Promises Not Cosmic Games (Genesis 17.1-7, 15-16 Romans 4. 13-25, Mark 8.31-38)

 

When you look back on your life how many promises have you made? One hundred, one thousand, one million? Perhaps some of them are to yourself, others might be to other special people in your life. Perhaps some of them might be legal. For example promising to pay a mortgage, or in my case abiding by that restraining order…

In all seriousness we all make promises all of the time. I’m sure you could list them if you had time and a piece of paper. Promises are important, and we should try to keep them faithfully. Though, sometimes we don’t.

Lent is a time of promises. When we say we will try to turn away from sin, perhaps we’ve given something up, or promised to take something else on.

But here’s a question, have you ever made a promise to God? Because God’s made a promise to you.

Abram had been walking with God a long time. He’d been following God and finally when he was 99 years old God visited Abram and said, I’m making a promise to you. I’m making a special promise with you that you will be the father of a nation. You will be fruitful, and I make a promise to you now that I’ll always look after your children.

This promise is forever.

This story isn’t really about Abram and Sarai though. It’s about all of us.

This morning I'm reminded of Captain Tom who died this week, who in his 99th year just like Abram, raised millions of pounds for NHS charities. It just goes to show that it doesn't matter how old we are, we can still achieve amazing things. All of us have a use. 

This story, it’s about the way God speaks to us, and has spoken down the ages. We’re not just playthings in some kind of cosmic game, that we’re too small to understand. Our lives and happiness are not just arbitrary things to God. How we feel, what we do, it matters.

God makes a commitment to all of us. I will be your God. I will be with you. That God cares for us and chooses to interact with people in this way.

Sometimes scripture can come across as cold, and God is vengeful and angry about things, especially when we don’t do what he says.

The fundamental truth revealed about God through the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament as Christians call it, and the New Testament is that God is in relationship with people and cares about what we do, and how we treat one another.

El Shaddai (Almighty God) or YHWH, the God of the Hebrews isn’t a God like all the other gods in surrounding cultures at the time.

We sometimes forget how revolutionary this idea is. That God is in relationship with us and wants the best for us. That She loves us.

YHWH isn’t a God like the Greek gods who live on mount Vesuvius, who treat humans as play things, abuse them and demand what they want out of them.

Who create violence and involve human beings in their sordid affairs.

This is a God of relationship. A God of love who is perfect. Because that’s what promises are all about, relationship.

God doesn’t just demand but gives in return. The laws that He prescribes are for the good of the people who keep them, and through it, the law should bless everyone around them. It's through Abram and Sarai that 'All the families of the earth will be blessed.' (Genesis 22.18) 

This is such a huge moment in the lives of Abram and Sarai that they change their names to Abraham and Sarah. A new life, a new way of being is theirs now.

It isn’t the law that saves us, but God herself.

God kept His promise. Abraham and Sarah were founders of a nation. They weren’t perfect, they didn’t get everything right, but they were in relationship with God, and God drew close to them.  

It shows that we don’t have to be perfect in order to be in a relationship with God. Sure Jesus says “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” but who can honestly say they are?

Keeping God’s promises is about the aspiration of being better. Knowing that we’re never good enough to earn God’s love, but that it’s given to us, each of us.

And this is what Paul is talking about in the Letter to the Romans.

Abraham was chosen by God, not because of the law. The law hadn’t been invented then. God made promises to Abraham before the law was given.

Abraham was chosen because of his faith in God. Whether he was good or bad was immaterial in his selection. He was selected because he chose to trust in El Shaddai.

“No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. Therefore his faith was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

As Christians we make promises to follow Jesus. To set our minds on divine things and not human things.

We are in relationship with God, we are in covenant with God (special promise) and that covenant has conditions.

In our Gospel reading we see Jesus reaching out to all of us across time with a message.

Follow him.

Abraham followed God, and His promises, and God fulfilled them.

So we follow Jesus by putting aside what we want in these days of lent.

We’re all a mixture of good and bad, of right and wrong, of sin and righteousness.

The real wisdom is knowing the difference.

Remembering that God’s covenant and special promise with us never goes away. That God is faithful to us, and reaches towards us with smiling face and open arms, and says.

Follow me.

So we beat the worn path, that perhaps we feel we’ve been on before. Because we have audacious hope like that of Abraham.

Hope that God is working his purpose out. Hope that Jesus will not be ashamed of us, and we will not be ashamed of him. Hope for a future where the justice of God is proclaimed from the hilltops to the bottom of the ocean.

We’re all useful to God. We keep our promises by following him the best we can, and remembering that our faith is one of relationship, with a God that reaches beyond everything we know to redeem us.

Amen.

Preached at Zoom Service for St John the Baptist, Old Lakenham and St Paul's Tuckswood, Norwich. 28/02/2021

Photo by Jasmine Carter from Pexels