These are your words, Lord. Your word is truth. Lead us into the truth. Amen.
Question 2: share with another neighbor about a time in your life when you had to trust that something was going to be okay, even though you were really anxious about it. How did things turn out? Did you survive that experience, or is it still haunting you?
And Abram’s story of trust and anxiety doesn’t end in Genesis 12. In our reading today from Genesis 15, Abram confronts God with this fact: Abram has no heir to his flocks and possessions, and the great blessings God had promised Abram would go to a slave if Abram were to die at that moment. In Abram’s time, your legacy after your death came through your children; with no children, Abram and Sarai’s legacy would be poor at best.
The story of Abram & Sarai goes through many more twists and turns before their lives are spent. They changed their names: “Abram,” meaning “he is exalted,” became “Abraham,” meaning “Father of a multitude.” Sarai also changed her name to Sarah, bearing evidence that God’s covenant will indeed change the both of them. They tried to take the matter of an heir into their own hands by way of a slave bearing a son, Ishmael, to Abraham. They were promised a legitimate heir, and when Sarah laughed at the thought of becoming pregnant at age 90, God instructed them to name the child “Isaac,” meaning “She laughs.” Abraham & Sarah lived long lives and only began to see the blessings God promised to them, but their whole story is marked by anxiety and trust: anxiety because they didn’t understand the situations in which they often found themselves, and trust that somehow God would accomplish God’s goals, even when Abraham and Sarah got in the way by attempting to protect God and themselves by their own deeds.
Come forward in time, then, around 2,000 years. Jesus has been preaching teaching throughout Galilee on his way to Jerusalem. He was beginning to develop a great following: people came to be healed by his touch, to learn from his wisdom and to be his disciples. Even some of the Pharisees were amazed and intrigued by this roaming teacher from Nazareth. So when those Pharisees heard that Herod was seeking to kill Jesus, they grew anxious. “Jesus, get out of here,” they said. “Protect yourself,” they said. “Take the safe road,” they said. These Pharisees knew that Jesus was some kind of great blessing from God, but they weren’t confident that God would protect their blessing. So they warned Jesus to try and protect him – even though Jesus knew that protection and safety wasn’t where he was going.
It’s not an easy thing, to trust when you’re anxious. In fact, we’re not very good at it. The thing is, neither was Abraham, or any of the Old Testament heroes, for that matter. Abraham’s greatest mistakes were made when he didn’t have faith in God’s promises and tried to guarantee his own safety and security by himself. When King Saul was focused on God’s word, he was a good king, but when Saul tried to improve on God’s promises through his own work, he lost God’s favor. King David, Solomon, Moses – all of them are lifted up to us in our childhood as heroes of faith, but in reality they struggled with trust and anxiety as much as anyone else in the Bible. The same goes for Peter, James, John, Matthew, Andrew, Judas and all the other apostles and disciples in the New Testament. They knew that in Jesus they’d found something incredible, but Jesus wasn’t born to be protected; he was born to reveal the kingdom of God, and if I might paraphrase C.S. Lewis here, the kingdom of God “isn’t safe, but it is good.”
In our gospel reading today, Jesus takes the role of a prophet to God’s people. When he cries out, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem…how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,” Jesus is remembering the long history of Jerusalem’s pursuit of safety through other gods. Israel was supposed to be God’s people, but even in the days after God rescued the people of Israel from Egypt, the people’s anxiety kept them from trusting God first for their well-being. The world around them was an uncertain place, but rather than trusting in the certainty of God’s protection, Israel pursued money, political power and other idols to ensure their safety and protection. They did it so often that God was forced to walk out on altogether to remind them that only God can provide what they need – a desperate attempt to regain Israel’s attention and trust by removing their safety and security altogether.
Jesus himself, in today’s gospel reading, became an idol to be protected instead of a Messiah to be worshiped. Imagine that: a people dedicated to God protecting that God too much! But just like Abraham, just like King David, just like the disciples and just like us today, the Pharisees who wanted to protect Jesus didn’t understand that God is not concerned with protection: God is concerned with faith and salvation, and those require risk, vulnerability, and trust in anxious times.
Tonight a television show will be aired on the Discovery Channel. The show will claim that archaeologists have found the tomb of Jesus’ family, that the bones of Christ have been found and the resurrection is a hoax. Some in the church have already begun to protest this show. I’m not so convinced that we need to worry so much about what is going to be said on this show. As a pastor I know put it, “I’m far too concerned with what Christ means to me today to worry about the distant past or the distant future.” Our business is trusting in God in today’s circumstances, living between that trust and the anxiety that surrounds us and can drive us away from our trust in God.
Sometimes our desire for safety and certainty can be opposed to God’s will. When that happens, God’s words to us turn into lament. “
The point of Christian living is not certainty: it is faith. Certainty requires proof before a relationship of any consequence is granted. The walls of certainty may offer protection, but they also prevent any genuine interaction with the rest of the world. Absolute certainty eliminates all vulnerability, and without vulnerability no relationship is ever genuine and no love is ever authentic. Being vulnerable brings about anxiety, for we leave ourselves unprotected, but being vulnerable also allows us to learn to trust one another as real persons who follow Jesus. The point of Christian living is faith, and faith is what happens when we learn to live between trust and anxiety. “The picture [of] faith painted here is one that denies any surety of belief, other than that which comes from the relationship with the One who stands behind the promise. All ultimately depends on the faithfulness of the Lord. This passage does not portray doubt or anxiety as something foreign to the person of faith. Quite the contrary! We see in Abraham one who lives in the tension between trust and anxiety. Faith, which is reckoned to be righteousness, is precisely that.”[1]
May Christ shelter you under His wings and keep you safe, brothers and sisters, and give you the faith you need – the faith to live between trust and anxiety. Amen.
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