Desperate Faith

Intro

The whole world has been scattered after Babel. The people are divided, and there’s no doubt that sin has taken its toll on humanity. Things are looking bleak in the Biblical story. As bleak as the story is, however, God hasn’t given up. He’s got a plan to fix all of this still, and central to that plan is this man named Abraham.

Why Abraham? It’s a question I’ve heard asked a number of times, and one I’ve asked myself too. Why did God, of all the people on earth, choose Abraham? “Surely,” some people might say, “it was because Abraham was faithful. God knew that Abraham would do what God asked him to do!” Maybe that’s true. Abraham was certainly a faithful person.... some of the time. Yet even Abraham showed an utter lack of faith at times. Later in his story, Abraham lies to Pharaoh about his wife, Sarah, and he repeats this same act again to king Abimalech. Even worse, he fails to believe in God’s promise of a son, and so he tries to take matters into his own hands and have a son with Hagar, which just caused a huge mess. So while there are times when Abraham was faithful, that surely can’t be the only reason he was chosen. No, in fact, the text today suggests a very different reason that God chose Abraham. It was because Abraham had absolutely nothing good going for him.

The Barrenness of Sarah

The story of Babel comes to a close and we get yet another long genealogy. This one ends a little differently, however. After a very long list of names, we finally get to Terah. We learn that Terah has three sons: Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran has one son, Lot, and then he dies. We get almost no details about Nahor. And Abram has a wife that can’t bear children. Abram’s wife Sarai is barren. Genesis has told us of birth after birth, son after son, as humanity grew across the face of the earth. Yet here stands Sarai, an exception to the rule. We expect that there will be no “these are the descendants of Abram”. His story must be over, he was a minor character, and the tale will have to continue on through another person, maybe Nahor or Lot. The Bible, however, is full of surprises!

The story takes a sudden turn. God chooses to coninue his mission to save humanity not through Lot or Nahor, but through Abram and Sarai, the barren couple who can’t have children. This is, after all, what God is best at: bringing life out of barren wastes. This is a radical decision, however, let’s make no mistake. God has two other perfectly good candidates to choose from here. Why make the effort to work with people like Abram and Sarai? They have no children, no livlihood, and no hope for a future.

The Barrenness of Us

Could you imagine being in the shoes of Abram and Sarai here? Could you think of being in such a situation? You’re a nomad, living in the desert. The only thing to support you when you get old is your children. The only way to maintain honor in the community is to have children. There are whispers from the neighbors, they’re wondering what’s wrong with you. The relationship between Abram and Sarai must have been strained as well. Who’s fault is it? In failing to provide children, Abram has failed to provide support for Sarai. In failing to provide children, Sarai has failed to provide an heir for Abram.

I imagine, for many, it’s not so hard to step into the shoes of Abram and Sarai. Infertility is something that many people today experience. It can be heartbreaking, when you want children so bad, but nothing you do works. Marrital strife also plagues many people today. Maybe you’ve lost a job, and you feel like you’ve failed your spouse. Maybe there are other problems, and try as you might, you just can’t help but feel angry and upset at your partner.

Maybe you can relate to Abram and Sarai as you imagine the nasty rumors the neighbors spread behind their backs. “Why don’t they have any children? What’s wrong with them?” One way of another, it’s not too hard to relate. We all know what it’s like to be broken. We all know what it feels like to desparately want something, but to know we’ll never be able to have it. We know what it’s like to mourn, to grieve, to feel desparate and helpless.

The Promise of God

But it’s to someone hurt, grieving, hopeless, and utterly broken, that God calls out, “Come, follow me, and I will bless you and make your name great… I will belss those who bless you and curse those who curse you.” It is to a barren, childless, aging husband and wife that God declares, “I will make of you a great nation… and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” You see, God’s strength is made perfect in weakness. In the beginning, when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was a barren oceanic desert… But God said, “Let there be light, and there was light…” Out of barrenness God brings forth fruit, out of death, God calls forth life. And so, as it turns out, someone weak, barren, and hopeless like Abram and Sarai, was the perfect candidate for God to create something new. And not just new for them, but newness for the whole creation. The promise of God to Abraham is, after all, not just for Abraham, but for all nations. Abraham is God’s solution to the brokeness and division wrought by the fall and particularaly by Babel. In Abraham, all nations will be brought together, and all nations will be blessed by God. The seed of Abraham will be the same seed by which the serpent’s head is crushed, and the curse of sin is wiped away.

God’s call to Abraham, however, was not an easy one. Before God says, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you,” he says, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you.” In other words, “Leave behind everything you have, then I will give you everything I have.” For Abram and Sarai, this would have been a terribly costly request. They’re old, and they have no children. Once they leave Terah’s tent, they have no assurance that they’ll be able to survive on their own.

The Faithful Response of Abram

And yet, Abram and Sarai go through with it. God presents them with a real puzzle. As Walter Brueggeman puts it:

“The whole of the Abrahamic narrative is premised on this seeming contradiction: to stay in safety is to remain barren, to leave in risk is to have hope.”

Staying in Haran, for Abram and Sarai, meant security. At this point, Terah, Abram’s father, is still alive. They also have Nahor and Lot. They’re in familiar territory. They know where the food and water is. And yet, if they stay there, they have no hope for a future. And so, while they follow God in faith, they also follow him out of desperation. They realize the despicable, hopeless situation they’ve found themselves in. There’s no hope for them where they’re at. There’s no hope for the world where they’re at. And so they choose to trust in God, they choose to trust that the one who brought forth life in the beginning can now also bring forth hope and life for them.

The Gospel Promise

Just as God promised life and hope to Abraham, he has now promised life and hope to us through our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. In a world mired in darkness, God sent forth his light to preach peace to those who were near and far. Where there was death, the victory of the cross promises life. Where there is sadness, grief, and pain, Christ promises to bring joy, dancing, and singing. In the midst of hopelessness, Christ is our hope.

The reality of the gospel, just as Abraham’s promise, is that there is a discontinuity between what is and what is promised by God. In Matthew’s Gospel, John awaits his execution, sitting in the dark, dank prisons underneath Herod’s palace. He’s done everything right. He gave up family and a comfortable life in order to follow the Spirit of God out into the desert and prepare the way for the Messiah. He placed his faith in God, hoping against all odds that the Messiah would finally come. But now, he was beginning to doubt. So he sent for Jesus and asked, “Are you really the one I’ve been waiting for?” And Jesus responds, “Go and tell John what you see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepersa are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and good news is preached to the poor.” For John, God’s promise seemed to be so far away. There was a disconnect between what was promised and waht really was.

The same was true for Abraham. He was promised a child, but for many years he and Sarai sat childless. John was promised the kingdom of God, heaven breaking into earth, all things made new. But there he sat in a cold dark prison cell, awaiting his execution. John, of course, unlike Abraham never really got to see God’s promise come to fruition. Yet he still held on, clinging to hope, awaiting God’s promise to be fulfilled.

Responding in Faith

Like Abraham and John the Baptist, we too have recieved a promise from God. We also wait for God to bring life from barrenness, to make our names great, to make all things new. And yet, there seems to be a disconnect between what we have been promised and what really is. And this is a much tougher problem for our culture because we’re not quite as patient as Abraham and John. We like our things right now.

So how can we respond in faith? How can we emulate the faith of Abraham? Or John?

Surely we want our church to grow, we want to see people in our community come to know our Lord, we want to witness the kingdom of heaven breaking in, to witness the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, to receive spiritual gifts of prophecy, healing, and tongues. But what do we do when the promise seems so far away?

This becomes an even more daunting problem when we hear that, like the promise of God to Abraham, the Gospel promise also comes with strings attached. In order to recieve the promise, you have to leave everything. Christ calls us, saying, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” “But why”, we might ask Jesus, “why would we give up everything to follow you out into the unknown? Why would I take up a cross for a promise that seems so very far from reality?”

I think the story of Abraham suggests to us a rather uncomfortable answer. The kind of faith that God calls us to only comes through desperation. Abraham and Sarai were willing to leave all that they had behind because they really didn’t have much to begin with. They had no hope but the hope of God. They were utterly desperate. Abraham and Sarai came to the conclusion that there was nothing they could do. They could not have children by their own power. They could not remove the curse of sin that had plagued humanity by their own power. They could not make their name great by their own power. There was nothing they could do. They became desperate. And it was only in that desperation that they were willing to give everything to God.

Following God was not safe or predictable, and certainly not controllable. But it was their only hope.

The story of Abraham calls us to wrestle with this same truth. It calls us to recognize that we really are desperate, destitute, poor, powerless. We, as mere mortals, cannot do anything to save ourselves. The world would have us believe otherwise though. Our culture would have us believe differently. We can be so easily enticed by wealth and worldly power that we really begin to believe that we aren’t so bad off. There are some of us who even forget we’re human, we like to imagine that our wealth, our possessions, our social status protects us, makes us powerful, makes us think we’re unstoppable. And we get blinded by the wealth and forget that we’re still mere humans, subject to the blowing of the wind, the rising of the sun, the passing of time, the call of death. We become blind to how little we really have, and how meaningless it all is.

As Jesus was walking along, a young man ran up and knelt down on the dusty road at his feet. The young man asked him “What do I have to do to have eternal life?” And Jesus says, “You know the ten commandments, right? Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness, don’t defraud, honor your parents...” “Oh, I’ve done all of that!” the young man interrupts. And Jesus lovingly responds, “You’re forgetting one commandment though. Go, sell what you own and give the money to the poor. Then you will have treasure in heaven, and you can come follow me.” But the young man was shocked, and he ran away distressed and grieving, because he had a lot to give away.

And Jesus’s disciples were shocked too. “If someone as rich as him can’t be saved, who can?” But Jesus responds “For humans it is not possible. But for God, all things are possible.”

We live in one of the richest countries on earth. How can we ever hope to be like Abraham? How do we drop everything to follow Jesus? We have to become desperate.