Out of the Blue: Nov 30th

IGenesis 17:15-22

15 God said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. 16 I will bless her and also give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.”

17 Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?” 18 And Abraham said to God, “O that Ishmael might live in your sight!”

19 God said, “No, but your wife Sarah shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac.[a] I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him. 20 As for Ishmael, I have heard you; I will bless him and make him fruitful and exceedingly numerous; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation. 21 But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this season next year.”

22 And when he had finished talking with him, God went up from Abraham.

Word of God. Word of Life.

Thanks be to God.

In our reading today, we hear God’s promise to make Abraham and Sarah the parents of nations. It seems to be a promise to good to be true… and yet, God makes good on that promise. But notice how hard it is for Abraham to believe that it will actually happen. Abraham outright laughs at the idea of God’s promise coming to fruition. It just doesn’t seem possible. But Genesis 17 isn’t the first time God has made this promise that Abraham and Sarah parents of nations. But it is the first time God has insisted that Sarah will be the mother of nations, and Abraham outright balks at the news.

You see, Abraham has been working on God’s promise himself. You likely recall the story, Abraham and Sarah had already decided to continue Abraham’s line through Sarah’s enslaved servant, Hagar. Abraham has already fathered Ishmael by this woman. You see? He’s saying to God. I’ve set you up for success here! The child has been born. No miracle with my ninety-year-old wife is required.

Out of the blue, God changes the script with one little word: no.

No, Sarah shall bear a son, and he shall be named Isaac.

Up until this moment, Abraham and even Sarah herself were fine with Sarah being left out of the covenant that God had made with Abraham. They didn’t expect any miracles. Sarah was ninety years old, and anyway, she was a woman, an afterthought in the continuance of Abraham’s line. No was the last thing they expected to hear from God.

But sometimes, when our expectations are too low, when our imaginations are too limited, when our systems are too broken, God’s no is just what we need to hear.

On November 3, the church calendar remembers the life of a saint who heard a no from the church when he should have heard a yes. Martín de Porres was born in the late sixteenth century in Lima, Peru, to a Spanish noble father and a mother of color who had once been enslaved. As his faith grew, Martín discerned a call to enter the Dominican order. But the local Dominicans barred nonwhite people from joining, and when Martín came knocking, they told him no.

But Martín persisted. He found work at the monastery cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry…for eight years. Finally, the prior of the monastery decided to ignore the rule barring mixed-race postulants, and Martín took his vows, angering some of his fellow monks.

Martín was assigned work in the kitchen, infirmary, and laundry, all of which he dutifully performed. But he also offered healthcare outside the monastery to those in need, founded an orphanage in Lima, and began a large feeding ministry to the poor. He offered his own cell and bed to people in urgent need of care, and when his fellow brothers told him to stop, because the people he was helping were too repellent, he had one word for them: no.

The radical hospitality of Martín de Porres lives on anywhere that love comes before obedience. Take, as a modern example, Sister Carol Baltosiewich, who traveled from the Midwest to New York City in the 1980s to serve on the front lines of the AIDS crisis. She witnessed the devastating effects of the epidemic firsthand. She also witnessed victims’ deep love and compassion for one another. The Roman Catholic Church, to which she had vowed obedience, continued to teach about the sinfulness of gay sex, to discourage the use of condoms, and to dehumanize AIDS victims. Meanwhile, Sister Carol held the hands of patients as they died, sometimes while their own families were afraid to be in the room with them. Like Martín, she used her actions to say “no” to practices of the larger church and reached beyond the boundaries to offer Christ’s love to those whom were being pushed away..

At times in the church we can be stymied with fears of what is or is not possible. We wonder just how far God’s plan of grace, forgiveness, and redemption for the world might really extend and we find ourselves tempted to start drawing lines in the sand of who is welcome and who is not. We pick our favorite sins to pick on and we so this group or that group need to change… but we can continue living the way we do because we trust in God’s forgiveness for us.

But when we draw lines around just how far God’s grace can go… God says “no.” Those who have been told they don’t fit because they didn’t believe quite right or they looked a little different or they had tattoos or strange clothes or their sexuality or gender was different from the norm… when we the church has tried to exclude… God says “no” to that dividing.

All of these people from Sarai and Abram to Martin de Porres and Sister Carol to the individuals sitting in this very space wondering if they are truly welcome… and that means all of us… God says yes. God says I came for all of creation. And if it sounds like a promise too good to be true… I get it. Laugh if you want, it wouldn’t be the first time that someone laughed in response to a promise from God. But God finds a way to make the impossible possible… and to say yes to the miraculous.