Genesis 15.1-12,17-18, Luke 13.31-end
“Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able
to count them… So shall your descendants be!”
Many of us these days never see a starry sky like the one
Abraham looked up into. There’s usually too much light pollution for us to see
any but the brightest stars here in South East England. But an ancient Middle
Eastern nomad like Abraham, whose only artificial light was the glow of a
camp-fire or a flickering oil lamp, would have seen thousands sparkling in the
night sky, with the Milky Way spilling across the darkness. Counting them would
have been impossible.
And that’s the point God is making to Abraham. He will have
more descendants than he could ever count.
But that’s something that seems more than a bit unlikely to
Abraham, because right now he has no descendants at all, and he’s already in
his eighties. His wife Sarah is well beyond child-bearing age too. If he
doesn’t even have one child, that starry crowd of descendants is impossible. Reason
tells him that he and Sarah will be the end of their family line.
This isn’t the first time God has made this promise, though.
More than a decade before, God had called him to leave his home town of Haran
in southern Mesopotamia, where he was living a comfortable and prosperous life,
to head out across the desert to a new home. And the only incentive that could
have led him to set out on this crazy expedition is that God has told him, “I
will make of you a great nation… “In you all the families of the earth shall be
blessed. “ The prospect that he might finally have an heir to carry on his family name
outweighs the uncertainty and danger of the journey ahead of him. He and Sarah set
off, with their nephew, Lot and whatever possessions they could carry between
them, into the unknown. When they get to the land of Canaan, God renews his
promise. “To your offspring I will give this land”, but the years pass,
and still the promised child is nowhere to be seen, and Abraham and Sarah are
getting older and older.
That’s the background to the reading we heard. Look
towards heaven and count the stars? So shall your descendants be? By this
point it’s all starting to sound like a cruel joke.
Abraham still seems to believe that God might come through
with a miracle, but understandably, he’s starting to feel he’s entitled to some
proof. “How am I to know that I shall possess this land?” he asks. How
can I be sure that the “great nation” God has promised will come into
being?.
And this is the point where an already weird story gets a whole
lot weirder. God tells Abraham to make a sacrifice. There’s nothing unusual in
that; it was a standard form of worship. But when Abraham lays the carcasses
out, a “deep and terrifying darkness” descends. The starry sky is
gone. The only light there is comes from a fire pot and a flaming
torch, carried by invisible hands, between the sacrifices.
“A deep and terrifying darkness”. How does any of
this answer Abraham’s question? How does it explain how a nation will come from
this childless couple? It doesn’t, is the obvious response. What it does
tell Abraham, though, is that God is still with him, and that God is in the
darkness as much as the light. Just because Abraham can’t see a way forward doesn’t
mean there isn’t a way forward. Just because Abraham can’t see what the future
looks like doesn’t mean there isn’t a future.
In time, as it turns out, Abraham and Sarah do have a child,
Isaac, and from him a tribe grows, until there really are too many to count. God
keeps his promise. Those who first told this story saw themselves as Abraham’s
descendants. This was their origin story. If Isaac hadn’t been born, they wouldn’t
have been either. But I don’t think that is, or ever was the most important message
of the story.
Much of the Hebrew Bible, which we often call the Old
Testament, was drawn together when the people of Judah were exiled in Babylon,
and its stories are deeply shaped by that experience. The Jewish people thought
they were facing the end of their nation, their culture, and their faith. Just
like those fleeing from Ukraine, they didn’t know when or even if they would
return to their homes, and what they’d find if they did. They’d lost everything,
maybe forever. So, what had it all been for, they asked themselves - their
history, their achievements, their struggles?
It felt as if the stars were being swept from the sky, those stars which
represented their legacy to the world, their impact on the world, not just
physical children, but all they had done. They thought they would be forgotten.
When their storytellers told them this story of Abraham they
were inviting them to stand with him in the desert, to look up into that starry
sky and to go through that “deep and terrifying darkness” with him. That’s what stories do for us. They enable us
to step inside them, try them out for size, and by doing that to find ourselves
within them. “The heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus” said Abraham
– Eliezer was actually Abraham’s servant, but he was going to inherit all his
master’s belongings, because there was no one else who could. In the same way,
it seemed to the exiles that their land was being left to anyone who wanted to
move in and take it. As Abraham wondered
what God was playing at, they were reminded of their own doubts and questions,
their fear that it was all over for them. But the Biblical storytellers knew
that if they could identify with Abraham’s despair, maybe they might also be
able to find his hope and his faith, and dare to trust God in their own “deep
and terrifying darkness” as they faced an unknown and unknowable future.
This story told them that God wasn’t only present in what
seemed bright and shiny, in triumph and glory, but also in confusion, pain and
doubt. That was a comfort and an inspiration for the exiles, but also for many
who came after them, including Jesus’ first followers. Abraham’s walk with God had
involved long years of waiting, and deep darkness, so the fact that Jesus had lain
helpless in the darkness of the tomb didn’t mean that God had deserted him, or
that he was a fraud or a failure. In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus
foretells the trouble ahead of him, as he heads for Jerusalem, “the city
that kills the prophets”. But that
wouldn’t be the end of the story, he said. “On the third day I finish my
work” – and of course that is meant to remind us of the resurrection. God’s
faithful presence with Abraham through the tough times he faced, and with Jesus
in the stillness of the tomb, inspired them to believe that he could be with them as they faced
persecution and hardship for the sake of the Gospel.
And perhaps it can inspire us to believe that God can be
with us too in our times. After all,
there’s no shortage of “deep and terrifying darkness” around us. We’ve lived
through two long years of pandemic – who could have imagined what this has been
like - and now the war in Ukraine threatens the peace of the whole world. If
we’re not feeling just a bit frightened, we’re probably not paying enough
attention. We don’t know what’s around the corner, how it
will end, what it will lead to, or how we will cope. Glib reassurance that it
will all turn out ok just won’t wash. There’s no magic wand, no easy answer.
We’re living in a time when it can feel like there’s no
certainty about anything. But faith isn’t the same as certainty; it doesn’t
drive away our questions. What faith does is far more powerful. It enables us
to live in the darkness, to walk through it lovingly and with integrity. Faith
is the act of reaching out into it, trusting that the living God will be there
to take our hand. And why should he not be? After all, life begins in the
darkness of the womb. Seeds germinate in the darkness of the earth. Resurrection
happens in the darkness of the grave, so maybe the “deep and terrifying
darkness” can be the holiest place of all.
Amen
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