Hoping against Hope

The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost

A sermon based on Romans 4:13-25 and Matthew 9-13, 18-26

In the name of Jesus; amen.

Now 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.’

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. (Genesis 12:1-5a)

Some 4,000 years ago a family of Semitic nomads left Ur of the Chaldeans, perhaps in southeastern Iraq, and settled in Haran, Turkey, on the Syrian border. In Haran the father Terah died and his son Abram received a divine command to continue his journey: "Leave your country, your people, and your father's household and go to the land I will show you."

It was a leap of faith. Abram left behind a familiar place and packing up his family and all those who he was responsible for set off into an unknown. He left behind the comfort of the familiar and opened his arms up in an embrace of the unknown and strange.

And he did it at 75 years of age! It might be hard for some of you to believe that I am set in my ways, but at 38 I really am not a fan of change. Sure I like new things, but once I get into a habit I’m happy and content with I don’t really see a need to do something else.

For example, these past few days I have been at the New England Synod Assembly in Worcester, MA. For the last 3 years I have gone to the same restaurant for either dinner the first night or lunch the second day and ordered the same exact thing because I like it and I don’t really see a need to try anything else that I might not like. And now that I am used to going to Worcester, MA and I know my way around the convention center and the hotel I found out that we are going to another place next year and I really don’t wanna.

In the book of Hebrews it says: "By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the Promised Land like a stranger in a foreign country" (Hebrews 11:8–9).

There is something counter-intuitive about what Abram/Abraham did. It’s worse than planning a trip to a place you’ve never been and not first looking up directions on Yahoo.com or going to AAA for a map or even knowing if you will have a place to stay when you get there.

But Abram does even more than simply allow God to make his travel plans for him. Abram lets God change his name and listens to and believes a promise that God makes saying: ‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then God said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ 6And Abram believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

Abram and his wife Sarai are 70-some years old when they make their move to the land that God promises. They are even older when God promises to make them the parents of un-countable descendants. In fact they are so far beyond the point when they can have children of their own that Paul later writes in his letter to the Romans that when Abraham considered his own body and the barrenness of Sarah’s womb he decided he might as well be dead.

This kind of faith is a journey all its own; a journey into an unknown, impractical, and counter-intuitive land where there is no other road map except hope.

Author and theologian, Daniel B. Clendenin says this of Abraham’s journey: “In his journey into the unknown, Abraham embraced his ignorance. He relinquished control. He chose to trust God's promise to bless him in a new and strange place. But this required a second choice on his part. He had to leave not only his geographic place. He had to leave behind his narrow-minded, small-minded, parochial vision, the tendency in all of us to exclude the strange and the stranger. God gave a staggering promise to this obscure, Semitic nomad: in response to his obedience God would make him the heir of all the world.”

But Abraham isn’t the only one to take a journey like this one. Approximately 2,000 years later a tax-collector named Matthew listened to and followed a man named Jesus on a journey of wonder and resurrection. A woman, outcast from society because of a horrible infirmity, journeyed from a place of illness and ritual impurity to wholeness and reunification with her community because she journeyed in faith with the tips of her fingers. And the grieving father of a dead daughter went on a journey of hoping against hope and once again held his child, alive and smiling in his arms.

We are invited on a similar journey on the nonsensical path of faith where hoping beyond hope is not just our map, but a righteous act. It is not an easy path because it takes us into an unknown world where we risk everything, but where we are reminded that there is nothing that God cannot do if we are willing to trust in the promises made to us.

Indeed God gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist all for our sake. This gift of grace given to us is a gift of purpose meant to take us out into the world to experience the wonder of God’s love. It doesn’t always make sense and certainly there are times when belief in God is counter-intuitive. But the gift of grace through faith is meant to justify us and make us right with God.

Abram went off into an unknown world and trusted that God would create new life out of his old life and God did. Matthew dared to follow Jesus and became a disciple. A sick woman believed that she could claim health in the tips of her fingers and a grieving father, hoped that his dead daughter would come to life again.

Imagine what God will do for you. Amen.