Genesis 15:1-6
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Abraham had a problem. Abraham was having a crisis of faith. We don’t know much about how Sarah was feeling, since the Bible was written by men and generally ignores the female point of view, but it’s a safe bet that, in this case at least, Sarah was feeling pretty much the same as Abraham. The problem was a fairly straightforward one for people in their day and time—they could not have children. In a culture in which children were a man’s pride and posterity and the measure of a woman’s worth, being childless felt like a curse, and was often interpreted as one. But that was their problem; it wasn’t the cause of their crisis of faith. That had a deeper cause, one that went beyond mere biology. Their faith crisis had its roots years earlier, when Abraham and Sarah obeyed a strange calling from God to leave their homeland and strike out for an unknown destination, a new land that they had never seen, perhaps never even heard about. That was back in Genesis 12, you know, the famous passage where God says, “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…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Well, being people of faith, Abraham and Sarah did set out and did leave the only land they had ever known, and went to a strange place, but once there, they couldn’t stay there. First there was a famine, and they had to go on down to Egypt…way on down in Egypt land…and they stayed there awhile, and finally made their way back to that place that God had called the “promised land,” the land of Canaan. And then, there were battles to be fought, and Abraham soldiered valiantly to victory, and performed well as a faithful servant of Yahweh. And that’s how we get to the crisis of faith.
When the curtain opens on the scene in Genesis 15, God comes to Abraham (who actually was still called Abram at this point), and essentially thanks him for all his faithful service, and promises that his reward will be very great. But Abraham, the man who had left his homeland for God, been driven down into Egypt, still believing in God, fought battles for God, and all along played the role of faithful believer, had had enough. He had gone on faith all those years, but he was getting old, and he was getting tired, and as far as he was concerned, the only thing that mattered most, God’s promise of posterity, of an heir, had not materialized. The mind of this great man of faith had become clouded by Doubt, which opened the door to Resentment, and pretty soon a good case of Bitterness had set in, and overshadowing it all, that gnawing sense of Fear that he could not shake—fear of dying childless, barren, with the promises of God rendered Null and Void.
Now let’s hit the pause button for just a second, because by now some of you may be feeling bit offended by all this talk of barrenness and childlessness. And rightfully so. Fortunately, we no longer measure the meaning of life or the worth of a couple by whether or not they produce children…at least most of us don’t—that is something that is passing out of our cultural baggage, and most of us bid it good riddance. Not that there is anything wrong with desiring to have children and using all the resources at our disposal to bring children into our lives…if such is our choice. Children are one of life’s great blessings. But the idea that our lives are worthless or doomed unless we produce children is becoming archaic. So it takes a bit of a leap of imagination to reach back into Abraham and Sarah’s mind and see the situation as they did, but it’s a leap worth taking, if it can open up this text for us and deliver some kernels of wisdom about the meaning of faith.
It may help if you think about the idea of barrenness as a metaphor—barrenness can refer to any state of life in which we feel deadened inside, bereft of joy or blessing, uncreative, unproductive, like all the juice has been drained out of our lives. Have you ever felt that way? I know I have. Some people experience this as depression, others have called it “the dark night of the soul,” but such feelings can often evoke a crisis of faith. We thought God had promised something better for us; we thought God had promised us abundant life. We thought that if we played by all the rules, and lived a good life, everything would unfold in the way it should, and not take us into detours and dead ends. But when the detours and dead ends come, and the promises we count on fail to materialize, we might feel like Abraham. We might experience a crisis of faith.
In the midst of this crisis of faith, God speaks. “Fear not!” God says. “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” According to Walter Brueggeman, this is a shattering, disorienting word, and it shakes Abram out of his lethargy, and into, it seems, anger. Abram protests, ‘O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless?” How dare God repeat a promise that has gone unfulfilled for so long? Is God playing with Abraham, like a cat teases a mouse? You can almost see Abraham stamping his feet—IT’S NOT FAIR! It’s not fair.
Well. Thus says Abraham in verse 2 of chapter 15 of Genesis. But our text from Hebrews today has an answer for Abraham. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” So begins one of the most eloquent passages of scripture in the New Testament, with the litany of the exemplars of faith who have preceded us, preparing the way for us, our spiritual heroes, who teach us the true meaning of faith. And who do we find right in the middle of this litany, but Abraham? There he is, cleaned up quite a bit from the petulant Abraham of Genesis 15:2. A hero of faith is this man Abraham, according to Hebrews—not the tired, bitter, disillusioned man we meet at the beginning of Genesis chapter 15. “By faith he received the power of procreation” we are told, “even though he was too old—and Sarah herself was barren—because he considered him faithful who had promised.” What happened?
What happened was something that can’t be explained, or quantified, or perhaps even understood, but only described. Only offered to us as a mystery that we can either accept or reject. What happened was that worn out old Abraham found it within his heart to take a mighty leap of faith—a leap that changed his life.
You see, the conversation between God and Abraham doesn’t end with Abraham’s protest. God speaks back. God repeats the promise and gives Abraham a sign. And here we have the climax of our passage from Genesis. “God brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
Now here’s the rub. As lovely as this story is, it doesn’t really explain how Abraham came to believe in God’s promise, this time, once again. What really happened in this encounter with God that moved Abraham from doubt to faith, from fear to confidence, from a closed mind to an open heart? It’s worth quoting biblical scholar Walter Brueggeman at some length:
The response of God to Abraham is not a fool-proof argument, like the brief of a lawyer….[The] sign, a glance at the heavens…proves nothing. How could it be that the multitude of stars is a promise of a son? We must not misunderstand [what] is at work here. It is not an argument, but a revelation. This is a vision, a disclosure that surprises old reality. We are struggling, as was Abraham, with the emergence of a certitude that is based not on human reasons but on a primal awareness that God is God. And that certitude is given in this dark moment to Abraham. He knows, and the knowing can only be credited to the work of God’s brooding care. The same God who gives the promise is the one who makes it believable….The new promise for his life is not an expectation of flesh and blood. Rather, he has come to rely on the promise speaker.”
Are you with me? What Brueggeman is talking about is what I am calling in today’s sermon, “Faith’s Leap” playing on Kierkegaard’s phrase, “the leap of faith.” One interpreter of Kierkegaard, D. Anthony Storm, has described the Kierkegaard’s understanding of the leap of faith in these terms: “This is not a blind leap as is often thought. Kierkegaard's concern was that faith is never easy or probable. Faith in God is an agonistic and often fearful struggle to cast one's entire person into relation to God.
There is no gradual accumulation of sensory data or rational proofs for God's existence or for the resurrection of Christ, etc. One performs a willed act of faith despite fear, doubt, and sin. The leap is not out of thoughtlessness, but out of volition. The leap…is not made by quantitative movements, stages, or changes….It cannot be mediated by proofs or reason. It is a sheer leap from doubt.
But enough of what scholars say. In the end, the mystery of faith, the absurd way in which we find our way out of the maze of doubt and fear-ridden angst and back into the arms of God is best rendered by the poets and the mystics. Because the leap of faith cannot be explained, but it can be experienced, and then shared. And so I want to share with you two poems, and two reflections on the poems. The first poem and the commentary on it that I want to share with you beautifully describes the essence of the faith journey. Because as we saw with Abraham, faith, ultimately, is a journey of the heart. Poet Miroslav Holub talks about the nature of the heart:
Officially the heart
is oblong, muscular,
and filled with longing.
But anyone who has painted the heart knows
That it is also spiked like a star
And sometimes bedraggled
Like a stray dog at night
And sometimes powerful
Like an archangel’s drum…
And in it is
Only a river,
A weir
And at most one little fish
By no means golden.
More like a grey
Jealous
Loach.
I stumbled upon this poem at a moment of great anxiety and uncertainty in my own personal life, in a time of wrenching transition, when I was trying to hold onto things that I needed to let go of, and afraid to launch out into my own unknown future. I found this poem while on a spiritual retreat, in a book by a Buddhist author named Paramananda. And I want to share with you Paramananda’s interpretation of this poem, which shook me to my core, because it spoke the truth about my own heart at that moment in time.
“When we start to look deeper into our own nature we are always confronted with paradox. At the very centre is not something grand and magnificent but something rather grey and guarded, something unknown and neglected. We think we know ourselves and others. We might feel that we have quite a sophisticated idea about the world…. But we have forgotten that there is this jealous grey loach. It is perhaps with the rediscovery of this little fish trapped as it is behind the spikes of a weir that a real moistening, a real coming into life, can begin. It might be that to be alive to ourselves we have to recognize this jealous little fish. Perhaps it is jealous because it feels the need to protect itself….Paradoxically, perhaps, this loach, this small, insignificant little fish with spikes around its mouth, corresponds to the bodhicitta, the great overflowing heart of a spiritual hero.”
Paramananda continues, “A weir is a kind of dam. Over the weir is the whole great river of life. This little grey fish has somehow to make it over the weir into that great stream of life, of being, of death. This is the work of the spiritual life and there is no map for this journey....for the poor little loach there is no map. It just has to take a chance and by a supreme act of imagination get over the weir into life. It is a kind of turning inside-out of what is most secret, most jealous, deepest within us—turning it out to face the world.”
What Paramananda, from the Buddhist perspective, calls a supreme act of imagination, I would call the leap of faith—because it not only requires a leap of imagination to visualize ourselves jumping over the weir that is blocking us from the great river of life, but it also, from the Christian perspective, is a leap of trust. We are able to leap over the weir because we trust that the One who created us in love, who redeemed us through the sacrificial grace of Christ, who sustains us through the ever-present Spirit, is there to meet us on the other side. And so I would like to close with one other poem, which is appropriately entitled, “Liminal,” because faith occurs in the liminal space between knowing and unknowing, between doubt and certainty, between the seen and the unseen, as the author of Hebrews tells us. Faith occurs at that moment when the little grey loach inside our heart gears itself up to make the leap of a lifetime over the dam that has been constricting its life for far too long. Faith is a journey fraught with uncertainty, leading to an unknown destination, and our only resources are love and hope and trust—trust in the promise maker, our Creator.
Faith is often described as a kind of rebirth, and so this poem draws on the imagery of birth.
Waiting in the birth canal
As if I have a choice
Knees splayed
Arms akimbo
As if my elbows could stop time.
Behind me,
The space I’ve outgrown
Oh so familiar and comforting
If I stayed now, it would smother.
Ahead of me,
A vast unknown
Full of brightness and color.
Clamoring voices
Waiting for me to arrive.
The intense possibility
That I could become
Anything I choose.
Try as I might,
I cannot defy creation.
My prayer is this:
May the hands that catch me
Be soft and strong
May the hands that catch me
Cradle me as I take my first deep breaths
May the hands that catch me
Brush away the tears I know I must weep
May the heart that catches me
Tremble with anticipation
As my head appears.
This poem, written by Elizabeth Kemper, pulsates with faith during a time of deep change—faith that as she moves from one phase of life into another, there are loving hands waiting to catch her. Such faith is not easy to come by. How many of us feel--when we are in the midst of great change and uncertainty, a passage from one phase of life to another, or in the ultimate transition, as we face our own mortality or the mortality of a loved one—how many of us feel certain that loving hands are waiting to catch us, or the one we love? Only a deep trust in a divine Presence that loves us into being can evoke this kind of faith. As I have recently been privileged to attend members of our own church who were dying, and to pray with them and their loved ones, I have been witness to this kind of awesome faith, a faith that knows how to lean into a “trustful letting go” of the soul into God’s hands, a faith that knows, with Julian of Norwich, against all reason, that “all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.”¡ My prayer for you today is that whatever is grey and guarded in your own life, whatever part of you is yearning for rebirth, will be able to lean into a trustful letting go, or to make the mighty leap you’ve been needing to make, knowing that all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well. Amen.
Benediction:
May the hands that catch you be soft and strong. May the hands that catch you cradle you with love. May the heart that catches you tremble with anticipation. May you know that as you go forth from this place, the God of life, the Christ of love, and the Spirit of hope awaits you, and that our God will lead you into a life of abundance and possibility that exceeds your wildest imagination. Amen.
¡ The phrase “trustful letting go” and the quote from Julian of Norwich comes from Jay McDaniel’s book, Living from the Center: Spirituality in an Age of Consumerism (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000), 121, 128.