“Hoping against hope, he believed…” (Romans 4:18)
Can somebody on Zoom finish the expression for me: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, ______”?
Well, you all know it! But Abraham certainly did not. And we know this for two reasons. The first is that Abraham didn’t speak modern English, so if you said this to him, he’d just be confused. But the second reason is that this is not Abraham’s first time having this particular conversation with God. And in fact, it won’t be his last.
One of the limitations of our lectionary is that you only ever get a part of the story, and that’s fine; nobody wants to sit here and read the eleven chapters of Genesis that it takes to tell the story of Abraham and Sarah. In Lent, I’ll be following our Old Testament readings as they move forward in history, starting with Noah last week; but there’s not enough time during these six weeks to read the whole Old Testament, so we get just a taste of each phase: first Noah, now Abraham, then next week on to Moses and beyond. We lose something when we take these snippets. It’s not just that we lose the context or the bigger picture. It’s that we lose the Biblical characters’ sense of exasperation in waiting for God to do something, for once. And when Abraham finally falls over laughing at the end of this reading from Genesis, that’s exactly what he’s feeling: exasperation and disbelief. Because this is not the first time God’s made a prediction to Abraham, and not one of them has ever happened yet.
The very first thing that happens to Abraham in the Bible is that God appears and makes a promise. It comes out of nowhere, right at the beginning of Genesis 12, with no introduction at all: “Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great…’ So Abram went, as the LORD had told him…[and he] was seventy-five years old.” (Genesis 12:1–2, 4) So Abram and Sarai go, and wander where God leads. They go down into Egypt; they come back up into Canaan; but still nothing seems to have happened.
And then God appears again; God makes the promise again. God appears to Abram in the dry land where he wanders and tells him that his offspring will be as numerous as the dust of the earth, uncountable in number. (Gen. 13:16) And God goes away, and Abram lives his life, and wages war with great kings, and still he has no children. So God appears to Abram yet again and says he’s offering Abram a great reward, but Abram asks simply, “What will you give me, for I continue childless? …You have given me no offspring.” (Gen. 15:2-3) God takes Abram out into the desert at night and tells him that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars of the sky and the dust of the earth (Gen. 15:5). And nothing happens. Another year, another divine appearance, another promise still unfulfilled.
Now, Abram and Sarai are getting a bit old for child-rearing—by which I mean, they’re their eighties and nineties—and no child has appeared. It seems that God won’t follow through on the promise. So Abram and Sarai take things into their own hands. They come up with a horrifying scheme that’s the inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale—Abram will conceive a child with Sarai’s slave Hagar instead, and so the child, Ishmael, will be his son. This, they think, must be what God intends. And Ishmael is born, and unsurprisingly, there’s family drama.
And then finally, twenty-five years after the first appearance, when Abram is ninety-nine years old, God appears again, in this morning’s reading, and promises to make him “exceedingly numerous.” (Gen. 17:2)
And Abram is speechless. Can you blame him?
There’s this trope that I love in Biblical narrative when someone is really at a loss for words. God appears out of nowhere, and speaks to Abram for the first time: “I am God Almighty; walk before me” and so on, for a whole speech. And Abram says nothing. And then when God speaks again in verse 9, which our reading skips, the narrator says, “And God said to Abraham…” And again, Abraham says nothing. And then God speaks again, and the narrator says, “And God said to Abraham.” (17:15) Instead of writing it as one long speech, the narrator keeps pausing, as if to leave a space for Abraham to fill—but he can’t! There’s nothing to say. It’s as if you had a screenplay:
GOD: I am God Almighty (and so on and so on…)
ABRAHAM: …
GOD: As for you, you shall keep my covenant (and so on and so forth…)
ABRAHAM: …
GOD: As for Sarah your wife, (etc., etc.)
And Abraham falls on his face, laughing. “I’m a hundred years old! Sarah’s ninety! I have a son—Ishmael—isn’t that what you wanted me to do?” “No,” God says, “but Sarah will bear you a son…”
And God goes away. And—by the way—still no baby appears until God returns one more time, finally ready to make good on the promise.
“I am God Almighty,” God says, “walk before me, and be blameless.” (Genesis 17:1) Abraham has walked a long way before God in these twenty-five years. But he’s certainly not blameless. “Walk before me,” you might translate it, “and be perfect.” But nobody in the Bible, let alone in our world, is perfect. And anyone who’s been following along with Abraham’s story knows that he’s far from perfect.
Paul, to be fair, gives him a lot of credit. Abraham “did not weaken in faith,” Paul writes to the church in Rome, “when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead… or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb… No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God.” (Romans 4:19–20)
“No distrust made him waver.” Okay, even setting aside the moment where he falls on his face laughing at God’s fourth attempt to make this promise, this isn’t quite true, is it? Abraham and Sarah assume God’s plan won’t work, and make a troubling arrangement with Hagar instead. There’s a lot that could be said about this exploitative relationship, but Abraham is far from “blameless.” In a more-trivial way, Abraham and Sarah are each so exasperated with God’s tardiness that, in separate stories, each one laughs in God’s face. They’ve been living with this promise for a quarter-century, and nothing has ever changed. Why should this time be any different?
But in some deeper sense, even in speechless disbelief, Abraham believed God, “and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” (Romans 4:3)
“Hoping against hope,” Paul writes, “he believed.” (Romans 4:18) After three empty promises, with no change in sight, he believed. Speechless and laughing in disbelief, nevertheless in some sense he believed.
The word “believe” is a remarkably unhelpful translation of the verb Paul uses here, writing in Greek. “Belief,” to most of us, is a kind of thinking; if you believe a prediction, it means you think it will come true; if you believe in God, it means you think that God exists. But that’s not exactly what the Bible usually means by “believe,” and so you’ll sometimes hear this word translated as “trust,” so that “Hoping against hope, Abraham trusted God.” By the end of this story, though, it doesn’t really seem that Abraham has much reason to trust God’s promise. I’ve always thought that another translation is helpful. The verb for “believe” or “trust” is closely related to the word for “faith,” and it means not just “faith” in our religious sense, but “faithfulness.”
And that, perhaps, is one thing we can say. Abraham may not have believed in God’s promise. Abraham may not have trusted God to follow through. But Abraham, without a doubt, was faithful to God; and indeed, in the end, God turned out to be faithful to Abraham. God calls Abraham to blamelessness; but Paul praises him for faithfulness. And that, I think, is good news for us.
If you haven’t been shaken by doubt in the last year—if you haven’t lost faith, if you haven’t been left speechless, if you haven’t fallen on your face laughing in exasperation with your family, your government, or your God—then I want whatever you’re eating for breakfast, because I, for one, have done all those things at least ten times. But here I am: still married; still your pastor—still, by the way, never having taken up arms to overthrow the government!— sometimes laughing in disbelief; sometimes full of mistrust; but faithful even when doubtful; hoping against hope even when filled with despair.
“Faithfulness” is not about being perfect. It’s not about being blameless in everything you do. It’s certainly not about believing at every moment. If this were what it meant to be faithful, Paul would never have praised Abraham as he did. Faithfulness isn’t about never failing; it’s about what happens when you inevitably fail, it’s about how you repair what is broken and restore what has been lost. Faithfulness is failing, again and again, and returning, again and again. It’s about waiting, and watching, and hoping, for as long as it takes, for the promise of the future to become the present.
And if we only have the faith of Abraham—the faith that takes missteps, that flags and fails, that waits and waits and waits through endless days, that hopes beyond hope—that’s all God asks for.