Sermons

Toward Promise

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  March 16, 2003          Genesis 17:1-8, 15-16/Romans 4:13-25

In her book called For the Time Being, Annie Dillard writes: “I was walking in a broad and broken landscape. A stream ran between rocks; downstream, green shrubs sprang from its banks. The stream was the river Jordan, and this water flowed from its source…The skies stretched to low horizons. No cloud passed overhead, nor any bird…In all this sober glory, something surprising happened. At this desert trickle, behind a young rock, I saw motion. Along came a blue crab…Why are you swimming around in the desert, I thought, instead of swimming in (the) Chesapeake, or in a pot of steam?…I looked for someone to show. In all the immense space, under all the dry sky, only one distant man was walking…I shouted… He made his way to me over the bare ground…I showed him the crab…He was gratifyingly amazed…Pleased, he thanked me, and before wandering off, he looked at me significantly. So: his look said, we meet. So: in this…bare spot, home of nobody under the sky, two humans stand side by side to look at a crab.” (Pages 111-112)

In Parker Palmer’s most significant book, A Company of Strangers, Palmer describes the experience of Thomas Merton. Merton, a priest living in a Kentucky monastery, had to venture into Louisville for a doctor appointment. He writes: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness…And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: ‘Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” (Page 25)

From the very beginning, God’s primary and fundamental agenda has been about people-making. People-making, to be sure, in the sense of the physical act of creating we human types, one by one, through the dramatic, remarkable, miraculous enterprise of human conception and birth.

I was touched now almost two weeks ago, receiving the ashes of Ash Wednesday on my forehead, with the words “from dust you were born and to dust you shall return.” I had said those words just the day before in a memorial service. They are true, and they are awesome. God gathers up the elements of creation and brings forth yet more creation, human creation.

That singular act of people-making is beyond understanding and any attempt at comprehension. But for us, it doesn’t stop there. God’s larger agenda seems to be this, people-making in order to make a people, people-making in order to build community, people-making in order to make creatures with whom to be in community, divine community, God-to-human community and human-to-human community.

We read the ancient story of Genesis, do we not, and become a bit mystified. What is all this concern about generations, about heirs, about who is to follow? And we would do well to remember that generations to follow were not guaranteed, that procreation was not guaranteed.

God chose awfully unlikely people to lead this parade, and one of the unlikeliest factors was that they were so old. Old age is a thing to be admired, honored, a commandment, even. But it’s not necessarily the best source for babies. And yet God makes an extraordinary promise to Abraham and Sarah, one that is, nonetheless, biologically dubious. Yet, and nonetheless, Abraham and Sarah become bound to God in a radical act of faith that will produce babies, laughingly, we are told, and more so, will produce a people. To the very primal question “is there a future?” the answer is a strong “yes.”

The theological word for this is “covenant.” It is perhaps our most important word. I remember learning it in Sunday school long ago, and even now, I fall back on those ancient definitions. Covenant differs from contract, in that it involves a relationship between parties that can never really be equal.

And unlike a broken contract, we human types break the covenant repeatedly and continually, with God and with one another, and it does not become void. God chooses not to break the covenant, but, rather, chooses in love to maintain the covenant, to patch it up when need be, to renew it and re-define it, but always to keep it. People-making and people-keeping.

Walter Brueggemann writes that “the covenant is the primary metaphor for understanding Israel’s life with God. It is the covenant which offers to Israel the gift of hope, the reality of identity, the possibility of belonging, the certitude of vocation.” (Genesis, page 154) God’s promise to Abraham is this, that “you shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations,” people-making writ broad and large.

And so it would seem to me that we who live in the tradition that we live, which occupies a certain place in the Christian spectrum, would do very well to remember the continuities of the Bible, rather than the disconnects we oftentimes presume when Jesus shows up. It would seem to me that the Apostle Paul, with the long view in mind, is considering a similar thing. How does God create a people? How does God call us into relationship? How does God respond when we break, over and over and over again, that relationship? How does the covenant – with Jesus as the pivot point but never superceding what went before him – how does the covenant get traction now, here?

Paul asserts, Paul demands, even, that the covenantal relationship came not to Abraham because of exemplary behavior, but that it was a gift of faith. And it is a gift of faith now. The “promise rests on grace,” Paul insists, and so it does. Being the people of God is a gift of God, and the covenant is sealed in the people-making moments of life with Christ – birth, re-birth, death, new life.

We have been thinking quite a bit about these things, have we not, whether we were overtly aware or not. We have been thinking of these things as we have examined and re-examined what it means to be a national people, and what it means to be connected to one another. It is that season again, when portions of us and arguing with other portions of us on matters of war. It is just heating up, and will likely get more heated as we move to what it appears we will move to.

That singular act of people-making is beyond understanding and any attempt at comprehension. But for us, it doesn’t stop there. God’s larger agenda seems to be this, people-making in order to make a people, people-making in order to build community, people-making in order to make creatures with whom to be in community, divine community, God-to-human community and human-to-human community.

We read the ancient story of Genesis, do we not, and become a bit mystified. What is all this concern about generations, about heirs, about who is to follow? And we would do well to remember that generations to follow were not guaranteed, that procreation was not guaranteed.

God chose awfully unlikely people to lead this parade, and one of the unlikeliest factors was that they were so old. Old age is a thing to be admired, honored, a commandment, even. But it’s not necessarily the best source for babies. And yet God makes an extraordinary promise to Abraham and Sarah, one that is, nonetheless, biologically dubious. Yet, and nonetheless, Abraham and Sarah become bound to God in a radical act of faith that will produce babies, laughingly, we are told, and more so, will produce a people. To the very primal question “is there a future?” the answer is a strong “yes.”

The theological word for this is “covenant.” It is perhaps our most important word. I remember learning it in Sunday school long ago, and even now, I fall back on those ancient definitions. Covenant differs from contract, in that it involves a relationship between parties that can never really be equal.

And unlike a broken contract, we human types break the covenant repeatedly and continually, with God and with one another, and it does not become void. God chooses not to break the covenant, but, rather, chooses in love to maintain the covenant, to patch it up when need be, to renew it and re-define it, but always to keep it. People-making and people-keeping.

Walter Brueggemann writes that “the covenant is the primary metaphor for understanding Israel’s life with God. It is the covenant which offers to Israel the gift of hope, the reality of identity, the possibility of belonging, the certitude of vocation.” (Genesis, page 154) God’s promise to Abraham is this, that “you shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations,” people-making writ broad and large.

And so it would seem to me that we who live in the tradition that we live, which occupies a certain place in the Christian spectrum, would do very well to remember the continuities of the Bible, rather than the disconnects we oftentimes presume when Jesus shows up. It would seem to me that the Apostle Paul, with the long view in mind, is considering a similar thing. How does God create a people? How does God call us into relationship? How does God respond when we break, over and over and over again, that relationship? How does the covenant – with Jesus as the pivot point but never superceding what went before him – how does the covenant get traction now, here?

Paul asserts, Paul demands, even, that the covenantal relationship came not to Abraham because of exemplary behavior, but that it was a gift of faith. And it is a gift of faith now. The “promise rests on grace,” Paul insists, and so it does. Being the people of God is a gift of God, and the covenant is sealed in the people-making moments of life with Christ – birth, re-birth, death, new life.

We have been thinking quite a bit about these things, have we not, whether we were overtly aware or not. We have been thinking of these things as we have examined and re-examined what it means to be a national people, and what it means to be connected to one another. It is that season again, when portions of us and arguing with other portions of us on matters of war. It is just heating up, and will likely get more heated as we move to what it appears we will move to.

And because we are Reformed Christians and therefore believe that God’s sovereignty extends even over into this conversation, we look at war through the promise of the covenant. Bur we look at everything through the promise of the covenant. That is who we are, the people we were made to be.

God hopes no less of us than that, and no more, to keep covenant with God and with one another. And the good news is that this people-making God is a covenant-keeping God as well, and more so, a sovereign whose promise is as true as a blue crab walking across the desert sand. Amen.