We talk a lot about the promises and covenants we have in our lives. I’ve just gotten through doing about five spring weddings here, and at each one, I talked about the covenant that the two people are entering into. A covenant of intentions with each other, because even though each couple has already lived through a lot, they are crossing over into a new kind of intentionality of what they want to be to each other.
But the mystery, of course, is how those promises, how that covenant, will unfold. How that story will evolve in any given pair of lives. What stages they’re going to go through, how it’s going to look at different points, and how sometimes it may not feel very good even when the covenant is working.
And all that good, rich, scary covenant stuff is what we’re plunged into today, in the call of Abram, who, of course, will become Abraham – but not yet. Before this in the Bible, we’ve only had one promise, one covenant, from God – with Noah, when God says, “Ok I won’t flood the world again.” But here, with Abram, is the beginning of a whole new thing – the shaping of a relationship between God and Abram, toward a relationship between God and a people, and God and all people.
But the thing is that we don’t get it all at once. It’s a tall order, a covenant with God, so as with these newly married couples, it has to unfold in stages. And what’s so great about this moment is that this is the very beginning – the wedding, so to speak – with God’s first big “hello, and by the way, I have plans for your life.”
It’s probably the last thing Abram expected. His wife, Sarah, is still Sarai. They both think themselves older people, too old to have the children they’d hoped for, too old for anything really radical to happen.
And God essentially up and says, “Think again, because I’m about to do a whole new thing.”
And suddenly what looks like ending became beginning, and together Abram and Sarai begin to move, in stages, toward the unfolding of this covenant God makes through them, the promises that altogether will become the rich and complex layers of a covenant.
And that’s the twist to all of this – it happens through them, and it happens in stages. Let’s keep this in mind as we look for our own stories deep in the heart of Abram’s story. Like the last line in the reading – they traveled in stages. That “happening through them in stages” is part of the real gift here – and I also think it’s what is a total and complete pain about how this all works.
First of all, this “traveling in stages” thing is very, very inefficient. I mean, if God is really so powerful, why not just swoop down and get the whole change made – get Abram’s family moved, give ‘em a bunch of kids early on when they’re young enough to tote them around more easily – all in one fell swoop. Why this unfolding, why the awkward times of life, why these stages of moving all around the Ancient Near East, from Ur to the Negeb to Egypt, then back? Especially when, as we all know about life, some stages can be really painful and interminable, while others can be so delightful we hate to see them go? Why does it have to unfold rather than just “happen”?
Well, the big answer isn’t one I, or any human, can give you. All we can know is that God apparently chooses to work more through us than on us. And that working out through our real lives more or less has to take place by stages.
And that brings us to the next hard thing about Abram’s call and what it tells us about our own lives. If God works through the working-out of our lives, and if it happens in stages, then there seems to be a fair amount of wiggle room for our participation in it, right? We get Abram’s call here in real short form, but I’m guessing that in reality, if you look at all the stuff that had to happen between these lines, he had to grapple with lots of possibilities, with options, with uncertainty. With paths followed and not followed, and sort of followed. He had to go ahead and fully invest himself without knowing how it was going to turn out. He had to invest himself to find out how it was going to turn out.
And when we think about that in our own lives, it gives rise to a pretty important question – how does God’s will, God’s participation, enter into the working-out of our lives? God has put something in motion – but then, how does God participate in it?
It’s a question that cropped up in the Bridge discussions a few weeks ago, and people pretty much identified all the places on the map. One is that God sets things into motion, then is hands-off – basically hanging out at Old City Coffee while we’re over here hashing out the issues. Or – God micro-manages every little thing, we do nothing independent of God, so we might as well not try to do anything – in which case, not doing anything would be God’s will, right, because we couldn’t choose it if it weren’t God’s will?
Well, instead of either of these extremes, let me advocate for a way of thinking that sends us back into Abram’s story. First, I want to suggest that God is not hands-off – leaving us alone to figure it out. Because then it’s too much like it’s really all our own doing. And the problem with that, the red flag, is then faith becomes our own doing. We just get up in the morning, put on our faith suit, get our faith attaché case, and go stand at the bus stop and when the faith bus comes along, just hop on, all bright and smiling.
I really don’t think that’s the way it works. Most people I know – me included – have to be dragged into faith kicking and screaming. Even when I feel God’s presence mightily, and I have been blessed with that experience, and even when I see evidence of God’s deep healing in my own life with things in the past that were so bad I didn’t understand how bad they were – even then, I can still manage to be totally resistant to God.
So I don’t think it’s the “faith bus” thing, that it’s all just up to us. God is intimately with us, in ways we never realize.
But on the other hand, I don’t think that makes God a micro-manager. That approach doesn’t answer the question of God’s empowering and endowing us with critical judgment, with intelligence and ability to evaluate, and with vigor to engage our lives and grow and transform. If God were a micro-manager, then, for instance, moral decisions wouldn’t really end up being ours, would they?
So what’s the deal, then? Where does that leave us, between those two places? When does the grace come? Is it in a decision we make? In the insights that lead to the decision? In the learning that comes once the decision is made? And the new questions that are always right on the other side of a decision?
Yes. Right. Exactly. All of it.
No one’s on coffee break here. And there’s no micro-management. Those are both very human images that we can’t project onto the mystery of God. If we do that, we limit God by our own limitations.
Rather, what I think we can dare to imagine is a being who dances intimately and mysteriously and lovingly with us. And sometimes we might feel we can tell. And sometimes – maybe most times – we can’t. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
There. That’s it. That’s my grand suggestion. I guess it really isn’t very grand, and there are lots of gaps in it. But it’s my own experience of God, and I think I see it here in Abram, and I want to put it out there as work in progress, for you to take where you will.
And this balance between God’s involvement and our participation does take us straight back to Abram and Sarai. A lot unfolds from this call we read about today. Moving around entire extended families, setting and resettling, more covenant between God and Abram. There’s the whole thing with Abraham’s servant Hagar and the son they have together, Ishmael, and then a jealous Sarah and the heart-breaking banishment of Hagar – what is seen as the founding of an entirely new Abrahamic religion – and then the birth of Isaac and the whole near-sacrifice of him. I know I’m running through a lot, in a huge sweep of the story, but this is one big story, and we have to remember that today, we stand with our toes right at the beginning of it.
And what I want to bring home in hitting all those hot buttons – if these stories are even vaguely familiar to you, they’re probably conjuring up all kinds of feelings – is that if, right at this beginning point, Abram had just sat back, shrugged, and said, “Ok God, we’ll hang out in our comfortable living room furniture and wait for you to give us that baby; we’ll believe it when we see it” – and if he didn’t pack up and move and repack and move again and struggle in major ways with relationships that certainly did not follow our own culture sees as “family values” – then would the story truly have unfolded?
Which means – most importantly – would the promises have unfolded? If Abram had not traveled by stages, each time confronting new challenges and joys and new understandings of himself as a child of God, then what would have happened to the promise?
We don’t know. And in a way, we don’t need to know. The point here is that we’re not called to stand outside the story and calculate it. We’re called into the story – that is, into our own story – to follow in Abram’s energy of faith. Fall into the energy of his footsteps, and feel ourselves drawn along, not knowing how it’s all going to pan out but going forward in a journey with God to see what happens to the promise in our lives.
And God’s covenant is like that – it’s more like invitation. It’s not an “I’ll get back to you later” kind of promise, but an invitation to go deeper into the next step – with God right there, working with that very next step.
See, God’s covenants are never separate from God’s work, which is why I can’t really get with the take that God sets things up then sits back for a smoke while we run around and try to manage.
The whisper of a promise – which is the whisper of an invitation – is done with God right there, and then right there again, and again. It may not feel like it. But I want to submit that I think it’s true.
And each time that God draws us further into the promises that altogether become a covenantal relationship, we have the chance to respond. Respond inside, respond outside. And that’s great, because, at least based on this story of Abram, there is no one definitive perfect way to respond. I don’t think Abram knew for sure he was always getting it right. Each time we respond to God and to life, we go further in figuring out what this faith thing means, and we are shaped by that. It may not sound like much, but it is. We are shaped by what we decided, by what we learned, and shaped by what we hope for.
Most of all, maybe we are shaped by what we hope for.
It’s how the story will unfold for Abram. He hopes for that promise. And the next few weeks of the readings go through some of the events of his life, though not all. There are moments where God’s promise seems bright and shiny – and times when you see the darker side of the promise, like when God tells Abram that all these descendents God has promised – which seems like a great promise, right? – they will end up slaves in Egypt along the way.
When God makes a promise to you, and invites you into a future, look out – life’s going to change. And there’s no going back. There will be a darker side to the promise. But even out of that darkness, something new is being wrought.
And that’s the Christian hope. It’s the hope we have in Jesus, that’s for sure. Because it’s what Jesus showed us about how God really works. And like for Abram, it’s the promise of something working out in our own lives, some of which we’ll see, some of which we won’t. So like Abram and Sarai, we’ll travel together by stages.