The Ground of Relationship
My father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1985 – about six months before my 16th birthday. There followed a season of thinking that we would have to live life without him, but advancements in treatment were happening, he had a great oncology team which he traveled to find at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and God helped my dad to trust that a combination of medicine and meditation would make a difference. He talked to God. He talked to his body. He talked to his cancer cells. He rallied and found remission – a couple of times.
My dad lived and traveled and thrived for another 25 years – enough time to see his youngest grandchildren reach school age.
In the last three months of his life, dad and I engaged in a very deep email conversation about God. We explored what we could and could not fathom about God. My dad, a preacher’s kid, was not a church-going guy, in fact he rejected “the church” as a traitor to the ideals of Christ, the ten commandments, the Lord’s prayer and the biblical idea of Shalom.
And my dad believed in a God “so much more omniscient and omni-powerful as to be completely beyond the understanding of (hu)man.” His words.
In some ways, today’s story about Abram and Sarai, eventually renamed Abraham and Sarah, is a story about THAT God….completely beyond understanding. And present. Active. All-powerful. Committed to relationship with creation. Dependable. Trustworthy. And it is a story about relating to THAT God.
In the chapters that come before today’s text, God has committed three things to Abram and Sarai – a place, descendants, and a blessing. If they will go where God sends them, away from their family of origin and all that is familiar, then God will provide them with people to be a nation, with land on which to settle, and with a blessing that will convey to each generation of their people.
While that is a very big set of commitments from God, those commitments come with very few details – you know, details like geography, biology, timelines, logistics.
From first conversation with God forward, we see Abram and Sarai going where God sends them and wrestling to trust God’s provision, wrestling to understand the timeline, wrestling to imagine how they will become a great nation.
Because, you see… they don’t seem to be able to have a baby.
God keeps showing up and telling Abram that things will work out. On one occasion, Abram challenges God a bit – he reminds God that he is still without a child. In the traditions of the time, if he died childless, all of his stuff would go to a slave born in his household. I hear in his pleading the question – How do I KNOW that You will do as You say?
In response, God shows Abram the night sky, promising his descendants will number more than the stars above. Then God asks Abram to sacrifice a cow, a goat, a ram, a turtledove and a young pigeon – and through a dream and by fire around the butchered animals, God made a covenant that finally includes some specifics – I, God, will give this land to your descendants, from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates, land that belongs to a lot of other groups at this time…
But there is no baby.
At one point, Sarai, frustrated by this fact, takes matters into her own hands, commanding her servant Hagar to lie with Abram. (To be clear, this would have been acceptable practice in the culture at the time.) Hagar becomes pregnant…and Sarai is so overcome by jealously that she mistreats the girl to the point that Hagar runs away.
God, through an angel, “sees” Hagar hiding in the wilderness and tells her to return to Sarai, promising that the son she will bear will have many descendants and will also be a great nation.
When Hagar gave birth to Ishmael, Abram was 86 years old.
A ripe old age.
An age where any sort of reproduction is miraculous…
…The story resumes 13 years later. So do the math – Abram is now 99.
Nothing in the text suggests that Abram has been talking to God during these 13 years. Perhaps it has been an uncomfortable silence. Abram has been raising Ishmael, born to Hagar, as his son. So Ishmael is now 13 – an age when children transitioned into adulthood in ancient cultures.
Suddenly, God shows up, kind of out of nowhere. Abram falls on his face before the God he’s not engaged for 13 years. God reaffirms the covenant and instead of an offering of livestock, God requires that Abram and every male in household be circumcised.
So Abram, at 99, circumcises all the males in his household…including himself.
In this exchange, God renames Abram to Abraham, (a name meaning ancestor of many) and renames Sarai to Sarah (a name that means princess). In this way, both Abraham and Sarah are named in the covenant with God – it is an agreement, a commitment, an exchange between God, Abraham, AND Sarah. God reiterates once again that Sarah will be blessed and that she will bear a son. And the text says that Abraham fell on his face (again) and laughed… “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old bear a child?”
God promises to bless Abraham’s son by Hagar, Ishmael, in another way.
But God’s covenant, the one he’s made with Abraham and Sarah, will be passed on to another son named Isaac, to be born in a year.
Suddenly it seems God has gotten very specific.
And that brings us to our text for today.
Today’s story begins at Abraham and Sarah’s tent near the Oaks of Mamre. Abraham is sitting in the entrance of the tent when the LORD appears to him.
The text is confusing here. As written, the LORD appears to Abraham… and then Abraham looked up and saw three men standing near his tent. Did Abraham see the three men as a representation of God? Remember that Abraham knew the timeline God had shared about Isaac’s birth. Perhaps he was watching for signs, expectantly waiting for more evidence of God’s promise to be fulfilled because he knew the clock was ticking on that promise in one year.
Upon seeing the strangers, Abraham springs into action – a kind of action that would be quite surprising for a man of 99. He runs, he bows, he calls for water to wash feet, and he plans a menu of rich food. He runs to his herd, selects a fatted calf, and instructs his servant to prepare it. Finally, he places before his guests bread and curds and milk and the prepared veal, standing by while the strangers eat. I have this image of him panting from the effort while they dine.
Hospitality to strangers would have been expected in a culture where there weren’t hotels or roadside restaurants. But Abraham is offering extravagant hospitality. He’s given up a fatted calf, something that would have served him differently in days to come. It had an opportunity cost.
The strangers ask about Sarah. From the tent she overhears one saying that upon his return in a year, she will have a son.
And now she laughs. It is her turn to belly-laugh. How can this be? I assume she’d heard this from Abraham after that incident with the circumcision. But to hear it again from strangers asking about her?
The text alludes to some things here – “it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women” – code for her being post-menopausal. And in her laughter, Sarah reveals something about Abraham…she says “After I have grown old and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” She is specifically talking about sexual pleasure. Folks, there is sex in the Bible…because it is part of life. And part of life is that at 99, it is also past prime for Abraham.
What God promises is simply unbelievable. Unimaginable. Impossible.
God then addresses Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh?” In fact, God challenges– is anything too wonderful for the Lord? The Hebrew word that is translated wonderful here conveys difficulty, effort, action. Is anything impossible with God? Is anything too hard for God?
Again, the promise is reiterated, and once again the promise comes from God as the earlier strangers seem to have disappeared – When I return, you will have a child.
I picture Sarah still in her tent, a little overwhelmed muttering almost to herself even as she breathless from her laughter, “I did not laugh.” And God’s voice right in her ear saying, “Oh, yes…you did laugh.”
And…it came to pass. In chapter 21, we read that Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age. And Abraham named that son Isaac and when we was 8 days old, he was circumcised, as Abraham had promised about a year earlier. And Sarah remembers her laughter – certain that all who hear the story will laugh with her…a 100-ish year old father and a 91-ish year old mother…
Is anything too hard for God? Too wonderful? Too impossible?
It was in my sleep on Friday night that the Holy Spirit wove my interaction with my dad as he died with Abraham and Sarah’s waiting on God for a child. It is not lost on me that both stories have long wait times – about 25 years from my father’s diagnosis to his death…perhaps much more that 25 years between God’s first promise to Abram and Sarai to the initial fulfillment of that promise in Isaac’s birth. It is not lost on me that the two stories are moving toward opposite ends of life – my father toward his bodily demise and Abraham and Sarah holding out even as their bodies fail for the promise of descendants with their genetic material.
For me, both stories are about a lifetime of relationship with God.
Time and experience are the ground of relationship.
Look at all the false steps and mistrust and absence and silence and deceit in the story of Abraham and Sarah. And yet at this point in the story (and their story is not yet over!) God fulfills God’s commitment. And they continue to follow God. Despite disappointing experiences for BOTH parties.
Relationships that are resilient have room for our doubt, our derision, our distraction, our need to be convinced, our coming around, our laughter.
God seeks that kind of relationship with each of us. I do believe that God holds space for our doubt, our wandering, our questions, our laughter…holding out for the moment when we don’t need to hear it from God, but instead we might say to one another, “is anything too hard for God?”
I wonder, are we good at holding that space for God?
We’ve been spending time in silence after the Word lately. And today, as we sit quietly, as we breathe in and out, I invite you to think about the story of your relationship with God – all of it, both sides of it – the dialogue, the doubt, the distraction, the miracles, the disappointments, the failures, and the laughter.
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