" 'O Sovereign Lord, what can you give me, since I remain childless?' "

"Abraham believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness."

         In all my years of teaching Confirmation, I have noticed that young people, whose faith is vulnerable, sometimes pray to God so that they might move from despair to success. They want their lives to work well, and when they struggle in some area, they feel it deeply. They pray to God to make things go better. When nothing changes, they can lose faith.

         But God rarely takes us on a journey from despair to success. Much more often the journey is one from despair to promise, and it is that journey which brings us to live by faith. It is then faith that leads us, not to success, but to the victory of God, which we experience through the cross of Jesus.

         Tell me the old, old story of Jesus and his love. It is the love of Jesus which draws us out of our despair and into the promises of God. Our part in the journey is faith, believing in God. God's part is love, the love of Christ on the cross.

         Abram found himself in despair. He and Sarah carried what Gordon Wenham calls "the unmitigated disaster of childlessness." Cathy Stanley Erickson has written in the latest Covenant Companion of her experience of being childless, and shares the deep and long-lasting pain of being in that situation. It is a very difficult human condition to go through at any time in history. But for people in the ancient world, childlessness meant not only that there was no one to carry on the family line and preserve the family inheritance, but also that it made people very vulnerable in their old age with no one to care for them. And there would be no one to look after the funeral rites when you died, rites that were seen to secure your soul's rest in the life to come.

         It was even worse for Abram and Sarah. For God had promised them a son, and a great and blessed nation living in a Promised Land. So Abram falls into despair, thinking "the promise of God upon which I based my life will not come true. I am too old to have a child. There will be no chosen people, no Promised Land. There will be no God who can be trusted, no God who is worth giving your life to in obedience. I either heard wrong, or I was surely deceived." So something like that ran over and over in his mind for all the years that he and Sarah carried their pain.

         One night, Abram had a vision, and God called to him. But the vision from God seemed pointless to Abram at first. "What can you give me, since I remain childless?" This is surely the point of despair, the dark night of the soul; to come to the point where we believe there is in fact nothing that God can give us. It is too late. Abram knows there is a God, a Sovereign Lord. But he cannot trust him or think that this God could help him, or even wants to help him.

         So God gives him a promise. He does not announce that Sarah is pregnant, that the problem has been solved. He gives to Abram a promise and then a picture; he takes him outside and has him look at the stars.

         Abram believed God. We are not told why Abraham believed. But the promise was enough for him to move from despair to hope. He was on a very significant spiritual journey of renewal.

         Lest we put Abram on a pedestal and make a hero of him, and then feel incapable of living up to his example, we should continue reading. There are three accounts of Abram's faith given here, one right after the other.

• In the first, Abram hears a promise from God and believes, and it is credited to him as righteousness.
• In the second God promises land to him, and Abram immediately asks for a sign, for some proof that his promise will come true.
• Then we are told that Sarah and Abram figure out a plan to gain a son without God and his promises. Sarah's handmaid Hagar is given to Abram, and Ishmael is born.

         If you read those three accounts chronologically, then you have to conclude that the pure faith of Abram quickly fades. He goes from believing the promise, to believing but asking for proof, to coming up with his own solution without regard for God. In other words, if you read it that way, it is a rapid downward slide from belief to skepticism to unbelief.

         But if you put the stories side by side, you then get a mirror of what life and faith are really like for most of us. Maybe in telling the story in this way, we gain an insight that it is possible to be all three at once. I know that I am fully capable of moving between belief, needing proof from God and fixing things on my own. I can sometimes almost do all three in the same breath. I am all too aware that I move from one to the other.

         I suppose another way to put it is to admit that I am not always so good at pure belief. I do not always live there. It does not mean that I don't believe. I want to. I want to believe the promises of God, and consistently act upon them. The love of Christ draws us to a consistent belief, a faith that expresses itself in discipleship.

         When Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem, to go to the cross, he realized that his disciples lacked faith, or that they were inconsistent in their faith. Sometimes they were fearful and sometimes they did not get it, and sometimes they were terribly self-focused. So Jesus, with just a matter of weeks left in his life on earth, realized he need to focus on discipleship, to prepare them and bring them to a life of faith. This next section of Luke takes place on the road, on a journey, and is all about developing disciples and helping them to believe. It is of course only in the cross and resurrection that they come to faith.

         When people in Samaria reject them, the disciples are ready to bring down fire upon them. Some thought Jesus would do the same on the cross. Some still think it's a good idea. But that is not the way of discipleship and belief.

         When people come to Jesus on the road, asking to become disciples, Jesus questions their priorities and allegiances that keep them solidly where they are. Joel Green writes, "Those who would be disciples of Jesus must reckon with how identifying with Jesus might place them outside the boundaries of what is acceptable to a world not oriented toward the will of God."

         For example, it took about a year to bury your father--to place the body in a tomb with proper ritual, and to respectfully mourn the loss for a year and finally place the bones in a box. Jesus only has a few weeks to live. And this word about plowing in the kingdom of God and not looking back, I know that farmers during planting season simply are not available for anything else. There is an urgency to what they are doing, and if they do not give full attention to this work, they are not farmers anymore. Belief in Jesus requires something of us.

         I know that belief in God is something of a mystery. How people come to believe is not easy to describe. It is not a matter of proof, but rather a matter of the heart, allowing God to work in our lives until we come to a place of taking a step of faith. It is a love relationship. It is a commitment to one who is the Lord.

         I know that belief in Jesus requires that we do not demand that he do certain things for us, that we do not feel the need to control God.

         I know that belief means that the Lordship of self is replaced with the Lordship of Christ.

         I know that belief requires a willingness for us to move, to be on a journey, to change, to be freer than you thought you were.

         I know that the power of the love of God draws us into the journey of discipleship.

         I invite you to belief in Christ, to let his love draw you from despair to living by the hope of his promises.

         Amen.