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St Columba’s United Reformed Church

Cambridge

Sunday 2 July 2017 Trinity III

Sermon

Genesis 22.1-14; Psalm 13; Romans 6.12-23; Matthew 10.40-42

I remember well some of the promises made to me. Of course, there are the promises that Bethan and I exchanged at our wedding, the love behind which is the greatest gift I ever receive. With Shakespeare, as I think ofthe benefits of class or skill, of wealth and garments, I can say to her, ‘All these I better in one general best./ Thy love is better than high birth to me.’ [1] Lasting promise. As if it was yesterday, I also recall a rather different promise the same summer. It was the pinnacle of the service in which I was ordained. Quoting I Thessalonians 5, the presiding moderator, The Revd Tony Burnham, prayed God’s blessing upon me and then, speaking in stentorian Lancashire tones he looked me in the eye and completed the quote, ‘He who calls you is faithful;he will surely do it.’(5.24) It is a promise to which I have clung tenaciously over the decades, and as I anticipate a further development of my ministry next year, it’s a promise that I trust will sustain and encourage me.

Perhaps there are promises that mean much to you? Promises that have been a source of your confidence and joy. Promises, too, that have distressed you as they were broken. Perhaps there are promises you anticipate making as marriage approaches, or as reliably caring for grandchildren absorbs you, or as you assume new responsibilities at work. Promises matter. They are at the heart of a society that we might characterise as ‘strong and stable’. They are also at the heart of Christian faith, whichtrusts in God’s grace more than it does in our own works.

So it is that, when we read the story of Abraham and Isaac, it is helpful to have the idea of promise in mind. It’s important because inevitably there are other less attractive ideas that come to the fore. After all, on the surfaceit is a grimaccount of narrowly-avoided child sacrifice. Andworse than that, it is no-one but God who calls for the boy to be sacrificed. As the old Yiddish folk tale has it, ‘Why did God not send an angel to tell Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?Because God knew the angels would say, "Dream on. If you want to command death, do it yourself."’ Little wonder it’s this chapter as much as any other that feeds scepticism about the goodwill and grace of God, causing book shelves’ full of theological discussion over the centuries. Moreover, it undeniably has to be seen as an episode to test Abraham. That’s how it starts: ‘Some time later God put Abraham to the test’. (22.1) Although the thought of God putting us to the test is disconcerting, perhaps we can see why the Almighty did so - as Kathryn M.Schifferdecker puts it: ‘God has risked everything on this one man, Abraham, and needs to know he’s faithful.’ [2]So, it’s a multi-layered, complexand challenging episode. It may be, though, that this idea of promise can begin to redeem for us an otherwise difficult story.

If we want to understand anything about Abraham, it requires us to recognise that his whole life is about receiving God’s promise and responding to it.

  • In Genesis 12,when still called Abram – ‘exalted father’ – he is sent by God to go ‘fromcountry and kindred and father’s house’ to a land that God would show him, where he will be both blessed himself and a blessing to others.
  • In chapter 13, when he’dentered Canaan, Abram is promised that God will give him the length and breadth of the land and make his descendants as numerous as thespecks of dust.
  • In chapter 15, whilst Abram is yet childless, the Lord promises him a son, to whose offspring will be given ‘the land fromthe river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates,19the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites,20the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim,21the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.’
  • In Chapter 17, God promises to make an everlasting covenant with Abram, to be his God, and the God of all his succeeding generations. Indeed, his name is changed from Abram, ‘exaltedfather’, to Abraham, ‘father of a multitude’. Abraham’s life is one promise after another.
  • Andlater in chapter 17, the news thatIsaac is to be born is but the culmination of those promises. He’s Abraham’s very own son, by his patient, fore-bearing wife, Sarah; literally his princess, whose love meant so much to him.‘Kings of people will come from her’, Abraham hears God say. (17.16)

Promise. Genesis’s intricate and extensive narrative of Abraham’s lifeoffers us a theological device to understandthat our hope, our joy, our purpose, is to be found in God’s promise to be our God, to journey with us, to bless us with identity, with abundance and with a future?Those who have studied these things are not convinced that Genesis 22 is part of a single chronicle that starts with Genesis 12 and steadily unfolds. Rather, it is more likely the result of some editorial work, by which, somewhatlater, a different writer adds this as an attempt to stress that it’s God’s covenantal promise which distinguishes the Israelites, rather than their own victories and triumphs. Other peoples will thrive by ingenuity, fruitfulness or sheer brute force, but God’s people are people who live and thrive by God’s promise. And in this graphic story of Abraham binding his longed-for and ever so cherished son to the sacrificial pyre, we have a dramatic representation of how God puts to the test Abraham’s trust in that promise – could it be that it’s less about an old man’s devotion being so total that he’d even forfeit his son, and more that his faith is so great that he trusts God will save the boy?

And in this twenty-first century, that is a stirring question. Do we live by trusting God’s promise? For Christian’s, of course, God’s promise has found its supreme and definitive expression in the living and dying and rising of Jesus Christ. There we find God’s covenant promise to the uttermost. God is ready to sacrifice not someone else’s, but his own son,yet with that resurrection motif showing God’s covenant love, God’s chesed, thereal inspiration of the promise, asentirely undefeated, indeed undefeatable. And yet, our generation seem to be increasingly hesitant to trust that promise. Gerhard von Rad has suggested that faith is making oneself secure in God. [3] How we succumb to the temptation to make ourselves secure in anything but God - secure in all those things Shakespeare’s Sonnet identified as it opens: ‘Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,/Some in their wealth, some in their bodies' force,/Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill,/Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse…’ Secure, too, in those narrow self-serving political ideas that are about me and mine instead of policies to promote the common good and impede the common ill.

But all those have the fragility of human limitation; skills are not infallible, wealth can slip throughour fingers, our bodies age, our ingenuity lets us down, our political answers are incomplete. God’s covenant promise, though,is from everlasting to everlasting. It is not the promise of ease or luxury or perfection. But the promise of belonging; the promise of being God’s children – ‘little children’, as the Gospel, has it; the promise of being blessed in order to be a blessing.

And perhaps therein we find the true insight, from which we discover what it really means to be people of hope. The gift of God’s promise, by which we are blessed, is that we know the ultimate joy of promising to bless others. That’s what happens in friendship and marriage, in neighbourliness, in local politics and international relations; they thrive when we promise to enrich one another by our mutual self-giving.

As we look for a new stabilityand harmony in society, perhaps it is promise that we need to emphasise in a new way: to rest in the promise of God that he will be our God, to promise that by God’s grace we will be God’s people, and, heeding Paul’s word to the Romans, to renew our promise as those bound to righteousness, to put ourselves at God’sdisposal, as implements for doing right (6.13) who are so transparent with Christ’s sacrificial love that it shapes the world. Surely that’s a promise to better the best, and the source of a faith that makes us secure in God.

N. P. Uden

2 July 2017

[1] William Shakespeare 1564-1616 Sonnet 91Some glory in their birth

[2] Kathryn M. Schifferdecker 2014 Commentary on Genesis 22.1-14. Available at Accessed 30 June 2017

[3] Cf Von Rad, Gerhard 1957 Old Testament Theology, Volume 1, translated by D. M. G. Stalker 1962 London: SCM Press page 171