“Do You Want A Blessing?”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Text: Genesis 12:1-6
It was a singular encounter that would change the whole world. It took place in Ur in the Chaldeas, somewhere between the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Known in many ways as the very centre of civilization, Mesopotamia, as it was known, was a rich place. This individual came from a long line and a great family came from Shem as one of the survivors of the flood in the story of Noah to Peleg, to his father Terah. This man, who was asked to leave Ur of Chaldeas, would change the world.
The one with whom he would have an encounter was none other than the Lord God, the living God, the one God. It was in this encounter that God reveals himself so this individual and his response would change the world. If you don't understand quite fully the extent of how the world would be changed by that encounter, let me tell you this: As of right now, 57 per cent of all the people on earth look to this person as their spiritual forefather.
Well over 4 billion people would confess that this individual was at the very beginning, the genesis of their faith. For Christians, for Muslims, for Jews, for Baha'is and many other smaller religions, this individual and that encounter was something that would change their world and would be part of their walk with God. It is also true that as a result of this individual there have been wars and conflicts over hundreds and hundreds of years, all trying to claim a unique relationship with that individual who left Ur of the Chaldeas between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
There have also been, and this has often been overlooked, centuries of peace and harmony and understanding and learning and cooperation between those who look to this man from Ur of the Chaldeas. There is definitely about this man something that has led people to be very exclusive, who have referred to him as “My Father.” This also means something profoundly inclusive because he is being referred to as “Our Father.”
If you haven't already figured out who that individual is and if you were not reading the text this morning, then it is Abraham. In that singular encounter between the One Living God and Abraham, in that one call, in that one moment in the history of the world, there was something so profound taking place.
I realized that even this last week. I was going to Home Depot to pick up an item. I love to wander around Home Depot! I never really buy anything. I don't have the ability to make anything. I just like the smell of wood and paint and want to seem macho with all the people who do know how to use those things. That, I think, is a real man thing!
There I was in Home Depot just looking around innocently and it really did come upon me as I had been reading this text for the last two weeks that in the checkout counter in front of me was a woman in a burka, that one of the people who served in one of the areas and came around wearing the orange vest had a yarmulke on his head, and a young woman who served at the counter had a gold cross around her neck. I couldn't help but think: “Abraham! Abraham! Here we all are, hundreds, thousands of years later!”
Something amazing was happening between God and Abraham. Unfortunately, as I said, this passage and this call of Abraham has been so misunderstood, so manipulated and so used by people over the years that it is hardly worth bearing thinking about. Yet it seems to me that in the encounter between God and Abraham there is something so rich, so brilliant, so touching that none of us that call ourselves believers in God can deny or walk away from. Indeed, one scholar has said that this is the “fulcrum text” of The Book of Genesis. What strikes me about this “fulcrum text” is that in it there is richness and a word for us that we really need to embrace.
We do so on this Father's Day. I can't think of anything more fitting than to look at Abraham on Father's Day, as in many ways he is the Father of the Faith. I cannot think of anything more fitting on Trinity Sunday, when we look at the nature of God, than to see God as he encounters Abraham. There is something powerful here. These verses talk, as does The Book of Genesis, a great deal about this one word, “blessing.”
It is a powerful word and it is a word that conveys a sense of bestowal of something upon somebody or upon something. When you give someone a blessing, you are in fact imparting a part of yourself almost to that individual or to that thing. When we bless a child in Baptism, as we did last week, we are imparting our love and our faith and our support and our desire for them to have the faith.
“Blessing” is a powerful word and because it is, it needs to be handled gently. It needs to be understood completely. There is a fascinating parts to this and I think there are two really, where in fact the blessing of God to Abraham teaches us what real blessing is about. The first is blessing as faith. God says to Abraham, “I will bless you and you will have a nation that will come from you.” And later on, God says that the nation will grow to be as expansive as all the grains of the sand on a beach.
Abraham went with an understanding that what he was leaving behind was going to bring upon him a blessing. In many ways Abraham had it well, between the Tigris and the Euphrates it was a lovely area. God was now sending him 500 miles to Canaan to an unknown land and Abraham went on the basis of one thing and one thing alone: He believed that God was going to bless him.
Sometimes, we Christians have a hard time with blessing. We are not quite sure what to make of it. St. Augustine once said in The Confessions, “God is more anxious to give us blessings than we are to receive them.” In other words, it has always been God's will and God's desire that we receive a blessing. It has always been God's desire out of love for humanity that humanity might experience the blessings of this life or why else would we have this life? If it is all just a dark and a turbid thing, why would God have created us? He created us because he wants to bless us. He wants to impart something to us. He wants to give us something.
Yet, so often we walk away from this. Even the little things we have we wonder if we should enjoy them. When we have a rich time with our family, we are not sure if we should embrace them. When we have a great and a free land and a country, we are not sure if we should enjoy it. We are sometimes a little ambivalent because of our guilt, because of our sin, because of our unrighteousness, all of which are real. We are not sure we really want God's blessing. God wants us to be blessed in the same way that God wanted Abraham to be blessed.
But you know one of the things I have learned is that blessings take many different forms. In fact, what is a blessing in one culture might not be considered a blessing in another. For example, when I went and visited the Khoikhoin bushmen in the Kalahari in Southern Africa as part of a research project I did many years ago, it was obvious talking to the leader, the herdsman, that they found the greatest blessing was simply the provision of water. If they could have one or two cattle, then as far as they were concerned God, the Divine Being, had given them everything that the world could ever give. Their desire to find water and to be able to travel and to get that water was a blessing for them.
When I did work in the Transkei in Southern Africa, amongst the Nguni-speaking Bantu tribes, it was obvious that the thing that they found the greatest blessing of all was children. Why? Because they were rural people and the more children they had the more labourers they had for the farm, and the more that they knew they were protected for the future. Children were the greatest blessing!
In the 19th and the 20th centuries, I would suggest the blessings that were most sought after by nations and by cultures and by tribes was power. The ability to influence others was the great blessing. Read the literature of the British Empire and you will see that so clearly. In our world, in our North American culture, it is the blessing of material goods: shiny things, nice things, things that make life easy, things that we are given, things that we might be able to earn, things that are material.
We see blessings differently but those are secondary things. They are all secondary things. Regardless of the culture, the primary thing that we find in The Book of Genesis, the first thing, the ultimate blessing, is faith. We have a world running around trying to accumulate more and more blessings (not that God doesn't want us to have those blessings as long as they are not at the expense of someone else), but ignoring the source of those blessings, which is faith.
What Abraham was given in that call to go to another land was the promise that God would be with him, that God would stand with him, that God protect him. It is that faith in that God that enabled Abraham to go. In faith, Abraham moved.
The Apostle Paul in writing about Abraham in the famous Book of Romans was dealing with two things. One, he was dealing with those who said that the law was more important than Abraham and that Moses and the Torah were more important than Abraham. Paul said “No. Abraham came before the law. Abraham was made righteous by faith before the law.” But then he goes on to talk even more fully about the faith of Abraham. I am reading from Verse 16, Chapter 4. These are brilliant words:
Therefore the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham's offspring, not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all, as it is written, “I have made you a father of many nations.” He is our father in the sight of God in whom he believed: the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.
And then, listen to this:
Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed, and so became the father of many nations.
The Apostle Paul has put it there: this is the Christian interpretation of Abraham. Abraham's blessing was from his faith. He responded to God who took him to another place but Abraham went on the basis of his faith. So it seems to me that for all of us what matters first and foremost is not the secondary blessings that we are running after but the primary blessing, which is faith in God and our recognition then that all the other blessings that we do get in our lives are a gift from the God in whom we believe.
But does the text end there? No! The text goes on and it suggests that blessing is also giving. Look at the language of the text again. Abraham receives a blessing: “You will have many descendants and many nations will be called after your name.” But then God says to him, “You will now be a blessing.” For those of you who have studied the Bethel Series this is old hat, isn't it? But we are blessed to be a blessing?
That is exactly what Abraham was supposed to be. He was supposed to be a blessing for others. But notice that God doesn't only say to Abraham, “You will be a blessing to others” he also says, “I will protect you in order that you might be a blessing to others.” There is a strong sense that God really loved Abraham. God says to Abraham, “I will curse those who curse you.” In other words, God says that those who mistreat you will be cursed by me and I will protect you. There is also an implication in this word “curse” in the Hebrew that it is not only a sense of a reciprocal relationship, but also this notion that there will be consequences for those who do not bless you. There will be consequences for those who could be the recipient of your blessing but turn their backs.
I couldn't help but think about that this last week during the Stanley Cup final. It was a dark day. I had to eat humble pie with all my friends in Boston. It was brutal! But it was also a dark day when you look at what happened that night. What was terrible about it was not just young people doing stupid things. It was more than that!
It is that here we are in this free country. Here we are with all these incredible blessings and wealth. We have the privilege of being able to watch an incredibly tense hockey series. We have been able to experience this in a free land that is not devastated by storms or earthquakes or famines or tsunamis, like so many parts of the world. And then, what do some people do? They chuck bricks through windows and set cars on fire. In a land of blessing and richness, there is this abuse of that freedom. That is what burns me the most with something like this.
When people who have a blessing do not understand how fortunate and free they are. I couldn't help but think with the things I have seen in my life that if those young people were doing those very acts of violence in Burkina Faso or in the Ivory Coast, or if they had been doing it in some other cities throughout the world, they would have been shot first and then interrogated second. But we have a free land, and so we should.
With freedom there is responsibility. There are the consequences for one's actions, and there is a need for us, all of us and all people, to see that when you have something that is wonderful, you need to thank God for it and to treat it wisely. God was sending a message not only to Abraham but to the nations around the Israelites and to those who would come from the seed of Abraham that they were to treat God's blessed people carefully and gently and in a wonderful way.
I think it is an incredible moment when God speaks to Abraham, because he not only offers him protection, he also wants him to be a blessing to many nations. He wants the word of faith to go forward through the world and through the nations. The Apostle Paul understood this in The Book of Romans, but he doesn't just take it as a universal thing. He doesn't make Abraham sort of God. He doesn't make Abraham the symbol of God. He simply says that he is the father of what was to come later.
For Paul of course, what was to come later was Jesus of Nazareth, the One, who as Paul I think was intimating in this wonderful passage when he said that God, who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as they were: the Resurrection of Jesus. Therefore, if we can have faith that the God who called Abraham to leave and go to another land, if that God keeps his promises to Abraham, then it is that very same God who keeps his promises to give us eternal life through Jesus Christ.
There is a final dimension and that is that if we have received a blessing of faith, then it is up to us to share that blessing with others. “With election” wrote Calvin, “comes mission.” Having received much; one gives much. That applies not only to the resources of this world, it means not only to care and provide for those who have not, it means not only in our outreach to those who are around us, which is an integral part of this but it also means sharing our faith. Maybe here is a word for our fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers this morning.
I met a grandfather not long ago. He was a very sincere, very devout person. He said to me, “Andrew, you know, one of the things that I struggle with is that my children and their children do not have the faith that I have. I would love it to happen.” Then he started talking about maybe what the Church could do to help out in that plan. They were all good ideas.
I then asked him a question. I said, “With all due respect, you can have all the plans in the world, you can move around all the Lego pieces and try to build a house as much as you want but how much of your faith have you really honestly shared with your family?”
Never mind the faith, how much of your faith have you really shared? How much of the blessing and the meaning of your faith that you have received have you actually passed on? Never mind programs and do this and do that and religious that and religious the other, I am talking about what is in your heart. I am talking about the things you really believe in. Have you really shared those? That is what faith is! Faith is belief in the promises of God and being willing to share it with others from the heart.
That is why Abraham is the Father of our Faith. That is why Abraham and his encounter with the Lord is one of the greatest gifts in the history of the world, and it is why Abraham and his faith have touched so many nations. Has it touched you? Amen.