Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 16, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It seems to me that we live in a time of despair, that we have all lost hope. Among other things, we have lost hope in our political, social and economic institutions. Very few of us trust the government any more. The economy has failed us, especially those of us who were relying in investments in stocks to fund our retirement, and it shows no signs of recovering any time soon. Society has become fragmented. Most Americans yearn for a sense of community and are utterly unable to find it in our social structures. We stand on the brink of a war that no one wants, that most of the world opposes, and yet our political structures can come up with no solution to international problems other than massive violence.

Last week I had dinner with my daughter Mary. The subject of the seemingly inevitable war on Iraq came up. Mary, whose plan has been to start a family within about the next three years and who has a passion for the welfare of children unsurpassed in anyone else I have ever known, said: “The situation of the world today makes me wonder how I can bring new life into it.” Things look that bleak to her.

Mary strongly opposes President Bush’s war policies. But some of you who are more supportive of those policies than she is, or than I am, have also told me that you hope and pray as much as I do that it will not come to war, and I know that you do. I have sensed in you, however, a kind of hopelessness on that issue, almost a desperation that somehow it will work out peacefully, without, it seems to me, much expectation that it really will. Whether we support our government’s policies or not, none of us, it seems to me, have much hope these days.

Hope is, of course, a cherished Christian value, but just what is hope exactly. Webster’s defines it as "a feeling that what is wanted will happen" or "desire accompanied by anticipation or expectation." The best definition of it I was able to find, however, comes from the Harper Collins Bible Dictionary, where the Biblical meaning of hope is said to be "the expectation of a favorable future under God’s direction." For Paul, hope is closely related to faith and is the assurance that what God has begun in Jesus Christ God will one day completed. So I guess we can say that hope is the anticipation that what we long for will one day be accomplished.

Well, when I look at the world situation today I am hard pressed to come up with much anticipation that what I long for will be accomplished. I long for a world at peace. I long for a world in which sharing by all will mean scarcity for none. I long for a world free of all the myriad forms of hatred that we humans are so good at dreaming to compensate for our weak sense of self worth. Yet when I look only at the world I can’t come up with much reason to anticipate that those good things are going to happen.

Which is where our Scripture readings this morning about Abraham come in. In those readings, Abraham is, or at least we can see him as a model of the Judeo-Christian value of hope. Those readings consist of an original Hebrew story of the covenant between Abraham and Yahweh from Genesis and a commentary on that story made many centuries later in Greek by the Apostle Paul. When we meet Abraham in our first reading he is 99 years old. In response to a call from Yahweh, he and his wife Sarah (originally Sarai) have left the land of Aram to the east and come to Canaan. In our passage, Yahweh, here as always in the NRSV called the Lord, promises Abraham that if Abraham will take Yahweh as his god he will make him the ancestor of many nations. And the Lord promises that Abraham and Sarah will have a child together, something they had been unable to do to that point.

This story was very important to Paul, as the passage from Romans indicates. Interpretation of Paul’s discussion of the story of God’s promises to Abraham usually focus on line "his faith was reckoned to him as righteousness," from Romans 4:22. Paul’s discussion here is a key passage for his doctrine of justification by grace through faith, which became the key concept of the Reformation. Today, however, I want to focus on another part of Paul’s discussion.

Paul is powerfully impressed by Abraham’s hope, which as I noted above here for Paul practically becomes synonymous with his faith, in God’s promises. Paul says that Abraham’s hope and faith that God would fulfill God’s promises to him never wavered. Actually, I’m not so sure that’s true. In the verse immediately after God’s promise of a son to Sarah, we read that "Abraham fell on his face and laughed...," so improbable did God’s promise seem to him. Be that as it may, Paul chooses to interpret Abraham as a model of faith and hope, and indeed for the most part that is what he was. And if you look at Abraham’s situation, hope was about all he had to go on. I mean, he was 99 years old. Now, even if we allow for some typical Biblical exaggeration concerning the age of the Patriarchs, the point is clear: Abraham was well past the age when any man could reasonable expect to be able to father children. More importantly in the ancient Hebrew view of things, Sarah his wife was not only well past her expectable child bearing years, she had not been able to bear any children at any time. (In the Bible, a couple’s inability to have children is always blamed on the wife.) So it’s not surprising that Abraham laughed at God when God made those outrageous promises.

Paul says of Abraham: "No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised." And despite the verse about Abraham laughing at God, let’s take that at face value. Abraham generally is seen in the Jewish tradition (and Paul was writing here as a Jew) as the model of faith, and Paul presents him as such to us in the Christian tradition. Abraham trusted in God’s promises when there was absolutely no earthly reason to believe that those promises could come true. And what happened? It’s not in the lectionary passage this morning, but we don’t have to pretend that we don’t know the rest of the story. Sarah bore Abraham that son that God had promised, the Patriarch Isaac. And, according to the Genesis account, from Isaac eventually came all of the tribes of Israel, the many nations God had promised to Abraham. We should also note that from Abraham came the many nations of the Arabs, who consider Abraham’s son by the slave woman Hagar Ishmael their progenitor. God’s promise was fulfilled despite its apparent earthly impossibility.

So, what does all that stuff about elderly people who had no business having babies having a baby have to do with us? Like every story in Scripture, it’s pretty meaningless unless it somehow speaks to our present situation and our present dilemmas, and I doubt that many of us would include the desire to have children at age 100 among our present dilemmas. There is nonetheless an important way in which the predicament of Abraham and Sarah parallels and informs our own. If Abraham and Sarah had hoped only in themselves, only in the worldly possibilities of the human, they would have had no hope at all. In human terms, 100 year old people simply do not bear children. The same is true of us. If we hope only in the finite abilities and possibilities of the human, we have no hope at all. Relying on human reason, human motivations, human passions gives us war and oppression, exploitation and injustice every time. Just as Sarah and Abraham could not give birth to a son on their own, so we cannot give birth to the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of peace and justice for all, on our own.

Yet Abraham and Sarah did not hope only in themselves. They hoped in God. And, so the Bible stories tell us, God delivered. God came through. God’s promises were fulfilled. Now, we can take those stories as literally true or not. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that in those stories we have the assurance that God’s promises can be trusted. We have the assurance that our hope in God is not in vain. Hope in ourselves will fail us. Hope in God will not.

That obviously doesn’t mean that we get everything we want how and when we want it. It doesn’t mean there will be no war in Iraq. It doesn’t mean the Kingdom of God will break forth in its fullness tomorrow. It doesn’t mean that we can sit on our hands and leave everything up to God. After all, Abraham and Sarah presumably did what people do to have children. The Bible doesn’t recount a virgin birth of Isaac. It does mean that there is a source of hope that we can hold onto and that we can trust. It means that we can live in hope with courage and strength if we hope in God rather than in ourselves. It means that we have a resource that can keep us from despair. That resource is God. If we hold fast to God and God’s will for us, we know that in the end our hope will not be in vain. Amen.