I don't know. I hope so. Fortunately Jesus - the Resurrection - and the unfailing love of God in Jesus is for everyone. Every single person. And that's the bottom line. You can listen to the delivered message here.
The texts for this week are:
Genesis 12:1-4a
Psalm 121
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
John 3:1-17
Come Holy Spirit. Break up our fear and open our eyes and hearts to know love as you offer it: with complete generosity. Amen
Abraham is all over today’s lessons but there isn’t a whole lot of context. The reading from Genesis is about Abraham being called by God. The reading from Romans is about how that call from God to Abraham might inform our faith lives (according to Paul, writing to the Jesus-followers in Rome). It seems like there might be a whole lot more story there, though, doesn’t it?
Nothing in the story before the Genesis lesson makes Abram seem remarkable. Why Abram? Why not one of Abram’s brothers, Nahor or Haran? Why did Abram take Haran’s son Lot, but none of Nahor’s children? WHAT’S SO SPECIAL ABOUT ABRAM?
Based on scriptural evidence, the answer to that question has to be … nothing. Abram was just one of many.
And that turns out to be kind of good, because if God can choose Abram, then maybe God can choose ordinary me (and maybe ordinary you, too).
Before naming Abram as entirely ordinary, though, let’s see if there is something else that shows something special about Abram:
First of all, he’s 75 when God calls him. Sure, people lived a lot longer then, but 75 is no spring chicken even by standards of that day. In the genealogy before Abram’s call, the babies were being born when the daddies were in their 20s and 30s, so by this point Abram could have had a bunch of children. But he didn’t. Maybe that’s why he took his nephew Lot along?!?
Abram did have a wife – Sarai – and they took Lot and went off to where God sent. And what is the first thing they did? They lied about being married. Because Abram was scared. It doesn’t seem like a very believing thing to do, though.
And how did God respond to that lying disrespect of marriage?
God blessed Abram! No punishment from Pharaoh… just take your wife and go. And here, take all your stuff, too. JUST GO AWAY. Safely.
And prosperity came upon Abram, who then rescued Lot from warring tribes. Melchizadek blessed Abram. Things were going GREAT!
So what did Abram do?
Instead of clinging to God’s promise of blessing and children, he thought maybe God was confused so he went to Hagar and had a child. It was Sarai’s idea, not God’s, but Abram had no problem hopping on board. Once again Abram tripped up…
And what happened? Did God say “that’s enough, I’m done with you Abram!”?
Nope.
God made ANOTHER covenant with Abram. God changed their names and said “let me be clear… I am going to give YOU a son, and here, you and Sarai will now be Abraham and Sarah. Don’t worry that you are 100 years old and Sarah is 90. You will have a child.
And they did! Baby Isaac was born. God picked Abram – now Abraham – again. Not because he was so good, though. Because those covenants kept coming after Abraham showed some pretty vivid and gross disrespect for what God had promised.
It was a start of a pattern throughout the Old Testament: God would say
I PICK YOU!
And the people would say YAY! And then go off and act as if they had never heard the promise.
So God would say… ok… I forgive you and I am crazy in love with you so I will PICK YOU EVEN MORE!
Over and over.
The big covenants always came after the egregious indicators of disbelief (at least by our way of seeing things). The things we see as the worst behavior were always followed by an even bigger promise of goodness, love, and grace from God.
Like the man who would later tell Jesus “I believe… help my unbelief” I believe God was looking at something else. I believe that God understood how our brokenness and small capacity to understand exactly what is happening around us made us step away.
I think God also saw the belief underneath. The yearning for something better. The hope that this was the right thing instead of actual willful disobedience.
God knows that love is always a better motivator than anger or punishment. God did get angry… but never as a motivator. For God, love is the only motivation worth offering to people.
And I think that is what God responded to…
I KNOW YOU WANT TO DO BETTER, BELOVED! HERE, LET ME HELP!
In fact, what I take from all of this is stuff like
* God is really confusing and hard to understand
* It is really hard to figure out how God is working in and through other people (not to mention my own self)
* God is not doing God’s things based on anything I can see or comprehend
And the most encouraging thing of all:
God is completely ok with me not knowing and getting it all wrong with surprising regularity.
In other words… God loves me! And if God loves me then God can love anybody!
God loves each of us. Period. Even if all we can muster is wanting to try. Even if we can’t even manage that.
God knows each of us is doing the best we can – and the best we can do is always going to be riddled with misconceptions, missteps, and even willful error, when we really should know better.
But God also doesn’t leave us in our own muck of brokenness, disability, inability, and fatigue (all things that often seem to be behind my most unloving behaviors.) Just like God didn’t abandon Abraham.
God came to love us firsthand in Jesus. It’s like God said “SO… y’all can’t quite figure out how who I am can fit with who you are, so I will take on your form. I will show you. This is the best way to love you yet, because you will see! You will see what it looks like to be God and to also be in human form. I will show you how my image is actualized in human form.
And what did Jesus do?
Jesus fed and healed, walked outside the rules and laws and customs of human power systems, told stories about humanity that gave a peek into the image of God in each of us. Jesus did not mete out punishment, Jesus just slathered love everywhere. On everyone. Even if they couldn’t receive it.
Jesus highlighted what it looks like when we see each other as God sees us.
Of course, God knew we weren’t really going to be very good at it, this slathering of love. There was such a long history to show that we just can’t get it right. We are hard-wired to be skeptical, to dismiss anything that shows all the ways that we are not being our best selves.
In our broken human state we are more likely to kill Jesus than follow him… and that is exactly what happened.
The people with the most human-granted power could not fathom that God would love them anyway, even if they did not have that power over others.
The men with human-granted power could not accept that Jesus’s inclusion of all the people could possibly be (and indeed was always) enough. Jesus loved everybody equally and completely: women and children, widows and prostitutes, people with mental illness, physical illness, dead people, up-and-coming rulers in the rigidly patriarchal system and old Temple leaders who had been around a long time.
And as a result – because not loving power is the most dangerous thing in our broken world – Jesus died. He absorbed the wrath that the powerful people saved for those most outside of their prevailing systems. They killed him dead in a most horrific manner.
AND IT WAS NOT ENOUGH.
The way of God was stronger and Jesus did not stay dead. We were given the ultimate gift – Resurrection – as the final and greatest indicator that even death cannot overcome love.
I do not know all the ways you might fear or welcome, understand or be puzzled by death. But I do know this:
Jesus loved.
Jesus was a human person like you and me.
Jesus was killed for it and the worst that humanity had to offer did not overcome the love that Jesus demonstrated so perfectly.
And for me, that is enough.
It is enough for me to keep on trying to love more.
It is enough for me to stay focused on Jesus to see that love looks like in action.
It is enough for me to believe… and in that belief to find righteousness that cannot be found in any other way.
AMEN.
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