Sunday, March 5, 2023  Lent 2

Scripture Readings:      Genesis 12: 1-4a

                                        Psalm 33: 18-22

                                        Romans 4: 1-17

                                        John 3: 1-17

This second Sunday of Lent we are, as we are all through lent, asked to give something up; to sacrifice something to remind us of Jesus sacrifice and suffering for our redemption. In our readings this morning we heard of Abram’s sacrifice leaving his home in Ur of the Chaldeans and also Paul’s explanation of what this means to us.

The story of Abram’s calling is a pivotal point in Biblical history. It's the beginning of the rest of the Bible, which even up to Jesus and the Gospels is essentially a story of the Israelites. There is Abraham and his children, Moses and the exodus, David and the kings, and finally the exile and the silent intertestamental period before the birth of Jesus and the Gospels. But we cannot understand from this account what Paul seems to have seen unless we broaden our horizon.

We need to look at Abrams calling in Genesis 12 in light of what has happened before, in light of the whole of creation, not just the Israelites, otherwise we lose the vital connection that Paul makes, that — “the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.” (Romans 4:13)^[1] The all-important truth that we are God’s — children of the promise.

There is a sense in which we could start reading the Bible from this point in Genesis 12. The only other bits we feel we need to acknowledge are that God exists, created the world and that Adam and Eve disobeyed, introducing sin and death into the world. And that is often how we read our biblical history.

Things start with the story of Abraham and the Jews who we interpret as receiving the law but failing in keeping it, and finally missing the advent of the Messiah, Jesus, who they put to death. But this is completely contrary to how Paul spoke of his Jewish fellows, identifying with them, holding them in high esteem before God as the ones chosen to bring the revelation of the law and the prophecy of Christ as he wrote in his letter to the Galatians. To understand, as I said, what Paul is saying to us in Romans we need to start at the beginning.

Genesis chapters 1 to 11 is a story of man’s disobedience and God’s judgement, but also His preserving blessing. Adam and Eve disobey God and eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In judgement God expels them from the garden and his presence but preserves and blesses them by clothing them to cover their shame.

Cain kills his brother Abel and in judgement is driven from his home and land but in a preserving blessing God marks him to protect him from further retribution.

Violence fills the earth and in judgement God sends the flood, preserving Noah and his family and blessing them with the promise of the rainbow.

In pride and arrogance the peoples of the earth build the tower of Babel in the valley of Shinar and God judges them by confusing their language ———- .

Do you hear the difference? There is no preserving blessing. Immediately after the story of Babel and the judgement that scattered the peoples over the face of the whole earth in Genesis 11:8-9, we have the genealogy of Shem, Noah’s oldest son, taking us to Abram and our reading today in Genesis 12.

The calling of Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans is the blessing to the scattered nations.

Now concerning the calling of Abram I don’t think the real Abram was as ready to give up everything as we often portray him to be, and I personally find that comforting. We assume Abram had a dream in which God spoke to him and based on that he left his land, relatives, secure community of which he was a respected member and set out for an unspecified land with no real plan or purpose. And we interpret that to mean that his incredible and unbounded faith was credited to him as righteousness, which leaves me empty and lost because I would never have been able to do that.

On the other hand, reading the story from Genesis 11:27, the story of Abrams father, Terah, and filling in some unspoken gaps, we read that Abram’s youngest brother Haran, the father of Lot, died. We then learn that his other younger brother, Nahor, married Lot’s sister, Haran’s daughter, his niece, Milkah. As innocent as all this might be in their time we read on and learn that Abram’s father, Terah, without any explanation, picks up Abram and his wife Sarai, who was barren, and Haran’s son Lot, and leaves for the land of Canaan, but doesn’t get very far. He settles in a place he names after his dead son, Haran. And I ask, why did Terah feel the need to get away from Ur, and by association, his son Nahor? Lot might otherwise have been best left with his Uncle Nahor and his sister.

In my imagination I paint a Cecil B. DeMille style movie script of the middle son Nahor arranging the death of this bother Haran so he can marry Millkah, whom Haran had refused him to have. Then, because his aging father was ill and his older brother Abram’s wife was barren, plotting to kill him as well to take the inheritance. Terah, to prevent his evil middle son from succeeding, ran away with his remaining child and grandchild, but illness and/or grief overtook him, and he settled for a time in a place he or Abram named after his beloved youngest son, Haran. It's always the middle child isn’t it?

It would be from here, as we begin chapter 12, that God called Abram, who had already left his home and lands in Ur of the Chaldeans, to go to the land Terah had intended him to go. This Abram I find much more satisfyingly human. Not that this detracts from his faith that was counted to him as righteousness, but it gives me hope that God understands our frailty, my weakness, and so before he calls me to do something, well, a bit over the top, he prepares me and the situation so I can succeed.

So when Paul speculates in our reading today, “if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about” we can see that Abram was probably not much different than you or I. Someone with nothing to boast about. And when it also says “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” that’s purely a matter of God’s doing, as it is with us. As Paul says, “to one who without works trusts Him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.” When we trust God it isn’t by our own work or gumption. God prepares the way for us and if we don’t refuse the path set before us as it says “such faith is reckoned as righteousness.”

So I think The Message gets it right when it translates Romans 4, “We call Abraham “father” not because he got God’s attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody.”

“Abraham believed … , deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said He would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples.” (16-17)

And what we need to understand is that Abraham wasn’t a Jew when God made these promises to him. Circumcision came later, and Moses and the law hundreds of years after.

It was through the people of Israel that the law and the prophets taught the world who God is and proclaimed the gospel and salvation and through whom the promised Seed, the Lord Jesus Christ came. But the salvation, the promise, was to Abram, a descendent of Shem and the peoples dispersed from the valley of Shinar. The promise, from the beginning, was for us; all of us. All the people of the earth.

I’m not sure if I have been able to express the difference this understanding makes to me. I honour and am grateful to the Jewish legacy that has given us more than half our Bible, carefully preserving, and communicating through centuries the revealed Word of God. Hebrew is the only modern language that has changed so little that if you know modern Hebrew you can read ancient Hebrew as well.

But it is the understanding that long before Moses, God was preparing his preserving blessing in response to His judgement at the valley of Shinar. That at the same time He was confusing the language and scattering the peoples, — my ancestors, — to the ends of the earth, He was preparing for a man by the name of Abram to accept his calling to go to Canaan and become the father of a great nation out of which a Seed, a saviour, would come. One who would be lifted up for our sins and who would crush the head of the serpent Satan. That we are not simply followers of a martyred Jewish prophet but so, — so much more. We are children of the promise made to Abram, and Noah, and Cain and Adam. That Jesus was there at creation and at each preserving blessing after judgement. That He is the merciful judge full of grace who blesses and preserves, — us.

As we continue our journey through Lent it brings home to me the famous verse in our Gospel reading this morning from John. When I think of this not just as a verse for calvary, but for an entire history of love, grace, judgement and redemption from the beginning of creation, it takes on epic significance. That when God sealed his promise with Abram it is the cross he was thinking of.

“For God so loved the world — that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him [you and me] may not perish — but may have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

Amen