"Our Questions, God's Answer"
Pastor Roger Gustafson
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus. Amen.
I ran across an interesting statistic recently about laughter. According to this statistic, children laugh an average of 400 times a day. Can you imagine that? Four hundred times a day! Laugh, chortle, chuckle, har-de-har-har – 400 times a day! And adults, in contrast, they laugh an average of about 14 times a day. Think about that.
What in the world happened!? Well, the obvious answer is: Life happened. We grew up. We came to realize that life is not a bowl of cherries, that things aren’t always easy, that life can be difficult, that there are challenges and frustrations and disappointments and grief as well as joy. We got serious about life.
A parallel process may well happen in our life of faith.
Our preschool children gather together every week for a chapel time, which is basically an extended children’s sermon. My favorite chapel time features a character I created when I was reading and telling bedtime stories to my own son years ago. It was a character named Roy. The chapel time story I tell, which works off of this story about Abram, goes something like this:
Once upon a time there was a boy named Roy, and he lived with his mom and his dad in a great big house near the edge of the ocean. One night after supper they decided to take a walk on the beach. Roy loved to walk on the beach with his mom and dad, because he loved them and they loved him, and they all loved being out in the great outdoors. So there they went, out to the beach, Roy between his parents, who each reached down and took one of Roy’s hands. And off they went.
Before they knew it, it got dark, and the only light was from the stars above. And they walked and they walked, and Roy stopped. He looked up at his mother and father and asked, “Mom and dad, do you love me?”
“Do we love you?” they said in surprise, “why, Roy, look up at the stars and count all of them.”
Roy looked up at the stars, and there seemed to be a hundred million zillion gillion of them, so close you could almost touch them, all sparkling and twinkling, and Roy said, “I can’t count all those stars; there’s too many to count!”
“Well, Roy, that’s how much we love you,” his parents said. “We love you more than all the stars in the sky.”
And when I tell that story to the preschool kids, they get it. And when I tell them that God loves even more than all the stars in the sky, they really get it.
Those preschool children are going to grow up, and they’re going to find out that life is difficult and filled with challenges and frustrations that will raise questions in their hearts about the reliability and faithfulness of God. And that’s when they will encounter the legacy of Abram.
Abram left his ancestral homeland and his father’s house in response to God’s command and God’s promise. The command: “Go from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.” The promise: “I will make you exceedingly great and prosperous.” So, no questions asked, Abram simply pulled up stakes and went.
And true to his word, over the years God blessed Abram with great prosperity, with military victory and with an expanding household. And Abram, for his part, continued to be obedient to God; in fact, he’s seen as the embodiment of courage, humility and faithfulness.
However, tonight, when God repeats his promise to bless Abram, which would have included offspring, his own children so that his family line could continue, Abram does not respond with silent obedience, but with a question: How are you going to make this happen? After all, Abram says, I’m getting on in years, my wife is getting on in years, we have no children of our own and, according to the rules, a slave born in my household is going to inherit everything. In the face of some very clear and convincing evidence, Lord, I see no way forward.
Abram is our guide over some very unsteady terrain.
We might be tempted to think that faith involves unquestioning acceptance of unexamined promises, so that when life presents us with difficulties that make us question or doubt those promises, we might feel as if we’re undergoing a crisis of faith. But check out Abram. Abram clearly challenges and confronts God, challenging his claims and promises. But those challenges lead to a greater faith. In response to Abram’s questions, God takes Abram outside for this astronomy lesson, and, the Bible says, Abram believed God. In the midst of all his questioning and doubting, Abram believes enough to take one more step in his journey of faith.
He still doesn’t understand how God will deliver on his promises; he still has questions. He believes, and he questions: “How am I to know I shall possess this land that you’re showing me?”
And that’s when God creates the covenant; that’s this business about the animals being cut in two and the pieces laid opposite the other, and the flaming fire pot that passed between them. This was an ancient ceremony in which a covenant was established, in which the one who initiated the covenant basically says, “May what happened to these animals be what happens to me if I do not live up to the covenant I’m creating with you.”
Abram never stopped asking “How?” “How is this going to work, let’s see the outline, I need to know the plan, Lord.” And God never stopped answering with, “I will bless you.”
Living in that tension, that disconnect, between what we ask and what God answers is where faith gets tough, gets hard. But it’s also where we find the rich abundance of God.
Trusting in God’s promises when he couldn’t see how they would be fulfilled, that was Abram’s legacy. Trusting in God’s promises when we can’t see how they will be fulfilled, that’s our legacy to those who will come after us.
May the future find a faithfulness witness in us. Amen.