This Strange, New World
Sermon – June 14 2020 by Jamie Howison on Genesis 18:1-15 & 21:1-7
With Pentecost and Trinity Sunday now behind us, we launch fully into the long season of Ordinary Time—though this year things aren’t particularly “ordinary” yet… maybe the “new ordinary” for now? The lectionary is going to take us on a long walk through the book of Genesis, right through until the middle of August. These readings will be a primary focus of my preaching over these weeks, though on her Sundays Rachel may well choose a different tack… and she gets a real doozy next week! But because she will be away on study time and vacation for the latter part of June and through July, it is going to be lots of Genesis.
And why? Because there is a fairly linear narrative path to be followed, with one story building on another. Oh, there’s lots that does get skipped, as we couldn’t possibly read it all in just a couple of months, and even tonight we’re starting well into the longer story of Abraham and Sarah. Don’t worry, I will catch you up on what has happened.
But again, why read these stories? In a famous address from 1917, the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth insisted that, “within the Bible there is a strange, new world, the world of God.” Yes, we can recognize very human qualities in the characters from these ancient stories—sorrow and joy, failings and flaws, jealousy, loyalty, and emotions of all sorts—yet they live in a landscape that is in so many ways utterly strange, utterly different from ours. And in this strangeness, we glimpse something of God, and of human striving to understand and even contend with the divine. That’s why time and again we return to these old stories; to see what newness might be found.
“The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day”. This is how the 18th chapter of Genesis opens, but already there have been six chapters featuring this man and his wife Sarah. Let me give you a recap:
As Genesis 12 opens, we are very suddenly introduced to a man named Abram, whose wife Sarai has been unable to have children. To them God utters a surprising directive—get up and go from this land and from your father’s house, and go to a new place I will (eventually…) show you. This is then followed by an even more surprising set of promises: You will become a “great nation” and “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Pretty tough to be the parents of a great nation given they have no children, but they do get up and go on this unknowable journey. The years pass, Sarai and Abram have no child, and they grow old.
Sometime later—perhaps many years later—God again speaks to Abram and renews the promise. “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them… so shall your descendants be” (15:6). Yet there is still no child, and Sarai and Abram continue to grow older.
Sarai is no longer content to wait for the promised child, and so she tells Abram that he should have a child with her servant, Hagar. And yes, a child is born, a son named Ishmael. In time this will lead to some “complications,” so to speak; jealousy and resentment. But that’s the story to be read next Sunday.
And then in Genesis 17 God once again appears and repeats the promise of a child. It is at this point that Abram is renamed Abraham. It is a variation on his old name, but deeper, saying very clearly that he is an, “ancestor of a multitude”. Sarai becomes Sarah—again, a variant of her old name, but this one very clearly meaning “princess”; royalty. “I will bless her,” God declares, “and moreover I will give you a son by her.”
Yet perhaps tired of hearing an impossible promised repeated, Abraham's laughs—just as Sarah does in today’s portion of the story—and even more strikingly, he says clearly that the child Ishmael is enough for him: “O that Ishmael might live in your sight.” God is relentless, though, promising that Ishmael will indeed live and be the source of a great nation… and that Sarah will bear a child, and that child will be a child of the covenant.
And now we arrive at today’s story. Abraham and Sarah are encamped by the oaks of Mamre, where, the text tells us, the Lord appeared to him. Singular: the Lord. But then this: “Abraham looked up and saw three men standing near him.” Three men. Upon seeing them, Abraham leaps into Middle Eastern hospitality mode, providing water, having Sarah bake cakes of bread, and having one of the servants prepare a calf from the herd to offer his visitors.
With the meal in front of them, the visitors ask, “Where is your wife Sarah?” “She’s there, in the tent,” Abraham answers, to which one of them then says, “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” Abraham is strangely quiet, perhaps resigned to the fact the this promise repeated over the decades has yielded nothing, but Sarah laughs. Here we go again, she must be thinking, with this hilariously impossible promise. And who can blame her?
“The Lord said to Abraham, ‘Why did Sarah laugh, and say, “Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?” Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.’ But Sarah denied, saying, ‘I did not laugh’; for she was afraid. He said, ‘Oh yes, you did laugh.’”
Notice that the narrative has shifted back to the Lord—singular—from the three visitors—plural. From very early in the Christian tradition, this has been seen as being a “type” of the trinity, in which the Lord—singular—is experienced in a three-fold, three-person way. The icon here beside me is Rublev’s Trinity or “Hospitality of Abraham,” from the 15th Century, but this way of reading or hearing the story goes back much, much further than that. A Jewish interpreter, of course, would read it much differently, but that’s okay. What is being said here is that God cannot easily be boxed into our expectations and categories, but also that these stories will continue to bear new fruit every time they are engaged.
“Why did Sarah laugh,” the Lord asks Abraham, “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.” But Sarah denied, saying, ‘I did not laugh’; for she was afraid. The Lord said, ‘Oh yes, you did laugh.’”
And there this part of the story ends, with Sarah’s laughter and then fear, and the visitors’ confrontation of that disbelieving laughter and insistence that nothing is too wonderful for the Lord. It will pick up again three chapters later—our reading tonight makes the jump from chapter 18 to chapter 21—and in between those sections the laughter has most definitely faded, as Abraham and Sarah continue their long journey, far from the land from which they were first called. Yet in the background there still rings that question, “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” Walter Brueggemann comments that this is “an open question, one that waits for an answer. It is the question which surfaces everywhere in the Bible. We must say it is the fundamental question every human person must answer. And how it is answered determines everything else.”
In time it will be answered, or at least it will for Abraham and Sarah, for the child is indeed born, named, perhaps somewhat mischievously, Isaac, or “laughter”. So no, this story says, nothing is too wonderful for God, but the path to those wonders is often fraught with bad decisions, tough challenges, long stretches of God’s silence and human doubt. The wonder is not only the birth of the child, but the fact that two characters so human and fallible as Abraham and Sarah stand as the birthparents of God’s covenant people. We’ll see such a wonder again and again over these coming weeks, as we’re introduced to such dodgy characters as Jacob… only to then see that he too is a keystone in the unfolding story of God’s long, slow way with God’s people.
So strap in for this walk through these stories, and dare to believe that there is nothing too wonderful for God, and that those wonders—big and small, glorious and oh-so-hard to see—involve not only these figures of old but all of us who are made in the image of God. It is a strange new world, this biblical landscape, and in entering it we are challenged to confront both its strangeness and its newness, and walk away with new eyes for our own world, our own selves, our own struggles and failings, our own callings to be people who strive to embrace our status as the beloved of God.
