The Lord Spoke to Abraham
This sermon was preached in October 2009 at a prominent mainline Protestant church in the South.
Now the Lord said to Abram, âGo from your country and your kindred and your fatherâs house to the land that I will show you. And 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 him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.â So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife.âŠ
(GENESIS 12:1-5)
THEREâS A column in The Wall Street Journal every Saturday called âHouses of Worship.â The author of last weekâs column, âRevelation Revised,â is Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University. Listen carefully to the first two sentences of the professorâs article:
Any claim of revelation is preposterous. It presumes that God exists, that God speaks, and that all is not lost when human beings translate that speech into ordinary language.
Now this is a remarkable statement for at least three reasons. First of all, it is obviously an in-your-face challenge to classical Christianity. Second, itâs a perfect definition of biblical revelation â although Iâm not sure the author meant it that way. And third, it expresses the doubts of a lot of people who sit in pews in mainline churches today. There are people who come to church â some of you are here today â holding various religious views but not really believing that God speaks and certainly not believing that human beings have translated Godâs speech into ordinary language. There have been people like that in my own family. They supported the church with their attendance and contributions even though they did not really believe in the basic tenets of the Christian faith. The result of this has been a great capitulation on the part of many preachers who donât want to risk alienating significant numbers of their flock.
But not all preachers. Will Willimon, who held forth for many years in the pulpit of the Duke Chapel, recently wrote that the Christian faith depends upon three words from the first chapter of Genesis. Can you guess what those three words are?
âAnd God said âŠâ
Itâs not too strong a statement to say that the entire structure of Christianity stands or falls on that foundation: âAnd God said âŠâ If we believe that, then everything else follows from it.
But âany claim of revelation is preposterousâ! And what was it that God said, anyway? âAnd God said, âLet there be light,â and there was light.â But science has shown us that that couldnât have happened, right? So we fall back on the idea that this is a beautiful myth that arose out of the storytelling imagination of some very gifted and spiritual human beings.
Actually, the creation story is a myth, in the sense that a myth is a pictorial way of expressing a fundamental truth â in this case, the truth that God created the world by his Word. Thatâs not what the history-of-religion people have in mind, though. A lot of them, and a lot of biblical scholars also, read and teach Scripture as though it was produced by human initiative out of human religious imagination. A lot of big-name speakers show up regularly at big-name churches to teach that God has evolved out of our understanding of God. What sort of god is that? The Old Testament prophets would have said it was an idol. Maybe the atheists are on the right track in thinking that a god projected out of human wishes isnât God at all.
On the other hand, the book of Genesis says that God was there before there was anybody to imagine a God. Thatâs what it says. Look, we donât have to believe what Genesis says, but why do we want to make it say something it clearly does not say?
In the mainline churches today, there is a theological problem. Those who think that maybe God not only exists but has actually said something are often written off as fundamentalists. The opinion-makers miss no opportunity to suggest that itâs only the unenlightened people in the âBible churchesâ that believe such things. So what are our choices? Do we have to give up believing in a God who speaks in order to be up-to-date?
This morning we have heard a reading that sets the whole Judeo-Christian story in motion. Actually, thatâs too feeble a way to put it. Listen to what a Jewish scholar says about the story of Abraham leaving home. âIt is an event of universal significance, produc[ing] far-reaching consequences for [hu]mankind as a whole, and constituting a major turning-point in human history.â How does this uniquely consequential story begin? It begins with these words: âThe Lord spoke to Abraham.â
The whole Bible is based on the claim that God has spoken. Now the ruling classes in our mainline churches donât generally say outright that this claim is preposterous. That would be going too far. We still read the Bible in church and theoretically hold it in high esteem. But what happens is that we read the Bible anthropologically â the Greek word anthropos meaning âhumanity,â and theos meaning âGod.â The way that we wiggle out of the claim that God speaks is to read the Bible anthropologically instead of theologically.
What does that mean?
Hereâs an example of a theological reading. A theologically oriented Old Testament scholar says this about Genesis 12: â[God] is the subject of the first verb at the beginning of the first statement and is thus the subject of the entire subsequent sacred history.â God is the subject of the verb. In other words, itâs not the more or less elevated religious notions of human beings that make biblical history; itâs God who makes biblical history.
But we donât like this, so weâve changed the subject of the verb. The story of Abraham has become an anthropological story. In todayâs versions, God no longer speaks. Abraham thinks that God speaks. There was a TV series on Genesis a few years ago, and hardly anyone noticed that God was not the subject. Only the very alert and biblically oriented viewers were aware that it was all about the human authors, their religious ideas, their concepts of a God who existed because they had thoughts about him. In a video version of the story of Abraham, when the voice of God speaks, itâs actually the voice of the actor who plays the part of Abraham. Do you see what I mean? Without our realizing what was happening, the speaking, acting, procreating God was removed from the story and was replaced by human religious sensibility, or spirituality if you will. Our spirituality becomes the main subject, and God becomes the object.
There will always be those who prefer the story of the human search for God. But thatâs quite different from the biblical story of the God who came searching for us. The opening chapter in the saga of that search is right here â âGod spoke to Abraham.â
Now we always want to think that Abraham was chosen because he was a great man of faith: God saw him being faithful and approved of him and chose him. But thatâs not what happened at all. The biblical account tells us only two things about Abraham and Sarah before God spoke: (1) Abraham was the son of Terah, and (2) Sarah was barren. Thatâs no way to begin a story! This couple is going to become the father and mother of all humanity! We want to know more about them! But this is not a story about a couple. This is a story about the living God.
Letâs see if we can get this. Weâve been talking about âand God saidâŠâ Well, what did he say? Did he say he was going to send another flood to kill all the ungodly people? Noooo ⊠we already heard that one. This is a new chapter. God told Abraham something that sounds very simple but isnât. He said, âLeave home and go to a place that I, God, will show you.â Now Iâm sure most of you have heard it explained that it was almost inconceivably more difficult for a man of ancient times to leave his roots than it would be for a young man today, when all young people are expected to leave home. For a man of Abrahamâs time it was nothing short of crazy to set out from home for no economic reason, just because God said so.
But there was a promise attached to the command of God:
âI will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great ⊠and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.â (vv. 2-3)
This isnât primarily a promise to Abraham at all. Itâs a universal promise, a promise reaching to the ends of the earth and to the end of time as we know it. The offspring of this one man Abraham will be blessed by God, and through those offspring all other families who will ever live will be blessed by God. This is the promise that Abraham lived on for the rest of his life. But isnât this rather odd, to say the least, that an elderly man and an elderly, infertile wife should be promised gazillions of descendants? Have we really thought about this? Why did God choose Abraham for this unique role? Why not someone younger? Someone who already had a child or two? And by the way, remember that after this first call from God, Abraham and Sarah continued to be childless for decades. There was absolutely nothing concrete to show for their long, long waiting.
The reason for this is that God is demonstrating the power of his promise. This is not a story about human potential. This is a story about what God did in the life of a man and woman who had no human potential â thatâs the whole point. As they say in the African-American community, this is a story about a God who makes a way out of no way. That is the way the story of redemption begins: with a God who promises to do what is humanly impossible. Only God can do what Paul the apostle said: the God of Abraham âraises the dead and calls into existence the things that do not existâ (Rom. 4:17). God promises that he will make Abrahamâs name great. It is the power of God and no other power that makes this no-name couple famous over the millennia. They would have been lost in the dust of Mesopotamia for all these thousands of years if God in his majestic purpose had not caused them to be revered today as Father Abraham and Mother Sarah.
Now listen to the rest of Paulâs words concerning Abraham:
He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead because he was about a hundred years old, or when he considered the barrenness of Sarahâs womb.⊠He grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.⊠(Rom. 4:19-21)
What God had promised. What is the power of a promise? President Obama has discovered that promises are easy to make but hard to keep. That is the reality that all politicians have to face when the campaigns are over. Have you had the experience of wanting to promise something and then being unable to do it because you didnât have the ability to follow through? Imagine being able to promise your friend with cancer that she will be healed. Imagine being able to promise a hard-working jobless man that you will definitely be able to find him a good position so that he can support his family. Imagine being able to tell a child with a drug-ridden mother and an absent father in a poverty-stricken neighborhood that he will have a brilliant future. Imagine being able to promise a person with early Alzheimerâs that the disease will get better instead of worse. We want to make promises to people, and sometimes we want to make them so much that we do make them, and then we fail because we canât follow through.
This is the reason that it matters so much that God actually speaks. Preposterous it may be, humanly speaking. But here are the words that the church lives by: âGod is able to do what he has promised.â In spite of all the deconstructionists and the skeptics and the scoffers, there is something about the Word of God in the Bible that eludes them all. There is a mysterious life in the Scriptures that renews Godâs people generation after generation.
How can this be?
Itâs because God is real, and he is our God, and he speaks the Word of life, and his Spirit cannot be quenched, and he â God alone â is able to keep his promises of blessing and redemption and abundance and righteousness and fullness of joy and eternal life in his presence.
AMEN.