Genesis 17:1-7,15-17
17 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. 2 And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.’ 3 Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, 4 ‘As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. 5 No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. 6 I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. 7 I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. ……15 God said to Abraham, ‘As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. 16 I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.’ 17 Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, ‘Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?’
This text is a reiteration and expansion of passages in Genesis 12 and 15. Abram has already trusted God’s call to uproot himself and his family in chapter 12. God calls Abram into an uncertain future on the basis of a promise: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 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.” But Abraham was old, as was his wife,Sarai. Children, much less a great nation, seemed highly unlikely, if not preposterous. So, Sarai and Abraham took things into their own hands. Sarai offered her slave Hagar as a surrogate to provide an heir—but this was not God’s plan. So, God has another conversation with Abram in chapter 15. God tells Abram his promises still stand: ‘Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’ Abraham points out the obvious to God: ‘You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.’—translate to:‘You have already failed in your promise and we have takensteps to make up for your error.’ God does not scold but he does contradict: ‘This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.’ Translate again to: ‘I made a promise and I intend to keep it.’ God told Abram to look at the stars: ‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ … ‘So shall your descendants be.’ Once again, Abram trusts the Lord and does what he is told: “And he (Abram) believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
How or why Abram decided to leave his homeland and the how or why he held on to God’s promises of progeny is unknown but the story is the prototypical example of trusting the Lord. In ordinary human experience, God’s promises are preposterous. They flew in the face of Abram’s experience as well as in the face of biological reality.
In our passage today, it gets worse. More time has passed. The mechanism God uses to keep his promises is even more preposterous. Abram has been wandering for 24 years—no promised land in sight. He is now 99. His wife is 90. His only son is a 13-year-old slave boy (Ishmael)—the promise of his own heir was beyond any biological possibility. Yet, God keeps making the same promise. This time Abram falls on his face laughing— “Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, ‘Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?”
This is the time to recognize that this story, as is much of the Bible, is about spiritual truth, which is often neither realistic, factual nor logical. But these parameters of the rational world are not the sole parameters of assessing truth. We do not need video tape or independent verification of the story of George Washington confessing he cut down a cherry tree to understand the truth that George was seen as an honest man with great integrity. It is important to remember that NOTHING that Jesus did was so convincing that all who saw, believed. Even if we had the video tape. Even if we were there, there was and is room to question the promises of God.
The truth of this story does not hinge upon archeological verification nor the likelihood of a 90-year-old woman’s pregnancy. This is an ‘origin’ story about a family setting out ona journey into uncertainty trusting that somehow, someway the promise of a better life was possible. Abram had flocks and servants, but he did not have progeny or land. Those were the criteria of the day to ‘be somebody.’ In today’s parlance, he was an illegal immigrant. And as we well know illegal immigrants are rarely welcomed. The ordinary real-life reaction is stereotyping, fear and suspicion.
The story is told through the lens of a Bronze Age patriarchy where maleness, land and lineage were the measure of the good life. As such, having a long lineage and owning land were the ‘proof’ of God’s favor. Hence, God’s insistence that Abram could have such things was a Bronze Age way of saying that even the disenfranchised could be special in God’s eyes. The theme is repeated in the Exodus story where the ‘nobodies’ were even lower on the social scale and later still when Jesus proactively included the outcasts of his century. Human rules for evaluating people are not God’s rules. Human ways of valuing people are not God’s ways. God’s ways are preposterous to our eyes. Faith is, in part, simply acknowledging that we don’t know it all.
FYI: In our narrative, there is no concern for who was excluded— the Canaanites, women, or the uncircumcised.Ironically these groups now occupied the status of ‘nobodies’ that had been the lot of Abraham before God’s promises. It is ironic how difficult it is for the “haves” to recognize the “have nots.” Gratitude can turn into entitlement in a heartbeat. Left to our natural devices, we do not ask first ‘How can we share for the benefit of the greater good?’ We ask instead: “How can we keep what we have? How can we secure our own future?” Then, maybe, we have room to be generous.
Abram’s righteousness was his willingness to accept God’s promise that he was a person of value chosen by God. He was asked to trust and believe that God would find a way—even when the odds were stacked against him. Such promises were so improbable that Abram fell to ground laughing. But later that promise was to extend to all humankind. But it is hard to ‘walk by faith.’ It is hard to trust in God’s preposterous promises. Faith in God asks us to leave open possibilities that are beyond our imagining.
One last note on the concept of being chosen. We are not standing around the school yard waiting to be chosen for a pick-up baseball team. God’s choosing is not based upon talent, popularity or obedience. God chooses us when we feel least desirable—when we know how often we insist upon our own way—when we turn from God—or even more commonly, when we are imprisoned by the secular world’s rankings. To be chosen by God violates human rules and that is a gift beyond measure.But it also becomes an enormous responsibility to go and do likewise. To be chosen by God is to love as we have been loved. Our natural selves want to receive more than give. Again, later, Jesus was to turn being chosen upside down. Chosen became more about a life of giving and sharing than a life of getting.
In a much more mundane example, most of us want to bechosen by another. It is wonderful to be wanted and desired. But then we find out that being in relationship is one heck of a lot of work. Mindfulness in our families is hard. It requires effort, inconvenience, and sacrifice. This work is hard enough but to walk the streets and see the hunger and inequities will absolutely exhaust you. How and when to respond requires constant discernment. It turns out signing up to be Christian is to choose a life of never-ending discernment with inadequate information.
It is a preposterous request only made possible by God’s preposterous promises. We are loved. Every bit of loving matters. Love will prevail. And God will always be with us. Hold on to them. Let it be so.
