Tag: Abram

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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“Nothing Seems to Satisfy”: Craving Identity

(for part 1 click here, for part 2 click here)

Psalm 121:1-3 I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come? My help comes from God, the maker of heaven and earth. God will not let your foot be moved and God who watches over you will not fall asleep.

Introduction

Do you know who you are? I know it sounds like a banal question, and maybe even moot. Of course, we all know who we are. I know that I am me, and I know that you are you. I know this because I am not you and you are not me. Thus, I’m sure that you know that you are you and not me because you are not me. If you were me and I were you, then we’d both be able to replace each other. And that means we would not be unique as individuals.

So, maybe I should rephrase the question: who are you as an individual apart from your relational roles and deeds? In terms of defining ourselves we default to our relationships, to our job, to our hobbies, to our interests and the activities therein to define ourselves not only to other people (to whom we feel a need always to be prepared to give justification for our existence) but also to ourselves. We cling to these things not only to define ourselves, but to validate ourselves and our existence. As we live in the wake of sola suspicio of our post-modern, post-enlightenment, even post-Theistic mindset, we are in a personal desperate way as we fight for something, anything to cling to affirm our uniqueness, validate our existence, and secure our identity.[1] But all of it is drift wood in this sea of tumult, chaos, and instability. There’s nothing secure enough in the material realm to cling that will give us a sense of self, an identity, a uniqueness and validation that won’t eventually become dust. Not even our own bodies offer us a stable constant, do they not betray us with time?

My identity is slipping through my fingers and nothing seems to satisfy.

Genesis 12:1-4a

God said to Abram, “…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.”

We pick up again in the book of Genesis. Here, Moses, our faithful story-teller according to tradition, is telling us about the call of Abram. Chapter 12 in Genesis follows a colorful series of events: 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.[2]

God’s promises and blessing to Abram suggests a reversal of the curses uttered just chapters earlier.[3] These blessings and promises highlight that Abram has done nothing to receive them; they come as a “bolt from the blue.”[4] The idea that God cannot be with God’s beloved as a result of the fall back in Genesis 3 is rendered myth in this moment. 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.[5]

In this moment of hearing the divine summons, Abram, in a moment, 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.[6] And not a new self for his own sake, but in this hearing of the divine summons, Abram is ushered into a new life for others. 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.[7] 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.[8]

Conclusion

We look in many places to anchor and secure our identity. We long for something permanent that’s always there to tell us who and what we are. Some of us spend our lives reaching for accolades to define ourselves, some of us invest all we have in our relationships striving to be good by our deeds, some of us spend all our time toiling away at some job, some of us are dead set that our “passions” or our “hobbies” are our identity. These things aren’t inherently bad; it’s good to have things to do and enjoy, it is wonderful to walk through life with other people, serving and sharing with them. But, when they’re forced to bear the burden of the weight of ourselves, our personhood, and our identity, they are found to be phantoms and illusions. They are merely a papier mache covering over fear and anxiety that, at the end of it all, we’re truly replaceable, unnecessary, forgettable.

We tell ourselves lies that we must be x or y or even z to be valued, forgetting all the while that we’re valuable because we are. full stop. These things that we reach for and demand they give us something on which to hang our identity will leave us still afraid and unstable because they can never give us what we so deeply desire: irreplaceability. These things are too fleeting and fickle to give us our uniqueness and irreplaceability—here one day and gone the next. We cannot attain our identity and irreplaceability by ourselves leaning on our deeds.

So, if nothing seems to satisfy, how do we navigate all this insecurity of identity, this threat of the loss of self? We must look beyond ourselves and our deeds. We must be awakened to our deep-seated need and hunger for irreplaceable identity.

The irreplaceable individual is the one in whom another takes interest. Would you believe me if I told you that I take an interest in you? that you are—to me—irreplaceable? But there is also something bigger, securing for us that long desired irreplaceability, anchoring the thing that makes us unique, and to whom our existence matters day in and day out. God. Specifically, God brought close to us in Christ. This is why we come here every Sunday, to hear the age-old story of God calling Abram, to hear our own names in the place of Abrams, to hear our own summons, our own promises, our own being seen, known, and loved. We come here week after week to encounter divine love for us in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. We come here together and individually, to hear once again that God takes an interest in humanity and thus in us because in Christ, God shrugged off royalty to be as us, to identify as us, even unto death.

Beloved, God so loves you therefore you are irreplaceable, you are unique, you are of interest. You are loved and remembered by God; in you God takes hope. [9] In our hunger for irreplaceable identity, we hunger for God; in our hunger for God our identities are held, anchored to dependable substance because this story of God’s love for you never changes, it holds from one moment to the next, from one era to the next, not always in the same form but always with the same substance: divine love for the beloved.

In hearing the summons of God’s voice in the proclamation of divine love in Christ, God taking an interest in you and remembering you, calling you unto God’s self by the Spirit, you are called to walk with others. For this summons of God’s voice of love will always overflow through us to our neighbors, with whom we share blessings and promises of God’s love, interest, and remembrance. It’s here where we’re brought further out of ourselves and our desperate attempts to secure our own identities by our deeds by ourselves. It is here, in the midst of the divine summons and love where I find identity with you, because you are the beloved of God and God is where you are; God is where we are in the hunger.

[1] Dorothee Sölle, Christ the Representative, 26. “In the course of the expanding process of secularization, the metaphysical irreplaceability of the human soul was itself transposed into secular achievements or expressions of life by which the individual made himself irreplaceable. Man discovered himself as essentially one who accomplishes things, and this prospect of self-realization, self-accomplishment, self-expression in work, blotted out the earlier metaphysical horizon. Now for the first time, in the context of the modern discovery of the individual, it was a man’s work-labour performed, his perfected achievement-which merited the dignity and status given to the relation between producer and player in the earlier conception. Man no longer acquired his identity simply from his relationship to God, which had once in itself provided an adequate explanation of the irreplaceability of the individual as a soul. He now achieves his own identity; he makes himself irreplaceable.”

[2] 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.”

[3] 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…”

[4] 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.”

[5] 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?”

[6] 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…”

[7] 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.”

[8] 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.”

[9] Sölle, Representative, 46. “Whenever man’s horizon is bounded by his contribution, substitution also comes into play. A different basis must be found for man’s irreplaceability. I am irreplaceable only for those who love me. Only for them does a surplus remain, over and above whatever I perform at any given time: something not expressed in my action. This margin, this surplus of the person over and above all he performs, alone gives life to human relationships. To love means, in this sense, to count on this surplus, on what has not yet been expressed, not yet appeared. The invisible and unexpressed surplus is a reminder that I have not yet reached my full stature. Identity continues to be preserved in the experience of difference; in the consciousness of non-identity. But this consciousness knows that it cannot expunge itself. I do not become an irreplaceable person by my own effort, but only as I continue to be dependent on others.

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