will have a child, even though the very first line of the passage says “When Abraham was ninety-nine years old,” and later in chapter 17 we learn Sarah is 90. So telling a couple nearing a century old, who were barren in the prime of their life, that they’ll give birth to a child and will be the parents of a “multitude of nations” is on par with “calling into existence things that do not exist.” Both seem equally impossible…to us.
And they also seemed impossible to Abraham and Sarah. In fact, whether he does so intentionally or not, Paul hardly gives an accurate account of Abraham’s faith. In our reading from Romans, Paul makes Abraham out to be this model of faithfulness, when in reality Abraham frequently lost faith…like, a lot. He was constantly doubting God or trying to take matters into his own hands instead of trusting God. In fact, the lectionary, in a kind of disingenuous move, cuts the passage short of Abraham’s reaction to God’s promise, which is anything but faithful. Our lectionary reading ends at v. 16, but the verse directly following it, v. 17, says Abraham literally falls to the ground laughing at God and God’s promise, and says, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” God makes this beautiful promise to Abraham, and Abraham laughs in God’s face.
And that’s not all. Then Abraham tries to tell God that God should just fulfill the promise through Abraham’s one existing offspring, Ishmael. Ishmael, if you don’t remember the details of the story, was born because Abraham and Sarah got impatient with God taking so long to give them a child and decided to have Abraham sleep with their Egyptian slave, Hagar, in order for him to have a child, like God had promised. Hagar, who is reduced to their property, like an object, has no say in this. So, not only does Abraham not trust God to come through and takes matters into his own hands, he also basically rapes his slave Hagar in an attempt to secure the future of his lineage.
Soooooooo…Paul’s got some rose-colored glasses on when he says Abraham “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 as he gave glory to God.” Yes he did waver! He totally wavered. He totally distrusted God’s promise. That’s exactly what happened, Paul!
But personally I take comfort in Abraham’s lack of faith (though I find the whole issue of Hagar and Ishmael profoundly, inexcusably disturbing). Because, while Paul doesn’t really tell the story accurately, it drives home the crucial point: that the faithfulness that matters is not ours but God’s. In the end, whether we fall down laughing in the face of God’s promises, or try to make God’s promises happen through our own ingenuity and cunning instead of trusting God, in the end the Good News God promises will come to pass.
That’s not to say that our actions and the actions of others don’t matter. When we rebel against God’s righteousness, as Abraham and Sarah did with Hagar, people get hurt. When we laugh in the face of God, it says much more about our own despair and cynicism than it does about God. It’s a marker of our faithlessness, not God’s.
This lesson is very applicable today. While we’ve never been called by God to a foreign land, or promised an heir that would become a great nation, out of whom would come the Savior, and through whom God would reconcile all that is to Godself, we do know what it’s like to be tired, exhausted, ready to lose hope and give up our faith.
I think this is why so many of us resonated with Brie’s testimony last week. Many of us have also struggled with our faith. We’ve become disenchanted with religion at one point or another. Maybe we’re actually feeling pretty disenchanted right now. I’d guess that, with the year we’ve had, some of us might be struggling with our faith today.
And I just want to say that’s okay. It’s understandable. Abraham, the one Paul lifts up as a model for our faith, laughed in God’s face (and so did Sarah a chapter later). Abraham and Sarah questioned if God could be trusted and tried to take matters into their own hands. But our readings from Genesis and Romans tell us that God is faithful even when we feel faithless, even when we are faithless. 2 Timothy 2 says of Christ, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful — for he cannot deny himself.”
One of the themes of Lent is Christ’s humanity, as he journey’s toward his own death on Good Friday. 2 Timothy says that Christ has so taken on our humanity, has so fully become one with us through the incarnation, that to deny us would be to deny himself. Talk about faithfulness. That is the degree to which Christ has committed himself to us.
These scriptures bring with them perspective. Our lives aren’t reduced to this present moment, this year of Covid, the last few years of extreme political extremism. We exist within a story that is thousands of years old. Really, we exist within a story that is eternal, because it’s rooted in the eternal God. But life has become so insular, so day-by-day, it’s hard to see outside of our immediate circumstances. But through Jesus, we receive a promise that was made thousands of years ago to an old man and his old wife. At 99 and 90, God gave them new names, a new purpose, to say that the story wasn’t over. And Abraham would go on to become the father of the “Abrahamic faiths”: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Could Abraham ever have imagined that at 99, when God showed up to promise him, yet again, that he’d have a son? No, the very thought of it caused him to fall down laughing.
While our current loneliness, isolation, fear, cynicism, disenchantment, whatever it might be, may feel all-consuming right now, I hope we can remember that this is not the whole story. This is not the end of the story. We are not left alone, but we are promised the presence of the One “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” Regardless of our emotional state or our spiritual strength, this is the One who is faithful to us. Always.
Lent is a season marked by the crucifixion. It’s a 40 day journey to the cross. We aren’t supposed to sing hallelujah for the entirety of this season. And yet the 40 days of Lent don’t include Sundays (it’s 47 days if we include Sundays), because even in the midst of Lent, even as we try our best to focus on the cross, each Sunday is its own small resurrection, reminding us that we can never really escape resurrection. The cross always harkens to the empty tomb. The crucified Christ always points us toward the resurrected Christ. We always know deep down that Lent is only the buildup to Easter. We can’t make it a week without a resurrection, no matter how small.
This is the promise of God. This is the Good News. This is the Gospel. May we have faith to believe in it.
Amen.