Maturity and Forgiveness

Genesis 45-46:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2045:1-46:34&version=NIV1984

            The story of Joseph is remarkable on several fronts, not the least of which is Joseph’s magnanimity towards his brothers and the sense of peace that Joseph developed after his years of struggle.

            Today’s reading begins with Joseph overcome with emotion and eager to reveal himself to his brothers.  His previous reluctance to trust his brothers until they had produced Benjamin and demonstrated their concern for their father and their repentance is more understandable.  When people hurt us, we want them to prove themselves, too.  Very often, though, our broken relationships end just short of full reconciliation.  We move closer to one another; we might demand and even get some sense of repentance out of the one who hurt us; but it is really hard to embrace that person fully again.  “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” seems to be our motto.  Yet, Joseph is not like his father, who was ‘reconciled’ to his brother Esau and promptly settled down someplace else, far from Esau (Genesis 33:16-17).  He wants his brothers taken care of and near.

            I think many of us could wish for such an attitude, such an ability to forgive.  Joseph developed that attitude over the course of some 20 years, and over those years he had had a chance to grow in wisdom.  That wisdom—one of the other remarkable parts of this story—was that he had had a chance to look back over his life and see the ways that the Lord had been directing him and grooming him and preparing him for the moment when he would be the one who would rescue his family from jeopardy.  Again, that wisdom seems to be a rare gift and very often we might find ourselves wishing that we could make sense of our lives.  Of course, again, Joseph only understood these things in hindsight.  I doubt he was feeling very optimistic as he was walking down to Egypt the first time or as he was languishing in prison.  But looking back, he could see the Lord developing in him the skills and attitudes necessary for his current position.

            It seems to me that these two things—the wisdom to see what the Lord is up to and the ability to forgive—go hand in hand.  The insight that God had worked all things out for the good of the whole family surely made it easier to forgive his brothers and the reconciliation with his brothers capped the sense of purpose that Joseph felt.  That’s the case for us, too.  Our ability to forgive those who have hurt us is coupled with our maturing ability to discern how good may have come out of evil.  Sometimes that good is simply the realization that pain and hurt have made us more sensitive to the pain we have caused others and the determination not to cause it in the future.  When we absolutely refuse to grow through pain and hurt, forgiveness remains a challenge to grant.  And conversely, refusing to contemplate forgiveness hinders our ability to grow into maturity.

            Would that the Lord would bless each of us as he blessed Joseph.  Not with power and enormous influence, but with the wisdom to see his hand guiding and shaping us in the difficult periods of life and with the ability to let go of old hurts!

Fearful Farewells; Fearful Homecomings

Genesis 31:1-33:20:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2031:1-33:20%20&version=NIV1984.

            Jacob’s bad behavior continues.  Notice that in Genesis 31:20 Jacob deceives Laban yet again.  He’s having a hard time learning!  The result of such bad behavior is that Jacob lives a life marked by fear.  He is afraid of his father-in-law; he is afraid of his brother.

            I think that bears reflection.  How often is it that our fears reveal more about us than they do about our circumstances?  I’m not suggesting that life doesn’t throw us unexpected curve balls.  It certainly does.  But isn’t it often the case that our response to those curve balls is dictated by our own sense of shortcomings?  It’s been 27 years this month that my father passed away.  And I sometimes blame him for bequeathing me a lifetime of uncertainty about my own cardiac health.  On the other hand, the fear I live with about those health issues has less to do with his early passing and more to do with my own nagging feeling that I don’t do enough to protect my health.  I eat too much and exercise too little.  Who’s fault is it really if I’m afraid?

            Then, Genesis 32:22-32 gets to the heart of the matter.  Jacob’s life has been a lifetime of wrestling, struggling with the Lord and His will.  God gives Jacob two reminders of that struggle:  a new name (Israel means ‘wrestle/struggles with God’) and a limp.  From now on, whenever someone addresses him and whenever he takes a step, he’ll have these two reminders of what has really been at stake.

            We should learn to see our scars that way, too.  Sometimes those scars are physical.  Sometimes they’re psychic, that is, living in our souls.  Wherever they reside, whether inside or out, they are reminders of hard won wisdom and revelations of the road yet ahead, as we struggle to become the people the Lord has called us to be.

            Interestingly, there’s no dramatic moment of change for Jacob.  He is and will be Israel, the one who struggles with God.  Even in the tragic trick that his sons play on him in the matter of Joseph (Genesis 37, which we’re scheduled to read Monday), Jacob is not the innocent victim.  The father so victimized by his sons is the son who victimized his own brother and father and who showed such favoritism to his own son.

            So perhaps we should learn, too, that there won’t be a moment when we ‘arrive,’ when we have God’s will sorted out.  Perhaps we should learn to content ourselves with that phrase I dropped last week, “a long obedience in the same direction.”  Arrival depends on the Lord; but walking the long road of discipleship—we accomplish that every day, one small, struggling step at a time.

Karma and Stuff

Genesis 29:1-30:43: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2029:1-30:43&version=NIV1984

            Christians don’t believe in karma, not on a cosmic scale.  However, we know that we reap the benefits and consequences of our behavior, and it shouldn’t surprise us when the Lord lets us be ‘victimized’ in the same way that we have mistreated others.  (What better way to learn about the cost of our misdeeds?)  Anyway, there’s something almost karmic about the story of Jacob and Laban.

            Jacob is a trickster, a shyster, a deceiver.  He has famously cheated his brother (twice!) and tricked his father.  One of the consequences of that behavior is that he had to flee for refuge to his Uncle Laban.  Today we discover a second ‘consequence.’  Uncle Laban is cut from the same cloth Jacob is!  Laban tricks Jacob into 14 years of labor as the bride price for Rachel, and, as soon as he strikes a bargain to give Jacob flocks of his own, he pulls out all the sheep that could produce benefit for Jacob.  (Jacob finds a work-around with his trick with the poplar branches.  Probably we should understand that as ancient superstition that the Lord just happens to bless.  It’s the same thing with the mandrakes, which were thought to be a fertility treatment.)  The deceiver is deceived!

            All through the story of Abraham’s family we see this pattern.  Consider that Rebekah loved Jacob more than Esau and that Isaac loved Esau more.  Then, in today’s reading, Jacob loves Rachel more than Leah.  This favoritism leads to all sorts of bad feelings.  One would have hoped that Jacob would have learned from his own relationship with his father not to play favorites, but apparently he didn’t and the dysfunction in his family is apparent.  (It gets even worse in next week’s readings when Jacob’s favorite son is sold into slavery by his half-brothers.)

            I’ve become a bit of fan of systems theory, and it seems to me that systems theory makes about the same point:  people in the same webs of relationships tend to share each others’ dysfunctions.  Highly critical people tend to be surrounded by other critical people.  People who don’t keep their promises tend to be surrounded by others of similar temperament.  The systems theory answer to that tendency is to change yourself.  Cultivate a desire to find the best in others and either you will slowly change the system you are in or you will find the courage to leave that system.  Put that in more specifically Christian terms, and we’d say, “Cultivate the fruits of the Spirit and the disciplines of the Christian life and you’ll begin to influence others to do the same—whether in your family or in your church or in the larger world.”  (I have deleted a political comment I was going to make here:  suffice it to say that a more positive politics begins with individuals committed to that behavior in every area of life.)

            There’s more to comment on here, but I should get to that job thingy I go to every day . . .

Jacob--On the Lam, but Going with the Lord

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2027:1-28:22&version=NIV1984

            What a complicated, messy, fascinating story!  Here we have Jacob, whose name means ‘deceiver,’ who lives up to his name by swiping the birthright and blessing right out from under Esau.  Consequently, Jacob flees for his life into what will become a 20-year exile, and still the Lord appears to Him and says, “I’ll bring you back and bless you.”

            So, first, again we have a member of Abraham’s family who is not willing to take God at His Word and to wait for Him to deliver what He promised.  I’m not sure how much more commentary is needed.  We just read the stories of Abraham and saw the various ways that he tried to ‘force God’s hand’ and get the promises accomplished in ways that made sense to him.  And he constantly had the Lord saying, “Not your way; my way!”  Abraham’s grandson needs the same lesson.

            And that’s the second thing:  Jacob is going to get that lesson.  For today, he is on the road to exile.  Over the next couple of days’ readings, he’s going to be deceived and ill-used himself.  Nothing teaches a lesson quite like being on the receiving end of your own bad behavior.

            Yet, third, the Lord hasn’t abandoned Jacob.  Despite Jacob’s behavior, the Lord fully intends to keep His promises.  That’s something for Jacob to hold on to in the coming years, as he learns to wait patiently for the Lord.

            So, applications?  There’s the constant theme through Genesis (and a lot of the rest of the Scriptures) that a major virtue of the faith is patience.  I think I’ve made this point before, but I struggle with this.  I know that we are to be patient and wait for the Lord; I also believe that the Lord has given us our ‘reason and all our senses’ and that He wants us to think things through.  I tend to cringe when Christians talk like they’re waiting for God to open the heavens and take care of everything for them.  How do you balance human agency and ultimate dependence on God?  I don’t have a good answer.  I think what I try for is to think carefully, to plan well, and to work hard—and to hold the whole thing up to the Lord in prayer that His glory would be enhanced and His plans advanced.

            Then, there’s the lesson about consequences.  We sometimes lose sight of the fact that God lets us endure the effects of our bad behavior.  We’d like to think that forgiveness means no consequences, but it doesn’t always.  If I lose my temper and verbally blast someone, I can apologize and they can sincerely forgive me.  But you know that relationship isn’t going to be the same for a while.  In enduring the consequences, we learn wisdom.

            Finally, we should learn to rely on God’s promise and goodness, especially in rough times.  The promises of God grab us as babies in Baptism and they shape and direct our entire lives.  Like Jacob heard the promise of God before he began his misadventures in Paddan Aram, so we heard the promises of God at the outset of our lives, and we want to let those promises guide us throughout life.

Contentious Kids

(http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis%2025-26&version=NIV1984)

            One starts to see the wisdom in the Lord’s decision to entrust His promise to a single family out of all the families on earth in today’s reading.  First, we remember from previous readings that Isaac and Ishmael didn’t get along.  Specifically, Ishmael picked on the young Isaac.  In today’s reading, they do get together to bury their father, but that’s about it.  Then, in today’s reading, we hear how Ishmael’s descendants didn’t get along among themselves.  (That, at least, is how the NIV interprets Genesis 25:18.  I’ll admit the limitations of my Hebrew skills, and just say the NIV was translated by smarter people than me.)  Finally, we read that Esau and Jacob ‘jostled’ in Rebekah’s womb.  Contention seems to be a pretty common theme when humans dwell close together.

            In some ways this may be related to the incident with the tower of Babel.  I’ve had the question a couple of times, “What was God thinking in the confusion of languages and the scattering of the people?”  This insight came to me about the incident.  It seems to me that humanity altogether was like a family with lots of children, and the children were given to mischief and squabbling.  Babel is the moment at with the Father, God, said to them, “Go sit in a corner!  You!  Over there!  You!  Over there!  If you can’t get along, I’ll separate you!”  And that strategy keeps working.  If Ishmael’s descendants can’t get along, then they have to separate.  If Jacob and Esau can’t get along, they’ll have to separate.  (That separation is still coming.)  I’m reminded of Rodney King’s plaintive cry, “Can’t we all just get along?”  Apparently not!

            So, all through Genesis, we have this centrifugal force, a movement away, a scattering.  Humanity continues the disintegration begun in Genesis 3.

            Two ‘application’ thoughts come to mind.  First, this centrifuge reaches its climax in the death of Jesus.  The Gospels want us to see Jesus completely alone.  Israel has spurned Him.  The nations have rejected Him.  His disciples have abandoned Him.  Jesus on the cross is in a way, the last human left.  Everyone else has spun away from God’s center.  But Jesus is faithful even to death.

            The second thought is an implication of the first.  If humanity has been separating out and incapable of living together since Genesis 3, a spinning off that reaches its climax in the death of Jesus, then the result of Jesus’ death and resurrection is that the ‘force’ reverses.  Jesus becomes a gravitational force, centripetal force.  (Yes, I know those are different sorts of forces.  Work with me here.  I’m a theologian, not a physicist.)  The point is that in Jesus we have humanity being drawn back together into one place.  Jesus is the gravity that pulls us toward God; He is the centripetal force that holds us together in the Church.

            And the Church is supposed to be the undoing of chapters like Genesis 25-26.  I mean, read Paul’s letters and discover for yourself how important unity is for the Church.  It’s not some optional, secondary virtue.  It is in some ways the Church’s identifying virtue.  At least, it’s supposed to be.  The Church is supposed to be a new family, composed of members drawn out of the warring families of the earth, learning and demonstrating what it means to be forgiven and so to grant forgiveness first to one another and then beyond.  It is supposed to be a demonstration and an enactment of the peace of God which surpasses understanding.

            In a season in which we speak of peace often, say an extra prayer for your congregation, your particular slice of the Church.  Pray that it may live in peace and unity, that it may be filled with the children of God, not the children of Ishmael.

Aliens and Strangers

(http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2023:1-24:66&version=NIV)

            The story of Abraham buying a tomb isn’t as straightforward as it appears.  I won’t pretend to have sorted through all the issues but let it be enough to say that the story is a careful negotiation in which not everything is as it seems and in which Abraham seems to be especially protective of his own independence.

            Note these several details:  Abraham describes himself as an ‘alien and stranger.’  The first word indicates that he had no inheritance rights among them; he wasn’t a ‘legal’ member of the dominant society; the second word indicates his nomadic existence.  Taken together, the two explain his existence.  As long as he was a nomad, just passing through (even though he’d been in the land for like 60 years), and as long as he made no demands on the dominant Hittite society, he was tolerated.  Now, though, he is making a request for permanence.  He was buying property.

            Second, the offering of the land as a gift is prefaced by the recognition of Abraham’s wealth and power.  They don’t want him as an enemy, yet they don’t particularly want to cede any territory to a potentially dangerous rival.  The offer to give him the land is designed to put him under obligation to them.  Some scholars suggest that granting him the land free of charge would be the same thing as bringing him under their feudal system, in which Abraham essentially would have pledged allegiance to the local warlord.

            Third, when Ephron is pushed for a purchase price, he names an exorbitant price and minimizes it by saying, “What is that between me and you?”  It’s like he’s saying, “We’re such rich and powerful men that 10 pounds of silver is like penny-ante poker.”  Perhaps Ephron assumed Abraham would haggle; perhaps he was trying to keep Abraham from buying the land.  Either way, the price is out of line.

            Fourth, Abraham insists on outright ownership, with absolutely no ground on which to challenge the purchase, and he refuses to be beholden to Hittite interests.

            This refusal to be beholden is also a prominent feature of the next story:  finding a bride for Isaac.  Abraham insists:  no Canaanite bride!  “Go to my country and my relatives,” he says.

            Throughout these two chapters, there seems to be this underlying theme:  God has plans and purposes for Abraham and his descendants and those plans and purposes will not be fulfilled in compromise with the dominant society of Canaan.  The day will come when the land will fully belong to Abraham’s family; until then, they live as strangers and aliens.

            1 Peter grabs on to this idea of God’s people as strangers and aliens (1 Peter 1:1, 2:1).  Peter argues that we latter day Christians are like Abraham—extended residents of a world in which we don’t belong.  Now, this needs some careful comment.  Just like Abraham had been promised that the land of Canaan would eventually belong to him and his offspring, so the world in its entirety has been promised to us latter-day people of God (cf. Matthew 5:5, for example).  So, please—none of this talk about ‘leaving earth and going to heaven.’  Our inheritance is the earth—the earth purified, restored, and made new, to be sure, but the earth nonetheless.  The earth is ours because the Lord promised it to us.  But, again like Abraham, that promise hasn’t been fully realized.  That means that we need to walk carefully in the world, dealing with them with integrity and yet refusing to be beholden to them.  We dare not compromise with the world, though we strive to live in the world as honest neighbors.

            I worry that, too often, we latter-day people of God miss this.  We seem to think that we can convert some aspect of this fallen world into the reign of God, and we end up getting co-opted into the world’s ways of doing things.  Sometimes we just don’t have the wisdom of Abraham.  The world offers us a free pass if we’ll just pledge a little allegiance to them, and we fall for it.  Or they make us an offer and we negotiate with them and give away a little of our integrity in the process.  Oh, that the Lord would grant us the wisdom to walk as aliens and strangers among the powers of a fallen world!

Back and Forth

            Genesis 19 tells how the Lord kept His promise to Abraham about 10 righteous people in Sodom.  In Genesis 20, with a firm date for the birth of Isaac in their heads, Abraham and Sarah return God’s favor by telling a familiar half-truth:  “She’s my sister.”  Why is it that Abraham so refuses to trust the Lord?  Who knows, except that he’s a human and we all have those problems.

            The Lord is ridiculously faithful to Abraham, though, and the child is born right on schedule.  And what an event it is:  joyful, filled with laughter and vindication.  The Lord had turned Sarah’s chortle of skepticism into a full-on belly laugh of joy.  Who would have said, indeed!  (There’s a great play on words in the story, because the name Isaac sounds a great deal like “laughter” in Hebrew.)

            In the end, God’s faithfulness finally blossoms into faith on Abraham’s part, too.  “Some time later,” we don’t know how long—the Lord demanded Isaac back.  Most of our Western pictures portray Isaac as a child, but Jewish tradition portrays Isaac as a man full grown, perhaps 30 years old.  Now, that means that Abraham would have been 130 and Sarah 120, and the next chapter tells us that Sarah died when she was 127.  If Abraham had had a hard time thinking that God would give him a son at 100, imagine how much harder that would be at 130!  Yet, at last, Abraham is willing to trust the Lord.

            Why this new found willingness?  Two pieces of evidence show us what was on Abraham’s mind.  First, Genesis 21:12 contains a promise that Abraham took to heart:  “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.”  Abraham believed that somehow God was going to keep that promise!  Second, Hebrews 11:19 says, “Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead.”  So, even if Isaac was killed, God would give him back to his father.

            After all the ups and downs, backs and forths, of Abraham’s struggle to trust the Lord, finally, at the end, he was willing to commit his ways, his family, and his future to the Lord.

            What does it take us to give similar trust to the Lord?  One of my favorite authors is a man named Eugene Petersen, a Presbyterian pastor.  In one of his earliest books, he co-opted a phrase from a notorious atheist, Frederick Nietzsche, “a long obedience in the same direction.”  Petersen basically said, “Look, Nietzsche had this right:  what is necessary for the Christian is the long, hard journey of discipleship.”  There’s no shortcut to Abraham’s kind of faith; there’s no magic pill or Bible verse that grants it.  If we long to have the same radical trust that Abraham finally came to, then we’ll have to follow God through our ups and downs, around our backs and forths, and maybe, we’ll come to a moment in our faith, when we will say without hesitation and against the world’s better judgments, “Yes, Lord.”

Hospitality

            Among all the things that could be commented on in Genesis 18-19—the promise of God, the scornful doubt of Sarah, the wickedness of Sodom and its destruction—I’d like to direct your attention in these few lines to something altogether different:  hospitality.

            In the ancient Near East, hospitality—welcoming strangers and friends alike into one’s home—was a key virtue.  Whether Abraham knew who the three men were is a question not answered in Genesis.  (Hebrews 13:2 may suggest that he did not.)  What is clear is that he welcomed them to share his home and his table.  Anything less would have been a scandal.  Likewise, the idea that the men would spend the night in the town square, that no one would offer them hospitality—that was too much for Lot, who insisted that they stay at his house.  Hospitality was just basic decency.

            Why do I highlight this one point of a rich story?  It’s simple, really.  I think we live in an incredibly inhospitable age.  My grandmother’s house—and many of the houses on her block—had a wide front porch.   I remember many a summer evening during which the adults sat on the porch, listened to a radio, and greeted passing neighbors, many of whom stopped for conversation.  In marked contrast, my last two houses have not had front porches, but they have had back decks, on which I have been able to relax in private.  What a shift from an inviting presence in the front to an isolating place in the back.  I used to comment about my subdivision in Michigan that I did not know my neighbor’s names but I did know their cars.

            In terms of the faith, hospitality remains a significant virtue.  Our God, of course, is the very picture of welcoming hospitality.  Jesus’ ministry is chocked full of situations in which He welcomed those whom the world excluded—sinners, tax collectors, outcasts.  And, by means of the cross, Jesus opens the door for us sinful outcasts to be welcomed into the presence of our God and Father.

            And we Christians are called to be just as welcoming.  Our churches are called to be welcoming.  I have wanted the congregations I served to be safe havens in a crazy world.  I’m no idealist; I recognize the challenges with that desire.  I recognize that it’s hard for a newcomer to break into an established group; I recognize that churches cause pain and alienate people because churches still live in a broken world and are filled with broken people.  But it pays to remind ourselves all the time:  we are called to show hospitality.

            And it seems to me that Christians as individuals ought to be hospitable in our personal lives.  Again, I know the challenges.  We have some friends that we have been trying to get together with for 2-3 months now, and between our schedules and theirs, it hasn’t worked out.  Perhaps the fullness of our schedules reveals something about why it’s so hard to be hospitable!  Further, I’m a private person myself.  I like my quiet time, my private time, my family time.  But welcoming others to our meals and into our lives, that’s an expansive approach to life that fits God’s own approach to us.

            Perhaps these two stories of Abraham and Lot can incite us to think a little more deeply about our social connections and our desire to welcome others into our lives.

Doubt, Action, and Circumcision

            Genesis 16 begins with another of those stories that is really unflattering to Abram.  He is 85; he has waited ten years for God to begin to fulfill His promise about descendants; and he decides (again) to take matters into his own hands—or, into his own bed, as the case is.  He impregnates his wife’s servant.  This was not an unusual arrangement in the ancient world.  The problem for Abram is the impatience and doubt it reveals about the Lord keeping His promises.

            I don’t think we should take this call for patience as a reason to avoid acting and making decisions.  Sometimes, I think that ‘praying about it’ becomes an excuse for refusing to be responsible for decisions.  I do think the story should remind us that our decisions need to be informed by God’s words and promises.  Let’s be fair to Abram:  it had been 10 years and all that the Lord had explicitly said so far was that the promised descendant would be from his body; Sarai hadn’t figured in the discussion much yet except for a repeated note that she was barren.  So, maybe it’s asking too much of Abram to 1) resist a common cultural course of action; 2) be radically faithful to his wife; and 3) wait until he was even older to have the child.  Sometimes for us, too, it’s just really hard to discern what God’s will is.  Perhaps I’m right that Christians need to act more often; or, perhaps I need to take contemplation and prayer more seriously as the appropriate response to God’s seeming inaction.  You can probably make a good argument either way:  sometimes the right course of action is wait-and-see; sometimes it is try-it-and-see.  Rarely is God’s plan written in big bold letters!

            On an almost unrelated topic, Genesis 17 introduces circumcision for the first time.  Notice that circumcision is the outward sign that Abraham and his descendants are included in God’s covenant.  (The name change from Abram to Abraham—‘exalted father’ to ‘father of many’—indicates Abraham’s changing fortunes with the Lord.  The promise is about to fulfilled!)  An external, bodily action that connects one to God’s promises?  Sounds like a sacrament to me!  The Sacraments—Baptism and the Lord’s Supper—are just that.  On the one hand, they are external acts—some water on a body; some bread; some wine.  On the other hand, they create and sustain spiritual realities.  They are means of grace, instruments that the Lord uses to connect us to the covenant of love He made with us through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

            There are those in Christianity who would disagree with me, but I see a remarkable consistency in the way God deals with His people through the ages.  Important features of that relationship include a continual emphasis on the fact that our God wants to deal with humans face-to-face.  (The current separation is the result of sin, and the Lord has been working to overcome it ever since Eden.)  And they include God’s desire to address us as fully human—body and soul—sacramentally.  Anyone who wants to say that the essence of a human is ‘spiritual’ and that the ‘physical’ is less important hasn’t been paying attention since Genesis 1.

He's Got This

            In Genesis 14, we see that God was keeping part of His promise to Abram, namely, that Abram was developing a great name, a great reputation.  The fact that Abram had 318 fighting men at his disposal is an indication of great wealth; the fact that he put the beatdown on four kings is equally impressive.  (Until the book of Kings, we should be a little careful with the word ‘king.’  We’re not talking Henry VIII of England or Louis XIV of France; ‘king’ in this period meant the ruler of a clan or of a city.  We might better translate ‘warlord.’)  Anyhow, Abram is rich, powerful, and famous.

            But that’s not the part of the promise that concerns Abram.  In a sense, that’s the easy one for God.  The hard part of the promise is the bit about descendants.  Abraham was, after all, 75 when the Lord first called him out of Haran—and Sarai, 10 years his junior, was 65.  Even in those days when lives were longer, that’s hardly the time when you look to begin a family!  And Abram is kind of freaking out about it; he worries that his man-servant Eliezer will be his only heir.  The story of John the Baptizer (Luke 3), which we read last weekend, comes to mind.  John says that God can make descendants of Abraham from stones.  Abram might think this is the hard part; God does not!

            The Lord assures Abram that he will have a son from his own body and descendants like the stars of the heavens.  And Abram took God at His word.  He believed Him despite the evidence, despite his own doubts.  That’s faith.  Hebrews 11:  “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (NIV Hebrews 11:1).

            I’ve often marveled how easy it is for us to get things turned around.  There’s a story about Jesus and a paralyzed man (Luke 5).  People are scandalized that Jesus dares to say that the man’s sins are forgiven, because only God can forgive sins.  Jesus asks, “What’s easier to say, ‘You are forgiven,’ or ‘You are healed’?”  His point is it’s easier to say, “You’re forgiven,” because no one could prove you wrong, whereas if the healing doesn’t work, everyone knows.  However, it is forgiveness that is actually the harder thing to accomplish because it will cost Jesus His life.  Forgiveness is the greater gift, and we don’t really think anything of it.  On the other hand, the other gifts—those we fret about.  It’s as if we sort of wave a hand and say, “Well, of course, God forgives my sins!  But these other problems of mine . . . I don’t know have a lot of confidence that He’ll work them out!”

            So, I’m trying today to take comfort in the angel Gabriel’s words to Mary, “Nothing is impossible with God.”  And I’m trying to do what Peter says and cast all my anxiety on Him (1 Peter 5:7).  I might think my problems are insurmountable, but He’s done the hardest stuff already and, on that basis, I can say, “He’s got this.”

Shifting Strategy; Set Purpose

            Genesis 1-11 is the record of God’s dealings with humanity as a whole.  That approach led to the Fall, the murder of Abel, the Flood, and the scattering at Babel.

            In Genesis 12, the Lord changed strategies and began to deal with one family out of the all the families of the earth for the benefit of all the families of the earth.  That is to say, the point of God’s dealings with Abram and his family—dealings that extend all the way to the book of Malachi—is to bring salvation to all humans.  Abraham’s family will be the instrument, the conduit, through which He will bring healing to the nations.

            Too often in Israel’s history she failed to grasp that grand purpose and thought that she was the end in herself.  She held on to the promise about being a great people and she held tenaciously to the promise about her land.  But she missed that she was meant to be a light for the Gentiles.  (One can argue that the Church has the same problem.  When God chooses you for a special purpose, it’s pretty easy to start thinking your special and losing sight of the fact that your ‘specialness’ consists in being used for God’s purpose.)

            Anyhow, look at Genesis 12:1-3 a little more closely:

            “The LORD had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you.

            “I will make you into a great nation

                        and I will bless you;

            I will make your name great,

                        and you will be a blessing.  

            I will bless those who bless you,

                        and whoever curses you I will curse;

            and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (NIV; Genesis 12:1-3).

Notice God’s promise has seven clauses—three pairs of two and a climactic seventh one.  Literarily, it’s clear that the last clause—about the peoples being blessed through Abram is the main point of the promise.

            Then look at the other story in Genesis 12:  Abram goes to Egypt to escape a famine and passes Sarai off as his sister, not his wife.  I think the reason this story is placed right here is to underline the important point that Abram is not the story.  God’s promise is the story.  For Abram’s part, he loses his nerve.  He does not believe the land God promised him will support him; he does not believe God will protect him until the promise just made is kept.  God’s response—to afflict the Egyptians—is probably not meant as a punishment to the Egyptians, rather, I think it’s meant as a goad to get the Egyptians to kick Abram out and get him back to the land he was supposed to be in.

            Abraham’s family will give the Lord as many problems as Adam’s family ever did.  But by placing His promise in one people in one land, He will manage and protect that promise for the eventual blessing of all humanity.  God’s goal and purpose remain the same; His strategy to accomplish that goal and purpose shifts a little.  In the long story of Abraham’s family, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the Lord is always moving things toward His eventual goal:  the undoing of Adam’s sin and the damage it has done to His creation.

Genesis 9-11: The Stage is Set

            We had a discussion in Wednesday morning Bible class about what sins we saw particularly prevalent in the first chapters of Genesis.  I said violence; another said adultery; a third said greed.  Today’s reading proves we were all right!  There is violence here:  the fear and dread the animals have for man and the strict accounting for a man’s life.  There is sex here:  the mockery of Ham at his father Noah’s nakedness.  And there is greed here, or said another way, excess:  the drunkenness of Noah.  The flood is merely a postponement of sin’s growth.  It’s all still there in the generation that survived the great flood.

            Things get even worse in tomorrow’s reading about the Tower of Babel.  There humans desire to build a tower to the heavens.  On the one hand, that sounds reasonable enough.  Perhaps they are trying to regain Eden, trying to regain their closeness and intimacy with God.  Unfortunately, that’s not the motivation they claim.  Their motivation is to make a name for themselves, and that desire for fame tells us what’s really going on.  Babel is the sin of Eden all over again.  In Eden, it was, “We shall be as God.”  At Babel it is, “We shall sit in the place of God.”  One of the recurring themes of the Bible is that man never quite knows his limits, that he keeps on pushing to get things his own way, that he is a greedy, violent, undisciplined creature, whose sin has shattered the image of God and made him more like a beast than some of the beasts!

            The Good News in all of this:  God still forbears.  He is long-suffering (a great old word that we should reclaim).  Or, as Jeremiah will put it centuries and centuries after Noah is dead and gone, “Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.  They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (NIV Lamentations 3:22-23).

            Genesis 11 brings us to the end of the primeval history, God’s first dealings with man.  Genesis 1-11 forms the foundation of everything that follows.  The keys here are the unique place that humanity occupies in God’s heart and in His creation, the devastation that is human sin, and the incredible determination of God that He will redeem His creatures, not destroy them—no matter how long it takes or how much it costs Him.  (I’ll comment on the first portion of Genesis 12 on Monday.)

NOT Related to Today’s Bible Reading!

            Some of you may know that December 6 is St. Nicholas Day, a day some folks celebrate by placing coins in their children’s shoes or by the giving of gifts.

            It’s all legendary and as such it’s hard to separate truth from fiction.  But St. Nicholas was a fourth-century bishop of Myra, a city in Asia Minor.  The story goes that Nicholas was orphaned at a young age and used his inheritance to help the poor.  One story of his alms-giving has the good bishop tossing a bag of money through a window to prevent three poor, young girls from being forced into a life of prostitution.  Hence, the tradition of gift-giving St. Nick. 

            What I didn’t know was that there is a tradition that says Nicholas attended the Council of Nicea in AD 325.  Legend has it that the good bishop was so ticked off at the heretic Arius (whose false teachings had caused the council to be called in the first place) that he walked across the room and slapped the heretic across the face.  Nicholas was imprisoned for conduct unbefitting a bishop, but Jesus appeared to him, releases his chains, and gave him a copy of the Gospels to occupy him.  When his jailers returned the next morning they were surprised to find him unbound and peacefully reading the Scriptures.

            The moral of the story?  I don’t know.  How does this sound?  Let your faith shine in works of charity and in zeal for the Lord’s truth!

            (For what it’s worth, you can find more here:  http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/home/.)

A Not-So-Cute Story

            Among the worst things we can do to the Scriptures are 1) to tidy them up and 2) to make them ‘cute.’  And the story of Noah and the great flood has certainly endured that treatment!  Many a child’s nursery is decked out in ‘cute-ified’ images from this story—pastel colors, an ark the size of a pontoon boat, and a giraffe sticking his head out the top.

            In that portrayal, we miss some things.  We miss the horror that human sin was working in this story.  I often hear that ‘things are getting worse all the time.’  I do wonder, though, if things are as bad as they were when God flooded they earth.  “Corrupt” is used three times to describe man’s behavior, and “violence” is used twice.  It makes you wonder how bad things must have been, how out of control human behavior was.

            Second, the flood is no spring shower.  The image of 40 days of rain just doesn’t seem like much.  But the story says the springs of the deep opened and that the flood raged over the earth for 40 days.  The waters didn’t begin receding for six months.  I tend to think that the flood is the result of a geologic catastrophe and that rather than think of 40 days of rain showers, we should think about the surface of the earth being ripped apart by earthquakes and of tidal waves that make the worst hurricanes pale in comparison.

            Third, theologically, we should recognize this as what one of my friends calls “the second-worst outpouring of God’s wrath in human history.”  (The greatest outpouring of that wrath is the punishment that Jesus endured in our place on the cross.)  I mean the whole human race, except for 8 people, and the plants and animals, save a handful, were wiped out.

            Once, we’ve “un-cute-ified” the story, we might very well be horrified to read it, and once we’re there, we’re ready to start asking Gospel questions of story.  The Gospel connection is about God’s forbearance.  Driven as He was to anger, He wasn’t blinded by rage.  He recognized that Noah remained faithful.  He acknowledged His own promise that He would redeem and save the human race, not completely obliterate it.  The flood was a devastating punishment, but not a complete one.  And, looking forward to Jesus, when the time came to fully pour out His wrath, the Lord knew that He could not pour that out on us without completely destroying us so He poured it out on His Son, who stood in our place.  The cross became our ark, allowing us to escape the rising flood of God’s wrath.

A Devastating Corruption

            The burden of Genesis 4:1-6:8 is that sin grows like a particularly aggressive cancer in the human race.  The most familiar story of the bunch—the story of Cain and Abel—demonstrates this.  God smiles on Abel’s offering (his gift of the ‘fatty portions’ indicates a gift of the best portions), but not on Cain’s (which, presumably, was not from the best portions).  Jealousy and anger grow, and the Lord warns of the danger: “Sin is crouching at your door.”  Refusing to acknowledge his own faults (either in a second-class offering or in his unfounded resentment), Cain lets his anger burst out into murder.

            Cain’s descendants continue the devolution.  While Cain’s descendants rack up all sorts of accomplishments of technology and art, morally they are bankrupt, as Lamech’s attitude shows.  “Cain, my murdering forefather, is avenged seven times, but me, seventy times that!”  Despite all his accomplishments, man’s violent self-assertion is never far from the surface.

            Finally, there is the devastating note in Genesis 6:5, that ‘every inclination of man’s heart is only evil all the time.’  That seems like an overstatement, doesn’t it?  But that’s what Genesis says.  Sin is not just an occasional misstep, a moral failure, a surface issue.  Sin is a deep corruption of human nature which means that the most basic thoughts of our hearts are turned away from the Lord.  Here’s how the Augsburg Confession, the founding document of Lutheranism, states it:

“Our churches teach that since the fall of Adam all men born in the natural way are born with sin, that is, without the fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence [that is, an inclination to sin], and that this original sin is try sin, even now condemning and bringing eternal death upon those not born again through Baptism and the Holy Spirit.”

It’s only the grace of God and His love for His creation that stays His hand.  Tomorrow we’ll read about the flood that destroys most life from the face of the earth, but the thing to see is despite the devastating corruption of sin, the Lord refuses to give up on His creatures.

            In this Advent season, it’s important to see the importance of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus.  Human nature is so terribly corrupted, and the solution is a human being who does not bear that terrible corruption, One who is not born ‘in the natural way,’ One for whom God is His only Father so that Adam’s corruption doesn’t touch Him.  I noted on Monday that the Scripture is the story of God’s interaction with humanity, and the climax of that story is the coming of the New Human Being, Jesus our brother and savior, in whose life, death, and resurrection, our very nature is recreated.

Genesis 3: The Fall into Sin

            Genesis 3 also deserves a more in-depth commentary than a single blog post can give it.  Genesis 1-2 are absolutely essential in introducing the main characters of the Bible—the God who is without beginning, who has life in Himself, and humanity, with whom He shares His life and whom He creates to be extensions of His gracious presence into His creation.  Genesis 3 sets up the essential conflict between these two characters, namely, humanity’s willful refusal to own and obey their Creator, their refusal to acknowledge themselves to be the creation.  What to do about humanity’s rebellion—that will be the question that drives God’s plans and purposes from Genesis 3 forward.  The story of the Bible—the story of God and man—is the story of God having to heal what Adam so casually broke.  I can’t emphasize this enough:  if you don’t get Genesis 1-3, the rest of the Bible won’t make any sense either.

            Let me just note some of the terrible consequences of Adam’s rebellion.

            First, Adam and the woman (she’s not named Eve until the end of the chapter) recognize their nakedness and cover it up.  This is not a newfound humility; this is a newfound and tragic sense of deception and hiding.  Previously they had had no shame, no self-consciousness.  It’s only in the aftermath of their sin that they consider parts of themselves as ‘unpresentable.’  I think that this is a significant commentary on the sinful condition of humanity.  We hide our motivations and our desires from ourselves and from those who are closest to us.  (I always think of that great Billy Joel song, “The Stranger,” words here:  http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/The-Stranger-lyrics-Billy-Joel/953DB3F466E12BCA48256870001B45F1; music here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnlvPoDU5LY, if you’re interested.)  This lack of transparency, this desire to shield ourselves from one another, this lack of trust—all of that is a consequence of Adam’s fall.

            Second, they hide themselves from God.  Now, there’s an act of self-deception!  God finds them right away: it’s the most one-sided game of hide-and-seek in history.  But the point here is that they tried to keep themselves separate from the God who had given them life and purpose—another terrible effect of sin.

            Third, they completely threw each other under the bus.  When confronted, the man owned nothing.  Instead, he blamed Eve.  “Not me!  Her!”  Here’s the root of what the hymnist called ‘our warring madness.’

            Fourth, the earth itself is caught up in Adam’s rebellion, “Cursed is the ground because of you.”

            This is a chapter filled with bad news.  In trying to assert their independence from God, Adam and Eve brought a terrible corruption into God’s beautifully designed and executed creation.  It is filled with the brokenness of human relationships and with the deadly consequences of a broken relationship with the Lord.

            The only good news is that there are glimmers of good news.  The first glimmer is that the Lord promises that this situation will not last forever, that the woman’s offspring will eventually crush the head of the enemy.  (That’s not just a glimmer, I suppose; that’s a full-blown promise.)  The other glimmer is the Lord’s uncommented, but significant, forbearance:  had you or I been in charge, we may have just started over, but our God chose the more difficult path of redemption, on which the rest of the story focuses.

Genesis 1-2: Creation

There are so many things that deserve commentary in Genesis 1-2!  What I would highlight as the most important is this:  Genesis 1 and 2 set the table for everything that is to follow by establishing the relationship between the Creator God and humanity.

So, observe first that Genesis simply assumes that there is a God who has life in Himself.  There is no argument about the existence of God nor is there any philosophical discussion about Him.  For Genesis, God is the one unmistakable and unmitigated fact.  "In the beginning God . . . " (And, no, I don't think that just reflects the naivete of an ancient people who don't know any better.  We moderns think we're so sophisticated, but I don't accept that radical skepticism about anything I can't see or touch is sophisticated.  Our constant reliance on our senses actually seems a little childish to me.)

Second, observe that that God who has life in Himself shares that life outside of Himself.  God is under no compulsion to create.  He has no need of creation.  He is full and complete in Himself.  On the other hand, since the Triune nature of God is to share His life within Himself, it is also a natural expression of His loving nature to share that life outside of Himself.  He is not compelled to create, but His very nature is such that sharing the free gift of life is normal.  We do well, then, to consider Creation as the first act of God's grace--reaching beyond Himself in an act of pure gift.

Relatedly, we recognize that everything depends on God for its existence.  Paul speaks about all things having their origin and sustenance in the life of God (Col. 1:16-17).  Too often, we think of the world as having an existence apart from God--a sort of 'God-is-in-His-heaven' thing, which disconnects God and His world.Genesis will have none of that.

Finally, observe that humanity is the climax and culmination of God's creation.  Genesis 1 moves climactically towards Day 6 and, on Day 6, things crescendo into God's deliberation to make man in His image.  God's image is a rich metaphor.  Lutherans have understood the image of God as sharing in God's righteousness.  More than that, I'd suggest that it means sharing in God's moral nature.  So, it is only to humanity that God gives the specific command not to eat from one tree; that is a moral command, a choice to obey.  More than that, humanity has a special task within God's creation, that is, to rule it and to take care of it.  To bear God's image is extend His own care and His own gracious rule over His earth.  Humanity is designed to be an extension of God Himself, a gracious and loving presence.

All together, then, Genesis 1-2 establish the foundation on which everything else in the Bible will build.  Because God's purpose for humanity was always that they would share His life and His work, the disruption that we will read about tomorrow in Genesis 3 cannot stand.  The rest of the Bible will revolve around God's  long, slow work of overcoming that disruption and re-establishing His creation as He meant it to be.