Readings (Track 1)

Today’s readings pretty much set the preacher’s agenda: faith—the faith of Abraham Paul celebrates, the faith shown by the woman with the hemorrhages in the center of Matthew’s story. So let’s attend to how Genesis chooses to start the story.

“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.’”

Genesis opens with the creation story we heard last week. The following chapters narrate the repeated human distrust (lack of faith) that results in the expulsion from the Garden, Cain’s murder of Abel, the violence that brings on the flood, the tower of Babel project thwarted by God’s confusing their language. A fellow named Lamech captures it:

“Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say:
I have killed a man for wounding me,
a young man for striking me.
If Cain is avenged sevenfold,
truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”

Our world. And, as the flood story made clear, simple punishment does nothing to change the human heart. What can God do?

Parenthesis: religion is often described as trying to answer our questions: Why do we live? Why do we die? What are we supposed to do? What may we hope? Holy Scripture has a different starting point. It speaks of God and the challenge God faces: a world of beauty filled with creatures bearing God’s own image—often acting as though they’re set on auto-destruct. How to heal this world? If we have questions for which we want answers, so does God!

In God’s initial address to Abraham there’s a fundamental shift in God’s strategy, from dealing with the whole human race, to focusing in a particular way on one family: “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.”

Abraham and Sarah are the beginning of a pilot project, not because God doesn’t care about the world, but because God’s strategy is to influence, to bless the world through this family. As in any pilot project the point is to show that something can and does work, in this case, God’s vision for what authentically human life looks like. This is what a human community looks like that isn’t set on self-destruct. The reason for Israel’s existence—and for the Church’s existence, for that matter—is the healing of the world. As William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1940s said, “The church is the only institution that exists primarily for the benefit of those who are not its members.”

But back to Abraham. Almost the first event after that divine call is…a famine. The folk preaching a simple theology of prosperity (obey God and God will make you rich) really do need to read their own Bibles. Abraham obeys God and arrives in Canaan just in time for…a famine.

So they continue south to Egypt in search of food.

When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife’; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account.” (Vv. 11-13)

That really should have worked. As the brother, Abraham can control access to Sarah, stringing along suitors until they give up or the famine is over. But Murphy’s Law kicks in: Pharaoh takes an interest in Sarah, and what Pharaoh wants, Pharaoh gets.

Now at this point the silences in the text are truly remarkable. We aren’t told what Abraham makes of the situation: he’s lost Sarah; he’s gained a lot of wealth. We aren’t told what Sarah makes of the situation: Abraham or Pharaoh? Nor are we told how long this goes on. But as the story continues, it’s clear that what is decisive is not what Abram or Sarai make of the situation, but what God makes of it.

But the LORD afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife. So Pharaoh called Abram, and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her, and be gone.” (Vv. 17-19)

We began our reading with that extraordinary divine call. At the end of our reading both God and Abraham have new problems. Abraham: this divine call apparently does not mean that life’s going to be a bed of roses. There’s still plenty of room for famines and rapacious rulers. “Would it have been that difficult for God to have put me in a less hostile environment?” How am I supposed to trust a God who apparently leaves me so unprotected?

But if Abraham has a problem, God has an equally serious problem. God’s made this promise to Abraham: “and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” But it turns out that Abraham is quite prepared to lie and offer up his own wife to save his own skin, putting at risk not only his own reputation, but God’s. All those plagues on Pharaoh’s house are not a very promising beginning to “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

I’ve described it as God’s problem; today’s Gospel gives us another possible angle. “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus: “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” Sinners—like Matthew the tax collector, like Abraham, like us.

What do we see in the Egypt story? A God whose call does not translate into an easy life for God’s people, a people of God who can cause profound embarrassment for God. How much does God love us? Enough to be this vulnerable…and we’re only at the 12^th chapter of the Bible. And it’s in this context that our faith can grow.