Sermon from
Sunday, 4 March 2012
Lent 2B ~ Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Christ Church, Millwood, Cunningham Chapel
The Rev. Karin MacPhail
The Old Testament readings for the first five Sundays in Lent this year
are stories of covenants. Taken together they provide a way of
looking at the history of God’s relationship with God’s people as a
series of covenants that grow more and more particular and specific. I
mentioned last Sunday that I will preach on these five Old Testament
lessons as a series.
First, a quick refresher on covenants…
A covenant is a binding agreement between (usually) unequal partners
that makes clear where two parties stand with one another. The
covenant includes promises about what each party will and will not do
and becomes the foundation for trust and relationship.
A covenant in the Old Testament was a sacred oath and a solemn
pledge, binding until death.
The first covenant in the Old Testament was God’s covenant with Noah
and all of creation—the promise God made never again to destroy the
earth the way he had in the Flood. We read that lesson last Sunday,
and you’ll remember that that was a one-sided covenant—Noah did
not promise anything at all.
Today’s covenant is with Abraham. Before we get into today’s
reading, let’s remember the story of Abraham, first called Abram.
God first called Abram when he was seventy-five years old, and his
wife Sarai was sixty-six. This was twenty-four years before the story
we read this morning. From the beginning of God’s call to Abram, God
promised him children and land. Abram and Sarai were already well
past the years of childbearing, and they had had no children. They
understood themselves to be barren.
For twenty-four years Abram and Sarai have been in a special
relationship with God, who talks to them. They’ve been listening to
God, following where God leads them—literally and geographically.
They have become wealthy, but they are still waiting for this promise
of children to bear fruit.
Abram and Sarai have not been perfect during this time. They have
made some decisions that we might find ethically troubling. They are,
after all, human. They are, in many ways, deeply flawed. I won’t
cover all of those details in my sermon, but if you read chapters twelve
through twenty-five of Genesis, you will get the picture.
One of the more disconcerting situations occurred when Abram and
Sarai went to Egypt to escape a famine in the land where God had led
them. Abram decided that Sarai was so beautiful that if they
acknowledged they were husband and wife, the Egyptians might kill
him so they could have her. If they pretended to be brother and
sister, however, the Egyptians might spare his life. So they deceived
the Egyptians. This deception was even carried so far that Pharoah
took Sarai as his wife—and Abram went along with it.
Another troubling development came years later. God had already
been promising for years that Abram would be the father of many
descendants. After ten years of waiting, even though God had told
Abram that these promised descendants were not to come from a
slave woman, but would be Abram’s legitimate descendants with his
wife, Abram and Sarai had given up on that idea.
So Sarai gave to Abram her slave girl Hagar to see if they would have
better success together. When Hagar conceived, she apparently felt
superior to her mistress Sarai and gave a contemptuous look to Sarai.
Sarai treated her so harshly that Hagar ran away.
In this morning’s lesson, we fast-forward thirteen years after the
incident with Hagar and the birth of Ishmael, her son with Abram. It
has now been twenty-four years since God first called Abram. There is
still no child for Abram and Sarai, and we haven’t had any news of
Abram and Sarai in the past thirteen years. Presumably they’ve been
going about their lives, growing older. Abram is now ninety-nine years
old and Sarai is ninety.
And now the Lord appears to Abram and renews the promise to make
him exceedingly numerous. After all of this time, after everything that
has happened, God is still promising Abram that he and Sarai will give
rise to a multitude of nations. Abram falls on his face. That seems as
good a response as any.
God’s covenant with Abram, now renamed Abraham, goes beyond
Abraham himself. As in God’s covenant with Noah, the covenant is not
just between God and the person to whom God makes the covenant
oath, but with all the descendants of the person.
God promises a multitude of descendants that will come from
Abraham, but these descendants are no longer just the promise of the
covenant. God also says that the covenant itself is made between God
and those descendants and is everlasting. Abraham will not live
forever, but God is everlasting, and so the covenant God makes is
everlasting.
God renews the promise of offspring, and (although left out of our
reading) the Lord also renews the promise of land. Listening to the
reading from Genesis, looking at that lesson printed in your bulletin
insert, we see a series of divine speeches—God’s speeches to
Abraham. The covenant seems one-sided, like God’s covenant with
Noah.
There is actually a dramatic covenant requirement God makes of
Abraham, but you wouldn’t know it from the lesson as we read it. If
you look in your bulletin or on the lectionary insert, you will see that
the reading is Genesis, Chapter 17, verses 1 through 7 and 15 through
16. What happened to verses eight through fourteen?
It’s always a good question, when you see a gap like that, to ask,
“What was left out?” Sometimes it’s something that just repeats what
you’ve already read. Verse 8 is the renewed promise of land, part of
God’s earlier covenant with Abraham, going back to God’s first call to
Abraham twenty-four years earlier. The promise of land is mentioned
more than once in the story of Abraham, so perhaps that’s left out to
avoid repetition.
Verses nine through fourteen, however, present new information. In
these verses, God gives Abraham the covenant commandment and
sign of circumcision, including details about how and when it is to be
performed. Circumcision is a covenant requirement not just for
Abraham and his male descendants, but for all males of the
household—including slaves.
Perhaps the folks who put the lectionary together were afraid to offend
our delicate sensibilities with these details, but skipping them makes
the covenant seem one-sided and a bit too easy for Abraham, so we
should know it’s in there.
The other covenant requirement is in our printed lesson, but you might
not recognize it as a commandment to Abraham and his descendants
at first. Towards the end of lesson, God says, “I will establish my
covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you
throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God
to you and to your offspring after you.”
When God says that part of the covenant is “to be God to you and to
your offspring after you,” God promises protection, provision, and an
ongoing relationship with Abraham and his descendants. But there is
another side to this.
Abram, twenty-four years earlier, had left his homeland in obedience
to God. He had also left a culture and religious climate of many gods
in order to follow one God. In Abram’s world, families had their own
gods, places had their own gods, various needs had their own gods.
If the god you were praying to for a good crop didn’t give you a good
crop, you found another god to pray to. If one god wouldn’t heal your
sick daughter, you tried your neighbor’s god, to see if he would listen.
God called Abram to leave behind the security and familiarity of ties to
kinship and the hope of protection from many gods for the one God.
And Abram obeyed. Now, in this covenant, God says that God will be
God to Abraham and his offspring. Being God to them obligates God
in the covenant, but also obligates Abraham and his offspring.
God is demanding fidelity and devotion. God will be GOD to them—not
one of many gods and not just when it rains the right amount. God
will be God, and God is a jealous God. This covenant demands the
faithfulness of Abraham and his descendants.
God already knows Abraham, and knows that he make mistakes. His
descendants will, too. God knows this. God doesn’t call perfect
people, and the story of Abraham and Sarah is an excellent reminder
of that. Again and again, God calls flawed human beings into faithful
relationship with God. Despite all their shortcomings, and the
shortcomings that will surely characterize all of these promised
descendants, the Lord willingly binds himself to this couple and all who
will come after them.
God always initiates the relationship between himself and those who
have and will turn away from God. God calls them anyway. This is
the old, old story we read in the Bible. In Abraham and Sarah, a
flawed couple are invited to become partners with God in a promise of
grace—a promise of descendants that will include Isaac and Jacob,
King David, and ultimately Jesus. This covenant of grace extends to
us, the spiritual children of Abraham, as we, too, try to live in faithful
relationship with God.
Abram and Sarai are given new names to signify this new covenant.
They are now Abraham and Sarah. The Lord even gives himself a new
name—El Shaddai, which literally means “God of the Mountains,” but is
rendered in most translations as “God Almighty.” These new names—
all of them given by God—signal a new reality for these old covenant
partners.
The reading ends before we hear Abraham’s response to all of this. He
falls on his face again, and this time he laughs! God goes on to
promise that after all this waiting, in one more year’s time, Abraham
and Sarah will finally have a son. That son will be the heir to the
covenant, the line through which the covenant with God will continue.
Abraham may have laughed, but he and his thirteen-year-old son
Ishmael, son of Hagar, and all the men in the household followed
God’s covenant requirement of circumcision.
And finally, a year later, when Sarah is ninety years old, and Abraham
is one hundred years old, their baby boy is born. They name him,
fittingly, “laughter.” Isaac. Isaac will then become the father of
Jacob, whom God will give the new name “Israel.” God’s eternal
covenant with Abraham will indeed bear fruit throughout generations
of faithfulness—flawed, human faithfulness to be sure.
Men and women will live and die and God will be their God, just as God
promised—through Abraham to Israel, through Israel to Jesus to the
church. And now, through the church, to us.1
We enter into this covenant in baptism, when we are given the new
name “Christian.” Our faithfulness, imperfect as it is, is a fruit of this
covenant. Lent offers us a season set apart to tend to our flawed
faithfulness—to reflect on the ways it is so often more flawed than
1
Kocher, Craig. “Second Sunday in Lent: Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16.” Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume
2. (2008: Westminster John Knox Press). 52.
faithful. God is to be our God, and we are not to put anything above
God in our lives. We fall short of the fullness of that obedience and
faithfulness.
We can and should repent of the ways we fall short, but with joy in our
hearts because the covenant does not depend on our perfection—it
didn’t for Abraham and it doesn’t for us. God keeps this everlasting
covenant promise. God Almighty is our God. At our core, no matter
what, we have received the promise and blessing of God’s covenant
with Abraham and Sarah.
God is our God, and we are God’s own.