Romans 4:18-25
Alice Pavey was
still a teenager when her fiancée Sam Bridge was killed working
on the railroad in England. Distraught with sorrow, Alice announced
that she would never marry anyone but a Bridge, and furthermore she
would now leave her native Nyleen Newton section of London and move to
Canada.
Move she did, never to see her parents or her six siblings ever again.
Put yourself into her family position and your role as a parent. I
don’t know about you, but I would be very upset at such a drastic move,
and I would do what I could to discourage such action. In any case,
Alice did move, and she arrived in Vancouver when what is now the
Granville and Georgia Streets area was a trail down which they dragged
logs with teams of oxen and horses. In due time, Alice got a job as
housekeeper and cook for a wealthy Vancouver family. While working
there, she met a man named Fred, and just a short time later married
him, because Fred Bridge was Sam’s brother. So, her vow never to
marry anyone but a Bridge was fulfilled, even though it was half way
around the world from the homeland of both. To this union,
eleven children were born, one of whom is my Mother. Alice and Fred
were my maternal grandparents, and Alice, or Granny as we called her,
lived in our home until her death at the age of 97. The local papers
reported that at her death she had 69 grandchildren and 85 great
grandchildren. Granny died just before the birth of a great, great
grandchild.
That bit of
family trivia seems to me to parallel the Biblical account of Abraham;
not just the leaving of his homeland, never to return, but also the
beginning of a large family tree. God said to
Abraham: "Go from your country, your enlarged family and your kin to
another country, which in due time, I will reveal to you." Abraham
obeyed, and set out travelling toward Egypt not knowing where exactly
he was going or where he would be settling. I wonder how many of us
would do that!
That is
impressive enough, but God also said to Abraham "I will make you the
Father of a great nation." and God said this, according to the Genesis
account, when Abraham was 75 years old. As the years went by, there
were still no children until God said to Abraham "You are going to
father a child, and your wife Sarah will have a son." Abraham could not
contain himself; he laughed and said "This is crazy. I am 100 years
old, and my wife is 99." And you can imagine what Sarah said when
she got the news.
Isaac is
born. His name means laughter. God establishes a covenant with
Isaac and his heirs, and the dynasty that grows to become the children
of Israel begins. The details of this
story are not important. Age, in this tale, is a graphic way of
illustrating the power of God. The point of the story is that Abraham
obeyed God. God was honoured, and the promises of God were made through
Abraham.
Centuries later,
Paul interprets this story to his listeners. Listen again to these
words. “Abraham did not weaken his 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 Sarah’s womb. No distrust
made him waver, concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in
his faith, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had
promised. That is why faith was reckoned to him as righteousness.” Now that is a
nice story, and I believe a very important one, but it is not important
unless we catch the meaning of the story for each of us. Paul states
the importance of living by faith “But the words, it was reckoned to
him as righteousness were written not for his sake alone, but for your
also.”
Dr. William Barclay, in his commentary on Romans, suggests that Paul is
referring to a saying that the Rabbis had: “What was written for
Abraham is also written for his children.” This story
suggests that all of our attempts to know God and make this world
understandable are of little avail; God cannot be known in human terms,
only hinted at, and our tidy definitions to try and make life
understandable are a fruitless effort. We live by faith, and faith is
the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Heb
11:1)
One of the
realities of growing up is that while we learn there is remarkable
order in many of the physical realities of our universe and our lives,
there is also a great deal that does not fit into any dependable system
or neat design. There is much that happens about which we simply do not
know how or why. Life is confusing. It’s a bit
like the child who came home from school and stated he was fed up
with mathematics. He said “ It took me a long time to remember that 3
plus 3 equals 6; now they tell 4 plus 2 equals 6.” Part of growing up is
the realization that the unexplainable does happen. People of deep and
consecrated faith do get sick and some even die from their illness.
Good people, devoted to the service of God, do get injured or even
killed from many kinds of accidents. Excellent Churchgoers who truly
believe and are faithful to their beliefs do have their marriages fail,
do have trouble with their children and some face the reality of a
failed business and bankruptcy. Whenever tragedies
of this nature come upon us, we find that the lamp of faith flickers.
Our tendency is to want to believe or at least hope that our faith will
shield us from life’s tragedies and allow us to be safe and happy
people.
Listen to me
very carefully: your faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ will not
protect you from the tragedies and hurts of life. As a human, you will
face the same problems and possible difficulties as any other human,
believer or not. That is the truth, but what is also true is your faith
provides you with the tools and the strength to deal with life’s
tragedies, if they do come. Yet, in spite of
this, millions today flock to Churches or mosques seeking an insurance
policy that will protect them from life’s happenings, and preachers are
among the worst offenders in proclaiming false hope. Explanations, more
complicated than the problem, are often given, trying to make what is
tragic understandable, or even worse as something done by God for a
purpose.
A person dies,
in hospital, after weeks of dedicated and costly medical care and
someone says "It was the will of God." Does this mean that doctors and
technicians were going against the will of God in trying to correct the
problem the person was facing? A youth is killed in
a terrible automobile accident, and some preacher says "God called her
home." Does that mean God caused the accident to occur? I don’t believe
that type of thinking for a moment. That is entirely contrary to the
nature of the eternal. The reality is that the youngster was killed by
speeding, or by someone else being very reckless and striking her.
Trying to soothe realites with religious superstition is simply not
right; in fact it is misleading and gives a false image of God. We were
created in freedom, and freedom allows us to do wrong or have
unpleasant things happen to us. If God chose who to protect and who to
inflict misery upon, the freedom principle would be lost, and we would
be puppets dancing on the end of a steering controlled by a capricious
or irrational being.
My very good
friend Cliff Schujer, now in his 45th year as the Pastor of First
Congregational Church in Mansfield Ohio, puts it this way in his book
"Tough Hope:"
“The Bible is right up front
about the ambiguities of life, about our vulnerability and our constant
exposure to the strange, the illogical, the disruptive, the bewildering
and yes, the tragic. It never claims either, that it will show us how
to make that go away, or that it has a neat explanation for why such
things happen to us."
In the Bible, we
meet a God who is not all neat and explainable. Our God gets mixed up
in awful situations, and gets involved with people no god ought to be
with; hotheads, liars, cheats, philanderers, even some murderers. Our
Bible describes this God and the involvement without a hint of
explanation. Anyone who can read
this Bible of ours, Schujer continues:
“and come away thinking that he
knows God’s system-knows just what God is likely to do next, or knows
what is God’s system of blessings and punishments, is either kidding
himself or smoking something he shouldn’t.”
God’s actions
often run counter to our thinking. The Bible is bold enough to tell me
that God chose a con man like Jacob to be the father of a nation. God
chose a murderer like Moses to lead the children of Israel out of
captivity. God chose an adulterer named David to be King. It tells me
that a redeemer will be born in a smelly old barn, and that through him
worthless and wasted humans can find meaning and purpose by being
transformed. The Bible tells me, through this Jesus that even
death is not what it is cracked up to be. In Christ and
through the Bible we are presented with a world and with a life in
which a powerful case is made to continue to hope despite the fact
there is no logical basis for it. We are told to love when it makes no
sense; to trust when it seems totally unreasonable to do so. We are
told to do this, not because we know it works, but because in this
mysterious world and life in which God has placed us, just about
anything is possible, and we don’t know what is really going on except
occasionally, when we look back.
Living the life
of faith is not an easy task. We are faced with circumstances that defy
explanation, and that is what makes the proclamation of our faith so
difficult. Many come to Church seeking answers to questions that don’t
have answers. Many are not faithful, because the answers they seek are
not evident; so, they leave. Others are confused, and all us deal with
the reality of wondering what we should do when the lamp of faith
flickers.
I close with the
words of Barbara Brown Taylor, whom I suspect you now know is my
theological guru. These words are from her book “When God is Silent:”
“We preachers are responsible for
doing our best to put all the tools of communication with God where our
congregations can reach them and for demonstrating their use with our
own lives. After that, the matter is out of our hands. Only an Idol
always has answers. The divine silence is not a vacuum to be filled,
but a mystery to be entered into, unarmed by words and undistracted by
noise- a holy of holies, in which we too may be struck dumb by the
power of the unsayable God.
"Whatever preachers serve on Sunday, it
must not blunt the appetite for food. If people go away from us full,
then we have done them a disservice. What we serve is not supposed to
satisfy. It is food for the journey.” (Page 118f)
When the lamp
flickers, we live with the ambiguities and the unexplainable, but we
continue to trust and live in faith. “Abraham went out not knowing
where he was going, but trusting God. Though he was old and his wife
was barren, he continued to believe that God was able to do what was
promised, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. What is
written of Abraham is also written for all his children. Thanks be to
God.