The Second Sunday in Lent

March 4, 2007

The Rev. Thomas William Blake

God and the Great Beyond

Genesis 15: 1-12, 17-18

In the exchange between Abram and God we hear this morning, it is clear that Abram begins in a state of disappointment and distress. “O Lord God,” he cries out, “what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?”

“O Lord God, what will you give me?” There is a tone of desperation in Abram’s words. But stating them once is not enough. God needs to grasp the severity of the situation, so Abram repeats his concern to God, this time more pointedly: “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.” You have, Abram says to God. He conveys a sense of utter urgency and impatience. He blames.

You and I have been in those shoes, no doubt. Maybe we are even standing in them now. We look back at what we once envisioned for our lives and notice lots of twists and turns along the way that came as surprises: not necessarily bad surprises, perhaps, but nevertheless surprises taking us off the beaten path.

Or maybe our dreams did come to pass, and everything fell into place pretty much as we expected, but even so, we still feel empty: emptier than ever before. The outcome of our accomplishments was not exactly as we predicted.

Or maybe we were once more free-spirited, taking each day for what it was, enjoying life to its fullest along the way, only one day to discover things crashing down: a diagnoses with something imminently threatening to our lives, a tornado unexpectedly sweeping away everything we own, a loved one dying unexpectedly, a severe financial crisis, our own loneliness eating us slowly away.

At first we try to put on a façade of collectedness, even though we are really torn apart beneath. “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless?” But the façade does not last for long, and eventually the only thing we can do is point the finger and pull out the card of blame. “You have given me no offspring.” All of us have stood in the shoes of Abram, or else we inevitably will.

At a vestry meeting one night several years ago, at another church, we were moving through the business agenda pretty routinely when someone approached the rector and called him away for a few minutes to tell him some shocking news. A parishioner had been killed in a hunting accident. The parishioner was only in his fifties, had recently remarried, and had just built a house on the water where he planned to retire.

The rector came back, reported the news to the vestry, and adjourned the meeting. He and I then left to deliver the news to the man’s wife; she had not yet been informed. The business agenda suddenly seemed inconsequential; now we were getting to the heart of the human experience: that gnawing feeling that we are not in control no matter how hard we try, no matter how wisely we plan, no matter how creatively we dream.

If the rest of us were in shock over the situation, then think of what the man’s wife must have experienced: unimaginable pain. She returned to church a few times afterward, but eventually came to the realization that she needed time away from the church. Perhaps it was too clouded with memories of her late husband. Perhaps all she could say to God is what Abram did: “This is what you have done.” Perhaps she denied God’s existence.

We seek explanation when we experience crisis, and sometimes— perhaps most of the time— religion cannot explain to our satisfaction. At a recent conference at Trinity Church, Wall Street, in New York, someone asked keynote speaker Jurgen Moltmann, how he would answer the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

With his quick wit Moltmann replied something to the effect, “That isn’t a question we should ask. If you go into peoples’ homes and proceed to tell them why something bad happened to them, they will throw you out. People don’t want to know why they are suffering; they want to know how to end the suffering or get through it.”

In other words, if we approach our faith from the standpoint of seeking concrete explanations for the chaos in our lives, then we have missed the point and we will predictably turn away in disappointment. What faith does do, on the other hand, is give us a framework for enduring such experiences with hope to the future. A plan of salvation is unfolding and all of our experiences are part of it.

Notice how God responds to Abram’s accusation, “You have given me no offspring.” God does not get defensive: pointing the finger back to Abram. God does not say, “Well here’s why I’ve given you no offspring.” God simply says, “Look toward heaven and count the stars if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be.” It is a rather strange response for the more practical-minded among us.

I have always been intrigued that God assuages Abram’s concerns by directing his focus to outer space. Of all places, why outer space? God could have conveyed a similar point by directing Abram to try counting the grains of sand on which he stood or perhaps the numbers of hairs upon his head, or one of countless other images conveying infinite possibilities. But I find it significant that God points Abram toward the sky.

When I look into the sky, what seems far more noticeable than the countless stars is the vast, dark, empty space in which they reside. It is that space, more than the stars themselves, that reminds us of our infinitesimal place in the scheme of things. We cannot explain that space and we surely cannot fill it. It is simply there. None of us, Abram or otherwise, can even begin to count the stars without first confronting that empty space.

Several centuries after the story of Abram was told, his descendants, the Judeans, found themselves exiled within a foreign land, having been forced to leave behind their homes, their possessions, their Temple, and their dignity. Imagine how we felt on September 11, 2001. Imagine those feelings compounded many times over. The Judeans felt utterly devastated. A vast, dark, empty space enveloped them. They called it “a formless void.”

Yet, not unlike Abram before them, they gazed into that empty space and found in it something that helped them escape their worries. They found a God who transcended the chaos of their lives and turned the chaos into order. They found a God who helped them see beyond their distress and toward new creation. They found a God unveiling a plan of salvation. We know it as the first creation story in Genesis. And it was good.

“Look toward heaven and count the stars,” God says to Abram. “And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” The story shifts from distress and pointing fingers at God —you did this to me— to a new hope and his embracing the unimaginable plan of God’s salvation. It is a moment of conversion into which you and I, also standing in Abram’s shoes, are invited as well.

Like Abram, all of us know what it is like to be distracted from the work of God, to get so bogged down on this concern or that concern that we lose sight of the larger picture. Our human nature is to worry and grapple with the realization that over most things, we have very little control. We get sick and die. We are confronted with devastating scenarios like hunting accidents or commercial planes turned into missiles. We struggle to make sense of our lives and why things come to pass or do not come to pass, or why one person struggles while others live lavishly, or why there is disease and famine and war.

Contemporary Western culture does not help the situation. We erect barriers between us and the larger creation—think big buildings and lights, televisions blaring and the sounds of the city. We contort space into something —cyberspace— which is not really space at all, but a conglomeration of information distracting us from a sense of anything larger. Those of us in the developed world are affluent, educated, and technologically advanced, and yet as distressed as ever before.

In the midst of all of this, the story of God and Abram reminds us it does not have to be this way. “Look toward heaven and count the stars.” Embrace the empty space above us, around us, and within us as room for God to work without our getting in God’s way. Be still and listen for God’s voice instead of drowning it out with our own. Remember that God’s ways are not always our ways. Open our hearts, as did Abram, for conversion and transformation.

Gone will be the cries, “you did this to me.” Replacing them will be a renewed awareness of God’s unfolding plan of salvation and the realization that God is guiding our journey. It is a place of new creation. It is a place of peace.

“And the Lord reckoned it to Abram as righteousness.”

Amen.