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.)