TEXTS:
Romans 4: 13-25
Genesis 12: 1-9
Genesis 17: 1-7,15-16

Sermon: “Faith 2”
In both readings from the book of Genesis we hear of God’s amazing promise to Abram to make him the father of many children. As a sign of this Abram has his name changed in the later chapter to Abraham which means ‘ancestor of a multitude’.
God is also definite that this promise includes Abraham’s wife, Sarai, as well, who is to be known as Sarah from now on; ‘the mother of nations’. This is a repeat of the promise that God had made to Abram when he first left the city of Ur to come to this strange land of Canaan. Despite all Abraham’s mistakes, all the years between the first and this
one God is faithfully holding onto the original promise made.
What an amazing God, and so worthy of worship and yet in the very verse following the last passage it says this; “Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed”.

He then proceeds to question God as to how this promise of descendants will occur due to his and his wife’s age. Later still we read about Sarah laughing at the same preposterous promise and yet still God withdraws neither promise nor love.
Questioning God, expressing disbelief to the point of incredulous laughter, did not stop Abraham and his family retaining their God and neither did it stop God claiming them as his people. In fact Abraham, and Sarah, are recorded in the Romans as models of faith. This idea of doubting faith can be quite challenging to those who were taught that acceptance of God’s will was fundamental to faith. The idea of honest dialogue with God; expressing confusion, disappointment, disbelief and even anger at God was not part of a good Christian up-bringing.

The trouble is that when life happens that contradicts expectations of God and others, they don’t know how to cope. And neither do the people around them.
A Baptist friend of mine shared how difficult it was having two severely handicapped children – not because of their high care needs but the reactions of their fellow believers. They were told to pray for healing, to take their children to healing services and so one. And when their children weren’t ‘cured’, they were accused of having unconfessed sins, of paying the price for the sins of their fathers, of not having enough faith. Now I think that attitude is spiritual abuse – to blame the parents and/or children of not doing enough to deserve healing. I understand on an intellectual level that it is a way for people explain why their prayers and anointing and concepts about God and healing aren’t working but “blame and shame”?

Underlying this behaviour is a simplistic concept of faith. Christian faith is not based on negotiating with a pagan god to get the results I want based on an appropriate gift. Neither is it hoping things will turn out well, or even a stoic acceptance of suffering (a form of martyrdom if you will). No it is something much deeper. As the Romans passage states “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” The story of Abraham and Sarah illustrates this hopeful waiting both in their failures and their successes. They continued to worship a God who they believed would fulfil these promises at the same time they laughed in disbelief and made their own arrangements to make an impossible promise come true. And despite what we would consider a lack of faith, God still delivered. Not in their life-time true, but in only a few generations Abraham and Sarah’s descendants were counted as multitudes.

Perhaps our problem today with faith is our desire for instant gratification. The thought of waiting for Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac and his wife Rebekkah to have their long-for twins Esau and Jacob. And then waiting for Jacob to spend seven years working to wed Rachel (and then getting Leah instead) and then working another seven years for Rachel. And then waiting for the twelve sons of those two wives and his concubines Bilbah and Zilpah to be born and take wives of their own. Worrying that this family would die out during the famine that drove them all the Egypt, where Joseph was able to ensure they became more numerous and more powerful than the Egyptians. It’s more than we can stand!

We pray for revival and expect numbers to increase next week. And yet it took seventy years of faithful attendance and prayer from the old grandmothers of Russians Orthodox churches before they were free from Soviet oppression. The great Welsh Revival of the early 1900’s grew from the soil of fifty years of prayer. Parish records show that the great Sunday School movements in Auckland, and elsewhere, in the fifties and sixties, came from the investment of money and people into this movement from the 1920’s – a whole generation of work before the fruiting. In fact many of these faithful people spent their entire lives working for Sunday School without any signs of success.

Today, we are hearing whispers of a quiet awakening – of young people coming to cathedral services, of one or two new people joining little church communities who thought they were dying. Our church school chaplains are noticing less apathy or antagonism and more curiosity about God from their students. But this is built not on the wonderful programme or charisma of people now but on the faithfulness of those who have worked without reward for years and years before.

Paul’s letter to the Romans also highlights that faith doesn’t mean everything is always nice and comfortable for the faithful. He is saying we may well suffer or be afraid but to remember we are still children of God. That means we can be sure of God’s love, that we will never be discarded no matter what we do or feel.

And yet despite this certainty he also wants us to understand that is okay to feel all those normal emotions when we are hurt, etc. He claims that it is the Holy Spirit that encourages us to cry out to our ‘Abba, Father’. And notice it is a cry – Rowan Williams, a former Archbishop of Canterbury writes this; “the cry to God as ‘Father’…is not a calm acknowledgement of a universal truth about God’s abstract fatherhood. It is the child’s cry out of a nightmare. It is the cry of outrage, fear, shrinking away, when faced with the horror of the ‘world’ –yet not simply or exclusively protest, but trust as well. ‘Abba, Father’ all things are possible to Thee…” In other words Paul is teaching that faith does not require unfeeling reactions to suffering but strength within the pain.

As God seems to be able to handle the messiness of our emotions and the reality of our less than perfect lives, perhaps it is time we allowed ourselves and our neighbours this grace as well to acknowledge our feelings and those of others, while still being able to praise the goodness of God, – to claim the perfection of an unseen future while admitting the pain of the present and the wounds of the past. As the psalmist says “Our God deserves all our praise” even the praise that comes despite and through our disbelief. So faith is moving onward into the unknown and of holding onto God despite our doubts, our mistakes, the lack of feedback and success, derision and persecution. It needs to be so imbedded in us that as Martin Luther said “I can do no other”. There is no choice, we have to do what Jesus has asked. But neither does that remove from us the responsibility of questioning and arguing with ourselves, others and even God.

Blind faith is not biblical. Unthinking obedience is not mandatory to be faithful. That is just an abdication of our role as members of a community to together be people of faith. True, robust faith is even more important in these days of dictators, narcissists, influencers and propaganda (in the church never mind the world).
In the silence of our hearts let us hear God’s call to live faithfully – with questions, doubts, pain and confusion,…
(pause to pray)