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 improbably 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 mean 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. (Tho 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? Ultimately who is your family? Where is your allegiance? Who is your god?
“To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do?”--Toni Morrison, 2002 lecture.
Tanya Luhrmann, Noel Q King Memorial Lecture, "Voices of Madness, Voices of Spirit" - (https://youtu.be/MTyxhro_Apw).
