commitment to the creation—rocks, trees, fish, reptiles, birds, and you and me.
Salvation, Paul declares earlier in Romans, is not, then, a matter of our righteousness. We have in so many ways failed to honor our part of the relationship. Even our worship is imperfect, infected with our own interests, burdened with our concern of what is aesthetically pleasing to us. We turn the law, that God gave as a guide to perfect fellowship with God and with one another, into a drudgery and something by which we rationalize our own judgments upon one another, and an excuse for boasting of ourselves and condemning others. “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe” (Rom 3:21–22a, NRSV)—for all who believe that God looks at the bow in the clouds and remembers his love for us, for all who believe that God looks upon our sin and sees the precious dearness that prompted him to give his own Son as an atoning sacrifice for our salvation.
But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided . . . Then God said to Noah, “Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” (Gen 8:1, 15–17, NRSV)
“The one who is righteous will live by faith” (Rom 1:17b, NRSV). “[T]here is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness” (Rom 3:22b–25a, NRSV). Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection are the supreme proof of the faith of God.
Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Spanish Springs Presbyterian Church, Sparks, Nevada
June 5, 2005
Genesis 12:1–9
Romans 4:13–25
Matthew 9:9–13, 18–26
“Reaching Out and Letting Go”
With just the sparest of descriptions, the book of Genesis reports the most momentous decision that any human being has ever made: “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him” (Gen 12:4a, NRSV). What preceded that is almost as brief: “Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 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. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed’” (Gen 12:1–3 NRSV). The same God who, Genesis testifies, was once so frustrated with humankind that he sent a flood to blot out the earth, now determined to make a covenant with Abram and his family forever, to bless them and make them a great people, and, through them, to bless every family on earth. And to that huge promise that gives shape and direction to all of history, that gives purpose and meaning to life, Genesis reports Abram’s response as simply this: “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him” (Gen 12:4a, NRSV). And, almost as a footnote, we are informed that Abram took his brother’s son, Lot, with him, and Sarai his wife, and their possessions and household, and set forth and went to Canaan. “Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed” (Gen 12:4b, NRSV).
The rest of the Bible—all the many chapters in the many books—is an elaboration, and explanation, of the working out of the promise that God made to Abram. And, as today’s reading from Romans shows, the apostles of Christ perceived that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were the fulfilling of the covenant God made with Abram so many centuries before, the covenant that Abram embraced with his simple yet crucial response: “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him” (Gen 12:4a, NRSV).
In ancient Near Eastern culture, it was unheard of for someone to strike out to find their own future off and away from the family, for anyone to journey into a foreign land far beyond the horizon from the farm where he had been born and had grown up. Contrary to our American pioneer heritage, such individualism, being cut off from one’s roots, was not considered a virtue, never recognized as a goal. And even if a younger person might chance it, might break with every tradition and go off on his own, someone as old as Abram was—seventy-five—would hardly set out to start life over at his age. But God had spoken, we know not how, and Abram had recognized God’s voice, we know not how, and Abram had trusted God enough not to raise practical objections or even ask questions at all, apparently, and to commit not only his own future, but the future of his entire family and household, to the venture of pioneering in a place where, for all he knew, there might already be inhabitants who would not welcome his incursion or obligingly step aside. The way might be treacherous; certainly, the journey would be difficult. And where was it that he was going, anyway? Had he ever even heard of it before? He would not have seen travel brochures. He couldn’t pick up a map at AAA. All he had to go on was the word of God.
In Abram’s case, though, one place might have been as good as another. Where he was, where he had been all his life, held little prospect beyond the predictable sameness of one day after another. The great word of God’s promise in Genesis comes only a few verses after the great word of despair in Genesis: “Now Sarai was barren; she had no child” (Gen 11:30, NRSV). In ancient culture, that little phrase was almost a death sentence. In fact, it was a death sentence, in a way; the family was everything, and if the family were to come to an end, if a man were to have no heirs to carry on the name and work the fields or tend the flocks, then his life was judged to be perhaps not a failure, but essentially pointless. Cruel and insensitive as it sounds, a marriage was thought to be unsuccessful if it produced no children. And without heirs, there was no need to have land. But that is just the reason that God’s promise to Abram was so remarkable: God was pointing Abram toward a land, a broad land, which presumes a need for the land, room to grow and expand, and God was announcing that this old man—“already as good as dead” (Rom 4:19b, NRSV), as Paul indelicately put it—and this childless woman, his wife Sarai, would be the parents of a great nation, blessed by God and a blessing to the rest of the world.
Most people these days would want a good deal more to go on than Abram had. Before leaving the only home they had ever known, where life was comfortable if not outstanding, where they knew the source of their next meal and knew the people who would come to their aid if the crop failed or the sheep died or the well went dry, most people today would want some guarantee of their future. More than a travel brochure and a map, we would probably insist that it all be in writing, spelling out exactly what God was promising to do and where and when God was promising to do it, and we might check with our insurance agent to see if a policy could be issued to cover our actual expenses plus emotional damage if things didn’t turn out just as expected. Abram not only didn’t have those things; the very point of his faithfulness, and the very point of Paul’s writing about Abram’s faithfulness, is just that he didn’t seek assurances or guarantees; the only assurance or guarantee that Abram required was the promise of God. His faithfulness is defined by the fact that as soon as God had spoken, Abram did as God directed. And the result, after episodes that flirted with doubt and temptations to take things into one’s own hands, was the nation of Israel, a people whom God took specially to himself and fashioned to become a witness to all peoples about who God is and what God intends, and with whom you and I are put on a par through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ on the cross.
If the writer of Genesis had ended the story after Abram had set out from home with Lot his brother’s son and his wife Sarai and the animals and servants, you and I would be unlikely to vote for Abram as the “Most Likely to Succeed.” He hadn’t planned adequately before forging
