Tag Archives: Believe

Walking with Abram & Jesus in Lent (2nd Sunday in Lent, 3/1/2026)

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Readings

The world Genesis 12 assumes is pretty much the world we know: we’re scattered, divided, infested with idols. And the Lord says to Abram, “Go…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” That’s the start of the main story line in the Bible, the story we’re part of, God’s primary response to our scattered, divided, idol-infested world. “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” or, as our Jewish brothers and sisters put it, the healing of the world.

Our text is a good reminder also towards the beginning of Lent. It’s easy to get distracted, to forget what the point of all this is.

Our other readings bring in big words like “faith” and “believe,” so it’s worth noticing how these play out in our first text. “So Abram went.” He trusts (he doesn’t write off the Lord’s words as one too many the night before). He responds. We’d have a very short Bible if Abram had simply stayed put with a new set of things to believe. He goes, and, not incidentally, leaves behind pretty much all his security (“your country and your kindred and your father’s house”).

More precisely, he enters into an open-ended relationship. “The land that I will show you…a great nation…a blessing.” None of this is nailed down. Abram will need to keep trusting, keep responding.

Abram helps us not mishear today’s collect. “Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word.” It’s easy to hear this as encouraging stasis over movement. Recalling the account of the Transfiguration we heard two Sundays ago, that sets us up to be clustered around the booths we’ve constructed for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus on the mountain, not noticing that Jesus is already down the mountain. Trying to get everything settled, nailed down, a sure-fire way of going astray.

So those small fonts with holy water at the entrances to the nave are important. “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” Our baptism puts us right there with Abram, invited into an open-ended relationship of trust and response. Equally, and more importantly, it puts us right there with Jesus, whose own path involved no small measure of trust and response. Jesus’ path looked to be ending with him nailed down on a cross. So both for Abram—childless—and Jesus—on that path—it was really important that, as Paul puts it, their God is the One “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

“I lift up my eyes to the hills; / from where is my help to come? / My help comes from the Lord, / the maker of heaven and earth.” Words that Jesus would have held onto; not bad words for us to keep handy in Lent. Like Nicodemus, whether it’s being born “again” or “from above,” we’re all in a lifelong process of unlearning, learning, relearning in this open-ended relationship with the Lord.

That’s the wonder of these texts. They’re not confined to the other end of the world, millennia ago. The same Lord who spoke to Abram speaks to us: “Go.” The same Jesus who engaged Nicodemus, Nicodemus, confident that he had so much nailed down, continues to engage each one of us. All the families of the earth are still in need of blessing; there’s a world to be healed. As Jesus puts it, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” May we continue to trust and respond.

Beginners at believing (11th after Pentecost, 8/4/2024)

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Readings (Track 1)

What a combination of readings! We might title two of them “The Morning after the Night Before,” so let’s start there.

Last week we heard the story of Jesus feeding the large crowd. The starting point there as in the David story is divine generosity. Recall how Nathan’s oracle begins: “I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; I gave you your master’s house…” Now the crowd has followed Jesus, and Jesus tries for a debrief: what was yesterday all about?

Jesus leads with this: “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” Nothing wrong with eating one’s fill, but if the conversation—if the relationship—stays at that level, it doesn’t have much of a future. It’s where many of Jesus’ interactions with folk—then and now—start, with our needs as we define them. And Jesus, being generous, will start there. But if that’s where things stay—my needs as I define them—then there’s about as much future there as in any relationship. Within that framework Jesus is at most one of many possible means to fulfill my ends.

Jesus’ statement gives us a way of wondering about how David got so badly off track. “I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; I gave you your master’s house…” David more than got his fill, but did he wonder about what the Lord wanted out of the relationship? Perhaps not often enough. Not often enough for Uriah the Hittite. But David chose not to disappear Nathan for his unwelcome words. David chose to repent—recall our psalm. So David ends as a figure of hope, and as a model for the serious acts of repentance most of us need from time to time.

A bit later in the conversation with the crowd: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” ‘Believe’: that’s one of this Gospel’s favorite words (32 times in the first three Gospels combined, 85 times in John). Oddly, John never bothers to define it, which may be one source of the arguments regarding how faith and works relate in the rest of the New Testament. Perhaps he thought he didn’t need to. Consider the word’s first occurrence in the Old Testament. Abram’s been in the Promised Land for a good stretch, but no children and he asks what’s going on. At the end of the dialogue: “And he believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6). It’s more than a mental act; it’s deciding whether to keep trusting or head back to civilization. Later it shows up in the wilderness after the spies’ pessimistic report regarding the land. “And the LORD said to Moses, ‘How long will this people despise me? And how long will they refuse to believe in me…’” (Num. 14:11). Again, more than a mental act: the people are ready to stone Moses and Aaron and to choose someone to lead them back to Egypt! So, back to John: believing in Jesus means trusting Jesus, particularly when that trust looks like a really bad idea.

So, in our context: believing is more than a hoop I’m supposed to jump through. How easy it is for baptism or confirmation to become hoops! That works about as well as treating marriage as a hoop, rather than as setting the agenda for the rest of one’s life. “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Believing in Jesus, trusting Jesus: paying attention to what Jesus is up to, letting him turn our world upside down and inside out multiple times so that at last we become, well, human.

Become human, or, in Paul’s language, “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” And because God is generous, because, as Paul spells out, God has showered all of us with gifts, this is doable. We’re on a trajectory toward life. Hallelujah? Hallelujah!

Now, in closing, two things to notice about Paul’s vision. First, this life “worthy of the calling” is inescapably corporate. This contrasts with the scripts that reduce the faith to me and Jesus, which in Episcopal circles can translate into “my spirituality is my affair and all I ask of others is that they not make noise.” This life is corporate. The gifts I receive are gifts my neighbor needs and vice versa. Aristotle got it right: the human being is a political animal, an animal of the polis, and God builds on that. Besides, the endgame is a banquet, a celebration, and who wants to party alone?

Second, the older we get (sorry!) the stronger the temptation to set everything on cruise control. So notice Paul’s language: “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up.” Here Paul is at his most diplomatic, so diplomatic that we can miss the point. Shorn of the diplomatic padding: “Grow up!” And when I find that discouraging or off-putting, I’m reminded of Thomas Merton’s observation in talking about prayer: “We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life!” (Contemplative prayer p.37)

“This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” In the coming week we’ll have multiple opportunities to do that work; may we stay awake enough to recognize them.

The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost: A Sermon

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Readings (Track 1)

What a combination of readings! We might title two of them “The Morning after the Night Before,” so let’s start there.

Last week we heard the story of Jesus feeding the large crowd. The starting point there as in the David story is divine generosity. Recall how Nathan’s oracle begins: “I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; I gave you your master’s house, and your master’s wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would have added as much more.” Now the crowd has followed Jesus, and Jesus tries for a debrief: what was that all about?

Jesus leads with this: “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” That’s an interesting, and an important challenge. Nothing wrong with eating one’s fill, but if the conversation—if the relationship—stays at that level, it doesn’t have much of a future. It’s where many of Jesus’ interactions with folk—then and now—start, with our needs as we define them. And Jesus, being generous, will start there. But if that’s where things stay—my needs as I define them—then there’s about as much future there as in any relationship. Within that model Jesus is at most one of many possible means to fulfill my ends.

Jesus’ statement gives us a way of wondering about how David got so badly off track. “I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; I gave you your master’s house…” David more than got his fill, but did he wonder about what the Lord wanted out of the relationship? Perhaps not often enough. Not often enough for Uriah the Hittite to still be alive. But David chose not to disappear Nathan for his unwelcome words. David chose to repent—recall our psalm. So David ends as a figure of hope, and as a model for the serious acts of repentance most of us need from time to time.

A bit later in the conversation with the crowd: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” ‘Believe’ is a slippery word. In contexts like this it’s more than thinking certain things are true. Here believing is pretty much synonymous with trusting. (Think, parenthetically, about the Creed. It’s not simply a matter of affirming that these things are true, but of trusting the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, putting my weight on these relationships, letting my past, present, and future be defined by these relationships.) Again, believing is more than a hoop I’m supposed to jump through. How easy it is for baptism or confirmation to become hoops! That works about as well as treating marriage as a hoop, rather than as setting the agenda for the rest of one’s life. “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Believing in Jesus, trusting Jesus: paying attention to what Jesus is up to, letting him turn our world upside down and inside out multiple times so that at last we become human.

Become human, or, in Paul’s language, “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” And because God is generous, because, as Paul spells out, God has showered all of us with gifts, this is doable. We’re on a trajectory toward life. Hallelujah? Hallelujah!

Now, in closing, two things to notice about Paul’s vision. First, this life “worthy of the calling” is inescapably corporate. This contrasts with the scripts that reduce the faith to me and Jesus, which in Episcopal circles can translate into “my spirituality is my affair and all I ask of others is that they not make noise.” This life is corporate. The gifts I receive are gifts my neighbor needs and vice versa. Aristotle got it right: the human being is a political animal, an animal of the polis, and it’s worth getting that right. The endgame is a banquet, a celebration, and who wants to party alone?

Second, as many teams are discovering again over in Tokyo, when you’re on the right trajectory, you don’t take your foot off the gas. Notice Paul’s language: “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up.” To shamelessly mix metaphors, we may be on the right trajectory, but we’re not out of the woods. “Grow up,” for our own sake and for the sake of the Uriahs among us. And over the next two Sundays we’ll hear Paul getting pretty specific as to how this growing up happens.

“This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” In the coming week we’ll have multiple opportunities to do that work; may we stay awake enough to recognize them.