"The Promise of God"

 

"Now the LORD was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did for Sarah what he had promised. Sarah said, 'God has brought me laughter, and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.' "

 

            When you fly west from here, it's interesting to look down and see the farms, the fields laid out in orderly fashion, with various crops growing. You can see the connection and the purpose in the landscape. But then you come to the mountains. They are not so orderly, but rather peaks are scattered about and you are not sure of the relationship of one to the other. They are part of the same range of mountains, but that is about all that holds them in some relationship to each other.

            We are reading through the Bible quickly this year, taking big chunks of Scripture each week, as if we were flying over it at 30,000 feet. And what do we see? Some sections are orderly, laid out with clear themes and purpose. Other sections seem jumbled, a bunch of unrelated stories lumped together. We wonder if there is a relationship. Are they part of the same range?

            This second section of Genesis, chapters 13 to 23, is like that. We see the peaks out the window: Abraham and Sarah having a child in old age; Lot going to live in Sodom before it gets destroyed by fire in judgment of its great sin; Hagar and her son Ishmael taunting Sarah, getting banished, almost dying, being rescued by the Lord. There are lots of lesser peaks and hills in between these. Is there a relationship, a central theme that helps us as we read? How do they fit together? In these stories we come to see that God is the Lord of all the nations, and he cares about all people, not just Israel. We see that sin matters in life and all people are responsible before God for their sin. We see that faith and unbelief can actually live in one person, and usually do. We see that the promise of God is not broken by human failure, or by circumstances. The Covenant promise of God seems to be threatened all along the way, but as Paul says much later, nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

            God makes a promise to Abraham that he will be the father of a great nation, with descendants numbering more than the stars in the heavens. Yet he and Sarah did not have even one child, and they were getting older. This does not stop Abraham from believing. But Sarah laughs. Faith does not come easily to Sarah. She is very practical, she knows what she sees, she knows how the world works. I think we all have some Abraham in us, and we all have some Sarah in us. It is best not to ignore Sarah, or deny her place in our thinking. The life of faith does not require that we live up to the standard of Abraham all the time. We had best recognize Sarah's voice and heart in us, and realize she is loved by God too.

            Sarah is first of all a pragmatic person. She hears the promise of a child and she knows that cannot come true given her age and her long years of not being able to have children. She knows how the world works. But she wants the promise to come true, and since she knows it cannot come true by God's action, she decides to do what she can to make it happen. She is more interested in doing God's work than in obeying God's commands. She is more likely to protect God rather than to serve God. She comes up with a plan. She will give her slave Hagar to Abraham, and Hagar can have the child who will be the heir. That was an accepted practice in those days, and the child born would be a legitimate heir. So it all works, except it is not what God promised; it was what Sarah figured out to do for God.

            I think we can identify with Sarah. We also tend to protect God rather than serve God. Often when a faith movement becomes institutionalized we can replace faith with human effort. Human effort is more predictable. We are more comfortable with planning meetings than with prayer meetings. We don't like to wait. We want to protect God's good name.

            But we do not have to replace faith with pragmatism. In our institutions: the church, the school, the hospital, we can keep prayer at the center. We can wait and watch for God to provide and then join God is what He is doing. I see more and more examples of this in these days. Keith Hamilton told us the story of Alaska Christian College when we were there. When he began as President he was the leader of a school that had no students, no teachers, no land, no buildings, no means of support and strong advice not to try it. But one gift at a time, one person at a time, the needs began to be met. He worked hard at it. This is not an issue of being passive. But it is trusting in the provision of the Lord to do the work the Lord has promised. Then our pragmatism leads to faith, instead of to exhaustion. When you try to do the work of God by your own effort you end up creating something other than what was promised. The promise of God to Abraham was not to create the conflict that arose between Sarah and Hagar. We need to learn to wait on the promises of God.

            Sarah was also self-protective, and in this she is much like us. When Hagar made fun of her barrenness, and when Ishmael mocked Isaac, she felt threatened in her core identity. To be a mother or to desire to be a mother sits close to the heart. Sarah lashed out at Hagar and at Ishmael. When an attack or threat lands close to our core identity, we lash out, we become angry, we defend ourselves, we begin a conflict. We act with compassion, forgiveness, generosity and love most of the time. But when something threatens our core, when we become afraid that we might lose our identity, then we do what we can to protect ourselves. We do not always like it when Sarah rears up in our talk. We try to hide her as best we can. But she is there. When changes come that are unfair to us we want to act in a moral, ethical, Christian way, but often it is too late before we thank of that. Sarah has already spoken. It is not easy to trust God with the core of our identity. But in Christ, our self protective instincts can move towards trust in God, rather than toward anger.

            Finally, in Sarah we observe the laughter of unbelief that becomes the laughter of joy. Sarah does not lack faith in God. She is always close to the Lord. But it is a struggle to believe when what is to be believed is so unlikely. So when she hears she will have a baby when she is 100, she laughs. It just comes out. She does not have to think about it. The idea is ridiculous and the very thought of it is so incongruous that she laughs out loud. Sometimes the promise of God does not make sense.

            But the unbelieving laughter of Sarah becomes the laughter of joy when Isaac is born, and that is what they name the child, "Isaac" – "laughter." When Ishmael sees Isaac, he also laughs, but it is the laughter of mockery. One of the primary journeys of faith we are on in our lives is the movement from the laughter of unbelief to the laughter of joy. That is a far better journey than that of the laughter of unbelief that leads to the laugher of mockery.

            "Blessed are those who do not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, but who delight in the law of the LORD." Turn on the TV and you will soon hear the laugher of mockery. What a different sound that is from the joy of the Lord. We need to follow Sarah on that path.

            In his commentary, John Walton quotes a rabbi he once knew named Chanan Brichto. The rabbi said that Plato equated belief and opinion, and said both come from ignorance. That is to say, if you do not really know something, you make up a belief or you form an opinion, until you can replace them with knowledge.  But, he said, Plato was wrong, because faith is not lack of knowledge or incomplete knowledge, but rather faith is knowledge of a higher order. "Faith is that certainty to which we refer the issues of life and death, as touching ourselves and others. Faith is not constant. It is a light that blazes like 1000 suns at some times; and at others, it flickers dimly, casting shadows of changing shapes."

            This is what Sarah knew. She knew flickering faith, but she came to the faith of delight and joy. Walton then goes on to say that Abraham embraced faith, and it is important to embrace faith; "faith that God is who he says he is, faith in his attributes, faith that he can do and will do what he says he will do, faith that he cares, faith that he is sovereign, faith that he is good."

            I am thankful for both Abraham and Sarah. They both came to embrace faith in their own way and time. May the same be said of us.

            Amen.