God calls
Commentary
We wish we knew or could know more about the nature of faith. It is one thing to have it, to express it, to rely on it. It is another to claim to define and understand it, or to defend all the actions connected with it. The line between faith and credulity, faith and gullibility, faith and irresponsibility has to be thin and blurry. People get congratulated for relying on one kind of faith in one way and get scolded for believing too many things about too many signs and wonders in the same books, on the same pages.
Those of us who ever write short journalistic columns work on the principle that in making the one point allowed you within, say, a 700-word limit, you have to be vulnerable to the charge that you are missing others. Of course, and indeed. Those who tell stories and parables advise each other that each can make only one point without losing the point. Think what could have been attached (to bad effect) to Jesus' parables as these are preserved in the gospels. No, he would make one point and leave many others up in the air, or dangling.
So it has to be with the stories of call and promise, response and faith, that color Genesis, the Pauline writings, and the synoptic gospels most of all. We have to assume that other questions remain: about responsibility to the families of Abraham and Matthew who might have been half left behind in the face of Jesus' impetuousness; of the grieving father and hemorrhaging mother in Matthew -- who would have been chided had they taken their concerns to a charlatan faith-healer. One listens, carefully, with discretion. But when action comes, there is always a dare. And the response of faith is its own dare, one that makes faith lively and allows for lives to be faithful.
Grist For The Mill
Genesis 12:1-9
Since we encountered Genesis 12:1-4a last March 3, we will concentrate here on 4b-9. What strikes one at once is the sense of place. While testifying to the Spirit on Pentecost, we begin to get that sense: it happens in Jerusalem, but is to spread beyond there into all the world. While testifying to the Trinity on the next Sunday, it became important to deal with something unplaced, vague.
Now suddenly we are on a map, though admittedly a very ancient one, certainly hard to trace with certainty in our day. Here come the proper nouns over which lectors have good reason to stumble through much of the year: Haran, Canaan, Schechem, Moreh, Bethel, Ai, Negeb.
Abram/Abraham has been called out of his country, to go to strange places in a land of promise that remained a land of promise. He was not a property owner (except for a private cemetery plot). Yet wherever he went, he put down stakes and made a commitment. "So there he built an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him." Later: he "pitched his tent" and "built an altar to the Lord." Then Abram "journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb."
We may not use altars the way Abram was pictured doing soon after responding to the call back at Ur. But we "invoke the name of the Lord" as Abram did. Maybe this is the day to put in a plug for today's wanderers. It is early summer; all but the poor or homebound will likely be using some of the weeks after June 9 to head for faraway places. The altar of the heart is portable, however, and God is to be invoked anywhere. Trivial? No: parabolic. Abram stands for so much in our lives, not least of all the need we have to sacralize, to see sanctified, the places along our way.
Romans 4:13-25
Abraham keeps showing up in Old and New Testaments alike. Some elements in his story remain constant. He was the father of the people of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. Now, by extension, he is "the father of all of us."
There is a directional change of emphasis, now. In the Genesis accounts the arrows are horizontal, lines drawn on the map of his journeyings on the way to the land of promise. Or, when vertical, there was often the upward arrow, as of the smoke rising from his altars.
Now, in Paul's letter to the Romans, we get used to the downward arrow. For it is clear that for Paul, what mattered about Abraham was the fact that he responded to divine initiative, to grace, if you will.
The promise came down to Abraham, from without him -- he was not just hearing voices in his head, biblical writers keep saying -- and from above and beyond him. "For the promise ... did not come ... through the law but through the righteousness of faith." "The promise rests on grace."
In other words, Abraham responded to the promise; he did not make it. His altar of incense did not produce the promise. God took initiative and was the agent in this hero story as in other biblical ones.
Tinges of near-humor enter the account to show how impotent Abraham was until and unless God acted. He was "as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old)," long past his sexual prime. Yet "as good as dead" he was somehow able to function, as did Sarah, long after one expects them to.
Paul wants it made clear that "it was reckoned to him" that he was righteous -- and so we can be, in the same faith and promise.
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
The selection from Matthew today is really several stories, all of them representing versions of what has begun to reach us in the Abraham account. There is a call and response dialect involved. God called Abraham, and he went out. God promised Abraham and Abraham believed. He is "the father of us all." At issue each time is faith and discipleship.
So he was the father of the "leader of the synagogue" who came in and knelt before Jesus. This father was being very Abrahamaic, because he had been taught to take his concerns to the source, and, in Jesus, the divine source stood before him. Jesus was the divine life, and the leader's daughter was dead. Jesus helped him.
Along came a woman with a hemorrhage. "Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well." We know so little about her except that she had a need that she brought to Jesus and he had a response ready, embodying as he did the action of a loving God toward creatures.
And then there is Matthew, "sitting at the tax booth." We are given tantalizingly few details. Jesus says " 'Follow me.' And he got up and followed him." Had he heard Jesus, or heard of Jesus, earlier? Was he pre-evangelized, ready, open, waiting for a call? If not, what would or did Mrs. Matthew say to him that night? "You what? What are we going to live off? What will the neighbors think? When will you settle down? Where will you go? Will you get an acceptable job?"
We can only speculate. Here the point is simply reduced to a single theme. God calls, this time through Jesus. Humans, their daughter dead, their hemorrhage flowing, their taxes half-collected, express faith, and rise to follow.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Genesis 12:1-9
There are two leavings in the story of Abram and Sarai's departure for the new land. One is self-evident; the other so hidden that it takes virtually all of the eleven chapters of Genesis to see it.
"So Abram" and Sarai "went ..."; three, and with the emendation, five words to describe a dislodging, a tearing loose, an uprooting, a wrenching so exilic yet so promising that millennia later it is remembered by three of the great religions
of the world.
There is nothing so very spectacular about nomads taking down their tents. That is the way it works. Abram's father's house was not a two-story colonial, after all. But it was domicile, home, and a familiarity even more essential: knowledge of pasturage, reliable springs, refuge in times of hostility. The routes, routines, and rituals of nomadic life ripen to safety: leaving them behind throws out predictability and with it, any sense of being at home.
Even contemporary travelers have a dim sense of Abram and Sarai's exposure. Before departure on some extended journey, they will commonly stop by the attorney's office to make sure of final arrangements.
The more subtle leaving in this story is even more dramatic: it is the good Lord's. Genesis 1-11 sets out a litany of disaster. The dialectic doesn't disappear. Creator, creation, and creature are all good, in the deepest sense of the word. But trouble breaks out in the beginning and continues, unrelentingly. Adam, "slow witted and belly oriented," as he has been described, and Eve, a much more appropriate partner for theological conversation, can't abide their limits. Their breach opens a causeway to trouble as disorder breaks out across the face of the earth: Cain and Abel, Lamech's 77-fold revenge, lusty angels, self-absorbed hearts leading to a flood, an assault against
heaven itself. There doesn't seem to be any end to it.
But there is an end. Having promised Noah's children never to destroy the earth, the Creator leaves with Abram and Sarai to bring in a new creation. Choosing them against all the peoples of the earth, God determines to craft a people of faith -- a new people who, leaving the old behind, will live in the confidence of the new. In Christ, you and your people -- in the midst of your own departures -- have been grafted into this selfsame promise. Even if there is no land to it and progeny is limited, there is this certainty: "... I will bless you ... so that you will be a blessing," a miniature of the new creation.
Those of us who ever write short journalistic columns work on the principle that in making the one point allowed you within, say, a 700-word limit, you have to be vulnerable to the charge that you are missing others. Of course, and indeed. Those who tell stories and parables advise each other that each can make only one point without losing the point. Think what could have been attached (to bad effect) to Jesus' parables as these are preserved in the gospels. No, he would make one point and leave many others up in the air, or dangling.
So it has to be with the stories of call and promise, response and faith, that color Genesis, the Pauline writings, and the synoptic gospels most of all. We have to assume that other questions remain: about responsibility to the families of Abraham and Matthew who might have been half left behind in the face of Jesus' impetuousness; of the grieving father and hemorrhaging mother in Matthew -- who would have been chided had they taken their concerns to a charlatan faith-healer. One listens, carefully, with discretion. But when action comes, there is always a dare. And the response of faith is its own dare, one that makes faith lively and allows for lives to be faithful.
Grist For The Mill
Genesis 12:1-9
Since we encountered Genesis 12:1-4a last March 3, we will concentrate here on 4b-9. What strikes one at once is the sense of place. While testifying to the Spirit on Pentecost, we begin to get that sense: it happens in Jerusalem, but is to spread beyond there into all the world. While testifying to the Trinity on the next Sunday, it became important to deal with something unplaced, vague.
Now suddenly we are on a map, though admittedly a very ancient one, certainly hard to trace with certainty in our day. Here come the proper nouns over which lectors have good reason to stumble through much of the year: Haran, Canaan, Schechem, Moreh, Bethel, Ai, Negeb.
Abram/Abraham has been called out of his country, to go to strange places in a land of promise that remained a land of promise. He was not a property owner (except for a private cemetery plot). Yet wherever he went, he put down stakes and made a commitment. "So there he built an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him." Later: he "pitched his tent" and "built an altar to the Lord." Then Abram "journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb."
We may not use altars the way Abram was pictured doing soon after responding to the call back at Ur. But we "invoke the name of the Lord" as Abram did. Maybe this is the day to put in a plug for today's wanderers. It is early summer; all but the poor or homebound will likely be using some of the weeks after June 9 to head for faraway places. The altar of the heart is portable, however, and God is to be invoked anywhere. Trivial? No: parabolic. Abram stands for so much in our lives, not least of all the need we have to sacralize, to see sanctified, the places along our way.
Romans 4:13-25
Abraham keeps showing up in Old and New Testaments alike. Some elements in his story remain constant. He was the father of the people of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. Now, by extension, he is "the father of all of us."
There is a directional change of emphasis, now. In the Genesis accounts the arrows are horizontal, lines drawn on the map of his journeyings on the way to the land of promise. Or, when vertical, there was often the upward arrow, as of the smoke rising from his altars.
Now, in Paul's letter to the Romans, we get used to the downward arrow. For it is clear that for Paul, what mattered about Abraham was the fact that he responded to divine initiative, to grace, if you will.
The promise came down to Abraham, from without him -- he was not just hearing voices in his head, biblical writers keep saying -- and from above and beyond him. "For the promise ... did not come ... through the law but through the righteousness of faith." "The promise rests on grace."
In other words, Abraham responded to the promise; he did not make it. His altar of incense did not produce the promise. God took initiative and was the agent in this hero story as in other biblical ones.
Tinges of near-humor enter the account to show how impotent Abraham was until and unless God acted. He was "as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old)," long past his sexual prime. Yet "as good as dead" he was somehow able to function, as did Sarah, long after one expects them to.
Paul wants it made clear that "it was reckoned to him" that he was righteous -- and so we can be, in the same faith and promise.
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
The selection from Matthew today is really several stories, all of them representing versions of what has begun to reach us in the Abraham account. There is a call and response dialect involved. God called Abraham, and he went out. God promised Abraham and Abraham believed. He is "the father of us all." At issue each time is faith and discipleship.
So he was the father of the "leader of the synagogue" who came in and knelt before Jesus. This father was being very Abrahamaic, because he had been taught to take his concerns to the source, and, in Jesus, the divine source stood before him. Jesus was the divine life, and the leader's daughter was dead. Jesus helped him.
Along came a woman with a hemorrhage. "Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well." We know so little about her except that she had a need that she brought to Jesus and he had a response ready, embodying as he did the action of a loving God toward creatures.
And then there is Matthew, "sitting at the tax booth." We are given tantalizingly few details. Jesus says " 'Follow me.' And he got up and followed him." Had he heard Jesus, or heard of Jesus, earlier? Was he pre-evangelized, ready, open, waiting for a call? If not, what would or did Mrs. Matthew say to him that night? "You what? What are we going to live off? What will the neighbors think? When will you settle down? Where will you go? Will you get an acceptable job?"
We can only speculate. Here the point is simply reduced to a single theme. God calls, this time through Jesus. Humans, their daughter dead, their hemorrhage flowing, their taxes half-collected, express faith, and rise to follow.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Genesis 12:1-9
There are two leavings in the story of Abram and Sarai's departure for the new land. One is self-evident; the other so hidden that it takes virtually all of the eleven chapters of Genesis to see it.
"So Abram" and Sarai "went ..."; three, and with the emendation, five words to describe a dislodging, a tearing loose, an uprooting, a wrenching so exilic yet so promising that millennia later it is remembered by three of the great religions
of the world.
There is nothing so very spectacular about nomads taking down their tents. That is the way it works. Abram's father's house was not a two-story colonial, after all. But it was domicile, home, and a familiarity even more essential: knowledge of pasturage, reliable springs, refuge in times of hostility. The routes, routines, and rituals of nomadic life ripen to safety: leaving them behind throws out predictability and with it, any sense of being at home.
Even contemporary travelers have a dim sense of Abram and Sarai's exposure. Before departure on some extended journey, they will commonly stop by the attorney's office to make sure of final arrangements.
The more subtle leaving in this story is even more dramatic: it is the good Lord's. Genesis 1-11 sets out a litany of disaster. The dialectic doesn't disappear. Creator, creation, and creature are all good, in the deepest sense of the word. But trouble breaks out in the beginning and continues, unrelentingly. Adam, "slow witted and belly oriented," as he has been described, and Eve, a much more appropriate partner for theological conversation, can't abide their limits. Their breach opens a causeway to trouble as disorder breaks out across the face of the earth: Cain and Abel, Lamech's 77-fold revenge, lusty angels, self-absorbed hearts leading to a flood, an assault against
heaven itself. There doesn't seem to be any end to it.
But there is an end. Having promised Noah's children never to destroy the earth, the Creator leaves with Abram and Sarai to bring in a new creation. Choosing them against all the peoples of the earth, God determines to craft a people of faith -- a new people who, leaving the old behind, will live in the confidence of the new. In Christ, you and your people -- in the midst of your own departures -- have been grafted into this selfsame promise. Even if there is no land to it and progeny is limited, there is this certainty: "... I will bless you ... so that you will be a blessing," a miniature of the new creation.
