Genesis 15
Hebrews 11: 1–3, 8–16
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Lord, may we hear your voice in the words spoken in your Name. Amen.
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This week, when I realized the Old Testament text for today was the
story from Genesis of God reassuring Abram that his descendants, like
the stars in the skies, would one day number in the thousands upon
thousands – I thought, “Oh good! This is familiar
territory – surely fertile ground for a sermon on
faith.” And when I read the equally familiar words from
the Epistle to the Hebrews, “Now, faith is the assurance of
things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” I
was even more certain that this sermon was going to write itself in
the faithful story of Abraham and Sarah.
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But the tricky thing here, as we all know, is that even for Abraham,
who is called the father of our faith, faith didn’t come nearly so
easily, and certainly not overnight. For our passage this morning
is all about Abraham’s doubts, lingering doubts that
have persisted even after he and Sarai, as she was known in those days,
had travelled by God’s direction from Haran to Canaan, from
Shechem to Bethel, from Bethel through the Negev – and then back
again – a journey that took them nearly 25 years. That’s
a long time to be hoping against hope, a long time to still have doubts.
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So the question that comes to my mind is, What kept them
going? In fact, What persuaded them to start out on
this journey in the first place? All the Genesis text
tells us is that God called them to start on that journey, promising
that one day He would give them lands and would make them blessings to
all the families of the earth. Along the way, he even added the
promise that one day they would have their own child. But that,
in fact, is all God offered them – Promises – ephemeral
things, at best.
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But here is something I know, something I know from experience and can
say with assurance – that somewhere along the way, Abram and
probably Sarai too, met Almighty God. They not only encountered
Him; they came so close to Him they could feel His love for
them. No, the text from Genesis doesn’t exactly say
that, but it’s the only thing that explains their long
faith–filled odyssey. For as Frederick Buechner has put it
so beautifully, “Faith is the word that describes the direction
our feet start moving when we find that we are loved. Faith is
stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just
beyond our grasp.”
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Clearly, then, somewhere along the way, Abram and Sarai encountered the
God whose Name is Love. And his love persuaded them to start out
on their journey. His loving hand led them, guided
them – into regions totally new to them – as they waited on
him, as they learned to lean on the promises of God.
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Do you know what that kind of closeness does? It teaches us
to get to know the One who made those promises to us in the
first place, to know Him by heart. It teaches us to get
up–close–and–personal with our living, loving
God. And, by His grace, when that happens, we are no longer
following the promises of something; we are following
Someone. Now it is no longer a matter of
what–we–want. It’s a matter of
whom–we–trust. Now, finally, we are energized
by faith in the God we have come to know and trust. And that
trust makes all the difference.
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But that word trust is no more easily defined than the word
faith. In fact, when I think of trust, I
don’t even try to define it in words. Instead, what comes
to mind is the image of a small child’s hand, resting in the open
palm of a much larger adult’s hand. That picture tells me
that the adult has received this vulnerable baby, this baby in the
faith. The adult has welcomed him in. And the toddler, in
turn, has come to depend on the adult, to trust in that adult’s
protection, guidance, love. It’s the adult, you see, who
guides the child. No matter that the child can’t discern
the way. The adult can. And that makes all the difference.
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Once again, for me, Frederick Buechner has the best illustration of
this crucial step in our journey of faith. In his book Telling
Secrets he tells the story of a time in his life when he and his wife
nearly lost their eldest daughter to the eating disorder of
anorexia. She lay in a nearby hospital, gravely ill, her life
flickering before them. And one afternoon, terrified that she
wouldn’t make it, they took a drive through their beloved Vermont
countryside. He wrote of that moment later:
. . .[We were] parked by the roadside,
terribly depressed and afraid about our daughter’s illness
and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car
came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it
the one word out of all the words in the dictionary
that [we] needed most to see exactly then. The word
was TRUST. What do you call a moment like
that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life
plays on us every once in a while? The word of
God? I am willing to believe that maybe it was something
of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the car
turned out to be, as I’d suspected, a trust officer in a
bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the
incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon
brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a
bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the
edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I
have ever seen.
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It was just such an epiphany that Almighty God offered to Abram that
night, somewhere out in the wilds of Canaan, when He called him out of
his tent to look at the myriad stars in the night sky.
“Abram, do you see those stars?” he asked his terrified
child, his terrified ninety–nine–year–old child.
“Yes, Lord, I see them,” Abram replied.
“Look toward heaven and count them, if you can,” the Lord
said. “So shall your descendants be.”
And the writer of the Book of Genesis then says, “And Abram
believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
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Now you and I might never have seen the wilds of Canaan or Shechem or
Bethel. We might never have driven through Vermont, for that
matter. All the same, just like Abram and Sarai we are on a
journey of faith, guided by the hand of the Lord. And every one of
us has doubts along the way. Every one of us, from time to time,
thinks we must have missed some crucial turn, some vital detail that
everyone else seems to know. So we allow ourselves to be distracted
by people who assure us if we will only read this book, take this
course, experiment with yoga, try this diet or join this
movement – we will find our way again. We will know, we will
be sure what we are doing.
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But the truth of the matter is that there are no printed directions for
this journey — directions we somehow missed. If there were,
it wouldn’t be faith. We are simply invited to follow even
when we have no map or navigation system, even when we
don’t know our destination, even before we fully
understand. Yes, it takes some courage, and certainly some
faith. Yes, it takes some prayer, some waiting on the
Lord. But the God whose name is Love renews our faith,
daily. He gives us courage. He gives us hope. He
gives us strength.
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And somewhere along the way we remember — he has promised never
to leave or forsake us. We can trust him. And keep on going.
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Amen
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