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Genesis 15:1-183

March 7, 2004

We must all thank Sharlene McGowan for beginning our Lenten pilgrimage the right way, avoiding and acknowledging our temptations. The length of Lent has been fixed - 40 fast days before Easter to match Jesus’ time in the wilderness. Still, Lent does not really fit neatly into the narratives of the Gospel.

Lent has been frequently called a journey, but does a journey have to go anywhere? Pilgrimages are journeys, but the worst thing in a pilgrimage is to arrive at the shrine. None of the stories in the Canterbury Tales happen in Canterbury; it’s along the road that things happen. Abram’s tale is one of those stories along an road that leads where we do not know.

Abram’s life was like most of ours - a hodge podge of going where circumstances seem to lead him, but then trying to fix it himself when things aren’t going as well as you want.

A way we have tried to “fix it” is in the contemporary emphasis upon choosing a career. At least by Grade 4, educators are requiring students to take a battery of career aptitude tests and attend career fairs. The pressure builds from there: You better know what you are going to be and how you are going to get there - or you’ll be lost and drifting for decades.

My daughter ‘Fred came up with an ingenuous way to stop this relentless nagging of “what are you going to be?” When a teacher asked her in one of those career programs, she answered, “President of the United States.” Since she was the only American in the class, and therefore only she could be President, that shut down the questioning rather effectively.

As a young teenager sitting in Mount Vernon Place Methodist Church, a sanctuary larger than this one, if someone would have said to me, “you are going to be a minister,” I would have laughed. And if someone said, “and you are going to do it in Saskatchewan,” I would have laughed even more and said, “where is that?” It isn’t so much that life leads us to strange places as it gets us there with a logic none of us are ever able to predict.

Why it was Abram has never been addressed, as far as I know. His father Terah was born in Ur of the Chaldees on the Persian Gulf and migrated to Haran in northwest Mesopotamia, the land that would become known as Aramea or Syria. It was a long trek, close to 1000 kilometers, and a different strange land.

Then God simply tells Abram to go where he will show him. No reason why Abram was chosen. He wasn’t the best student in his class; he had no particular talents that the Bible mentions. He just takes his family south to Canaan, an even less hospitable mountainous region. But it was a Promised Land and Abram was determined to find out why.

Jesus and Paul made much of Abram’s faith, that he simply went at God’s bequest. Yet Abram kept trying to fix things. In the time of a famine he took Sarai down to Egypt and any faith in God’s plan went out the window once he believed his life was in danger. The Egyptians will see that you are very beautiful and if they know you are my wife, they will kill me to get you. But if you tell them that you are my sister, then they will treat me well. It seemed to work until the Pharaoh himself took her into his house and it is not clear how far the Pharaoh went. God sent plagues upon the Pharaoh and he got the message and sent Abram angrily away, though with a healthy assortment of riches.

Abram became a very rich man, so rich that he and his now rich nephew Lot could not live together. They possessed too much and the land could not support their flocks and herds. When you become too rich even then around 2000 B. C. conflict and bickering arose between them. Abram graciously offered Lot the option to choose in which part of the Promised Land he would live. Lot chose the lush lower regions of the Jordan Valley, so Abram settled in the less arable Canaanite hill country. God still kept coming to him and saying this is the place.

But after being involved in a war, Abram was not getting any younger. Still he had no children to initiate this great nation God kept mentioning. Like so many prophets after him, the Word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision and tried to reassure him that the Promise was still in effect, despite the fact that he had been a lot of different places and done a lot of things and nothing really had happened.

So Abram gave God what for. “Look, you’ve said I will be the father of a great nation, but we have no children at all and the legal heir to my wealth right now is a slave if nothing else happens.

“I could have gone to Ontario and been more powerful. I could have gone to Alberta and been richer. I could have gone to BC and been warmer. But I’m here and lots of other people already living here and they belong here, so why am I here?”

God reassures Abram, pointing to the stars in the heaven, whose almost infinite number will approximate the multitudinous descendants of Abram. Abram buys it again and believes God’s promise. God counted Abram’s belief as righteousness in one of the famous phrase to be used a couple of millennia later by Paul. And still Abram is not really convinced. “How am I to know that I shall possess this land?”

But just as you cannot understand where your life is going in the middle of it, so Abram’s tale and God’s part in it cannot be fully comprehended in this episode. Abram and Sarai would go on trying to fix this childless problem by having children through his wife’s servants. Only late in life would Sarai be able to give birth to a promised son, Isaac. And then Abraham would go off and nearly sacrifice, murder his son for God knows what reason. Abraham had immense faith in the providence, and never nearly enough.

People are not as Biblically-literate today, and so do not twig to the parables and models of Biblical literature as generations before have. Television and movies have become the new mediums for parable and models of morality. I hope most of you are old enough to remember ÔThe Honeymooners,’ starring Jackie Gleason and Art Carney - Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton.

The typical weekly episode seemed to revolve around Ralph cooking up a scheme to make it rich or make life a lot easier, and so on. And they were great schemes, except for one tiny detail, and we would roar in laughter as that one detail would unravel everything Ralph and Ed tried to finagle. We would laugh too because Ralph and Ed were no different than us, except funnier. We can be so unhappy where we are and where we are going, because we are convinced we should have been there by now.

God knows that you and I and Ralph and Ed are going to keep trying to fix God’s promise to suit our ideas and our timetables. We are going to persist in trying to fix God. Even when Abram appears to believe God and has covenanted with God on this pilgrimage, Abram is still going to get caught in a series of those embarassing and ludicrous Honeymooner escapades.

Before this episode is over, one of the weirdest events in Biblical history takes place, something that no 21st century person would admit being part of. God wanted to reenact one of the more ancient and - we might call today - primitive rituals of a covenant between two parties. Abram had to bring a whole bunch of animals - a heifer, goat, ram, turtledove and pigeon - slaughter them and cut them in two. The custom was for both parties in the covenant to walk the bloody path between the separated animals and in effect say, “if I neglect or violate my part in our agreement, may I become like these animals split in two.” Not a nice sacrament.

However, Abram never walked through the animals. Instead, a surreal scene enfolds, as it necessarily happens when the Ultimate Being comes into the presence of a merely human being. Abram fell into a deep sleep as it became dark, and a terrifying darkness descended upon him, a darkness one could almost touch. As the tale has been passed down throughout the millennia, no one is able to describe what happened in plain language. A smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed eerily through the split animals. But after all, who really can describe God? Our attempts are always irrational, even silly in the end. God reiterates the Promise to Abram, and God’s implication is terrifyingly clear. “If I do not keep my promise to you, I will become like these animals split in two.” Is that even thinkable? What kind of a God would promise his own annihilation to a human being? We would be in a lot of trouble if our God were sacrificed.

It may be the Old Testament and a particularly ancient primitive tale to modern scientific, socially conscious ears, but this is our God and this is the Gospel. The reality of this world is that our God, the God of all the world, not just one tribe or another, does not want to hold your feet to the fire for every foolish mistake you make, for every selfish scheme you try to concoct. Our God is willing to unravel his divine essence to bring us to life. And in time, the Promise did come to fruition. Abraham never did make it Canterbury or even to Jerusalem, but his pilgrimage was complete.

God does not expect you and me to have a proper career. There are too many important things to do otherwise along the road. But since you and I are images of God, there is the expectation that your love will offer itself for your neighbour in the same way God does for you.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan