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The Second Sunday in Lent,
Year A In many ways the story of faith begins with Abram (or Abraham, as he comes to be known); the one who is “our father in faith” and whose call is recounted today. The Scriptural story to this point has been one of fall and decline for the human race: first Adam and Eve, whose story is followed quickly by that of the Flood and the Tower of Babel. Humanity has been faithless to this point: self-centered, sinful, and unmindful of God’s command. As punishment, the world has been virtually destroyed once in the Flood, and then dispersed from Babel to the four corners of the earth. But now something new is happening, and it happens with Abram. Yet the focus of our Scripture today is not really on Abram. It’s more properly on God, YHWH, who is the chief actor. It is YHWH who speaks to Abram; it is YHWH who appears to him. What Abram does is a response to God, who initiates the new epoch in history, and chooses Abram. It is God who will give him a new name and a new identity, and lead him in a new direction. For that is how we know something new is happening with Abram, through the notion of direction and journey. God initiates the action through call: “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 blessing” (Gen. 12:1-2). The response is simple, “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him” (Gen. 12:4); he sets forth, into the unknown, without much indication of where he is going. Abram trusts God, in other words; as it says later in Genesis, “And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6). It is this aspect of Abram’s story that so impresses the Apostle Paul, and which he emphasizes in our second reading. Abraham has faith in God. We know something new is taking place with Abram because he sets forth in faith, trusting God that he will bring him to the place he ought to be. God has promised to bless him; Abram believes it and ventures forth. He is seventy-five years old and has no offspring; yet he believes that God will give him an heir and make of him a mighty nation. He even trusts God enough to be willing to offer the heir as a sacrifice, and then receives him again alive. As Paul comments, “in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom. 4:17). YHWH calls him from familiar surroundings and into a strange land, and Abram does not hesitate. He builds an altar to the Lord, and then moves on. The faith of Abraham is the faith of Jesus, who also trusts in God as he journeys to Jerusalem. He moves forward in faith, at a point of great stress, knowing the tremendous cost of the journey. Yet he trusts in God. As Jesus says in our Gospel today, “So must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (Jo. 3:14). He will be lifted up on the cross, trusting in God for vindication, and by trusting in God will himself become the source of our own life through his death and resurrection. This is the pattern of faith, of trust in God, that is repeated in our own lives. We like to think that we are in control of our own destinies, but it simply isn’t true. Maybe this is a forgivable fiction, but it is still fiction, for we’re not in control of events. God is the only One that we can trust, for he alone is trustworthy. “God is our rock, in whom there is no fault”, as the Psalmist says somewhere; the One who is not marred by stress line or fracture or crack, and on whom we can stand with full confidence. We can journey forward into the unknown of our lives, because Jesus Christ has promised to be with us. We can pause, week by week, to build an altar to the Lord and call upon his Name, to remind ourselves that God has called us and we have responded, as we go about the business of our lives. God is faithful, who has called us to new life in Jesus Christ. The Rev’d John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington. |
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