God's Promise: The Future is Now
Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
September 24, 2006
Genesis 17:1-8; 15-19
We had a wonderful celebration yesterday as Kristen and Andy were united in marriage. Andy’s children, Emma and Ethan, were also a part of the service, and it truly was a blessing for all of us, and I really believe it is going to be a blessing for this church. Of course, I’m not sure what we in the church office are going to talk about from now on… it seems like an important part of staff meetings for the last six months has been taking time for wedding updates from Kristen. As I said yesterday, I think I knew more about her wedding than I did about my own wedding!
With yesterday’s wedding and our text for today, I’ve been thinking about weddings and vows and promises: I, Andrew, take you Kristen…I, Kristen, take you Andrew... It’s a wonderful promise, but when you think about it, also a rather outrageous one. A couple stands before a pastor, before each other, before family and friends – and before God – and they make this promise to be loving and caring, faithful and supportive partners, for better or for worse, for as long as they shall live. But what do they really know about each other? “Imagine my surprise to learn that you don’t believe in picking up your underwear or putting the top back on the toothpaste.” They have made this promise about a future they nothing about. They don’t know what it may hold for them, again for better or for worse, or what tomorrow may look like. All they have is this promise, a promise which will mold and profoundly shape them, will create a new reality for them that had not been there before. No certainties, no guarantees, just a promise on which they are staking their lives. When you think about it, it is rather amazing that any of us decide to do such a thing. But of course, basing a life on an outrageous, even unlikely promise, really is nothing new for people of faith.
“When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, ‘I am God Almighty…And I will make my covenant between me and you and will make you exceedingly numerous. You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations…As for Sarah your wife…I will bless her and I will give you a son by her and she shall give rise to nations…Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed…” Abraham, age ninety-nine, and Sarah, age ninety, are told by God to buy a crib and a car seat and to paint the nursery. A son is on the way. They are given a promise, an unlikely, indeed impossible promise, and told to shape their lives by, and to trust their future to, that promise. They doubt it, my goodness, they laugh about it - I love the humanity of Abraham and Sarah – but eventually they trust it and embrace it, and a world is changed.
Reflecting on this text, on this promise, Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, writes, “The Bible regularly confesses more than it understands. It claims more than can ever be explained. This birth is an event defying explanation, resisting reason. Abraham and Sarah and all of us are thrown back from reason and understanding to the more elemental responses of wonder, amazement, astonishment, gratitude, praise, and laughter…The imagination takes off…The God who can give this couple a baby can give anything. The God who can work this new life can work new life in every circumstance. The bounds of possibility are broken. Every aspect of life is now set to lyrics that invite celebration and amazement.” All because of a promise – a promise made, resisted, then believed, lived out and fulfilled.
What do you think of that…allowing our lives to be shaped, not by hard fact, but by a promise? It must have been difficult for Abraham and Sarah to believe in and cling to this outrageous promise – do you think they shared it with their friends? “Guess what God said to Sarah the other day.” It must have been a hard thing to believe in a promise, to trust a promise, a crazy wild promise that they had no power to make come true. Talk about relinquishing control. As Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Everything was in the future tense – the land, the child, the blessing. Everything would happen, by and by, but what was there to live by now?” What does the promise do for us now?
I think about my preaching, my teaching, my ministry. A lot of it really does focus on the promises of God, promises which for many of us have become flesh in Jesus of Nazareth – promises of peace, of justice, of hope and new life; blessings for the poor, the meek, the peacemakers, those who mourn. So many promises. And yet, just this week, I met with two families to plan memorial services for loved ones, I talked with two people, each of whom has a father near death with terminal cancer, I encountered a single mother with no home, no income and pretty much no hope, and I talked with a parent about a severely troubled child. There was also the great wedding celebration we had – life is ambiguous – but, it was a tough week for the promises of God. We have this vision, this promise, of peace and harmony and righteousness, of the lion lying down with the lamb, but then each day must deal with the reality of hard times and sadness and hatred and anger. It all sounds good for the future, but what about now? Is it crazy, a waste of time, to bet our lives on a promise, to shape and order our lives according to a story that is still unfolding, that is not yet complete? Is our gathering here on Sunday morning nothing more than an exercise in futility?
I think back to Martin Luther King’s, 1963 “I have a dream” speech. He spoke of a time when all people would live as brothers and sisters, of a time when the agenda of every legislature would be to secure the God-given rights of every individual, regardless of skin color. He quoted the old hymn, which repeated a promise of scripture – “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last.” It was a dream, a promise, a vision of a future time, a time which quite honestly many in that crowd did not think would ever be possible. But some saw it, some believed it, some embraced it. When heads were beaten with billy clubs, churches were bombed, and people attacked with dogs and fire hoses, they remembered the promise, they remembered the dream, and through it all they were energized. They did not quit, and again, a world was changed. I think of the old black woman walking during the Montgomery bus boycott. “C’mon, grandma, you must be tired, hop in the car.” “I’m not walkin’ for me. I’m walkin’ for my grandchildren and their children. My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”
I think that is what Abraham and Sarah were feeling. They received God’s promise against a background of hopelessness and barrenness. How to trust a promise that contradicted everything they knew about reality? Could God really be trusted to work a genuine newness, way beyond theirs and the world’s expectations? They decided that yes, God could do that. And so, much like that old woman and thousands like her in the 1960’s, Abraham and Sarah were energized by a promise and allowed it to shape their lives. They dared to believe that God just might do some wondrously weird things, might even make a way where they could see no way.
And, says Taylor, “What better way to live than in the grip of a promise, and a divine one at that? To wake every morning to the possibility that today might be the day. To remain wide awake all day long, noticing everything…To search the face of every stranger in case it turns out to be an angel of God. To handle every moment of one’s life as a seed of the promise and to plant it tenderly, never knowing if this moment, or the next, may be the one that grows. To live like that is to discover that the blessing is not future, but now.”
Does that make sense to you? The promises of God drawing us into the future, not depressing us, but energizing us, bringing us around to where we ought to be, keeping us open and attentive to God’s presence and God’s present work. Making anticipation and hope, expectation and worship, a way of life.
Earlier I talked about a week when it was at times difficult to believe in the promise. But I can’t tell you how many times people, people in difficult, even heart-breaking circumstances, have told me that they were convinced that God was with them, somewhere in the meat and marrow of their lives, God was with them and that was enough to get them through. It was enough simply to know that the promises weren’t just words, weren’t just futile dreams, but that God was there, within the promise, sustaining and maintaining them. It has been very helpful for me to think that, very helpful.
And so, in the words of Taylor, “For two dozen years Abraham and Sarah lived in the promise, led by the delicate threads stitched through their hearts. For two dozen years they watered every seed that fell upon their path without losing sight of where they were going or who had set them on their way. There were lean times and there were fat ones, but insofar as they were all God’s times, they were all good times, rolling out ahead of the old couple like a red carpet for them to walk upon. Never did this seem more true to either of them than the spring morning of Sarah’s 90th year, when she came in to her husband drying her hands on her dress and said – with stars in her eyes – ‘Abraham, I have something to tell you.’”