Armadale Uniting Church

Sermon for 10th Sunday 

Abraham

Sermon for the 10^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Martin Wright

Armadale Uniting Church, 8 June 2008

Genesis 12:1-9, Matthew 9:9-13

Today, and over the coming three weeks, we follow the story of Abraham.  It begins today when God first calls him to get up, leave his homeland, and taking only his dependents with him, journey into an unknown country.  But although today’s reading is the beginning of Abraham’s and Israel’s story, it does not come out of the blue.  Last week we read the flood story:  at the end, after the waters have receded, God makes a new beginning with Noah and his family, virtually a new creation.  They are to be fruitful and multiply throughout the earth.  

There’s another important story we’ve missed between last week’s reading and today’s:  the Tower of Babel.  By that stage, Noah’s descendants have proved very fruitful indeed, and the human race is thriving, one large, powerful family.  So powerful that they want to reach out into the heavens and become like God.  God’s response, of course, is to scatter them throughout the world, and confuse their language—often seen as a destructive act, but actually it’s a new sort of creativity, if it’s understood as an explanation for the rich variety of languages and cultures we humans have.  Now in place of one undivided human family, there are many families, tribes and nations. 

From Babel, we follow the genealogy of just one of these families, tracing just one line of descendants through, until we arrive at Abram.  And that’s where we pick up the story today.  It was very clear for the people who put the book of Genesis together that Abram was just one particular representative among many, of one particular tribe or nation among many, when God singled him out.  So in one sense this is the story of one man; but at the same time it is the story of the whole world.  God says to Abram, “Everyone who blesses you I will bless, everyone who curses you I will curse, and all the families of the earth will be blessed in you”.  What happens with Abram is going to change the way that God deals with the whole of creation.  What begins today will finally culminate on the cross of Christ when, through one man, God’s blessing will be made available to all. 

So there is an awful lot hanging on Abram’s response, and remember, he could have said no.  He could quite easily have told the Lord, “No thank you very much, I’m quite happy living an unremarkable life as an ordinary citizen in my particular family of the earth, I’d rather not risk it all on a strange voice telling me to do something absurd”.  In fact he didn’t, but chose to take the risk of becoming remarkable, and embracing an unknown future.  For this reason, Paul calls Abraham not only the father of Israel, but the father of all of us who have faith in God.  Abraham’s faith is the paradigm of all who would get up and go where God calls them; more than that, it was his initial response that allowed the history of Israel to get underway, and so made it possible for all his descendents, including us, to encounter the same God through faith. 

So this is not only one man’s story, and not only the story of the whole world, it is our story too, of each one of us and of the church as a body.  If we really are seeking to follow the calling of Abraham’s God, we’ll find that his faith and ours follow the same sort of course.  Four examples of what this might look like. 

Firstly, Abraham lives according to a promise.  God says to him, “I will make of you a great nation… your descendents will inherit this land… all the families of the earth will be blessed in you”.  Now Abraham knows he will not live to see any of this.  He can see the promised land—he gets a glimpse of the distant horizon—but he is not going to arrive there in his own lifetime.  All he has to go on is the promise of God, and that is enough. 

We Christians too live according to a promise, that Jesus Christ who has lived and died among us will come again, and bring all the evil in the world to judgement, and will establish his kingdom of peace on earth.  We know that we may well not see this in our own lifetimes (we may, who knows).  But in faith we keep our eyes on the promised future, trusting that God will be faithful, and living our lives by the standard of that future, not the present.

Secondly, Abraham is promised that his descendents will inherit the land of Canaan.  Problem is, there are already people living there, specifically the Canaanites.  Every living soul in the world outside, Abraham’s tiny entourage, could tell him that this hope was entirely unrealistic.  From the very beginning of God’s promise, it is contested; the rest of the world is telling competing stories and making their own claims to the world which is God’s alone to give. 

The Christian story is always contested, and that is more obvious for us now than it has been for many generations.  The church in the West today is having to learn how to be small again (I say again, because that’s how the church began, as a very unpopular minority).  The rest of the world will clamour to tell us we are living a lie, and try to convince us that their own claims and stories are more truthful, that something as weak and absurd as the church couldn’t possibly be the herald of a coming kingdom.  And yet that is God’s promise. 

Thirdly, Abraham never really puts down roots.  Once God has called him to get up and go, he and his people live like nomads, stopping here and there for a time, but never settling permanently.  It’s not until Joshua leads the Israelites into Canaan that they ever really settle; even then they are exiled again soon enough; in fact the whole history of God’s people is a very unstable one. 

Living according to God’s promise means being a people on the move.  The writer to the Hebrews understood that this was also true of the church when he wrote that “Here we have no abiding city—we are seeking one that is to come”.  God’s people can never become too comfortable.  Our eyes are on the horizon and we can never rest until we reach it. 

Finally, and on a related point, the promised land is not given to Abraham as his possession.  He has no control over it.  Even when the Israelites finally arrive there generations later, they depend on God to sustain them in the land.  Now in this country we’re always being told that the Great Australian Dream is for everyone to own their own home, to have their own little patch of land, their castle, where they can retreat at the end of the day, and shut out all the competition from the world, and find their own safety and security.  This may well be comfortable and convenient and it makes a certain amount of sense.  But with the eyes of Abraham’s faith, we can see that the Great Australian Dream is a myth.  No security that we can find in property, comfort, health, or lifestyle will last—all these things can be taken away from us tomorrow.  The only place we are ever really at home is in the presence of our Lord, and he has a tendency to wander around. 

When Jesus met the tax collector Matthew, he addressed him in much the same way that Yahweh addressed Abraham, saying only “Follow me”.  And with the same sort of readiness as Abraham, Matthew got up, left his work behind, and followed his Lord.  He was going to get used to being on the move—Jesus never really settled down, but led his disciples on one long journey which ended at the cross and the empty tomb.  And after that, Matthew and the others were on the move spreading the good news throughout the rest of the world.  He’d also find his new life contested, in fact it happened as soon as he sat down to a meal with Jesus.  He’d have to learn to live by a promised future that he would not see fulfilled in his own time. 

The fact that each one of you has come here today shows that, some time and in some way, you have heard these same words of Jesus, “Follow me”.  We’re gathered here not to shut the doors behind us and set ourselves up in a new home, but because we know that once we’ve heard those words, we need to keep hearing them again.  Week by week we need to come into God’s presence to be reminded of our calling and listen for where he would have us follow.  Christian life is a pilgrimage, but thank God, not one we make alone—we have the good company of one another, and our Lord who walks with us.