Sermon: Just how many children are in this family?
Lots
of people claim to be Abraham’s children.
Jews, Christians and Muslims all claim Abraham as their spiritual father
– and Sarah as our mother.
And the
evidence suggests God wants us to see ourselves as members together of one
spiritual family. Why else would God
change Abram’s name from “Abram,” meaning “Exalted Father” (a name of exclusive
honour for the patriarch of a particular tribe, setting set him and themselves
apart from, and above others) to “Abraham,” meaning “Father of many” (suggesting
other tribes too are meant to be in his tent, and the family is much bigger
than just us).
Except,
instead of being one happy family we are too often a quarrelsome lot with
divisions, in-fighting and suspicion tearing the tent apart, both between our
different tribes – Jewish, Christian and Muslim, and within our separate tribes. None of us really live up to the other name-change
God made – to that of our mother, changing her name from “Sarai,” or “quarrelsome
one” (which we still are too much of the time) to “Sarah” meaning “princess, or
regal or noble one” (suggesting the kind of ennobling influence and uplifting
presence we are meant to have together on the life of the world).
Why
do we find it so hard sometimes to live together into the happy, uplifting and
ennobling role we are meant to play as a spiritual family in the life of the
world? Why do we find it so easy to be
quarrelsome?
I
wonder if it’s related to our forgetfulness of the way Abraham and Sarah – our
father and mother, actually related to God in the time that they lived.
First,
they lived in the time after the fall of the Tower of Babel. The time of the Tower was the time of humanity’s
great mistake of exalting itself and trying to reach the heavens with our own
ingenuity and technology. By the time
Abraham and Sarah came on the scene, the tower was down and in ruins, and theirs
was a time of divinely-enforced, learned humility.
And they
lived in the time before the giving of the Law and its commandments, and all
the moral prescriptions and religious ritual that the people came to see as the
basis of their relationship with God once they started living in the Promised
Land. These things came in only through
Moses and in the time after Moses, so Abraham and Sarah were not religious in
the way we understand the word. There
was no capital-L Law for them to follow.
No authoritative code of moral prescriptions to obey. No finely-tuned body of religious ritual to
practice. No heaven-sent list of ways to
prove themselves righteous.
We, on
the other hand, have all those things – for good, and for ill. As their children in our
separately-established and evolved traditions, we have the Law and our
interpretations of it. We have moral
codes, faith traditions, religious rituals and spiritual practices that have
developed over time and that define who we are among ourselves and distinct
from others.
And
because of this – thinking (mistakenly) that these are the basis of our
relationship with God, we also have orders of merit and reward, and notions of
just desert and holy punishment. We have
degrees of obedience to the faith, and levels of righteousness. We have hierarchies and circles, and hoops to
jump through. We have lines between inside
and out, and patterns of exclusion, differentiation and division, as well as
suspicion and even fear of others whose orders, rituals, practices and
traditions are not the same as ours.
It
means that sometimes we know who we are in the world more by whom we are not, than
by who and what we actually are. It also
means if we are blessed and privileged we assume we must somehow have earned
it. And if others suffer or are deprived
we assume somehow they must deserve that.
Abraham
and Sarah, though, living in the time they did – if anyone had asked them why
God blessed them as God did, why God called them his children and promised them
a land, a family and a way of blessing the world, they would honestly have had
to say, “We don’t know. I can’t think of
any way we have earned it. It seems God
just did it. Out of love or mercy, I
guess. Divine kindness. We just know we’re thankful – eternally and
unshakeably grateful. And grateful as we
are for being lifted now by God out of the muck of our own poor pride and
self-centredness, we will certainly do our best to do the one thing God asks –
to walk with God, or walk after God in the world, and be open to the way God
shows us to live well.”
And
there it is – the heart of who and how they are in the world, and what their family
– all their children, too often forget. What
makes them special – what makes them God’s people and the head of God’s family
in the world is not their own specialness, but their special awareness of God’s
love for all. And their life of
obedience to God’s way is not a matter of living out and proving their
righteousness, but of following as best they can the pattern of gracious and
generous love that they see in God as the way to truly be – and to be happy as,
the kind of people God intends us to be.
We
have no idea why we have been blessed as we are. But as children of Abraham – father of many peoples,
we are aware of, and we trust in the gracious goodness of God towards all.
And
trusting this as the basis of our own life and blessedness, how can we not choose
to be as generous and gracious towards others – all others, as God is towards
us, thus ennobling the life of Earth and being an uplifting presence in the
life of the world as our dear mother Sarah would have us be?
It’s
a radical way of being in a world that lives so much with distinctions of
insider and outsider, of neighbour and stranger, of ally and enemy, and with
sometimes-strong and deeply-engrained and publicly-unquestioned definitions of
who deserves and who doesn’t deserve our help and generosity.
But
with what we know of God and of ourselves, is there any other way to be truly
human, than the way of unqualified and unconditional generosity and grace? Is this not the way that’s shown to us to be
the spiritual family we are called to be together on the face of the Earth?
No comments:
Post a Comment