Sermon for Lent 2 2019

Sermon for Lent 2 2019

Grantchester Parish Church

Genesis 15, 

“Abram believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

In our Old Testament and Gospel passages today we have a before and after shot. In the ‘before’, Abram and Sarai are living in the cruel reality of having been promised so many descendants that they would parent a nation, but they remain barren. Still, Abram trusts in God’s promise and the Lord sees it as righteousness. In the Gospel, Jesus confronts the nation that God promised to Abram over their lack of faithfulness; the very nation through whom Jesus himself came as God incarnate, the nation whom God begged to return to his ways and for whom Jesus would later lay down his life.

Abram and Sarai have heard God’s promises before. Over the last four chapters the Lord has promised Abram that he would father a great nation, and they still haven’t had a child. Everything around them links success, respect and upstanding, with children and heirs, even the voice of God. All they needed was a son, and yet, in all their righteousness before God, in all their painful hoping and trying, no child had appeared. They have waited, but it’s too late. Abram is 75, Sarai isn’t much younger, yet God’s heart-wrenching promise persists. Sarai can’t conceive, Abram knows that, and so do we.

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a shock then, that when we first hear God addressing Abram in this passage, his response isn’t anything like the prophets who follow after him. Abram doesn’t fall over in terror at the presence of God, he doesn’t bow his face to the ground, he doesn’t proclaim his unworthiness of meeting the Lord. 

Instead, Abram accuses God:  “you have given me no offspring”.

So why does God take him outside, force him to look up at the stars and again proclaim that his descendants will be numerous, as numerous as the lights in the heavens? and why and how does Abram believe him?? 

Abram has been walking in the Lord’s way for a while now, by God’s hand he left the land of the Chaldeans, with the promise of his own land, the promised land of thepromised nation which will come through the promised son. Abram believed God’s promises, God counts it to him as righteousness.

What happens next is truly terrifying. Abram is told to split a heifer, and a female goat and a fertile ram in half, dividing their broken bodies, and he does so. The verb that describes making a covenant comes from this story and means ‘to break’: C-R-T. Abram isn’t told what his part will be in this plan, he doesn’t ask, nothing like this has ever happened to the Hebrews, but it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to know that an agreement over broken bodies suggests fearsome consequence. 

In one of the later Harry Potter books, ‘the Half-blood prince’, the protagonists find themselves musing over a similar puzzle, as their professor discloses that he has made an ‘unbreakable vow’:

“Well, it’s just that you can't break an Unbreakable Vow” said Ron.

“I'd worked that much out for myself, funnily enough”, said Harry, “What happens if you break it, then? "

“You die”, said Ron simply. 

Abram has prepared and protected the sacrifice, but, before he can join in the agreement, he falls into a deep sleep, and it is God who moves through the broken bodies, God who makes the covenant to Abram, God whose actions spell out, “over my broken body will this covenant be broken”.

We probably know what happens later on. Abram, the righteous servant who once believed the lord, breaks that belief and steps aside from the Lord’s way, fathering Ismael through Hagar, Sarai’s handmaid. Later, their own son, Isaac, is born of Sarai, and the schisms begin.

“How often” says Jesus “have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wing, and you were not willing. See, your house is left to you”. 

As Jesus speaks in our Gospel reading, we skip past countless generations of the faithful and unfaithful people of God’s promise. But when we look at Jesus, we see that he isn’t talking to the revels, but to the law keepers, the Pharisees. God’s word is deeply etched into their minds, they know every promise by heart, if anyone could be righteous it’s them, but they don’t recognise him, their pursuit of righteousness has blinded them to God incarnate. Jesus talks to them as a mother, longing to gather them up and to protect them, to be their ‘shield’, as God said to Abram, but they are not willing.

As we walk through this season of lent, we try to walk more in the way of God, through prayer and fasting… but the season leads to its own spiritual hurdles. we might have experienced some of the desire of the Pharisees thinking ‘if only I could do more, learn more, fast more, then I will be closer to God’. We might also have experienced the pang of Abram and Sarai, ‘Lord, you promised me spiritual growth, but I just feel like I’m failing’ or ‘Lord, I can’t see your sovereignty in the chaos of the world around me’. We are coming face to face with our own humanity, the very humanity that Jesus embraced when he was made incarnate, and that he longs to embrace further in the Gospel passage, and learning to depend on God as we try to walk in his way.

In a couple of weeks we will, like the people in Jerusalem, cry out ‘blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’ as the passion narratives of Holy Week play out. We will watch and wait until ‘on the third day’, Jesus finishes his work of salvation by resurrecting from the dead. 

But for now, like Abram, we’re in a strange place of waiting and trusting, we’re descending into a deep sleep on the side of a hill, straining to watch and understand as God keeps his covenant and becomes the body broken for us. 

Amen.