This week again, we’re back in the Book of Genesis and, as I have already mentioned, we’re going to read from this book until mid August, so it’s going to be quite a journey! Most of us, I guess, are familiar with the stories of Genesis, a lot of them are well known and often well loved, and this is certainly the case with the beginning of Chapter 12 we have just read where God famously calls Abram to leave his country for a land God will show him, a land God will give to Abram’soffspring. That’s how he came to be known to us as the Father of all believers, sometimes we even say the Father of all nations.“Abram” will be renamed “Abraham” by God, meaning literally “The Father of the people”, and so this is where it all started of course.
Yet there’s something I find interesting. If we rewind a little to the end of Chapter 11, we will realize that there is actually an important story before Abraham. We find this long genealogy informing us that Abraham is a descendant of Noah’s elder son Shem, reminding us that God has already made a covenant with the people after the flood. Abraham comes from a family line of righteous people, obedient to God, and, as it turns out, he we call the Father of all people also had a father, a man named Terah, who had already started the journey Abraham finds himself called to. This is what we read: Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. Yes indeed. Terah already dreamed to go to Canaan. Did God put this desire in his heart? Did God talk to Terah first? The Bible does not say. What we know is that after they had walked from what is today Iraq to modern Turkey, about 600 to 700 miles, they came to Harran [and] they settled there. (Genesis 11:31) For some reason, the journey to Canaan came to a stop.
Now there have been a lot of speculations about why Abraham’s father did not travel any further – and those reasons are often a bit cynical. Harran was a prosperous city with flourishing business, and so Terah could have been tempted by the business opportunities he found there. It is also said that Terah started worshiping the pagan gods in that place. Maybe. An hypothesis I find more compelling is that Terah was mourning. We learn earlier (Genesis 11:28) that Terah had in fact three sons, and one was named Haran, who was Lot’s father, and he died in Ur. And so the fact that Terah was “stopped in Harran”, a city named like his dead son, could mean he was actually stuck in his grief, and couldn’t move further towards the promised land. It’s very symbolic of course, but the reality is one most of us have experienced: Grief often puts our plans on hold, and sometimes great sorrow can become paralyzing.
And so having that in mind, we understand that when God calls Abram, God does not call him out of the blue to something completely unexpected. Rather, God is encouraging Abram to move on, to move away, to unstuck himself from the family tragedy. I like it that the passage mentions twice that Abram took Lot, his deceased brother’s son, with him. He wanted a future for him.
What’s important to see is that Abram is not just called to go on a journey, he is called back to life by God with all his family, out of their grief, and starting again. It’s the beginning yes, and yet it’s also the continuation of something older: A faith that ran through the family, the dream of a new land, a desire for something more in the depths of their hearts. And they’re going to keep trying to make it happen with God, as God keeps trying with people since the Fall: Noah and his sons and now Abram and Sarai like a new version of Adam and Eve, not in a garden this time but in a wilderness, and in barrenness.
To the Jews, Abraham was and still is such an important figure. In our passage from the Letter to the Romans, we hear Paul speaking about Abraham and do you know that he is actually mentioned 75 times in the New Testament? It’s hard to overestimate his importance. I must say that it only hit me recently. I always think about Moses, or even David, as the great heroes of the Hebrew people. But you know David was the King and Moses was the teacher, the giver of the law, but Abraham he is the father. The Jews defined themselves as the sons and daughters of Abraham. When Jesus calls the woman “daughter” in our passage of the Gospel, he does not mean the woman is like “his” daughter, he means “daughter of Abraham” because that’s how people would call each other. There is a sentimental feeling, an affection towards Abraham that’s irreplaceable. There was even this belief that when people died, they would return to Abraham’s bosom (Luke 16:19-31). So he’s not just a Dad, he is also like a Mom. Of course that was also an identity, what defined the Jews as people was to be Abraham’s descendants. But again, we already talked about that last week and we read it plainly today, they were “blessed as a nation” to bless others. God started with Abraham the dream of a reconciled humanity, at peace with God and with one another. That’s what it means to be a chosen people. It does not mean “God is on my side I can do whatever I want and crush everybody else”. It’s actually the other way around: When we’re a chosen people, it means we let God work through us for the rest of the world, we let God use us to make God’s goodness known, and to show an example of faith. That’s already something to think about…
Now what does it mean to have faith? Well, I think it’s worth noticing that the Bible does not start with giving us a definition of faith but rather tells us about this man (and this woman too). Faith is not so much about beliefs or duties, it’s about how we live, how we journey through life. God didn’t start by teaching Abraham a religion, giving him instructions on how to worship or giving him a moral code to follow. No, the first thing God does is to inspire Abraham to trust. To trust God’s goodness and God’s provision. Now Paul exalts Abraham’s faith as many believers did in his age, but when we look at the texts we see that many times Abraham doubted (God had to reaffirm the promise several times), Abraham was afraid (of Pharaoh), he tried to make things happen his own way (having a child with Hagar) and so on. And I like it because often we think that faith is something inside of us, that we “have” little faith or great faith almost as if it were something we could measure like blood sugar, but with the story of Abraham we learn that faith is more like an arch over our lifespan. Faith is a journey. Faith is what puts us in movement. Faith is what takes us somewhere. God initiates a relationship with Abraham, and maybe he could have given him a Son right away but what God really wants is the relationships and for us to be blessed in this relationship, and bless others. We talked a bit about that for the feast of the Holy Trinity: God wants to invite us into God’s being.
That’s why it’s really sad when both in our words and in our actions we make of faith this tool that can “get us things” from God. Like if we have enough faith then maybe we’ll be able to obtain what we want, get God to fix our lives, to make us successful, maybe even win the lottery. But when Paul says in his letter that we need to imitate Abraham in “hoping against all hopes” it certainly does not mean that God is going to yield if only we have enough energy to keep begging for whatever we long for. Paul, in fact, is very clear about what we should long for, hope for, and actually the whole Bible is very clear about that. We must have faith that God can bring life out of nothing (as God showed in Creation) and we must have faith that God can bring life out of death (as God showedin Jesus). Actually, the story of Abraham is for Paul a foretelling of the story of Jesus. Paul does not talk about Sarah’s barrenness but about the “deadness” of her womb, and he explicitly says that Abraham was “good as dead”, and Paul does that on purpose so we understand the power of God, how powerful God is, and also the type of power God has: It’s the power to raise the dead. It’s also very clear in our Gospel today when Jesus raises the little girl, and also when he cures the loss of blood, blood is life in the Bible, which means that when the woman kept losing blood, her life was wasting away. This is our hope, that our lives aren’t wasting away, because we have faith in the God of life.
When Jesus says to the woman “Your faith has made you well”, it does not mean that her faith was so great God could not say no. I think it rather means that faith can make us well, or even save us, because, again, faith puts us in movement, keeps us going towards God who gives us life. It’s interesting that this woman came to touch Jesus’s cloak because it’s almost superstitious. She does not even say a word. It’s like the degree zero of a prayer. And yet it’s everything, because she shows up. God comes to people who try and we know this woman kept trying (in Mark’s version of the story, it says she has spent all her money trying to find a cure – 5:25-26). Abraham certainly made mistakes, had doubts and even sometimes he ran away, but he kept trying. He did not only pray with his lips, but with his life (BCP, p. 101). His faith was his life. You know how the Book of Genesis was written during the exile. The Jews had a lot of questions then about their future. Abraham and Sarah are images of Israel. They have no children, and yet an offspring is promised to them. During the Exile, Israel needed to know they could be made whole again. They had to learn to move on from grief and self pity, to move away from idols and a comfortable life, to repent and find again their old dream and move towards God’s call. Maybe that’s where we are too in our churches. We don’t have children, we doubt our future, we’ve gotten used to the same old same old. Maybe we need to start something new, or rediscover an old dream. We need to keep trying even when nothing seems to work, even when we are discouraged, because our trying is our prayer and our faith.
We don’t have to be a saint or a hero of faith to hope for more. Abraham wasn’t a saint or a hero to start with, but he was willing to listen to God. He heard because he listened. There is this expression of Jesus several times in the Gospel: O ye of little faith. A theologian said: We read it as a rebuke but it could be kind of affectionate, meaning “O you little ones, you in becoming”. And the theologian said: Instead of feeling humiliated by our little faith, we should claim it. Yes, we are of little faith but we have a little faith. We have a little faith and so we keep showing up, we keep trying, as God keeps trying with us.