At the end of a week in which we have all been moved by the plight of the people of Japan wrestling with the devastating consequences of earthquake, tsunami and radiation hazard – as well as all those caught up in the turmoil of events across the Arab world – this morning’s readings about the faith of Abraham, or even Jesus’ debate with Nicodemus about what it means to be ‘born again’, may at first seem heartlessly irrelevant. Yet I shall seek to persuade you, as Paul seeks to persuade his readers, that it is precisely in such a crisis that we need to be reminded of the calm, steady faith that sustained Abraham through a long life of nomadic wandering, and brought him at last to the place where God wanted him to be.
Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. These words don’t appear in the passage from Genesis that we read for our first lesson; they come much later in the story when Abraham has journeyed with Lot from Haran, north of the Euphrates, to Canaan; on from there into Egypt, where Sarah is taken into the household of Pharaoh, only to be sent packing again in a prefiguring of the exodus story. Back then to the land of Canaan, where Abraham and Lot part company; and still the ageing nomadic patriarch moves on at God’s command to settle in Hebron. At various points in all this journeying – before he sets out from Haran, again after he parts company with Lot, and yet again when he has settled at Hebron, God promises Abraham that he will make of him a great nation, indeed the father of many nations, with offspring so numerous that they can no more be counted than the stars in the sky. And Abraham believes him, even though he and Sarah are childless and getting older and older all the time. Indeed, by the time he hears the promise for the third time, he is allegedly 99 and Sarah 90. Even if they weren’t very good at counting birthdays in those far-off times, we also read that Sarah was by this time beyond the menopause. No wonder she laughs when she overhears the promise from the door of her tent. Even Abraham politely asks God to explain how he intends to make good his promise. But still he believes, as does Sarah, rapidly denying her involuntary chuckle. And in God’s own good time, Sarah conceives, Isaac is born, and the nation in which all the families of the earth were to be blessed began to be established in the land God had promised.
I have taken the liberty of reminding you of this long, testing story, because we might easily suppose, from a rapid reading of the condensed Reader’s Digest version so to speak, that God’s promise to Abraham was relatively easy to believe and to hold on to. It wasn’t. Over so many years of hope deferred and promises unfulfilled, Abraham could easily have become cynical and disillusioned. Remember too that, as the first of the patriarchs, he does not have any of the history of God’s gracious dealings with his chosen people to sustain him in his faith. He does not know what God’s love would prompt him to do in and through Jesus. But he hangs on in there, against all the odds, and finally, when his faith has been tested again and again, ‘the Lord reckons it to him as righteousness’ (Gen 15.6).
Here we have to pause to explore what that piece of theological jargon actually means. Under the Jewish tradition within which Paul was brought up, righteousness – a right relationship with God – was something that could in theory be earned by doing good, keeping the law. But Abraham lived hundreds of years before the law was given to Moses, so he didn’t have that option. Yet God chose Abraham to be the father of the Jewish nation. And he chose him, not because he ticked all those boxes, but simply because he trusted God’s word to him. God said ‘Go’ and he went. God said ‘I will give you this land’ and he believed it. God said ‘I will make of you a great nation’, and he believed that too, even if – not unlike Mary – he was puzzled enough to ask how that was going to happen, given that he and Sarah were old and childless. Abraham had kept no laws, because there weren’t any, but he had put his trust in what God said, and that was reckoned to him as righteousness – in other words it counted (it was reckoned) as being worth a whole lifetime of good behaviour (righteousness). But righteousness is so much more than good behaviour. It is the word used to describe a relationship with God, which is in such harmony with his will, that we can be comfortable in God’s presence. ‘Since we are justified by faith’, Paul writes at the end of his excursus into the faith of Abraham, ‘we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand’ (Rom 5.1). Faith, peace and grace. Faith – or trust – is the essential foundation on which a right relationship with God is established. With a right relationship, built on faith, we are at peace. And we don’t have to work at faith – he gives it to us, because he loves us. Sowe have God’s grace to thank, even for the gift of faith.
Nicodemus is drawn to Jesus because he has seen the signs, the miracles Jesus has worked (John 3.2). He hopes that the signs will be the clue, the Ariadne thread as it were, that will lead him to the presence of God. Jesus dismisses his seemingly practical approach. The presence of God in our lives is a gift, a new birth as unearned as the gift of life itself. We recognise it when we see it, just as we see the trees bend before the wind, but that doesn’t tell us what causes the wind to blow. ‘So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit’ (John 3.8). Nicodemus is puzzled – How can these things be? – but Jesus goes on to assert from his own knowledge of his Father – we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen (v 11) – that God gives because God loves. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son (John 3.16). The relationship with God that Nicodemus was seeking, our citizenship in God’s kingdom, is not something we can earn, but something we receive as a free gift when we put our trust in God’s love. That was the faith that sustained Abraham through all the danger and confusion of his life-long wanderings. That is the faith that we all need to hang on to in the darkness, when unimagined disasters rise from earth or sea, or from mankind’s own capacity for inhumanity. Our hearts go out to all those who are facing the consequences of such catastrophic events around the world. We pray for them, whatever their faith, we admire their dignity and courage, and we do what we can to show God’s love to them in our support of the agencies that may help them to put their lives together again.
A reporter on the Sunday programme this morning was asking an Egyptian Copt whether the fall of Mubarak would make any difference to the oppression of his Coptic Christian community by Islamic hooligans, and he replied: We don’t know, but the Bible teaches us that all things work together for good to them that love God. I think old Father Abraham would recognise that expression of baffled but steady trust in God’s loving purposes in all the confusion and uncertainty of life.
You will forgive me, I know, if I finish on a more personal note. As our daughter Hilary lay in hospital, fighting the cancer that so suddenly blew her life away, she was still able to say: God loves us. In the mini-tsunami that has swept through my life and that of my family, leaving such devastation in its wake, I am profoundly grateful for that candle of faith and hope and love, that she found the strength to light for herself and for us.