“Stepping Out In Faith” Genesis 15: 1-6

 I was listening to a podcast this week about death that asserted that most people are not remembered more than three or four generations after their death. The stories aren’t passed down. Their legacy isn’t carried on in the way we would hope.

  But as I was listening to that particular program I was thinking about Abraham, or Abram as he is still known in this text. Abram who has been remembered countless generations. Abram who had more decendants than the stars. Abram, the father of nations. 

If different choices would have been made, if Abram would have possibly trusted God less, than the entire story may have been different. Abram and his wife Sarai were getting up in age and were still without a son. Perhaps they had even began looking around and wondering what would happen to their legacy, their possession, their family name, their story, after they were no longer alive. Yet, God intervened and came to these two people and said that they would not only have children, but would be the parents of generations. 

The only thing is that they needed to leave where they currently live and travel with God to a land that God would reveal to them. In other words, they had to step out in trust. 

The interesting part to me about Abram’s story is that he doesn’t always get it right. But we don’t talk about those parts of his story as much. He decided to try to fulfill the promise on God on his own, by having a child with Hagar. This was completely permissible under the law of the time, but it wasn’t what God had indicated nor intended. He also found himself in a foreign land, where he tried to pretend his wife was his sister in order to spare his life. In fact, he did it twice. 

Yes, Abram had blunders along the way, but he is still remembered as a man of faith. Which I find comforting, for don’t we make blunders along the way from time to time as well?

I think Abram’s story invites us to pray deeply around the question “do we really trust God?” When it looks like day after day or year after year, things aren’t going the way we would like, do we trust God. In the face of hard decisions, do we trust God. All too often I think we say that we trust God, and then we try to put on a good face for other people, but really we have deep doubts. Or worse, we say we trust God, all the while trying to make God’s will bend towards our way. 

In this potion of Abram’s story we see that God and Abram talk in a variety of ways. In this particular part of the timeline, its a vision. But generally, when God speaks, Abram listens. But after he listens, he asks a question. Is God’s vision to have his heir be through Eliezer. 

Sometimes we make our prayer life too small. We think its coming before God and us doing all the talking before we say “Amen.” But there’s actually a whole lot more listening than talking that happens when we come before God. And as Abram shows us, after we listen, its okay to ask questions. I think God would rather have us be honest then pretending that we have it all figured out, especially since God can see our true heart. If the model of faithfulness, Abram, had questions, then won’t we as well?

Abram knows his age. He knows that time is precious and there seems to be more behind him than ahead. So he can’t quite wrap his mind around what God is proposing. He tries to fit in into his human terms - thinking who he could pass everything down to, when God has something else planned entirely. God says, no, you are going to have your own child, your own son. That is the way I am choosing to work. 

When Abram still can’t wrap his mind around it, he gave him a visual to cling to, telling him to look up into the sky and see the stars. The uncountable number of stars. That is how many descendants you are going to have. 

Abram may still not understand it, but he now has a sign of the promise. Can you imagine being Abram, traveling to this place that God is going to show you. And when you are weary and exhausted, not knowing what’s next, you look up into the sky and you remember the words of God. You remember the promise.

When I am speaking to people who are starting their journey into ministry, I tell them that everything has a purpose. It may seem like lots of people are asking to hear their call story, to the point where they may get weary of telling it, but really its so that story is so deeply inside of them that they can bring it to mind, even on the most difficult of days. 

I don’t know what that reminder of the promises of God is for you. I would guess that many of us have different signs, different ways to remember and reaffirm the blessing of God in our lives. 

Abram has this great promise before him, a heir and more descendants than the stars, but as I mentioned before, that didn’t mean that he got it right all the time. See this promise of God to Abram, and the promises of God in our lives, they aren’t because we are good and deserving. Instead, they are a generous gift from God. The question is really, what are we going to do with them. 

Abram chose the path of obedience. Even when it didn’t make sense. Even when it was too big for his mind. And those times when Abram, this man of faith, didn’t know what came next, God in his mercy and grace kept coming back again and again and again to remind him of the promise.

I want to end this morning by taking time to pray. To ask God to remind you what promise is a part of your life that God wants you to claim. What call. What blessing. What direction God is calling you to go in faith. Let us pray and remember, my friend, who we are and whose we are…..

“Creation and Fall” Genesis 2:4b-7, 15-17; 3:1-8

        All societies and religions have a creation story. Something that attempts to tell how the world came into being from their perspective. But this creation story that we find in Genesis is uniquely our story. And it threads its way through the rest of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, reminding us how we got where we are, but also telling us that this isn’t the end of the story. Not yet. There is more to come. 

From now until the end of October we are going back to the beginning. Back the very beginning of scripture to talk about the stories found there that inform our faith here and now today. Many of these stories may be ones that you think you already know. Maybe ones you’ve heard over a hundred times before. I want you to try to set that aside over the next several weeks and simply listen. Listen to the story like you are hearing it for the first time. Listen with the curiosity and wonder of a child. Let new details capture your attention. In other words, make room for the Spirit to speak. 

Too many times when we hear stories from God’s Word that we think we already know we shut ourselves off. We unintentionally put up roadblocks. One of the beautiful thing about Scripture is that God uses it to continue to speak to us today. I may hear or read the same story again and again and again, but by God’s mercy and grace, it hits me in new ways each time. 

With that in mind let us go back to the beginning. The very beginning. With the creation story found in Genesis. 

God created. God created everything that was good and beautiful and pleasing. God made the earth and the plants. God made the rain to water the ground. Then God made man. But God didn’t just create man - God formed him out of the very dust of the earth and breathed into his body the breath of life. 

But God didn’t just form man in this amazing way. God gave the man a purpose. God took the man and placed him the garden and told him to care for it. To the till the ground. Man had a mission from God. 

Then God gave man rules to help guide him. Saying that he could eat anything he desired from the garden, except from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

But humanity eventually did not listen to God. They broke trust with their disobedience. A crafty serpent tricked the woman, telling the woman that if she ate from the tree that was forbidden then she surely would not die. 

They both ate from the tree and came to realize that they were naked. They also realized that they had been disobedient so they hid themselves from God. 

There have been countless depictions of this unfolding of events made. Paintings. Plays. Poetry. Songs. But my absolute favorite depiction is John Caird and Stephen Schwart’s musical Children of Eden. This one musical, in two acts, tells the stories of Genesis from creation through Noah. 

In the song entitled “Childhood’s End”, Eve explains to God, who she and Adam call Father, that it was okay to eat the fruit because it didn’t hurt her. She didn’t die when she ate it. So all is well. And she is filled with this sight for things she wasn’t able to see or understand before. To which God replies “Eve, you see too much. Can’t you see you have to go….This is a place of innocence. This is a place for children. And you are a child no more.”

Sometimes this depiction of Adam and Eve as innocent as children make us uncomfortable. Probably because we seem so far from that today. We want to make our own decisions. We want to be independent people. 

But isn’t exactly what got Adam and Eve in trouble, my friends? God gave Adam a purpose, a mission, to till the ground and be a caretaker for the Garden. God gave one rule and one rule alone, to act as a guardrail to help steer them away from danger. And yet. And yet they made a choice to do that one thing. They abandoned the mission in favor of doing something else. They abandoned the rules at the trickery of the serpent. And now here we are today. 

One of the first memories I have as a child is from after my brother’s were born. There were three of us in the house under the age of three and my mom would often let me “help”. One day, I wanted to help make bottles, so I tried to put my doll’s bottle on the hot stove along with my brothers. Thankfully I wasn’t hurt. But I could have been. I’m sure I had been told countless times to stay away from the hot stove, but I let my strong will push that aside in favor of helping. 

Friends, its the same way with us today if we are left up to our own devices. While we may not be as bold as to say so, we try to live our lives by our own rules, defining for ourselves what is good and evil. Like Adam and Eve, we too, ignore the guardrails, and as a result, we break trust through our disobedience and fracture our relationship with God. 

But there is another way that we can be like Adam and Eve in this story that we do not talk about enough. Genesis has one of the only creation stories where humanity is specifically created. In so many others, humankind was simply an accident, a fluke, something that happened. But in Genesis we see the care God took in creating us. And creating us with a purpose. Not just something to keep us busy or a meaningless task to occupy us - but a purpose and role in creation. In other words, God gave us a mission. 

But how quickly was that mission abandoned when Adam and Eve listened to the snake. After their initial disobedience, there was another disobedience - they were no longer fulfilling their call. They weren’t tilling the land and caring for the Garden. They made clothes for themselves and they hid from God!

We, too, abandon the mission, do we not. Our mission may not be exactly the same as Adam and Eve today, but it was given to us just as clearly by our Lord and Savior. Go out and make disciples. But what causes us to stray from that mission? Or what things do we try to make part of our mission because of our own definitions of what is good and evil?

When God’s command was broken, humanity stopped living into their mission, their call, their purpose the same way as before. But that is not an excuse for continuing to do so today. Because this scripture from Genesis, Church its the beginning of our story, not the end. 

The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome “For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.” (Romans 5: 15). Adam’s disobedience may have led to sin and abandoning the mission, but Jesus came, my friends and gave us new life, a new mission and a new purpose. The question is are we going to follow? Are we going to heed the call or are we going to continue to try to do things on our own terms and in our own way?

From death to life. From self-purposed to call. From abandoning the mission to giving us a mission as big as this world. Let us go forth, people of God, as ambassadors of Christ to tell the story. Our story. The story of our creation, fall, and ultimately our redemption. Amen.