The Rev. Virginia W. Nagel
Ephphatha Parish of the Deaf
Episcopal Diocese of Central NY
Today our first reading is part of the long story of Abraham. It is one of the foundational stories of the Old Testament. Abraham was the first person the Lord choose for a particular job, and that job was to be the founding father of the Jewish...and therefore also the Christian...religions. What's more, the Muslims also look to Abraham as the founding father of their faith. And the key word here is FAITH . If Abraham had not had faith, there would be no Judaism, no Christianity, no Mohammedanism. So, today, the church gives us a lesson in faith.
You really should take an hour or so with your Bible and read the whole story of Abraham, from beginning to end. It isn't very long. You will find it in chapters 12 through 23 of the book of Genesis. Today's reading is only a small part of it.
Abraham, when he was far advanced in years, around 80 or so, received a call from God. That call was mind-boggling. Leave your homeland and your father's house, and take your wife and your servants, and go to the land I will show you. Now you know that not very many people in their eighties are going to be ready to pack up their tent and all their possessions and collect their wife and servants and start walking south, with no map, not knowing where they are going....just that they had to keep on until the Lord said, "Stop, this is the place." But Abraham did it. Actually his name at that time was Abram, but God changed it later. Abram and his wife had no children, and that was thought to be a shame, a punishment for some sort of wrongdoing. After all, everybody knew that children were a blessing from God. No children, no blessing....what had they done? It was a great sadness to them both. Especially, it was a great sadness to Abram, because he had worked hard and had big flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. He was a wealthy man, and had no child to leave his fortune to.
Well, they set out, and walked and walked, for weeks and months, and finally arrived to the land of Canaan. Today we call it Israel. But that name came later. God said, this is the land I will give you and your descendents.
Abram very sensibly answered, "Lord, you know I have no children, and my wife is beyond the age of bearing children. I have no descendents to inherit my property. One of my servants will be my heir."
And then things got really, really hard to believe, because God enlarged his promise: I will give this land to you and your descendents; you will have more descendents than there are stars in the sky, more than there are grains of sand on the sea shore.
Now that is really some promise!
Well, time went on. Abram and his wife, Sarai, traveled around the land, getting to know it a bit, as the Lord told them to do. They also made side trips to neighboring lands such as Egypt. And, quite understandably, Abram became very impatient. Neither he nor Sarai was getting any younger. Where were the promised descendents?
After a battle, Abram made the usual sacrifice of thanksgiving, giving money and animals to the local priest, and then he started to complain to God. "Where are those descendents you promised me? We are not getting any younger. I don't think we will ever have a child...we are both old now. My servant will be my heir, as I said before."
We have just read what God answered, and what he told Abram to do.
And time went on.
Finally, Sarai became impatient. All this waiting, for nothing....where was the child the Lord had promised? Finally, she got Abram to agree to father a child through her maid. Eventually the boy Ishmael was born. He became the father of the Arab peoples. But God was upset with Abram. Didn't he have faith that the Lord would keep his promise? Why did he try to take matters into his own hands, instead of trusting God? They had a stormy discussion, God and the man Abram. Again, God repeated his promise. He became even more specific about it: You will have a son, the child that your wife Sarai will bear to you, and his descendents will be more than the number of stars in the sky, more than the number of grains of sand on the seashore. He will be the child of your own body and of your wife, Sarai.
As a token of this promise, God changed their names: Abram became Abraham and Sarai became Sarah. God often changes the names of people when he gives them special work to do.
And time went on.
Finally, after many more years, Sarah did have a son, whom they named Isaac. And you can be sure that the elderly parents
were overjoyed. God's promises were coming true. Think of it: the son of these two elderly people would be the father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on, of millions and millions of people, and the land of Canaan would be theirs.
And so their waiting was rewarded.
That brings us to the whole point of all this. One of the Psalms says, Your time (meaning the people's way of telling time) is not my time, says the Lord. Another Psalm says that a hundred years in our sight is like a few hours during the night to God. God and we live in different time frames. We have short lives, a hundred years or less. He lives through all eternity. Our entire childhood, up to the age of 21, is just a couple of minutes to him. And for that reason, we have to hold tight to our faith. God WILL fulfill his promises, but in his time, not ours. And if we, like Abraham, try to take matters into our own hands and hurry God up, we are showing a lack of faith. That is one of the big lessons of the story of Abraham. There are other lessons in this story, but today we are focusing on that one...patience as we wait for God's promises to be fulfilled.
In today's epistle, Paul tells us to follow his example in godly living. This doesn't mean only avoiding sin; it also means holding onto the promises of God, continuing to believe with all our hearts no matter how long it seems to be taking. After Paul was baptized, he was left alone for about 15 years before he was called to start his preaching and teaching. It must have seemed endless to him, but God always has good reasons.
Today's Gospel points up this same idea: trust God . Trust God 100%, unconditionally. Jesus said that we can only enter into the kingdom of heaven by the narrow, difficult gate. That gate is the gate of FAITH...the gate where we hold onto God's promises, no matter how much it seems that they are just dreams without any "meat" to them. The wide gate is easy to enter, and requires nothing of us. We follow our human instincts, and find ourselves on the road not to the Kingdom of God but to eternal punishment. The narrow gate, which leads to the Kingdom of God, is, as I said, the gate of FAITH. It means simply believing God, and acting on our belief, no matter what. And most of us, like Abraham, find that very hard to do, indeed.
One reason we are encouraged to read our Bibles is to help us grow in faith, by seeing how faith has been part of the stories of those who have followed God before us, and how it needs to be part of our own story of living with God now. The story of Abraham in the Bible is one of the key Scriptures that helps us grow in faith, and thus grow closer to God, if only we pay attention to it and learn from Abraham's experiences. Amen.
