What’s So Great About Abraham?
THE SECOND SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Genesis 12:1-9 • Romans 4:13-25 • Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
The planetarium in St. Louis right now can show you what the sky looks like from other planets. You lean back in your chair, or lie down on a mat on the floor, and take in the extra-terrestrial view on the dome-shaped ceiling above.
On Mercury, the sun is a round, orange disk, wider in diameter than the sun viewed from earth. Because Mercury has no atmosphere, the stars are visible all day long, and that big, orange sun settles among them. On Venus, the thick atmosphere blocks out the stars, night and day. The daytime sky just a milky haze hiding all celestial bodies, and filtering out a lot of sunlight. On Mars, the sunset is an ethereal blue. The nighttime view is similar to the view from a desert on planet earth, with lots of stars, and the same recognizable constellations.
Abraham got this view of the stars from the Negev desert, as confirmation of the promises he starts to receive in today’s first reading. As Abraham leaves behind his birthplace and family home, God promises to make of Abraham a great nation. In the next chapter, God promises to make Abraham’s offspring as numerous as “the dust of the earth.” Two chapters later, when Abraham protests that he still has no biological children, God shows Abraham the starry night sky. When Abraham falls silent before those stars, God declares that Abraham’s descendents will equal them in number.
For many people of faith, Abraham sets the standard of a righteous person, for his virtues of obedience and faith. But sometimes, I suspect that the reason people are so interested in identifying Abraham’s virtues, is because many of us want to get our hands on blessings like Abraham’s.
Abraham isn’t just righteous; he’s also loaded. He scores a lot of sheep, donkeys, human beings, and—last but not least, apparently—camels from Pharaoh, after going to Egypt, claiming that his beautiful wife Sarah is his sister, and letting Pharaoh take Sarah into his harem (Gen 12:16). When the Lord afflicts Pharaoh for taking another man’s wife, Pharaoh sends Abraham and Sarah away and lets them keep their loot.
Not long after that, Abraham measures his wealth not only in livestock and people, but in silver and gold. He and his nephew Lot have so many possessions that their herdsmen squabble, so the two agree to find pastures in separate regions. Family is family, though, and when some warrior-kings raid other kingdoms and capture Lot and all his goods, Abraham rallies his personal army of three-hundred and eighteen trained men to recover Lot and other people’s property. Abraham turns down a reward from the recovered spoils, because he doesn’t want any earthly king to get the credit for making him rich. Abraham’s wealth comes from God.
By the end of his life, Abraham is rich in other ways. He dies at what the Bible tells us is the “good old age” of a hundred and seventy-five, and his sons bury him alongside his beloved wife, Sarah (Gen 25:7-10).
It’s no wonder that later generations have tried to crack the code on how Abraham unlocks all these blessings: a successful family business with its own security force, financial and human capital, ripe old age, children who all outlive him, and burial in a tomb beside his lifelong partner.
Some people have thought that it was Abraham’s perfect obedience that earned him these rewards. Some even thought that Abraham miraculously observed all the commandments centuries before they were revealed through Moses.
But our second reading today has another theory—Paul’s theory—that it was Abraham’s faith, not his obedience, that earned Abraham his rewards. According to Paul, Abraham’s faith in the God who created the world from nothing, and in the God who brings life to the dead, never faltered. Despite all evidence ot the contrary, Abraham had faith God would do everything he promised. And because of Abraham’s faith, God delivered.
***
Paul’s theory has some problems, though. Paul says that Abraham “did not weaken in faith” when he considered his old age or his wife’s barrenness. But in the book of Genesis, Abraham lashes out at God for not giving him offspring (Gen 15:2-3), he follows a concocted plan to have biological children with his slave Hagar instead of his wife (Gen 16), and he falls down laughing at the thought that a hundred-year-old man and an as-yet infertile woman could have a child (Gen 17:17).
Paul describes Abraham as “Hoping against hope” that he ever would become a biological father, but . . . a hundred years old in biblical years was more like forty today. You might think your life is over, but trust me—it’s not! Abraham may have been a touch overdramatic at the time. As a matter of fact, after Sarah dies and their son Isaac has a wife of his own, Abraham marries another woman and has six children with her, no problem (Gen 25:1-6).
What Paul describes as Abraham’s indomitable faith in God against all odds may have been just the impatience of a rich man that God hasn’t blessed him fast enough.
Despite Paul’s own transformative encounter with the risen Christ, what Paul does with Abraham’s story is just substitute one reward-generating virtue for another. While some people thought it was Abraham’s perfect obedience that gained him the rewards that come with righteousness, Paul thought it was Abraham’s faith, and that we Christians could earn rewards too by having faith that God raised Jesus from the dead. Either way, the assumption is that virtues merit rewards, whether long life, or eternal life.
But, as generations of rabbis have known, this paradigm ignores the messiness of Abraham’s life, which mixed impatience and scheming with loyalty and generosity, and which blended silence with bold outspokenness in his relationship with God.
What’s more, many obedient and faithful people don’t secure the rewards of Abraham. And, unquestioning obedience and steadfast belief that defies evidence are ambiguous virtues—that can draw people away from the promise of life abundant.
***
If we still want to believe nevertheless that the God of Abraham and the God of Jesus invites us to live by faith, we might reconsider what life-giving faith could be.
Maybe faith isn’t just silent obedience to authoritative voices. Parts of Abraham’s story show us that faith is setting out for an unknown destination, looking to the stars for a perspective larger than our individual lives, and envisioning a future on this planet for generations after us.
Maybe faith isn’t just the steadfast belief admonished by Paul—the white-knuckled, full-throated insistence that Jesus rose from the dead two thousand years ago. Maybe faith, as we see in today’s gospel, is reaching out to touch Jesus in the hope that he can make us whole. Maybe faith is the confidence that the world could be a more hospitable place than it is right now. Maybe faith, or placing trust in Jesus Christ, is the feeling that some risks are worth taking, whether the outcome is success or failure.
Maybe faith is letting go of things we think we’re so sure about.
I believe that Jesus came not to confirm our paradigms, but to blow our minds. The God of Abraham, and the God of Jesus, invites us to see the world from another perspective—beyond the paradigm that says we can use certain virtues to secure permanent rewards. This God beckons us instead to trust that whether the blessings of our lives are as glistening and innumerable as Abraham’s, or hidden from our perception like the sun and the stars when viewed from the planet Venus, we are each a cherished part of the cosmos that belongs wholly to God.
© 2023 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas