2 Lent A (17 February 2008)

Genesis 12:1-4, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

Pr. George L. Murphy

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron OH

UNGODLY FAITH

He was resting in the sunlight, taking it easy and glancing at the Sunday paper. It was good to relax now – things were pretty well set up for the rest of their lives. He was seventy-five, which wasn’t that old. He still got around fine. But it was time to take it easy and not have a lot of responsibilities. Just stay settled and enjoy life.

The only thing he really regretted was that they hadn’t been able to have kids. They’d always felt bad about that but it wasn’t anybody’s fault. And when you came right down to it, they had a lot of family here. There’d be people to look out for them here and remember them. Things would work out all right here at home, in the old familiar surroundings with familiar people.

“There go the church bells again. Well, I’m not going to feel guilty about staying home today. I know I’m not the most religious person but I guess I do okay. There they go again. No – that’s the phone. Better answer it. Hello!”

Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from 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. 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 will be blessed.

It sounded crazy – really impossible, to tell the truth. But Abram believed. His buddies down at the garage, when he was getting ready for the trip, thought he was nuts. “You’re going halfway around the world because you think God called you? You don’t even go to church when it’s raining! You getting to be some kind of religious fanatic?”

Well, no, Abram wasn’t what you’d call especially religious. He just – well, he believed God. Of course he had a lot of questions. “I will make of you a great nation” – how could that be when they didn’t even have children? But still, he believed, and went.

Things weren’t easy when they got to Canaan. Everything was different – different language, different customs, different beliefs. It was hard to get used to after so many years at home. Sometimes it seemed there was nothing left of the old life at all. Sarai was with him of course, but they still had no children.

Once in awhile he’d get another call from the LORD with more promises like “To your descendants I will give this land.” God even changed his name to Abraham, which means, “father of a multitude.” Sometimes that puzzled Abraham him and sometimes it angered him and sometimes it seemed like the world’s biggest joke. “Great! I’m in my eighties, my wife in her seventies, we have no kids, I don’t own a square cubit of this land outright, and ‘To your descendants I will give this land.’ Whatever you say, LORD.”

Abraham did see God’s promises fulfilled – a little bit. They had a son when he was a hundred years old and Sarah was ninety. They named him “Isaac,” which means, “He laughs,” because it really was a joke. And Abraham did finally own some land: when Sarai died he bought a cemetery plot from Ephron the Hittite. His possession in the land of promise was a tomb.

What was so special about Abraham, that he should be called “the father of us all”? The old rabbis, long after Abraham’s time, told some stories to answer that question. They imagined that Abraham had figured out from his observations of the heavens that there was only one true God who deserved worship. They told about how he had destroyed the idols in his father’s house, and so on. They were very natural stories because it seems to make sense that Abraham was chosen because he was very smart and very religious.

Wait a minute! I’m not terribly smart and I don’t feel terribly religious. If that’s the way God works, if God chooses only godly people, I’m out of luck.

But the God of Abraham, the creator of the world, is the God who justifies the ungodly.

Abram started out ungodly, like all his friends and relatives back in Haran. “Long ago,” it says later in the Bible, “Your ancestors - Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor – lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods.” They were idolaters and their moral standards probably weren’t that high. In fact, if you look at the preceding chapters of Genesis it looks as if their world was in a lot of trouble. It was kind of like today. And God’s saving work began in the middle of that ungodly, unrighteous world.

It was just as when God made the universe in the beginning. There was nothing – darkness over the face of the Deep – and God called the world into being. Now again God begins to create light and life where before there was only death and darkness. It is the same work. Paul says in our Second Lesson that the real God is the one who “justifies the ungodly and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

Abram was part of that sinful world. God called him out of death to life, and Abram believed. That is why he is the father of us all – because he trusted God, and God counted him righteous because of that faith. Abram probably wondered sometimes why he went on trusting God’s promise, but most of the time he was too busy living, being a stranger in a strange land. Sometimes he believed in spite of what was happening, as he and Sarai got older and older and no child came. There were doubts, but each time there was the reminder, “God has promised.” And in spite of doubts, he believed.

He believed God, not himself. If he’d trusted in his own piety or churchgoing or moral rectitude, if he’d been a positive thinker and said ‘I just have to believe in myself,’ we never would have heard of him. He would have been forgotten like so many others who worship themselves. But “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

The God who justifies the ungodly called Abram and his descendants forward to the fulfillment of the promise. And as preposterous as the promises to Abram seemed, that was nothing compared with what God would do with Abram’s promised descendant. Finally all God’s promises are focused in Christ nailed to the cross as a lawbreaker and blasphemer. God has justified the ungodly by becoming one of them: “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” And it is in Jesus Christ that the ungodly are declared righteous.

In the preaching of the cross of Christ God continues to call men and women to lives of faith as God called Abram and Sarai. Go from your native land, living in a world of sinners and knowing that you are a sinner but trusting in the promise of God. Trust even though you see only hints and tokens of the fulfillment of the promise. Trust even though the promise of being righteous people sometimes seems like God’s biggest joke.

The God of the promise, the God who may seem such a joker, is not only the one who “justifies the ungodly and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” Paul says also – it is the part of the same pattern – that God “ gives life to the dead.” Abram’s only real estate was a tomb, and from another tomb on Easter God will play his greatest joke on death and on doubt.