Maybe in Utah
THE NINTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Genesis 15:1-6 • Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16 • Luke 12:32-40
One night, a man dreams years into the future. The dreamer sees an old, gray-haired couple from behind, as their children and grandchildren stream through a front door. The dreamer tells us, not one of these family members was “screwed up.” The dreamer doesn’t know whether this dream is “wishful thinking.” But he says it “feels real,” like a land not too far away, where, as he puts it, “all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy and beloved.”
When the man wakes up suddenly to his humbler life, he says of that place in his dream, “I don’t know. Maybe it was Utah.”
I’ve just described the last scene of the 1987 movie Raising Arizona. The movie’s main characters aren’t able to conceive a child. They can’t adopt, because one of them has a criminal history. But in his dream, this man visits a transcendent place, so close but so far, where he can fulfill his dreams of capable parenthood and beloved children . . . and of being considered a good person.
In today’s first reading, the Lord asks Abram to look to the heavens and envision a place where he will be important, remembered, safe, and righteous. But this vision isn’t something that the Lord just gives him. It’s something that Abram practically has to wrestle from the Lord.
At this point in Abram’s life, a faith of silent obedience isn’t working for him anymore. Years before, the Lord had instructed Abram, “Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house to the land I will show you.” The Lord promised to make Abram into “a great nation” (Gen 12:1-3, trans. Robert Alter). Abram didn’t answer the Lord—he just did as he was told.
Years after that, the Lord told Abram to lift up his eyes and scan a particular territory—north, south, east, and west. The Lord promised that land to Abram and his descendants, who would be as uncountably numerous as the grains of sand under his feet. Again, Abram didn’t answer the Lord—just walked the length and breadth of the land as instructed (Gen 13:14-18).
But today, after facing a famine and a dangerous battle with people in the region, it seems Abram has had enough of silent obedience. “FEAR NOT,” the Lord tells Abram today. “I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great” (Gen 15:1, trans. Alter). I imagine Abram erupting, at least in his heart of hearts, “I didn’t leave my homeland and fight and starve just to hear generic platitudes like, ‘Fear not’, or the cliché that the Lord will be my shield (Ps 33:20), or some vague promise about a ‘great reward’!”
What Abram actually says to the Lord starts out more respectful. “O Lord God,” Abram begins. But what Abram says next comes straight from his deep disappointment that he carries on living without a child, and that the closest thing he has to an heir is some guy named Eliezer of Damascus.
The Lord apparently is taken aback. We can infer that Abram’s words stun the Lord into temporary speechlessness because of a technique in biblical literature. When biblical texts report someone speaking twice in a row—“And Abram said X, And Abram said Y”—it’s implied that the person being spoken to is conspicuously silent.
Let me paraphrase today’s passage, filling in some of the silences between the lines of those who speak twice in a row:
The Lord says: Fear not, Abram. I’m your shield! Your reward will be great!
Abram says: O Lord God, what reward are you talking about??? I have no child. The heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus.
The Lord pauses, surprised that patient, obedient Abram has talked back to him for the very first time.
Abram then spells out his complaint more forcefully: Look, Lord. You’ve given me no children. So now, the closest thing I have to an heir is a slave born in my house.
The Lord recovers himself and finally responds to Abram: This slave won’t be your heir, the Lord says. Someone from your very own loins will be your heir.
Abram greeted this reply with some kind of silence lost between the lines of the biblical story. Was Abram skeptical and defiant? Or was he choked up with relief at the Lord’s reassurances?
Whatever the nature of Abram’s silence, the Lord tries again. He leads Abram outside and asks him to look at the stars. The Lord says, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you’re able to count them.”
Again, more silence from Abram.
The Lord breaks the silence and tells him: “So shall your descendants be.”
This episode is a turning point in the life of Abram. Abram finally talks back to the Lord, sharing his disappointments and his desires. And apparently the Lord can no longer coast on his authoritative voice. In today’s reading and the rest of the chapter, the Lord has to stoop to signs and an oath and a ritual pact with Abram, who, when it comes to the Lord’s promises, no longer just takes God’s word for it.
Many of us have been trained in Christian settings to think that intimacy with God means submission, gratitude, and blind trust. But for the heroes and heroines of the Bible, intimacy with God—vibrant faith—meant speaking to God with audacity and confidence. When these heroes of faith presented their desires and demands to God, they exposed the deepest parts of themselves, and God showed up to meet them there, in dialogue, and working through sometimes painful silences.
Abram is a famous example of this kind of faith, but in the chapter after today’s reading from Genesis, which is left out of the Scripture we read on Sundays, we meet another—a woman named Hagar. Hagar is an Egyptian slave, forced into pregnancy by Abram and Sarah when Sarah is unable to have Abram’s children. But once Hagar is pregnant, Sarah harasses her until she runs away.
A messenger of the Lord finds Hagar and tells her, “Return to your mistress, and submit to her” (Gen 16:9). But in Hagar’s story we see once again an implied silence between the Lord’s first words and those that follow. Hagar doesn’t accept the Lord’s instructions, that she go home and submit. So the Lord has starts talking again, promising to multiply her descendants and to respond to her suffering. Years later, when Hagar and her son finally have left Abram and Sarah’s house for good, they run out of water in the wilderness, and the Lord provides enough for them to survive (Gen 21:8-21).
We could take Hagar, like we sometimes take Abraham, as a model of faith in difficult circumstances, who shows us that the Lord will provide if we just obey and believe. Or, we could celebrate Hagar, also like Abraham, as someone determined to extract better promises from God. Hagar first set out from Abram and Sarah’s house not knowing where she was going, but full of desire and confidence that there must be something better than a life shaped by the assumptions of slaveholding patriarchy.
In the biblical story, Hagar didn’t receive what Abram did, and what so many of us yearn for: someone to tell us “the sky’s the limit!” in such a way that we believe them. But when we praise the faith of Abram, we also can honor the desire that Hagar felt maybe more strongly than Abram—a faithful, defiant yearning for so much more, for a land of real promise. Where “all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy and beloved.”
© 2022 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas