Trinity 1
Gen
15:1-6
6/23/19
I promise you that it will happen. The Illinois Centre Mall here in Marion will
spring to life. Every store location in
the mall will be filled high end stores. Every spot in the foot court will be
filled with a variety of wonderful foods.
The mall’s parking lot will be filled all the time, and the mall will be
thronged with customers. In fact, the
mall will have to extend its hours to accommodate the people who will come in
from all over the area to shop there.
The Illinois Centre Mall will become the hub of social life in
Marion and all of southern Illinois. A
trip to the Marion mall will be a family outing enjoyed by all. It will be the place for youth to see others
and to be seen as they cruise the mall, because the mall will be the place to be.
Now, I am guessing that as you sit there, you are very skeptical
about my promise. More to the point, no doubt you think that I have completely
lost touch with reality. Opened in 1991,
the Illinois Centre Mall is now dead. A
couple of major stores still operate as independent entities, but if you went
into the mall you would find nothing there. And any notion of a revived future
for the mall must be blind to the fact that all malls are a dying breed. The advent of online shopping has completely
changed people’s shopping habits.
Physical stores struggle to hang on and survive as more and more people
shop online.
If my promise about the future of the Illinois Centre Mall sounds
absurd, then you have a good introduction into how God’s promise to Abram must
have sounded. Yahweh had called Abram
when he was in Haran, what is today southeast Turkey. Abram had travelled with his father and
family from Ur in southern Mesopotamia with the intention of going to
Canaan. However they had stopped in
Haran and then ended up staying there.
At that time, Abram was a pagan, worshipping the false gods of
his family and area. But Yahweh called Abram and told him what to do. He said, “Go from your country and your
kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will
make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so
that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who
dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be
blessed.”
Yahweh told Abram to leave behind all of
the family connections that grounded his life, and to go to a land that he
would show him. He promised to make
Abram into a great nation, and that in Abram all the families of the earth would blessed. Abram listened to
Yahweh, he believed and obeyed. Later,
Yahweh promised to Abram that he would give him the land of Canaan as the
dwelling place for the nation that would come forth from him.
The promise sounded great. But there was a serious
problem. Both Abram and his wife Sarai
were old – far too old to have any hope that Sarai could conceive and bear a
child. It was just impossible. And
beyond that, Abram had just experienced a reminder of how tenuous life can
be. His nephew Lot who lived in Sodom
had been taken captive when a group of kings defeated the king of Sodom and
took the people of Sodom as plunder. Abram had raised a force of his own men
and attacked those holding Lot in order to free his nephew and his family.
Abram had no hope that Sarai would bear a
child. He had just seen how dangerous
life in Canaan could be. This must have
been a low point for him as he considered his life and his future. Then we hear in our text: “After these things
the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision: ‘Fear not, Abram, I am your
shield; your reward shall be very great.’”
Yahweh told him to cast away his fear. Why should he do this? It was because Yahweh
was his shield. Yahweh, the creator of
heaven and earth, was the One who was protecting and caring for him.
Then Abram replied with the real problem
that weighed on his mind and clouded his perception of the future. He said, “O Lord GOD, what will you give me,
for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus? Behold,
you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my
heir.” Sarai remained barren. Yahweh had not given Abram a son, and so
someone other than his own direct family was going to be heir of Abram’s estate
when he died.
It’s not hard for us to relate to Abram. We live in a world that is constantly
reminding us about how tenuous life can be.
On social media we learn about tragedies that have struck others – often
people that we actually know. Trips to
the doctor result in scans, or endoscopy procedures or biopsies in order to
find out if something really bad is happening in our body. And the promise of
God to love and care for us rings hollow when we see our struggles at work or
school; when we see the difficulties our loved ones are experiencing.
God knew Abram’s weakness. And so he
replied, “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your
heir.” Then the gracious God doubled down on his promise. He brought Abram
outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to
number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” Yahweh spoke his word of promise to Abram. Then we learn that Abram, “believed the LORD,
and he counted it to him as righteousness.”
Abram believed God’s promise, even though at that moment he had nothing
more than God’s word to go on. And we
learn that God “counted it to him as righteousness.” God considered Abram to be
righteous before him on the basis of faith – because he believed and trusted in
God and his word.
For St.Paul, Abram is the proof that our
standing before God is based on faith and not things we do. God speaks his promise. It is an expression
of his grace. Abram had done nothing to earn it – after all, he was just a
pagan that God called to be his own!
There was nothing that Abram could do in order to make it happen. All
that he coudl “do” was to believe and trust in God’s word – in his
promise. All he can do is believe and
trust in the character of God himself.
The apostle Paul told the Romans, “As it is
written, ‘I have made you the father of many nations’--in the presence of the
God in whom he believed, who gives life
to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. In hope
he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as
he had been told, "So shall your offspring be." He did not weaken in faith when he considered
his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years
old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb.”
Abram didn’t focus on the factors that made
the promise seem impossible. Instead, he
focused on God, the One who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the
things that do not exist. Pauls says, “No
distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in
his faith as he gave glory to God fully convinced that God was able to do what he had
promised.”
The apostle tells us that this belief and
trust in the God’s promise is why Abram’s faith was “counted to him as
righteousness.” And then he adds: “But the words "it was counted to
him" were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be
counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who
was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.”
Like Abram, we are called to believe and
trust in God’s loving care in the midst of all circumstances. We are able to do this because our faith is
in the God who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He is the God who gives life to the dead and
calls into existence the things that are not.
And he has demonstrated this by raising Christ, the Son of God, on
Easter.
Paul says that Jesus our Lord was delivered
up for our trespasses. God the Father
gave the Son to be the sacrifice on the cross.
The Father gave the Son into the cross hairs of his own divine wrath and
judgment. But then, on the third day, he
raised Christ from the dead. Because of
this we are justified. The verdict of the Last Day has already been spoken.
Because we believe in the crucified and risen Lord, God counts us as righteous.
God says that we are innocent and holy because of faith in Christ. And it is God’s
word that determines reality. It
alone decides how things really are.
It
is the Spirit of Christ who has worked this faith. It is the Spirit of Christ
who enables us to see what God has already done for us in Christ. And the
Spirit now leads us to apply this truth to the times when the promise of God to
love and care for us seems open to question – when God’s promise and the events
don’t seem to be matching up.
God has given Abram to us as a model of how
this works. He is an example of how faith
clings to the promise and character of God.
As Paul says in Romans, “He did not weaken in faith when he considered
his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years
old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. No distrust made
him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he
gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had
promised.”
We are fully convinced that God is able to
keep us in the faith and sustain us in the difficulties of life because God has
revealed to us how he raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Jesus lives!
Because he does, we have life. We have peace with God. On Good Friday it
looked like there was no reason for hope.
But in the resurrection of Easter we have learned that God was in fact
at work in the midst of the cross to fulfill every promise he had made to us.
We now live as those who live by faith in
the risen and exalted Lord. Paul
expressed what his means when he went on to write in Romans chapter five: “Therefore,
since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord
Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace
in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God,
knowing that Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of our own resurrection on
the last day.
Because this is so; because God has given
us his Spirit in Holy Baptism and made us a new creation in Christ, we are also
able to approach the challenges of life in a new way. We see in them how God
remains at work, building us up in Christ into the people of faith he wants us to be. As Paul said: More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings,
knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character,
and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's
love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given
to us.”
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