On the second Sunday of our annual journey through Lent, I’d like to focus if I may on the man called the father of Israel - the first of the great Patriarchs of the Old Testament - Abraham. In fact in our reading this afternoon he’s not yet got that name. Names are important in the Old Testament, and as we meet him today he’s still called Abram. That’s still quite a good name: it means “Exalted Father” - but he’ll soon to be re-named, and his new name Abraham means “Father of Many Nations”.
We find the story of Abram / Abraham in the very first book of the Bible, Genesis. Chapter 12 tells us that Abram left his home and lands in the city of Ur in obedience to God’s call. In today’s reading he’s on the move, travelling from place to place, not yet knowing where he’s bound - only that God wants him to journey to a country that God has said he will show him.
We honour Abram (as Abraham) for his faithful and trusting response to God’s call: a reckless response in the true sense of that word - Abram didn’t reck or reckon, he didn’t weigh up the pros and cons, he just got on and did what God wanted, trusting that things would all work out as they should.
But it’s a long hard journey, and from time to time Abram’s faith and trust wobble a bit. “I am your shield,” God has told him. But Abram wonders how God can possibly deliver on his promise. God had said that Abram would be the founder of a great nation - yet he had no child of his own. His only heir, Eleazer, was the son of a slave. How - he wondered - can I be the founder of a nation?
So God says to him, “Step outside your tent, and look up at the stars, try to count them. Your descendants will be as numerous and countless as the stars in the heavens.” So Abram did that, and believed. And the next sentence in the story - Abram put his faith in the Lord, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness - we can read again in the letters of Paul, for example chapter 3 of Galatians. All who live by faith are children of Abraham.
But in Genesis Abram has another bit of a wobble almost straight away. “But how can I be sure I’m actually going to be able to take possession of this land you say you’re going to give me?” he asks. And then it all starts to get a bit weird.
Abram’s told to make animal sacrifices to the Lord, which he does. And then he goes into a trance, in which he has a terrifying vision that involves a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passing between the divided bits of the sacrifices he’s laid out. And a covenant, a solemn promise, is made that the whole stretch of this land will belong to his descendants. And although he doesn’t get his new name until two chapters further on, here is where it’s first confirmed, that Abram will be the Father of Many Nations.
But the way it all happens is well outside my experience. I find the idea of animal sacrifice a primitive and bizarre thing, objectionable, even. But I suppose this passage is a bit like the story of Isaiah in the temple, or the apostles on the Day of Pentecost; an attempt to describe in mere words, a sense of the immediate presence and power and authority of God, and that has to be something far beyond what mere words can express.
In Abraham’s world land, flocks and family were hugely important. You were measured according to the size of your flock, that’s what gave you status and identity. And it was a shame and a sign of God’s displeasure if you had no descendants to take over from you.
If we understand that, we can see why Abram needed to know, needed to be sure, that what God had promised really would happen. The journey he and his wife Sarai are making is pointless unless it serves God’s purposes. That’s why we’re offered this story as a reading in Lent, I suppose. Lent’s the time to reflect on journeys - the one Jesus made, and our own faith journeys as his people. To take Lent seriously I need to believe that my journey is blessed by God, and that I too stand under his promise.
So let’s think about Jesus for a moment. Like anyone who might claim the title of Messiah, he has set his face towards Jerusalem. Where else would God’s servant go? Where else would a son of David go? But he goes to Jerusalem knowing that there of all places, his message will be rejected and scorned. He is going there to die. Jerusalem, the city founded by God as a light to the nations, will reject him as it’s rejected so many prophets before him.
Here’s what Jesus says: “How often have I longed to gather you to me, as a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” His words are in fact a quote prophet Isaiah, saying that this is what God longs to do. But Jesus knows already how desolate and lonely his journey will be. Even his closest companions will desert him.
One of my Lenten books includes this sentence: “Our journey in Lent is incomplete until we feel in our own hearts the pain of the cross.” Why? Because the reason for the cross is all the stuff that gets in the way of my serving and loving God; and because the purpose of the cross is the love that always wants to shield me and shelter me, even though I so often push that love away.
So my Lenten journey, and yours, ought I think to be like Abram’s. Let’s be a bit reckless! Let me not plan things out in order to get the result I want; Let me instead just open myself up to God, to listen for what he wants to say to me, to place myself under his will. It’s what I pray, after all, whenever I say the Lord’s Prayer - thy will be done. God has something to say to each of us, and in his word we’ll find both promise and call. Abram made sacrifices, but we need to be a sacrifice, remembering these Old Testament words from the 51st Psalm: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
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