Tag: Divine Encounter

Broken and Ground, yet Raised

Introduction

Jesus’s parables, spoken to a targeted audience of an ancient society, are meant to interrupt those who are listening. The imagery intwined with the story line, the twists and bends, the upheavals and reversals, create a verbal encounter for the hearer. As mentioned before, the goal Jesus’s parables are to bring the hearer to a conclusion that they would not have come to on their own. The parable is an encounter with God in the event of faith; the one who is addressed by the parable (slowly) begins to realize that the reign of God and this man called Jesus are different. In uttering a parable, Jesus is bringing the kingdom of humanity into conflict and crisis as it collides (head on) with the reign of God; in loosening a parable into the world, Jesus is bringing those who hear—their common sense and ideologies—into conflict and crisis with himself (the word of God). In other words, if one really does have the ears to hear they will hear what Jesus is saying; in hearing, they will be forever altered and changed precisely because they have heard and, by the power of the Spirit, have understood. And we all know that once that happens there’s no going back; bc #iykyk.

The issue for us; we have history in the way. So, when we read the parables of Jesus either we have enough Sunday School to apply the right conclusion, or we have the events of Christ’s life past tense providing the right framework through which to come to the right conclusion. And, we have access to the times where Jesus speaks a parable and then, gazing upon his confused band of disciples, proceeds to explain; therein, for us, is lost the power of the parable to sit and linger, festering images and words creating an infection in our spirit of divine proportions, something only the great celestial Medic could heal by their Spirit. So, are the parable of Jesus the Christ lost on and for us, today?

No, I don’t think so. Like the first audience, there is plenty in the parables to challenge us, to bring us into a head-on collision with God in Jesus Christ and the reign of God in the world, to bring us to their conclusion even if we know how it makes sense and what happens. All we need to do is allow our curiosity a front seat as we listen and hear as if this story is being told to us (because it is). Rather than being lookers-on, let us be addressed…

Jamie reads the gospel

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Matthew 21:33-46

In this portion of Matthew, Jesus is sharing parable upon parable to describe the reign of God and of heaven. Jesus must use parables because there is nothing on earth controlled by the kingdom of humanity that is like God’s reign. (God’s reign being interruptive and disruptive to the kingdom of humanity.) Thus, Jesus speaks in story and narrative to communicate the radical and otherworldliness of God’s reign.

Jesus begins, writes Matthew, telling the chief priests and the elders of the people (21:23) to listen to another parable (21:33a). This parable is the second of three parables meant to bring his audience to the conclusion that the chief priests and elders of the people refuse to come to when Jesus asks them, “Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” (21:25a).

There was a person, a landowner, who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a winepress in it, built a tower, and leased it to vinedressers; he then went abroad. Now, when the time of the fruit came near, he sent forth his slaves to the vinedressers to receive his fruit. And after the vinedressers received his slaves, they thrashed one, they killed one, and they stoned one (vv33b-35).

Jesus begins this second of three parables speaking telling of rebellious vinedressers against the land/vineyard owner. In a desperate event of violence, the vinedressers—the ones under contract to care for and harvest the fruit during the (familiar and common[ii]) absence of the vineyard owner—reject the slaves and the authority invested in them to retrieve the owner’s portion of the harvest. Considering the details of the story so far, we can assume that the vineyard owner is wealthy:[iii] 1. He builds and plants a vineyard, 2. It takes a few years to produce financially productive crops, 3. He can hire vinedressers to care for the land and crops for years before they can earn their portion of profit from the fruit, and 4. He can live abroad without needing a harvest to satisfy his economic needs.

Something must be up when the landowner never receives his slaves (and the harvest). So, he sends another but bigger group of slaves, and, according to Matthew’s Jesus, the vinedressers did to them in like manner (v36). Again, this group does not return; no slaves and no harvest. Curious. Now, the landowner decides to take serious measures[iv] to secure his portion of the harvest from the vinedressers. Jesus tells the crowd of religious leaders,[v]

Now, finally, he sent to them his son saying, “They will give respect to my son.” But after seeing the son, the vinedressers said to themselves, “This one is the heir, come! Let us kill him! Let us have his inheritance!” And after receiving him they threw him outside the vineyard and killed him (vv37-39).

The vinedressers have gone too far; the son is the representative according to law who can literally stand in for the father, the landowner. In an impulsive moment,[vi] the vinedressers decide to take matters into their own hand to seize the land from the landowner via insurrection;[vii] they decide to take over ownership of the vineyard and take the son’s inheritance as their own by killing the son. The owner of the vineyard will have to respond penally.[viii]

And like a spot light, this dark narrative is directed at the religious leaders of Israel, the ones who were covenanted to care for the people and the land for God and for the wellbeing of all the nations.[ix] The fruit of being a blessing to the nations and the work of righting wrongs has gone ignored by Israel’s religious leaders; Israel, the vineyard, has been hijacked by those who have decided to seize the blessings for themselves and redefine who gets the inheritance.[x] Jesus is pointedly telling them what they are going to do to him. But this targeted and dark address doesn’t stop here. Jesus goes on,

Then, whenever the lord of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those vinedressers? (v40).

We can imagine a pregnant pause, a contemplative silence, an oppressive quiet as those whom Jesus addressed consider their answer…carefully. Maybe after a moment of looking askance at each other they quietly discussed their answer and came to an agreed upon response,

They say to him, “He will utterly destroy those wretched, and he will lease the vineyard to other vinedressers, ones who will return to him the produce in the season of the fruit” (v41).

Let’s imagine another moment of pause, silence, and quiet as Jesus lets their answer sit in for a minute before going on with his comments. They have just pronounced their own verdict and sentence. Then Jesus intensifies it all and makes it crystal,

Have you never read in the scriptures, “The stone the ones who build rejected, this one has become the corner of the head; this has happened from the Lord, and it is wonderful in our eyes”? Therefore, I say to you that the reign of God will be lifted up from you, and it will be given to a people producing its fruit. And the one who falls upon this stone will be broken to pieces; upon whom it might fall it will grind him to dust (vv42-44).

The chief priests and the elders have the moral of the story spelled out for them. If they didn’t get it before, they get it now and are ticked (v45): they are the ones who are the vinedressers and they are the ones who will kill the Son and be the ones who forfeit the reign of God.[xi] But Jesus’s Psalm quotation lets the audience know that there is vindication for the son in death just as there is vindication for the stone rejected by the builders:[xii] God wins over human sin, life wins over death.[xiii] God is coming, says Jesus, to take the vineyard (Israel[xiv]) away from the chief priests and elders and give it to another people,[xv] an entirely new entity (not the church but a people a varied people group lead by Christ) who will be grounded in God, do what God desires, and who will participate in the divine mission of the revolution of love, life, and liberation.[xvi]

Conclusion

We are left with a divine gift of self-reflection and awareness. While we know (and have known) this parable is about Jesus telling the chief priests and the elders of Israel what is going to happen, we have a moment to be self-aware in this space and currently and reflect. How much are we like the murderous vinedressers, rejecting the will and desires of the vineyard owner? It might be tempting to see how we, like Israel, are held captive by both the rulers and ideologies of the kingdom of humanity, forced into awkward and compromising positions of complicity. This is true, in part. It is also true that sometimes we blatantly and intentionally act in ways aligning us more with the wretched vinedressers. So, we, honestly and humbly, must ask that question and look long and hard in the mirror.

The good news is that Jesus is born, lived, died, raised, and ascended to the right hand of God. And, like the woman at the well, when we are thusly exposed as the vinedressers, we are received and not rejected. This is Jesus’s promise at the very end of this parable (as bad as those words sounded in our ears). Our exposure in the divine light of truth is a falling on and under the cornerstone (Jesus), and we are both broken to pieces and ground to dust in that exposure and encounter. Ye, because of Easter morning, we know that light triumphs over darkness, liberation collapses captivity, God’s grace and mercy over human sin, and life wins over death. We do not stay broken and ground, but rise in new life now and in the future because Jesus Christ is both risen today and tomorrow.

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] R. T. France The Gospel of Matthew The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Gen. Ed Joel B. Green (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 808-809. “The story of an absentee landowner reflets a familiar economic situation at the time; some of the chief priests and elders to whom Jesus is speaking would probably have owned land away from Jerusalem.”

[iii] France, Matthew, 809. “The landowner must be a wealthy man in that a newly planted vineyard could not be expected to produce fruit for at least four years, during which he would have no return on his capital outlay. Once the vines began to produce fruit, there would be an agreed proportion of the crop due to the owner, leaving the tenants to derive their living from the rest.”

[iv] France, Matthew, 813. “Within the framework of the story the sending of the son is clearly a last resort, short of the owner returning himself (as he will eventually do in v. 40).”

[v] Anna Case-Winters Matthew Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible Eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2015), 255. “Jesus’ ‘target’ is the religious leaders, not Isael as such. It is unlikely that Matthew of his (predominantly Jewish) community would have promoted this idea, setting Jew against Gentile in their shared community of faith.”

[vi] France, Matthew, 813. “As a bid for independence and an attempt to gain possession for themselves it was hardly likely to succeed in a society under the rule of law, and it reads more like a spontaneous and ill-conceived impulse than like a calculated policy.”

[vii] France, Matthew, 813. “When the son goes as this father’s messenger, he goes with all his father’s authority, and so deserves ‘respect’ and obedience. To reject the son’s demand is therefore the climax of rebellion. But to kill him is to add injury to insult.”

[viii] France, Matthew, 814. “To kill the son is an act of defiance to the father, and he cannot be expected to let them get away with it.”

[ix] France, Matthew, 809. “The fault of the tenants in withholding the due produce (and in the violence perpetrated on the slaves) is massively compounded by their decision to murder the owner’s son and so to attempt to take over the property. At this point the story has moved away from everyday reality…and…apparently invaded the story line: the murder of the son represents the forthcoming execution of Jesus.”

[x] France, Matthew, 812. v.33 “Israel’s Failure to produce the fruit God required in Isaiah’s day is now being repeated, but on a more disastrous level, as the parable will go on to explain.”

[xi] France, Matthew, 817. “Israel, they have assumed, is where God rules, but they have rejected his will and so will find themselves outside his domain, while he will rule over a reconstituted ‘Israel’ which acknowledges his sovereignty.”

[xii] France, Matthew, 811. “In that case the psalm quotation adds an element which is missing from the story: if the same stone which is rejected will become the cornerstone, then the son who is rejected may also be expected to be vindicated and to replace the present leadership.”

[xiii] France, Matthew, 811. “There is thus inherent in this parable with its appended psalm quotation a bold Christology of rejection and vindication, of death and resurrection, and it is focused in the parable character of the owner’s son.”

[xiv] Case-Winters, Matthew, 255. “There is much more reason to believe Matthew is associating Israel with the vineyard itself…It is a change in the leaders that is needed; replacing the unfaithful with faithful leaders. The landowner in the parable seeks more obedient sons and better tenant for the care of his beloved vineyard. He does not go seeking a new vineyard.”

[xv] France, Matthew, 808. “This last is the most significant of his adaptions: the mention of another ‘nation’ to replace ‘you’ in the tenancy of the vineyard takes us to the heart of the issue of the true Israel which underlies this whole section of the gospel, and in conjunction with the other two parables in the group it enables the reader to reach a more far-reaching understanding of what the vineyard parable implies than is possible from Mark and Luke when they record it alone.”

[xvi] France, Matthew, 811. “The addition of this quotation thus points us beyond the death of Jesus to his resurrection, which is the amazing thing which the Lord will do. In that case the new ‘nation’ of v. 43 may be understood as the people who follow the risen Jesu, just as the ‘something greater than the temple” in 12:6 appears to point beyond Jesus himself to a whole new regime focused in him.”

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Exposed and Naked: We are Guilty

Luke 18:13d: “‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’”

Introduction

Help, I have done it again
I have been here many times before
Hurt myself again today
And the worst part is
there’s no one else to blame.
Be my friend, hold me
Wrap me up, unfold me
I am small and needy
Warm me up and breathe me[i]

We are not in control; this bothers us. Further, we are guilty; and we detest it. To be out of control is one thing, but to be guilty, too? Repugnant. Why is it repugnant? Because we like to—nay—need to see ourselves as good and irreproachable. Anything falling short of that is inadmissible. Our person and being, our existence and identity is formed and conditioned on being right and good. Our ideologies must be right so we can see ourselves as good; our actions must be good because we are right. Anything that challenges this association collapses the fragile worlds we’ve built around us where we are king and queen, self-enthroned monarch. We’ve conflated our existence with our actions and thoughts; we are what we do, we are what we think, we are what we say. Thus, admitting we are out of control or, worse, we are guilty is an existential problem. So, we must avoid that confession at all costs.

I wish I had better words. I don’t. I know we’d like to blame something else or someone else for being out of control and guilty. The sheer terror we feel in confessing being out of control and our guilt makes us eager to displace this repugnant feeling somewhere else; someone else is toxic, someone else is the problem, that group over there, that generation above us or that generation below us. It can’t be us ever because that will undo us, unravel us into nothing. Sadly, the very bad news is that we have no one to blame but ourselves. We’ve done this. We’re the issue. Hi, it’s us, we’re the problem. In our inability to be honest—really, truly, terrifyingly honest—we cause problems for ourselves, for others, and for the world. We are out of control, and we are guilty. We are undone; this makes us ruthless.

Ouch, I have lost myself again
Lost myself and I am nowhere to be found
Yeah, I think that I might break
Lost myself again and I feel unsafe
Be my friend, hold me
Wrap me up, unfold me
I am small and needy
Warm me up and breathe me[ii]

We’ll do anything but confess that we are out of control and guilty. Think of our tendency to resist offering someone a true apology when our actions have negatively impacted them. Oh, I was just joking, why are you so serious…Oh, I didn’t mean it… If you hadn’t _____, then I wouldn’t have____, I’m sorry you feel that way…. Or we let ourselves off the hook completely by blaming supernatural forces, The Devil made me do it… We will do whatever it takes to avoid the humiliation of being wrong. Because if we are wrong, then we must be bad, too.

Look at our national situation. We would rather spin tales and myths than admit we backed the wrong horse. We would rather sacrifice our dignity on the altar of Molech than walk back an ideology that is clearly causing not only pain and suffering, but death. We’d rather keep straining forward and pouring valuable resources—specifically other human beings—into systems that are visibly broken and destructive to all existence on earth than embrace deconstruction and Demythology of the self and start anew. We’d rather cut off friends and family (who have loved us) to reinforce our own chosen narratives defending violent people who don’t even care for us a little bit. We would rather lose ourselves to our fear and anger than make “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”[iii] We’d rather shrug and keep enduring chaos and tumult than confront anyone especially ourselves and our captivity and complicity in all this death and destruction around us. We’d rather die than admit defeat. We’d rather kill than declare our guilt.

Isaiah 53:1-9

He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account.
Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people.
They made his grave with the wicked
and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Using the voice of one of the Isaiahs, God brings us to trial, and we are found guilty. God sent God’s self in God’s son, Jesus Christ, and this one is deemed, by us, unattractive to our sensibilities, unworthy of our care and consideration, and only qualified for our repulsion.[iv],[v] Humanity, hook line and sinker, rejected this one who was of God and who was truly good; and not simply a spiritual rejection, but a physical one, handing him over to painful suffering[vi] and death.[vii] Rather than strip ourselves of our clothing, we stripped him; rather than bear the pain of reproach, we reproached him; rather than endure the discomfort of being guilty, we made him the guilty one and sentenced him to death. We are ruthless when threatened with guilt

What was he guilty of? Exposing us…to the core. Jesus exposed our inability to judge between good and evil correctly. The very thing we craved back in Genesis 3, to discern and judge good and evil, comes back to haunt us and we are exposed in our failure. We sent an innocent man, one who upheld the law every minute of every day, to die the death of one who broke the law while releasing the one who did (literally) break the law: Barabas. But not just Barabas; we also released ourselves. In exposing our inability to judge between good and evil, Jesus exposed our guilt, so we condemned him as the guilty one to let ourselves off the hook.[viii] As Luther writes, “His suffering was nothing else than our sin.”[ix] Jesus exposed not only that we did not understand the law but that we also broke it by forcing it to do what it wasn’t intended to do: condemn the innocent and acquit the guilty.[x] In this way we are the ones who caused Jesus to suffer and to be bruised.[xi] But it isn’t only his life and work that exposed us; his death also exposes us. His agony on the cross becomes our agony.[xii] We are exposed, we are naked, we are guilty, and our ruthlessness bears its teeth. Crucify him!

Isaiah’s prophetic prayer highlights that whether we know it or not, whether we want to admit it or not, we are in agony and are guilty. We are guilty because we believe the mythology that we are in control, because we refuse our creaturely status, because we would rather be ruthless than merciful, we’d rather be right than risk even being a little bit wrong. Thus, this agony is not the product of divine chastisement; it’s the product of our own hands.[xiii] We are caught up in the muck and mire of the tension between being held captive and being complicit. Isaiah says, all have gone astray, we have all turned to our own way. Each of us is called to account for our complicit and captive actions against God’s mission of the revolution of divine life, love, and liberation in the world.

Conclusion

We are exposed naked and we are not in control; [xiv] we are fragile; [xv] we are unsafe;[xvi] we are hurt;[xvii] we are lost;[xviii] and we are guilty; we are stuck and captive, in need of intervention.

However, we’d rather kill than let someone else help us out of our own ideological and mythological quicksand.

Rather than let Christ’s voice call us, Christ’s actions challenge us, Christ’s presence change us, we clamored for Jesus’s death, and we got it. Because we hate being exposed and being guilty, hate being naked and fragile, hate having to be wrong, confessing our being lost and unsafe; the judgment of God is surely upon us. Today, in this story, we are reminded that Jesus bore our iniquity…because he bore our very, very bad judgment informed by the doctrines and dogmas of the kingdom of humanity and not the kingdom of God. The weight of that judgment, as we watch and witness the death of God by our hand, renders us to our own death. Today, our incarceration to our own comfort, to what makes our own selves feel safe, our hardheartedness and stiff-neckedness comes to a cataclysmic head-on collision with God; none of us survive.

Today, we get what we want, we get to let ourselves off the hook and continue down deadly paths of ignorance and denial; by our own hands we realize and affirm our captivity to our ruthless, hopeless, helpless, lifeless, and groundless self-centeredness while we parade about as God proud of ourselves as the world burns down around us. Today, we are dead where we are as we were, stuck in ourselves, curved all the way in. Because, today, we killed God.

[i] Sia,”Breathe Me,” verse 1 and chorus.

[ii] Sia,”Breathe Me,” verse 2 and chorus.

[iii] Step 4 of AA’s 12 Steps

[iv] LW 17:220, “‘There was nothing to attract us, nothing that we might care for. Everything about Him was repulsive.’ See how the prophet toils as he describes His contemptible appearance. It is as if he were saying, ‘The people treated Him in a most horrible way.’”

[v] LW 17:220, “There was a revulsion of seeing.”

[vi] LW 17:220 “He is a man wounded and beaten…”

[vii] LW 17:220, “rejected by men” “…‘one for whom there is no concern whatever, one from whom all turn away.’ This is not an easy suffering. These words cannot be understood as referring to the glory of the Kingdom, nor do they speak of a simple and spiritual suffering. They speak rather of a physical, open, and extremely shameful suffering.”

[viii] LW 17:221, “It was not for Himself and His own sins, but for our sins and griefs. He bore what we should have suffered.”

[ix] LW 17:221

[x] LW 17:221, “The law is that everybody dies for his own sins. Natural reason, and divine as well, argues that everybody must bear his own sin. Yet He is struck down contrary to all law and custom. Hence reason infers that he was smitten by God for His own sake. Therefore the prophet leads us o earnestly beyond all righteousness and our rational capacity and confronts us with the suffering of Christ io impress upon us that all that Christ has is mine.”

[xi] Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah: A Commentary, The Old Testament Library (Louisville: WJK, 2001), 414. “…the confessing community bears testimony to what it has seen and now understands. It was for ‘our sins’ he was tortured; it was for ‘our iniquities’ he was bruised.”

[xii] Heschel, Prophets, 149. “Deliverance, redemption, is what the lord has in store or Irael, and through Israel for all men. Her suffering and agony are the birth-pangs of salvation which, the prophet proclaims, is about to unfold. In answer to the prophet’s servant invocation (51:9), the Lord is about to bare His arm or His might before the eyes of al the nations.”

[xiii] Abraham Heschel The Prophets (New York: JPS, 1962), 151. “Suffering as chastisement is man’s own responsibility; suffering as redemption is God’s responsibility. It was he Who had chosen Israel as his servant; it was He Who had placed upon Israel the task of suffering for others. The meaning of her agony was shifted from the sphere of man to the sphere of God, from the moment to eternity.”

[xiv] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/02/18/exposed-and-naked-we-are-not-in-control/

[xv] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/02/22/exposed-and-naked-we-are-fragile/

[xvi] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/03/08/exposed-and-naked-we-are-unsafe/

[xvii] https://laurenrelarkin.com/2026/03/22/exposed-and-naked-we-are-hurt/

[xviii] https://laurenrelarkin.com/?p=7127

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Faith Fuels Audacity (sermon for St. Luke’s)

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

When I was first Christian, I had this (mis)understanding that faith would be this thing that added flavor to my regular day in and day out, that I’d be even more fine with life (whatever it was before I had faith). Fatih returned me to my life and just made me more easy going about it all. It was embedded in the evangelical culture that surrounded me, texts, discussions with peers over coffee, and littered throughout the youth material I was exposed to while helping to lead youth group. Faith wasn’t about changing anything around me, it was about changing my attitude and posture towards the things around me. Essentially, “having faith” was synonymous with “actively choosing” to be always happy even when things turned toward not-so-happy. I had to be always happy and always clappy. To be anything short was a lack of faith. Faith had nothing to do with activity of justice in the world.

But that’s a very wrong idea of faith. It’s wrong for wo reasons: 1. faith is dynamic and not static; and 2. Faith has nothing to do with choice but with trust that seems to be born from the void. In no way, shape, or form does faith return you to the status quo in which it encountered you. Faith isn’t an affirmation of your current experiences. To have faith means to encounter God and to encounter God necessarily means to be moved from something old and dead into something new and alive. And this faith isn’t something we do but something that is done to us; thus, when we encounter God and hear our names called by this God in God’s incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, faith comes to us from the outside and finds home in our hearts and minds by the power of the Holy Spirit, much like mercy, grace, and forgiveness do.

This is the point of Lent (or one of the points of Lent). Lent is a moment in liturgical time that asks us to come to the end of ourselves and find ourselves flung upon God and God’s mercy and grace. Lent, week by week, pries one finger at a time off the rope we are clinging to justify ourselves and make ourselves important in our own eyes (and the eyes of others) until the couple of fingers that are left cannot hold our weight, and we are forced to let go and fall into the void we are terrified to fall into. But in that darkness lives not a leviathan eager to consume us, but God ready to catch us and consecrate us into a new life on new ground participating in the mission of God by faith in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Genesis 12:1-4a

“The Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’”

Chapter 12 in Genesis follows a colorful series of events: A loving God’s creation of everything from nothing, from the biggest to the smallest and everything in between (Gen 1), the establishment that community—with all of its similarities and diversities—is the best representation of God’s being in the world (Gen 2), fierce cherubim and seraphim blocking off all access and reentrance to the Garden of Eden after the rather fateful “applegate” and subsequent curses (Gen 3), the first murder (Gen 4), various human civilizations being established (Gen 5), the appearance of the Nehphilim (the byproduct of the Sons of God knowing the Daughters of Humanity) (Gen 6:1-6), a massive and destructive flood (Gen 6:7-8:22), a rainbow of divine promise (Gen 9), and the Tower of Babel (Gen 11). It’s here, at this point in the story, where God (once again) begins anew, moving from a general approach to a specific approach: God will call one person, not for any other reason than God’s love for the whole world.[ii] Promise eclipses condemnation; salvation triumphs over judgment.[iii]

God’s promises and blessing to Abram suggests a reversal of the curses uttered just chapters earlier.[iv] These blessings and promises highlight that Abram has done nothing to receive them; they come as a “bolt from the blue.”[v] The idea that God cannot be with God’s beloved as a result of the fall back in Genesis 3 is rendered myth. God calls Abram and blesses him; where Adam, Eve, and the serpent leave behind paradise, Abram is invited into it: paradise is union with God. Herein is the foundation for the claim that the curses are being reversed: by God’s love, Abram will be a great nation (many children, one of whom will be the Messiah, the promised child of Genesis 3) and this nation will be a blessing to the rest of the world.[vi],[vii]

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him.

In this moment of hearing the divine summons, Abram goes from a childless old man to the parent of many; here Abram becomes a new person, a new being by the Word of God summoning him to God’s self and thus into new life.[viii] And not a new self for his own sake. In hearing of the divine summons, Abram is ushered into a new life for others.[ix] This other-orientated characteristic of his new life will become part of his new identity in God and with God as he becomes a conduit for God to bless other nations.[x] And in our context, the overflow of blessing and promise has already started: as Abram responds to God and finds his new life in God, Lot goes with him into this new thing.[xi]

Abram’s encounter with God in the event of faith sent him on the way; it moved him from his old life defined by his old patterns and actions into a new life defined by new patterns and actions. God’s promise and good word called him out of and moved him from the ways of the kingdom of humanity into new life defined by the reign of God.[xii] Through no work of his own or deservedness, Abram is called out of death into life, [xiii] and receives all righteousness by faith[xiv] alone (sola fides).[xv] The bareness that once defined Abram’s (and Sarai’s) life—a bareness that symbolized not only a lack of promise[xvi] but a lack of lively living and the absence of hope—is now replaced with faith clinging to the promise of God resulting in the active fruit born of faith trusting in God’s action toward Abram and Sarai.[xvii] And it is this faith on the move with the God who seeks after the beloved that will provoke God’s glory to be hallowed by the neighbor who is so loved[xviii] by those who, like Abram and Sarai, live and act by faith and participate in God’s mission of justice[xix] and the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation.[xx]

Conclusion

Faith is not a return to or affirmation of what was; it can’t be because it is born of God and not of humanity. (Humanity prefers the known and old; God is always on the move, doing something new.) When we acquire faith, we acquire all of God and that means (definitively) we acquire something new, something different, something (even at times) strange from what we have known. Faith is not our own work that brings us up into the light where everything becomes clear and discernable. Faith is the work of God summoning us down into the dark, into the void, into the depths of trust. Faith renders us fools and stumbling blocks to those who dominate by the wisdom and reason of the kingdom of humanity. Faith beckons us (always) into something new…not a new God but a new encounter with God that moves us and provokes us to new life that is bedazzled by the new fruit of the reign of God. Faith moved Abram into being a blessing to the nations (and not only for his own). Thus, while the one who receives faith is passive in the reception, they do not stay passive; they become active because faith does not know stillness and idleness and is eager to work itself out in loving deeds for the neighbor’s well-being (being blessed) and to the glory of God (God being blessed by the neighbor).

To have faith isn’t always about having confidence and certainty about events and situations in the world. Even if by faith we can be certain of God’s disposition and posture toward us, we cannot be certain that things of the world will go our way or the way we want. (And often they won’t.) What faith does do, though, is give us the daring energy and praxis in the world to call forth and pull into the kingdom of humanity the reign of God—whenever and wherever it is needed and demanded. It fuels the audacity of our participation in the mission of God which is the bringing forth of divine justice in the world. Faith is the bedrock and foundation of our active pursuit of love where there is indifference, of liberation where there is captivity, and life where there is death.

(Portions of the middle were edited versions from this sermon: https://laurenrelarkin.com/2023/03/05/nothing-seems-to-satisfy-craving-identity/)

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Levenson, “Genesis” The Jewish Study Bible: Featuring the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation. Eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler. Oxford: OUP, 2004. 30.    “The universalism that marked Gen. chs 1-11 having now failed, the Lord begins anew, singling out one Mesopotamian—in no way distinguished from his peers as yet—and promising to make of him a great nation, not numbered in the seventy nations of ch. 10.”

[iii] Miguel A. De La Torre, Genesis, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible. Eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2011), 142. “This biblical passage….bridges the story of human rebellion with the story of human promise, the story of God’s judgment with the story of God’s salvation.”

[iv] Levenson, “Genesis” The Jewish Study Bible, 30. “What the Lord promises Abram (his name is changed to ‘Abraham’ only in ch 17)—land, numerous offspring, and blessing—constitutes to an extent a reversal of some of the curses on Adam and Eve—exile, pain in childbirth, and uncooperative soil…”

[v] Levenson, “Genesis” The Jewish Study Bible, 30. “The twin themes of land and progeny inform the rest of the Torah. In Gen. ch 12, these extraordinary promises come like a bolt from the blue, an act of God’s grace alone; no indication has been given as to why or even whether Abram merits them.”

[vi] LW 2 (Luther’s Works Vol 2 “Lectures on Genesis Chapters 6-14” Ed. Jaroslav Pelikan. Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1960.) 246. “…Moses reminds his people that they were chosen by the Lord, not because they had deserved this but because the Lord had loved them and was keeping the oath that had been given to their fathers? In this passage we see that the beginnings are in agreement with the end. For what is Abraham except a man who nears God when He calls him, that is, a merely passive person and merely the material on which divine mercy acts?”

[vii] De la Torre, Genesis, 145-146. “Because Abram obeys, God promises to make him (not Sarai) a great nation, blessing him and making his name so famous that future generations will use it as a blessing. Unlike those who solely rely on their own abilities, set out to make a name for themselves (Babel), and fail (1:4), Abram discovers that obedience to God is what makes on famous.”

[viii] LW 2 247. “Thus, as I said above, Abraham is merely the material that the Divine Majesty seizes through the Word and forms into a new human being and into a patriarch, And so this rule is universally true, that of himself man is nothing, is capable of nothing, and has nothing except sin, death, and damnation; but through His mercy Almighty God brings it about that he is something and is freed from sin, death…”

[ix] De La Torre, Genesis, 142. “Even though God chooses one people, the promise made to God’s chosen exhibits caring for all of humanity, for they too can partake in the blessing. The God of Abram is not limited to this one family, this one clan, this one tribe. Abram’s God is the God through which all nations can find a blessing because Abram’s God is the God of all nations.”

[x] LW 2 258-259. “Here is presented the amazing promise that this people will not only be increased among itself and be blessed materially and spiritually, but that the blessing will also overflow to the neighboring nations and peoples. This happened to the Pharaoh in Egypt.”

[xi] LW 2 275. “Behold God’s marvelous counsel! The promise pertained to Abraham only, not to Lot. Nevertheless, God attaches Lot, like a proselyte, to Abraham as his companion and moves his heart so that he wants to go into exile with his uncle rather than remain in his native country among the idolaters. This is because the promise given to Abraham be blessed with his descendants, it him others would become partakers of the blessing, even though the promise did not properly pertain to them.”

[xii] De la Torre, Genesis, 145. “The call of Abram becomes the call of all who choose to follow God. All who are to follow the Divine must leave their old life behind and follow toward a new creation.”

[xiii] De la Torre, Genesis, 145. “Abram’s hand was on the plow, and he did not look back. He obeyed and left, breaking with tradition and the past. There were no preconditions before God called or chose Abram. Unlike Noah, we are not told that God chose Abram because he was righteous or just. Indeed, as Abram’s life unfolds, we discover a very flawed man. Nevertheless, God chose him.”

[xiv] LW 2:267. “Therefore faith is an active, difficult, and powerful thing. If we want to consider what it really is, it is something that is done to us rather than something that we do; for it changes the heart and mind. And while reason is wont to concern itself with the things that are present, faith apprehends the things that are not present and, contrary to reason, regards them as being present.”

[xv] De la Torre, Genesis, 145. “Abram did not need to first change his life or become more acceptable to God before being chosen. All he did to make himself worthy of God was obey. Abram’s obedience becomes the foundation of faith.”

[xvi] De la Torre, Genesis, 143. Ref. Walter Brueggemann “…[Sarai’s] barrenness symbolizes a people without promise.”

[xvii] De la Torre, Genesis, 143-144. “As Bruegemann states, barrenness is the way of human history, an effective metaphor for hopelessness; but in the arena of barrenness, God’s life-giving action takes place.”

[xviii] De la Torre, Genesis, 146. “God’s purpose for the world will rely on this one man and his descendants, a difficult task since he and Sarai are advanced in years and she is barren. Any hope of fulfilling the promise will only be attributed to a miracle from God.”

[xix] De la Torre, Genesis, 147. “If God is a God of justice, then all who are committed to justice are a blessing to the one who God chooses to exemplify justice, even if at times they fall short. Only when we practice justice can we call Abram our spiritual father and be grafted onto the vine.”

[xx] De la Torre, Genesis, 146-147. “We bless Abram, and God, by doing what God requires of us. And what does God requires or us? He requires us to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God (Mic. 6:8). Justice cannot take place on an individual basis. Community is needed if justice is to occur, if loving mercy is to happen. Hence the call of God for Abram to be an example of God’s justice requires the establishment of a people, of a nation; thus Abram must have descendants.”

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