Faithful, Scoundrel Abraham

"Faithful, Scoundrel Abraham"

Romans 4:13-25
March 8, 2009

13-15That famous promise God gave Abraham—that he and his children would
possess the earth—was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It
was based on God's decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then
entered when he believed. If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing
everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that
eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract!
That's not a holy promise; that's a business deal. A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed
lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to
collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise—and God's
promise at that—you can't break it.
16This is why the fulfillment of God's promise depends entirely on trusting God and his
way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God's promise arrives as pure
gift. That's the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the
religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of
us all. He is not our racial father—that's reading the story backward. He is our faith
father.
17-18We call Abraham "father" not because he got God's attention by living like a
saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn't
that what we've always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as
father of many peoples"? Abraham was first named "father" and then became a father
because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life,
with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham
believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on
what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God
himself said to him, "You're going to have a big family, Abraham!"
19-25Abraham didn't focus on his own impotence and say, "It's hopeless. This hundred-
year-old body could never father a child." Nor did he survey Sarah's decades of
infertility and give up. He didn't tiptoe around God's promise asking cautiously skeptical
questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that
God would make good on what he had said. That's why it is said, "Abraham was
declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right." But it's not just Abraham; it's
also us! The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who
brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless. The sacrificed Jesus
made us fit for God, set us right with God.

The text today is from the book of Romans, the first and most pivotal of Paul’s work—
and it ranks at the head of the class for a lot reasons, but the most important is that it
seems to be his most mature work, written late in his life, after years of thinking through
the meaning of what he has experienced as a convert from Judaism to this new faith,
Christianity. Last week, we talked about the messiness of trying to explain the meaning
of Christ’s death, and this week, the messiness continues, because for someone like
Paul, a faithful Jew who had made his mark first by persecuting those whom he would
eventually join, Paul had to make sense of this Christian story he was buying, putting it
context of the Judaism that he was raised in. If last week, we saw the messiness of
trying to figure out the meaning of Christ’s death, something still being debated today
within the church, this week we see the Apostle Paul trying to piece together the
connection between the faith of his past to the faith of his present. One of the things I’
ve often remarked is that if you are person in need of clear and concise explanations of
the divine, if you are person who needs your faith nice and neat, then Christianity is not
for you—it’s as a messy as real life, and Paul’s attempt to stitch together his past with
his present, well, its messy, but it’s important and worth listening to, especially if it can
tell something about real and authentic faith.

So, what is Paul doing here? Well, some background might be important: we think that
Paul wrote this letter in the years 57- or 58 CE, while he was wintering in Corinth. A
decade earlier the Roman Emperor Claudius had expelled the Jewish people from
Rome, one of the many moments in Jewish history when they have wrongly blamed or
harassed by those who ruled over them. At some point, however, the ban had been
lifted and many Jews and Jewish Christians returned back to Rome, but during the time
of their absence, it seems as if the Gentile Christians, those with no roots in the Jewish
faith, Jesus’ own personal faith, had risen to leadership and grown in importance, as
they would continue to do so throughout the rest of the century. This caused some
tension in those early Christian communities, as one can see scattered all throughout
the New Testament, and so for Paul, the question had to be answered: how does he
connect his old faith with his new faith, and how does he explain this to both the Gentile
Christians and the Jewish Christians in a way that will bring them together, rather than
in a way that will continue to exacerbate the tension that has not quite been worked ouf
the system, especially on the side of those early Jewish Christians who felt a little bit
superior because they shared the same faith as Jesus, as opposed to the Gentile
Christians who came out of more “pagan” faiths.

Well, Paul begins his argument this way: look folks, he seems to be saying in the early
chapters of Romans, we all fall under the law, that set of moral and sometimes
ceremonial laws and codes that were given by God as a way of ordering life, and he
includes the Gentiles in this “all” event though they were never directly given that Law
as the Jews had been. The point is that the law is written, is etched into the universe,
and so all follow under its purview, and, all follow under its judgment. It’s that judgment
“thing” that is the second point he is making before he arrives at this chapter—the
reality is that all of us have stumbled, have not done the right thing, including those
whom the Law had been most clearly given, had been most fully revealed, Paul’s own
people, the Jews. The point he is making is that we are all in a lot of trouble because
neither of us, Jews or Gentiles, can seem to get it right—we don’t do the right things in
our lives, in how we treat people or treat God, and so all of us have fallen under the
condemnation of God, the logic goes. We are all in the same boat, Paul is arguing, so
none of us better than the other, as some Jewish Christians have argued.

And then Paul does something quite extraordinary, really, he shifts everything over a
bit, and makes the case that Abraham, the great father of the faith, actually the father
of three faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—that father Abraham was not seen by
God as a good man because he was actually that good of a guy—we’ll get to that point
in a second—but he was seen as righteous, as good with God, because he believed
that promise that God gave him in Genesis, chapter 15. It’s that moment when God
makes a covenant with Abraham that his children would be like stars in the sky, despite
the fact that he had no children of his own at the moment, and that both he and Sarah
were past their child-bearing years. Before the Law was given to Moses, there was
Abraham, being made good in God’s eyes, not because he was good guy, because he
had followed that had not been given by Moses, or one that was written into the
universe, as it had been for the Gentiles, but because he believed that God would
actually do what God said, that God would actually keep the divine promise made to
him, despite the absurdity of that promise being made to an impotent man, as our text
today says. Paul skips over the Law and goes backwards even further to Abraham to
make his case that his new faith, his Christian faith, is a return to something more
ancient than even the revealed law or nature’s law—that God embraces us not
because we are good enough, moral enough, likeable enough, but because we have
the daring to believe, to have faith, when it seems absurd to have faith, as it did for
Abraham and Sarah, barren as they seemed to be, and yet being promised by God
with a million children.

Now that I’ve probably bored you with Paul’s answer to a question that most of us are
not asking in the twenty-first century, I want to make it a bit more interesting, because
there is a tension within the text that we need to acknowledge, something that doesn’t
quite add up in Paul’s argument. Paul really, really thinks of Abraham as being the
exemplary of what it means to be faithful to God, what it means to be a person of great
faith, because he believed the promise God had given him, and in our text today, the
implication is that Abraham didn’t doubt that promise, didn’t wonder whether God really
was going to actually fulfill this absurd promise made to him about being the father to
many nations. In our translation, it says that Abraham—and I am quoting here -

19-25Abraham didn't focus on his own impotence and say, "It's hopeless. This hundred-
year-old body could never father a child." Nor did he survey Sarah's decades of
infertility and give up. He didn't tiptoe around God's promise asking cautiously skeptical
questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that
God would make good on what he had said.

Well, there is a problem here, because, actually, if you actually look at the story of
Abraham’s life, after he received that promise from God, he really didn’t act as sure of
himself and sure of God’s promises as Paul seems to say here. Paul seems to say that
Abraham didn’t the faintest doubts that God would live up to his word, and yet that
seems to be absurd, if you look at stories about Abraham, and to be frank, his
sometimes dubious and ambiguous personal character. It’s almost as if Paul is ignoring
all the stories he knows that don’t quite add up to his argument. For example, Abraham
was so fearful twice in life that he tried to pass off his wife as a his sister, (Genesis 12:
10-20, 20:1-18) because he was scared that his beautiful wife would get him killed, that
the rulers of the countries he passed through would kill him in order to get her.
Friends, he literally prostitutes his wife in order to save his own rear end, instead of
believing, having faith, that this would not happen, and that God would find a way, and
that he would live long enough to be the father of millions. And then Abraham decided
that God wasn’t getting the promise done fast enough through his wife Sarah, so he got
his slave girl Hagar pregnant (Genesis 16:1-16). God has specifically said that the
promise would be fulfilled through Sarah, not some poor surrogate, and yet Abraham
clearly had some real doubts that this was going to happen, hence the reason for
putting his own plan of action into place, so to speak. And let’s not forget that
wonderfully funny moment when both he and Sarah fall out laughing hysterically at God’
s specific promise that they would have children in their old age—folks, I don’t know
about you, but laughing at God’s promise to you is probably NOT the best way of
showing that you are taking God all that seriously—that is not faithfulness, that is
skepticism and doubt.

So, maybe Paul is being a bit generous in his reading of Abraham’s life and
story…Abraham is a mixed bag as an example, especially if you give a hoot about the
character of a person. He was not all that good to his wife, or to that poor slave girl he
impregnated, and he often put people into harm’s way, including those rulers who were
so enchanted by the beautiful Sarah that they came close to committing adultery with
her, thinking she was simply the sister of Abraham, and not his wife. This is not a really
nice guy, in many ways, and he doesn’t quite live up to the billing that Paul makes here
in our passage today, at least when it comes to showing someone whose faith was
unwavering and sure. He obviously had doubts about the promise God made him,
because he kept trying to shore up his bets, kept trying to find ways to protect himself,
even to point of abusing those he cared about. In fact, he did doubt, he did wonder
whether or not God was going to do what God said was going to be done. Now, to be
fair, it could be that Paul is taking a whole different approach to his understanding of
belief than the commonsense notion of it, but I don’t think so, not really—he seems to
be understanding trust and faith in the same ways that we use that word, and there are
certainly moments in Abraham’s life when faith and trust are not what he operates out
of. Granted, there are moments when does trust God, when he believes and acts out
of his belief in God’s promise to him and Sarah, like his setting out to Promise Land,
and the difficult story of Isaac, and his possible sacrifice on that mountain. But there is
plenty on the other side of the ledger to counter Paul’s argument here—there are
moments when Abraham is not so full of trust and belief.

Which actually fascinates me, really, because if Paul had been right, that Abraham had
never doubted the fulfillment of the promise, I think I wouldn’t be all that hopeful for
myself, because, honestly, I’ve had my doubts about God, about promises being
fulfilled, about God being there in some of the more difficult times in my life. I’m a
skeptic by nature, and though Paul may not have been, I know a lot of people like me
who don’t come by faith easily, and who do as much doubting as they do believing.
But, but if the model of faith, minus Paul’s attempt to gloss over the reality, is Abraham,
well, I think I can be faithful, because Abraham looks more like me and my friends than
the idealized version Paul tries to prop up. I do have faith, don’t get me wrong—it
would be hard to be a minister without faith, but I also have my doubts, like father
Abraham, and yet Paul says to look to Abe if I want to see what a heart-felt, authentic
faith looks like. That truth I can relate to, and my faith in Christ, which is more on than it
is off in my life, well, that is doable and if Paul is right, then that is enough for me to be
right with God, and it is enough for you to be right with God, whether you got plenty of
that trust and belief in you, or whether you are constantly having to dig up traces of
that trust in your life. In his attempt to make Abraham into a perfect saint, into this
completely all-trusting, all believing saint, Paul made a mistake, I think, but he got
something really right in his attempt to point us to a deeper truth: that what makes us
right with God is not being right about this or that, or living the perfect life, or having an
always all-trusting faith. What Paul got right was that faith is about stepping out onto
the ledge you are not quite sure is going to hold you, plunging into a promise that
seems absurd to believe, taking that leap that the philosopher and theologian Soren
Kierkegaard spoke of, leaping off the cliff hoping that someone or something is going to
catch you on the way down. It is not rational, it is not sensible, but there are times in
life when leaping off the cliff is the only thing one can do, as Abraham found out. Sure,
he got it wrong a lot of times, but sometimes he got it right, and those moments of trust,
few and far between as they are for most of us, they make all the difference, and they
embrace back the God who has first embraced us.

Someone has said that the only thing that thing that really recommended Abraham was
his willingness to wander (Fewell & Gunn, Gender Power, & Promise, 39) and I think
that is probably right. Obviously, he made mistakes in his wanderings, but at least he
stepped out, and trusted in the absurd, in the madness, in the promise that seemed
destined to be broken. If all that is required to be counted as good and faithful in God’s
eyes is a willingness to wander, to wonder, then count me in, and count in most of my
friends, and many of you in this place, I suspect. If Abraham can be considered a great
man of faith, then so can you and me, right? His path was messy, very messy, as full of
stumbles grounded in mistrust, as leaps of faith and trust. There is that old children’s
song about Abraham, a little sexist, but reflective of the time of its composition, that
goes:

Father Abraham had many sons
Many sons had Father Abraham
I am one of them and so are you
So let's all praise the Lord.

The song is right: I am a son of Abraham, and you, you too are daughters and sons of
Abraham, people of faith whose imperfection, whose moments of doubt and mistrust
are not counted against you, and me. That is the kind of God we follow, one that points
to this messy man, a scoundrel, really, and says to us, be like him, at least when it
comes to his willingness to step out in faith in moments when doing so seems like an
absurdity, seems like craziness. In moments like that, of course, we become just like
Abraham, with our insecurities, our doubts, messiness, and our willingness to wander
after this God who promised us much and believed in us even more. Amen.