Mid-Advent 2
Gen
21:1-7
12/11/19
Abraham had not intended to end up
in Haran. When he left Ur in Mesopotamia
– modern day Iraq – with his father Terah, the goal was the land of
Canaan. Yet in making the long circular
trip to Canaan that avoided the desert, they stopped in Harran – modern day
Turkey – and for some reason never continued.
Instead they settled there.
We learn in Genesis chapter eleven
that Abraham made the trip to Harran with his wife Sarah, at that time called
Sarai, as Abraham was called Abram. We are
told that “the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai.”
And then the very first thing we learn about her is: “Now Sarai was
barren; she had no child.”
Many of us know women who have
struggled with infertility. Women were
created by God to bear children. They
were created to want to bear children
– to want to be a mother. When for some
reason this doesn’t happen for a wife, we feel deep empathy for her pain. In a culture that valued children even more
than we do, Sarai’s condition was the greatest of tragedies.
While in Haran, Yahweh called
Abraham. 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.”
God
promised to make Abraham into a great nation. And he promised that in Abraham
all nations would be blessed. Through
his call, God identified Abraham’s offspring as the means by which he would
fulfill the first Gospel promise that we heard about last week. This One would
be the seed of the woman – he would descend from Eve and would defeat the devil.
Abraham
was seventy five years old when God called him and he went to Canaan, where God
promised that his descendants would possess the land. God had promised to make
Abraham into a great nation. Of course,
there was a problem with this plan. Sarah was barren and did not seem to be
able to have any children.
Years
passed, and during that time God said to Abraham, “I
will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the
dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted.” It sounded great … except Sarah continued to
be unable have any children.
And so it was later that that the
word of Yahweh came to Abraham in a vision saying, “Fear not, Abram, I
am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” But this time Abraham replied, “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.”
Yahweh
responded to him: “This man shall not be your heir; your very own
son shall be your heir." God brought Abraham outside and said, “Look
toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them. So
shall your offspring be.” Then we are told, “And he believed the LORD,
and he counted it to him as righteousness.” God makes a promise that is
contradicted by past and present experience.
But Abraham believes God’s word – he believes God is able to do it. And God
reckons – he counts this faith as righteousness.
St
Paul tells us that Abraham had faith in God “who gives life to the dead and
calls into existence the things that do not exist.” He had faith in
God, “fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised” and
so, “That is why his faith was ‘counted to him as righteousness.’” And the
apostle tells us: “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.”
Abraham is held up as a great
example of faith. We know that we are
not always able to be so strong. There are times we doubt God and fail to trust
in him. We question him because of the way things are going, and wonder whether
he really is there; whether he really does care.
It turns out the Abraham and Sarah
were no different. In the very next
chapter we learn that when Abraham was eighty five years old, Sarah was still
barren. A decade – ten years – had
passed since God first spoke his promise about Abraham being the father of many
nations. And in spite of God’s repeated promises affirming this, nothing had
happened.
So Sarah came up with her own plan. She had a servant named Hagar, and she said
to Abraham, “Behold
now, the LORD has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it
may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And we learn that Abraham
listened to Sarah. Abraham and Sarah ignored God’s promise and tried to do things their own way. Abraham had sex
with Hagar. She became pregnant and gave birth to Ishmael. But by ignoring
God’s word and doing things their own way, it actually just made things worse
as Hagar and Ishmael became the cause of hurt feelings and anger for Sarah.
That’s what usually happens when you ignore God’s instruction and try to do
things your own way.
Then,
when Abraham was ninety nine years old – twenty four years after God had first
made his promise - Yahweh appeared to him and said about Sarah, “I will bless
her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her,
and she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.” This was too much for Abraham. He fell on his face and laughed and
said to himself, “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?
Shall Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?”
Yet Yahweh affirmed,
“No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his
name Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting
covenant for his offspring after him.”
In fact God added, “I will establish my covenant with Isaac, whom Sarah
shall bear to you at this time next year.”
Finally, Yahweh and two angels came
to visit Abraham. God said to Abraham, “I will surely return to you about this time next year,
and Sarah your wife shall have a son.” Sarah was listening at the tent door
behind him. Moses tells us that not only was Sarah old but that she was in
menopause. And so seemingly with good reason Sarah laughed to herself,
saying, “After I am worn out, and my lord is old, shall I have
pleasure?” However Yahweh said to
Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I
am old?’
Is anything too hard for the LORD? At the appointed
time I will return to you, about this time next year, and Sarah shall have a
son.”
Tonight in our
text he hear, “The LORD visited Sarah as he had said,
and the LORD did to Sarah as he had promised. And
Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of
which God had spoken to him. Abraham called the name of his son who was
born to him, whom Sarah bore him, Isaac. Abraham was a hundred years
old when his son Isaac was born to him.”
Our
text says that God “visited Sarah,” which is a term loaded theological meaning
in the Old Testament. It describes God’s
saving attention directed toward Israel and her people. This visitation was God
enabling Sarah to become pregnant.
And
note how the verse in parallelism says the same thing twice: “The
LORD visited Sarah as he had said,
and the LORD did to Sarah as he had
promised. Twenty five years earlier,
God had spoken his promise. Year after year passed as Sarah remained
barren. She was at a stage of life when
physically it was no longer possible for her to have children. Yet just as God had promised – and then just
at the time God had said – Sarah conceived and gave birth to Isaac. God kept
his promise. God was true to his word.
A hundred year old man having a child is
unusual. But in our own day it’s not unthinkable. The oldest recorded age of a man having a
child is Ramjit Raghan who did so at ninety six years old in India. There are at least eight other well known
examples of men who have had a child in their eighties or nineties.
However,
elderly women in menopause don’t conceive children. It never
happens. And yet at the critical
juncture when God promised that he was acting to bless all nations; at the time
when he began to fulfill the promise of the seed of the woman who would crush
the serpent’s head, God used a barren menopausal woman to give birth to Isaac.
God acted in an unexpected way. For as
God said to Abraham, “Is anything too hard for the LORD?”
God’s promise
to Abraham took many years to be fulfilled. When it was, God did it in an
unexpected way - a way that reveals is creative power. During Advent we are
preparing to celebrate that God kept his promise about the seed of the woman
who would crush the serpent’s head. Here
too, it was many years before God’s visitation. But God
kept his promise. He
was true to his word.
In Sarah God
used the dead womb of an old woman. In
Mary God used the fertile womb of a virgin, who became pregnant without ever
having intercourse with man. Yet after
all, nothing is too hard for the Lord.
Abraham and
Sarah had both laughed at the idea of Sarah bearing a child. Yet after she had
given birth Sarah said,
“God has made laughter for me; everyone
who hears will laugh over me.” Now they would laugh as an expression of joy
over the crazy, amazing thing that God had done for Sarah.
As
we prepare to celebrate Christmas we do not laugh at the idea of virgin giving
birth to the sinless Son of God. We do
not laugh at the premise that a single man dying on a Roman cross was God’s
powerful visitation bringing us forgiveness and salvation. We do not laugh at the witness of the
apostles that God raised Jesus from the dead.
Instead we laugh for joy that
God had has done these amazing things through the seed of the woman to give us
redemption.
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