When I moved to North Carolina a few years ago, I was instructed that there is this thing called “Hell’s front porch season”, and I remember wondering what the fuss was all about. Well, I found out pretty quickly. For me, it comes each year as this season where I start doubting all of my life choices. I generally don’t start by noticing the heat, part of my brain knows that it is to be expected, but emotionally I just find myself in the midst of this relentless questioning, and then I realize: “Oh, right it’s Hell’s front porch season again, let’s just give it a few months!”. All this to say, I am wondering if it isn’t what Abraham and Sarah are experiencing as well in this third passage of Genesis we are given to hear on our Sundays after Pentecost. This is how it begins: The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. If you remember last week, we read from Chapter 12 about the call of Abraham to leave the city of Haran to follow God on a journey to a new land with all his family, and now we find ourselves in Chapter 18. This is a big jump and a lot has happened. Abraham has arrived to Canaan but there was a famine there, so he had to cross to Egypt, where he became a rich man but when he came back, he had to share the land with his nephew Lot. Then there was a war with all the kings of Canaan. Later, Sarah, tired of waiting for a son, gave her servant Hagar to Abraham to have a child for her, and then Ishmael was born. In the midst of all of that, three more times God has appeared to Abraham to renew the promise of giving him an heir, a legitimate one, from his wife Sarah, but now it seems less and less likely that it’s going to happen. Abraham has pitched his tent, in Hebron at the doors of the desert of the Negev, and today is a very hot day, maybe even hotter than what we get in North Carolina, Abraham has just turned 99 years old and he is sitting on the porch, doing nothing at all and that’s why it seems to me it could be when he would start questioning all of his life choices.
Actually at this point, one thing we know about Abraham is that he is no stranger to a good faith crisis. Well, maybe we don’t know if we only read the beginning of Chapter 12, but if we start following the journey that leads us from Chapter 12 to our passage today it seems more and more debatable that he who has been called “The Father of all believers” was just this hero of faith who would do anything God called him to do, without experiencing doubts, discouragement or even fear. We actually learn that when Abraham arrived in Egypt, he was so afraid of Pharaoh that he claimed that Sarah was his sister so Pharaoh would not kill him to get her. When later Sarah suggested Abraham should have a child with Hagar, he seemed to think it’s a good compromise and a way to make things happen, at last. And later, when God appeared to him to renew his promise for a third time, telling Abraham he actually will have a son through Sarah, it is said that he “(…) fell on his face and laughed” (Genesis 17:17).
So much for the hero of faith!
And you know that could be a bit disheartening for us to realize our role model was not a role model to start with, but in the meantime it teaches us something very important about faith, and we’ve already talked about that a bit last week. Abraham was not called the Father of all believers because he had a such an unshakable faith from the beginning, rather he became the Father of all believers because he was willing to start a journey to get to know this mysterious God calling to him in through his mourning, through the desert and through the night.
Faith, we said, is not something inside of us, small or great, something that could be measured, rather it is what draws us towards God for meaning, healing, blessing. After all, when Jesus praised people for their great faith, all they actually did was to show up and ask for help. And so if faith is this dynamic between God and each believer rather than a thing we possess or not, faith is also a tension between us and God, and therefore crisis are inevitable. Faith is a back and forth in which God asks us to trust him more deeply, and then we get scared at what God asks or we feel disappointed that things don’t go the way we want them to. I think this is what happens with Abraham: He has to leave his land first, but not just that. Then he has to trust that God will provide during a famine, he has to trust God not to be afraid of Pharaoh, he has to trust God that he can win a war against the kings of Canaan…so that’s a lot. And yet all this faith journey reminds us strangely of the Book of Exodus and the Book of Joshua. And so you see, it’s not just the story of Abraham, it’s also the story of all the people, Abraham was the father but also, and perhaps mainly, the forerunner of all what God’s people would have to go through: Famine, Egypt, wilderness, wars.
And if it is true for the Israelites, I guess this is also true for us today. Faith is this tension between us and God, and so when we have what we call a faith crisis, it does not mean we’re losing our faith (like we ever “had faith”), rather it may mean we are drawn closer. The story of faith isn’t a linear journey, it’s a circular one towards the center. Some people like to walk the labyrinth and you know at some point in the labyrinth you’re puzzled and you feel like you have walked back to where you started because you stand right next to the entrance, but in reality you’ve almost arrived. This is how it is with faith: Sometimes it can feel like we’ve lost our way when in fact we’re getting closer. We’re just called to the next level. This summer, I am meeting with a group of students to talk about those passages of the Bible we hear on Sunday, and I was so surprised this week when we read from Romans these verses we have just heard: “We boast in our sufferings. Knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope”. I was very surprised because one of the girls said: It’s so good to hear that, that God is not going to just give me some peace but that God has also something in store for me, I am glad that God is not just there to pamper me but to build me up. And I thought “Wow, hearing that from a young person, that’s a longing for spiritual adulthood we may sometimes have lost track of”. And yet that’s indeed an important idea in many of Paul’s letters, that God is in the business of building us up and that what we may experience as doubts, disappointments, anger even, does not mean we’re falling out but maybe growing out of the pampering stage.
So what can we do?
Well there is this one thing we know how to do, what Abraham did, what Israel in Exile did, they kept listening to the promise. That’s what we do on Sunday don’t we? You know how we say that each Sunday is a little Easter, because each Sunday we are reminded of the Resurrection. And of course it’s hard to believe for us, as it was hard to believe for Abraham and Sarah that out of death can come life, God did not blame them for laughing because indeed it’s unbelievable, God does not blame us for our doubts, and yet God keeps asking us as he asked them: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?”, because that’s God’s promise from the beginning, that’s all we need to trust, that God is pulling us near to the center where Eternal, superabundant life is, as we shed away layers of our old ways of being.
What is happening to Abraham and Sarah today? In a way, it seems that they have never been further to the fulfillment of the promise. They are past their nineties, they have settled in the land they don’t own yet, and they have also settled for an heir that is not their biological son. To top it all, it’s hell’s front porch season and there is nothing to do but to hang out at the entrance of their tent. And yet. And yet something extraordinary happens. Not so much that God shows up, at this point in the story we have almost gotten used to that, what is extraordinary is the way Abraham shows up when he would have had all the reasons in the world to feel checked out. He hastens to meet the men and he begins to serve them, a little water and a little bread to start with, and then twenty pounds of cakes, a whole calf, his best calf, milk and curds. And then he stands there as they eat, waiting. And I think he knows something we don’t, I think he knows that the time has drawn short, that now is the time the promise is happening. Indeed the visitors say in one year they are to return and they will see Abraham and Sarah hold their very own child. And Sarah laughs, but Abraham does not laugh this time. Maybe he had understood something that she hasn’t understood yet, maybe he knows something we cannot know when we catch this story in Chapter 18. But if we go back to chapter 17, we learn what happened: In the midst of his faith crisis, Abraham chose to surrender to God, he gave himself and all he had to God, and the concrete sign of that is that he was circumcised with all the men of his family – and we know how this ended up defining all the Jewish people: The sign in their flesh of their belonging to God, the sign of the covenant.
As rabbinic commentaries go, Abraham was actually recovering from his circumcision sitting at the entrance of the tent on that day. But here is what’s important: Abraham had decided to belong to God, in spite of everything. And that’s when he finally not just obey, not just follow, but finally belong to God that God will be able to act through him. For us Christians it cannot not remind us of these words spoken by Jesus: Without me, you cannot do nothing (John 15:5). Abide in me (John 15:4), The branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine. The key to live out our faith and become spiritually fruitful is that we don’t just listen or even follow or obey or do things for him, but that we accept to belong, to give ourselves to Him. Each crisis of faith, each trial in our life, each celebration, is an invitation to re—dedicate ourselves to Christ, to trust him completely. Ultimately we are called to be His, and that’s the great purpose of faith. We’re still in Genesis but it really gives us a clue of what all the story of The Bible is going to be about, it’s about how we become his people. So let’s not just stand at the entrance of the tent, at the threshold of our faith, as we so often do, listening, pondering, doubting at times and maybe laughing at little with embarrassment. Today and each Sunday is our invitation to give ourselves to him who comes at the door and brings heaven to us.