Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
Psalm 22:22-30
Romans 4:13-25
Mark 8:31-38
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Before God renames Abram and Sarai in
today’s reading, they have been struggling for 24 years with an unrealized
promise from God. When God first speaks to Abram in Haran, urging him forward
into an unknown land and promising him offspring, I imagine that Abram and
Sarai expect that child to come to them soon—after all, they are both already
in their seventies. They have no time to lose! Now, in today’s story, they have
traveled, sinned, survived, fought, followed, and suffered, and still there is
no child. Abram has done shocking things like force his wife into a foreign
king’s bed in order to save his own skin. As for Sarai, she has struggled with
envy and despair, mistreating the servant Hagar who bore Abram the son that
Sarai has been promised. Those twenty-four years make the
missteps and heartbreak that we all find in our daily lives look tame. And now, Abram is
ninety-nine years old—“already as good as dead,” says St. Paul—with still
nothing to show for his faith except for a lifetime of struggles. No wonder he
lies down on the ground and laughs when God comes around once again with new
names and a renewed promise: “Really, God? Is this all some cruel joke?” he
snorts.
Paul points out in today’s reading
from his letter to the Romans that it is because of Abraham and Sarah’s faith
that God is able to fulfill God’s promise to them, to make them a blessing to
generations yet unborn. They “hope against hope.” They believe in the face of
twenty-four years of evidence to the contrary. Outside of the Bible, though, how
does such faith really work in our lives? Isn’t that mere gullibility? Isn’t it kind of
ridiculous to go along holding onto some voice from God when it is telling you
that a ninety-year-old woman is finally going to bear you a son? Or what about
holding on to the promise that my life is going to be some great offering to
God, when it’s all I can do to put food on my family’s table? Or how about
believing that I am going to survive and flourish after a loved one has been
taken from me? Or that a hopeless sinner like me is somehow worthy of profound
love? Or even that an aging mainline congregation can have a significant impact
on their neighborhood? How can we live into crazy divine promises
with uncertain outcomes?
Psychologist Brene Brown defines
faith as “a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we
cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.”[1] She
would say that Abraham and Sarah are able to go on because they practice
letting go of their fear of uncertainty. On the one hand, nothing forces us to
let go of certainty more than travel and moving to a strange land—just ask
anyone who relies on airplane schedules or who has tried to navigate a foreign
city in which one doesn’t speak the language. And yet, grasping for certainties
can be a difficult habit to break. Before heading off to a new place, I scour
the Internet to find information about that city until I get a nice, preconceived
image of the future in which I can feel secure. As a matter of fact, when I
have any strange ache or pain, I retreat to the computer then, too, to search
for information on what that new complaint could be, as if becoming versed in
symptoms and diagnoses could shore me up against destruction. Looking for
certainty is the way in which we try to avoid being vulnerable.
Sometimes even the certainty of our
faith itself can serve as an attempt to avoid vulnerability. Look at Peter in
our Gospel lesson. He is the first disciple to speak out in faith that Jesus is
the Messiah. But Peter’s faith tells him that the Messiah is to be a great king
like King David, a king who will restore the sovereignty of Israel, crush the
Roman oppressors, and bring peace and prosperity to the land. When Jesus begins
to teach that he is instead a Messiah who is going to undergo great suffering
and total rejection and even death, Peter would rather keep the certainty of
his old faith views than face the vulnerability that Jesus himself describes.
Peter thus cries out against the vision that Jesus preaches.
For us, when our history, our
tradition, or even our scriptures become a refuge from uncertainty, rather than
a bearer of God’s mystery, then we need to take a look at our motivation. Are
we using our faith to avoid being vulnerable and unsure? We need to remember
Abraham and Sarah, moving forward into the unknown, following a God with the
Name, “I will be who I will be.” God always calls us into an open-ended future,
a future that renames us in the present.[2]
I recently watched one of the saddest
movies that even I—a connoisseur of sad movies—have ever seen. Called “The
Broken Circle Breakdown,” it tells the story of a young bohemian couple who
meet, fall in love, have an adorable daughter, and then stand by helplessly as
their child is taken from them by cancer. Their loss overwhelms them. The
inconsolable mother lashes out at her husband, loses her grip on reality, and
eventually takes her own life. The mother is a tattoo artist, and her body is a
visible patchwork of old relationships that she has covered over with new
tattoos. In her grief, she removes even her husband’s name from her body.
Before she dies, however, she impulsively gives herself and her husband new
whimsical names. As the film ends, her husband bends over her lifeless body to
find both of their new names entwined in a new tattoo. It is as if the couple
could survive the loss of their child only as a new entity—a new entity which
exists only as a sign, a small mark on a body no longer even alive.
I couldn’t help but think of this
tale of tattoos, life, death, and new names as I read the story of Abram and
Sarai this week. As they move into the circle of God’s covenant, God gives
Abram and Sarai new names, new identities—Names that are free of the suffering
of those 24 years in the wilderness. And God also gives them something else. You
see, our lectionary leaves out the very important fact that the covenant that
God makes with Abram is also to be worn on his body and on the bodies of all of
his male descendants in the mark of circumcision. Like the rainbow is the
reminder in the heavens of God’s promise to Noah, circumcision is the visible
sign of God’s promise to Abraham and his children. Like a tattoo, circumcision
is a painful and tangible bodily reminder of its bearer’s story. Tattooed
Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz Weber explains, “When you ask people about their
tattoos, what you'll find, even though they might not articulate it this way,
is that it allows us to put something on the outside that is already on the
inside. It's a way of sort of wearing our insides.”[3]
What can be more vulnerable than
“wearing our insides on the outside,” where they can be seen? And isn’t that
what we are doing when we take up our cross in faith? To us—we who are too old
or too young, too afraid or too despairing, too poor or too rich—Jesus calls,
“Renounce yourselves.” Let go of the certainty with which you have been
structuring your futures and walk blindly forward, holding only onto God’s
hand. Pick up the cross with which I mark you. Carry—outside where everyone can
see it—all of the uncertainties of your human lives: death, sickness, sin,
brokenness. Take them up in the sign of the cross and follow me. For I will
show you that, with God, death can be life, and loss can be gain. In me, the
circle can never be broken.
That is the promise that Jesus offers
us. That is the new covenant in his blood. And we step out into the unknown ...
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