Do you hear God speaking?

“I will make you father of a multitude.” Well might Sarah laugh - as she does in the next chapter of the book of Genesis - when she hears God make this promise to her ninety-nine year old husband. She is old too. And yet shall she have pleasure? She asks you. And yet - the day comes when God's improbable promise is fulfilled. Not by the means they concoct - here is Hagar, take her - but by God's own improbable scheme. For he has more in mind than these two's progeny - or Abraham's "seed" (biological offspring). 

    God through these human means will bring a new joy into the world, a new closeness between humanity and Creator. And not before time. It has taken three thousand years - so far - for us human beings to live into the implications of that promise. To live into that promise and the call in earlier chapters of the same book to both care for and commune with the creation of which we are a part. 

    Over and over God calls on the people to come into relationship, and offers a few ... guidelines. As my friend Lois used to put on the butcher-paper cover over her Bible: "If all else fails, follow the directions." 

    How are we to live? Here is a way: to become the parents of a multitude, the progenitors of faithful offspring beyond count. Beyond count and beyond the charts of genealogists and family therapists. (Though hoo, boy, Abraham's children could use some of those as well... ) But the emphasis here is on the gift: the free gift of God to all humankind, through the faithfulness of Abraham and Sarah. And what is that gift?

    No less than life itself, life in communion with God, each other, our own true selves, and all creation.

    So easily broken is the covenant, so faithful is the promise, that we continually are called back into it.

    "If God is speaking, God speaks more often than people hear."--Tanya Luhrmann.

    God is speaking and offering life. A few people fishing, straggled along the shore of a small Mideastern lake, get the message - a bit directly. A man comes toward them along the shore, past the small mammals and large birds and shoreline plants and rocks, a man they may know - from a hill town some nine hours' walk away - or may not have met before: and he inhabits and manifests and makes known clear and loud the Word that is God come to humanity - and this time, to 'simple fisher folk', in the form of a man who works with his hands, and calls them.

    The man along the shore has something to say to the workers mending their nets - the two brothers, the other two brothers, perhaps an independent woman working her own boat - and offers them a wider world.

    Come with me and I will make you fishers of people.

    This calls them away from their everyday occupations. It requires another level of concern, of care, of commitment. 

    Who do you really serve?  

"Do you hear God speaking?" Keeping the Faith, Home + Life, Arizona Daily Star, Sunday, April 21, 2021, E3. 

• Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
• Romans 4:13-25
• Mark 8:31-38
• Psalm 22:22-30
  
  

http://edgeofenclosure.org/lent2b.html

Tanya Luhrmann, Noel Q King Memorial Lecture, "Voices of Madness, Voices of Spirit" - (https://youtu.be/MTyxhro_Apw). https://www.tanyaluhrmann.com/

Faithfulness and Hospitality

 Faithfulness and Hospitality

When God promised Abraham and Sarah that from them would come a multitude, that they would be the parents of nations and of kings, when God made that covenant promise, Abraham and Sarah had already shown faith. In Genesis 17 the promise seems all one way, but as the Apostle Paul pointed out, Abraham's faith “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” And they had shown it: traveling with Abraham's father up the Euphrates Valley from Ur in Chaldean territory near modern-day Baghdad to somewhere near Mosul or Kirkuk, but then Abraham and Sarah had struck off on their own through the desert and across to Syria, and down through the Judean hills, probably along the Gaza coast and into Egypt, and then back to the land of Canaan, where three angels, Genesis 18 tells us, found them resting with their flocks and herds in the front of their tent under the Oaks of Mamre. The land they travelled through was not deserted: this happened about a thousand years after cultivation began in Tucson - Jericho was half as old as it is now, olive trees that are old now (and still bearing fruit) were only a thousand years old back then. There were no borders, no walls, no iron curtains thirty feet high between countries, but there was desert, and mountains, and rivers, and plains, and people who could be hostile or friendly. And it was in this environment that Abraham and Sarah showed faithfulness, courage - trust in the promise, and hospitality. For their response to the strangers who approached their tent was radical hospitality. Come turn aside to rest, let us give you water and food. And then it was that the three who were one, who were God cloaked indeed in mystery, laid on them their strange promise: you will indeed have children, Sarah will bear a child. We'll be back and you'll see. No wonder Sarah laughed - with surprise but with delight and joy.

Faith was reckoned unto him as righteousness and their hospitality showed it in action.

• Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
• Romans 4:13-25
• Mark 8:31-38
• Psalm 22:22-30
• Genesis 18

After the Second Sunday in Lent, Year B