August 12, 2001
Romans 4:18-25  ( RSV) ( KJV) ( NIV)

"When The Light Flickers"

Alice Pavey was still a teenager when her betrothed Sam Bridge, was killed while working for the RailroadCompany in England.  Distraught with sorrow, she announced that she would never marry anyone but a Bridge and furthermore,would now leave her native Nyleen Newtown section of London and move to Canada.

Move she did, in her late teens, never to see her parents or her six siblings again-ever.  Put yourselfinto her family’s position and your role as a parent.  I don’t know about you, but I would never tolerate such a drasticmove on the part of our children.

In any case, Alice arrived in Vancouver B.C. when what are now the main streets were trails where logs weredragged by animals.  She got a job as a maid and cook at a wealthy person’s home.  In due time, Alice met a man namedFred and shortly they were married.  Fred, you see, was the brother of Sam and so her vow never to marry anyone but a Bridgewas fulfilled- albeit half way around the world from both of his or her childhood homes.

To this union, eleven children were born one of whom was my Mother.  Alice and Fred were my maternalgrandparents and Alice, or Granny, as we called here lived as a widow in our home until her death at the age of 96.  Thelocal papers reported, correctly, that she had 69 grandchildren and 85 great grandchildren.  Grannydied just before her first great great grandchild was born.

That bit of family trivia seems to me to parallel the Biblical account of Abraham; not just the leaving ofhome, never to return, but the beginning of a large family tree.

God says to Abraham, go from your country, your family and your kin to another country, which I will showyou.  Abraham obeyed and went out traveling toward Egypt, not knowing where he was going to eventually settle.

That’s impressive enough, but God also said to Abraham, I will make you the Father of a great nation andGod said this even though the Biblical story says Abraham was 75 years old when he was asked to make the journey.  God saidto Abraham when he was 99, I will see that you and Sarah, your wife, conceive and have a son.  Abraham cannot contain himselfand laughs and says, this is crazy, can I father a child at the age of 100, can my wife have a child at then age of 90?

Isaac is born and God establishes the covenant made originally to Abraham with Isaac and the dynasty begins.

Please don’t get hung up on the details of this story: frankly, they are not important; age here, is agraphic way of illustrating God’s power.  This story’s point is that Abraham obeyed God.  God was honored and thusthe promises of God were made through Abraham.  Paul, I think, interprets it correctly when he tells the Romans, in the wordsfrom our text this morning;

“Abraham did not weaken his faith when he considered his own body,which was as good as dead because he was about a hundred years old or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver, concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith fully convinced that God was able to dowhat He had promised.  That is why his faith was reckoned to him asrighteousness.”

Now, that is a nice story and I might add a very important one but it is of little importance if we do notgrasp the meaning of the story to each of us.  Paul states its meaning; “But, thewords, it was reckoned to him were written not for his sake alone but for yours also.”

Paul here is referring to a saying that the Rabbi’s had, “what is written of Abraham is also written forall his children”   ( Wm. Barkley: Romans Commentary)

What this does is throw all of our tendencies to make this world understandable or even greater, to make Godunderstandable in human terms, out the window.  Our nice, little tidy definitions and desires to make a system that everyonecould figure out go KAPUT!

One of the realities of growing up is that while on the one hand we come to recognize that there isremarkable order in the physical dimension of life, there are other areas of our lives that do not submit to any dependable systemor neat design.

It’s a bit like the school child who came home from school and stated he was fed up with math.  Whenasked why, he stated, “it took me a long time to remember that three plus three equals six.  Now they tell me four plus twoequals six.”

Part of growing up is the realization that the unexplainable does happen.  People of deep andconsecrated faith DO get sick and some die from their illness.  Good people, devoted to the service of God DO get injured oreven killed in automobile accidents or other types of accidents.  Excellent Church goers, who truly believe, DO have theirmarriages fail or have to face the realities of bankruptcy.

Whenever tragedies of this nature come upon us, we find that the lamp of faith flickers.  Our tendencyis to want to believe, or at least hope that our faith will shield us from the tragedies that happen to many humans.

Listen to me carefully: your faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ will NOT protect you from the tragediesof life.  As a human being you will face the same possible difficulties as any other human, believer or not.  What yourfaith DOES do is provide you with the tools to deal with life’s unexplainable tragedies.

However, there are Christian believers and plenty of Christian Ministers, lots of them on TV who stand ontheir heads to make all of life meaningful to a person of faith.  Somebody dies after a stay in the hospital and they say it’sthe will of God.  Does this mean that Doctors were going against the will of God by trying to make the person well?  Ayouth is killed in a terrible accident and people say God called him home.  I don’t believe that for a second.  Thatis contrary to the nature of God.  The reality is the youth was killed by speeding or someone else who was reckless. Trying to explain life’s tragedies by religious superstition is little different than refusing to walk under an erected ladderor refusing to stay on the thirteenth floor of a hotel.

I like the way Cliff Schutjer of our Congregational Church in Mansfield Ohio puts this thought.  Hewrites, in a sermon in his book, “Tough Hope”; “The Bible is right up front about the ambiguities of life, about ourvulnerability and our constant exposure to the strange, the illogical, the disruptive, the bewildering and yes, the tragic. It never claims either, that it will show us how to make that go away or that it has a neat explanation for why such things happento us.”

In the Bible, we meet a God who is not all neat and explainable.  Our God gets mixed up in awfulsituations and gets involved with people no god ought to be with; hotheads, liars, cheats, philanderers, even somemurderers.  Our Bible describes this God and the involvement without a hint of explanation.

Schutjer sums it up by saying, “Anyone who can read this Bible of ours and come away thinking that he knowsGod’s system-knows just what God is likely to do next, or knows what is God’s system of blessings and punishment, is eitherkidding himself or smoking something he shouldn’t.”

God’s actions often run counter to our thinking.  The Bible is bold enough to tell me that God chose a“con” man like Jacob to be the father of a nation.  God chose a “murderer” named Moses, to lead the children ofIsrael out of captivity.  God selected an “adulterer” named David to be King.  It tells me that a redeemer will beborn in a smelly old barn and that through him worthless and wasted human beings can find meaning and purpose by beingtransformed.  The Bible even tells me, through this Jesus, that even death is not what it is cracked up to be.

In Christ, and through the Bible, we are presented with a world and with life in which a powerful case ismade to continue to hope despite the fact there is no logical basis for it.  We are told to love when it makes no sense; totrust when it seems totally unreasonable to do so-NOT because we know it works but because in this mysterious world and life inwhich God has placed us, just about anything is possible and we don’t know what is really going on except occasionally, when welook back.    (Schutjer- pg 14)

Honest preachers need to say to people, God is beyond our total understanding.  Our God is so great Hespeaks out of mystery.

I close with the words of Barbara Brown Taylor, Butman Professor at Piedmont College from her book, “WhenGod is Silent”.   “We” (preachers), are responsible for doing our best to put all the tools of communication withGod where our congregations can reach them and for demonstrating their use with our own lives.  After that, the matter is outof our hands.  Only an Idol always answers. – The divine silence is not a vacuum to be filled, but a mystery to be enteredinto, unarmed by words and undistracted by noise - a Holy of holies in which we too may be struck dumb by the power of theunsayable God. – Whatever preachers serve on Sunday, it must not blunt the appetite for food.  If people go away from usfull, then we have done them a disservice.  What we serve is not supposed to satisfy.  It is food for the journey.”(Taylor, 118ff)

When the lamp flickers, we live with the ambiguities and the unexplainable but we continue to trust and lifein faith.  “Abraham went out not knowing where he was going but trusting God.  Though he was old and his wife wasbarren, he continued to believe that God was able to do what God had promised and, it was reckoned to him as righteousness.

What is written of Abraham is also written for all his children; Thanks be to God.