Hilton Head Island, SC – January 28, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 12:1-9; Genesis 16:1-11
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “By you all the families of the earth will bless themselves.” – Gen. 12:3b (RSV)
Many biblical scholars claim that Abraham is the first historical person recorded in Genesis. Everyone prior to that are mythological people intended to portray mythological truths, they say. Abraham lived about 1800 BCE. He was born in Mesopotamia in the city of Ur. Ur was in what now is southern Iraq.
At God’s command, Abraham’s father Terah took his entire extended family, left Ur, and went to the land of Haran, in what now is northern Syria. It was while Abraham was there with his wife Sarah that Abraham followed God’s directive to leave Haran and go with Sarah to land God said he would give to Abraham and his descendants. The amazing thing about this divine-human encounter is that Abraham was maybe in his early nineties and Sarah in her early eighties. And they had no children. So how could God give them a land for their descendants?
Here is where Genesis probably fudges on historical numbers. For example, it says that when Abraham’s father Terah died, he was 205. I don’t think so. It is an extension of the mythology of Genesis. It is a way of making theological “facts” out of storied fiction. Earlier, everybody in Genesis lived to be five or seven or even nine hundred years old. Methuselah was 969 years old when he died, we are told. I really don’t think so. But the message being conveyed is that “back in the day” things were very different from what they are now. That was true, no doubt, but nobody lived to be 969.
Anyway, Abraham gathered together his wife, his cattle and sheep and everything else he owned, and he headed for the land of Canaan, which now is the modern state of Israel. And he did so because he believed that God indeed intended him to the father of a great nation, and would make his name great, and that by Abraham all the nations of the earth would bless themselves.
By the traditions of the peoples of the Middle East, Abraham is the father of both the Arabs and the Jews, the Arabs by his son Ishmael and the Jews by his son Isaac. But Abraham didn’t have any sons for a very long time. He and Sarah were living in Canaan when a famine came, as happens every so often in the Middle East. So they went to Egypt, where the Nile River was, and where there was no famine. Then, when conditions had improved in Canaan, Abraham and Sarah returned there. Once again, God told Abraham that He would give Canaan to Abraham’s descendants, and once again Abraham reminded God that he had no descendants. Nonetheless, Abraham trusted that God knew what He was doing, and so he went forward in faith. Many questions in his mind went with him, however.
About then Sarah took matters into her own hands --- sort of. In a burst of female generosity, which she later regretted, Sarah told Abraham she was never going to be a mother. Therefore she said he should have a baby by her servant girl, Hagar. The story says that Sarah gave Hagar “to Abram as a wife.” Abraham had psychological doubts this idea would work, but he said okay. (He was a male, wasn’t he, and aren’t most males programmed to reproduce, especially when it is always at the expense of females?) Hagar gave birth to a son named Ishmael. That name means “God Hears.” God heard Sarah’s plea that her husband should have a child by her servant woman, and Abraham’s plea that he should have children by anyone, because he was getting no younger.
Incidentally, up to this point, Abraham’s name was Abram, or, in Hebrew, Avram. Abram means “Exalted Father.” Soon, after the birth of Isaac, God would change his name to Abraham, which means “Father of Nations.” The name-change illustrates the promise God had made to Abraham years before in Haran, that Abraham would be the father of a great nation, but that all nations would be blessed by him.
In terms of subsequent history, Abraham became the most influential person in the development of world religions, more important than Moses or even Jesus. For from Abraham came Judaism (through Moses and the prophets), and Christianity (through the Jews Jesus of Nazareth and Saul of Tarsus), and Islam, through Muhammad, the Arab, the descendant of Ishmael. Abraham, besides being the Father of Nations, is the Father of the Three Great Western Religions. There is no one in the evolution of world history more important than he is.
God has plans. He has big plans. And He has big plans for all of us. But if those plans are to come to fruition, we must follow God. Life is not a matter of doing our own thing; it is a matter of doing things the way God wants them done. We must be like Abraham. We can’t just go willy-nilly on our own way. We must follow God’s way. And as the Bible says, God’s ways are not our ways. Abraham believed that. With an undivided heart he believed that. At God’s bidding he went to Haran, then to Canaan, then to Egypt, then back to Canaan. He was God’s Great Nomad.
The other night I watched Fiddler on the Roof on the Turner Classic Movies channel --- for the sixth or eighth time. Every now and then I need a Fiddler fix, and it was good to get another.
Assuming you are all familiar with this outstanding Broadway musical, you will know that the main character is Tevye, a poor milkman of the Russian Jewish village of Anatevka. I will never forget seeing Zero Mostel, the original Broadway Tevye, when he came back to New York to do a second run of his most famous role. He was arthritic, he had cancer, and he was close to death. He was also magnificent. The cinematic Tevye is the Israeli actor Topol. He is very good.
Tevya is like Abraham; he does what God wants, but he also has conversations with God in the doing of them. For instance, he inquires of God about the possibility of becoming rich; “Would it spoil some vast eternal plan if I were a wealthy man?” But it doesn’t happen.
His wife Golda prays that their oldest of five daughters, Tzeitel, to marry Lazar Wolf, the rich butcher of Anatevka, but it doesn’t happen. She chooses to marry Motel Kamzoil, the tailor. Chooses!? Unheard of. Unthinkable. Both of the parents want God to prevent their second daughter, Hodel, from marrying Perchik, a political radical. She does it anyway, and also, like Tzeitel, for love. Perchik is arrested, and sent to prison in Siberia. Tzeitel resolves to join him there. Sitting in the whistle-stop Anatevka railroad hut, Hodel tearfully says, “Papa, I don’t know when we shall see each other again.” Tevye looks up to heaven and ruefully says, “Then we’ll leave it in His hands.”
The beleaguered parents really want God to put the kibosh (a Yiddish word) on their third daughter, Chava, from marrying Fyedka, a Gentile. This the observant Jew Tevye could not and would not bear. When Chavele decides to be married to Fyedka by the priest of his village, Tevye declares, as do so many Orthodox Jews in similar situations, that Chava is dead.
At the end of this most moving of musicals, Russian soldiers come and order everyone to leave Anatevka. As the villagers slowly trudge past Golde and Tevye’s home on their way to wherever it is that they are going, Chava and Fyedka come to say goodbye. If the Czar’s troops could do such a terrible thing to Chava’s beloved villagers, they too shall leave for a new life somewhere else. Tevye will not even look at his daughter as he puts the last parcel on the wagon. In deep sadness, Chava and Fyedka walk away. Again, without looking at them, Tevya quietly intones, “May God bless you.”
Tevya is Abraham; Abraham is Tevya. Golde is Sarah; Sarah is Golde. They go forward into the unknown, trusting that God goes with them. Faith essentially is trust. It is not belief per se. It is the conviction that God is God, that He is there, that He is here, and that in the end, He will not fail us. We cannot know that, but we can trust it. If we do trust in God, we know that ultimately all will be well.
Abraham and Sarah knew that. At times they wondered, but somehow they also knew; they knew.
Frederick Buechner was a Presbyterian minister who never served a day as a called minister in a parish church, to my knowledge. His ministry was writing books and being a guest preacher in many churches and at many church gatherings. Buechner wrote over thirty books. Some of them are humorous, like Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who. The bulletin cover quote comes from that book. Most of his books are fiction, but some are non-fiction, and almost all are, to some degree, autobiographical. One, Telling Secrets, is a loosely autobiographical masterpiece of a troubled family and of one especially troubled family member. It is a glittering gem of theological, psychological, and spiritual depth.
I’m going to do something I have never done before. The penultimate ending to this sermon will be a very long quote from Fred Buechner’s brief bio of Abraham in Peculiar Treasures. In seminary we were told you should never use a long quote in any sermon under circumstances. However, I’m a long way from seminary. Besides, I’m old and crotchety. The quote starts with part of the bulletin cover quote.
*****
“If a schlemiel is a person who goes through life spilling soup on people and a schlemozzle is the one it keeps getting spilled on, then Abraham was a schlemozzle. It all began when God told Abraham to go to the land of Canaan where he promised to make him the father of a great nation and he went.
“The first thing that happened is that his brother-in-law Lot took over the rich bottom-land and Abraham was left with the scrub country around Dead Man’s Gulch. The second thing was that the prospective father of a great nation found out his wife couldn’t have babies. The third thing was that when, as a special present on his hundredth birthday, God arranged for his wife Sarah to have a son anyway, it wasn’t long before God told Abraham to go up into the hills and sacrifice him….
“In spite of everything, however, Abraham never stopped having faith that God was going to keep his promise about making him the father of a great nation. Night after night, it was the dream he rode to sleep on --- the glittering cities, the up-to-date armies, the curly-headed kings. There was group photograph he had taken not long before he had died. It was a bar mitzvah, and they were all there down to the last poor relation. They weren’t a great nation yet by a long shot, but you’d never know it from the way Abraham sits enthroned there in his velvet yarmulke with several great-grandchildren on his lap and soup on his tie.
“Even through his thick lenses, you can read the look of faith in his eye, and more than all the kosher meals, the Ethical Culture Societies, the shaved heads of the women, the achievements of Maimonides, Einstein, Kissinger, it was that look that God loved him for and had chosen him for in the first place.”
(Then Frederick Buechner quotes Abraham himself in this deeply imaginative portrait of the first of the Genesis patriarchs.)
‘They will all be winners, God willing. Even the losers will be winners. They’ll all get their name up in lights,’ says the old schlemozzle’s eyes.
‘Someday – who knows when? – I’ll be talking about my son, the Light of the world.’”
*****
The Rev. Thomas Olivers was an Englishman who became one of the first Methodists in the middle of the eighteenth century, just as Methodism was starting. He was converted by the preaching of the early Methodist evangelist, a Calvinist, of whom there soon were very few. Olivers then converted to the Arminian John Wesley, and Wesley made him the editor of the Arminian Magazine. Wesley put up with Olivers’ lack of a proper clerical education, his many faults, and his stubborn streak of independence for twelve years, and then dismissed him.
One time Olivers happened to be in the Great Synagogue in London where he heard the medieval Jewish tune Yigdal, also known as Leoni. The tune was sung to creedal statement of Judaism by the famous twelfth century Jewish scholar and sage, Moses Maimonides. Yigdal is still frequently sung in synagogues all over the world. Olivers made a paraphrase of Maimonides’ statement into a ten-stanza hymn. You will be pleased to know that when we sing it momentarily, we will sing only three stanzas. The hymn does great credit to the man honored this morning by this sermon.
Without Abraham, there would be no Hebrews or Arabs. Without Abraham there would be no Israelites or Jews. Without Abraham, there would be no Jesus. Without Jesus, there would be no Christians. Without Jews and Christians, there would be no Muhammad. Without Muhammad, there would be no Islam. From Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to New York City and Cleveland and Chicago and Los Angeles, from Holy Russia and Australia to Ireland and Canada and the United States and Ecuador, from Indonesia and Pakistan to Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Morocco, Abraham’s imprint is found everywhere. Without Abraham, the God of Abraham would be praised nowhere.
Is everything in Genesis that tells about Abraham actually and factually historical? Probably not. Is it true? Our faith leads us to trust that it is. We sing today first in praise of the God of Abraham, but also in praise of Abraham. The God of Abraham praise, all praised’ be his name!
It is a remarkable story. Abraham is the beginning of the mainly historical parts of the Bible, and Abraham is the beginning patriarch of all the great Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim patriarchs. Praise to all the matriarchs and patriarchs, the mamas and the papas!