Our first reading today comes from the book of Genesis. We heard a reading from Genesis last week as well. Both of these readings come from the story of Abraham and Sarah, a part of Genesis that begins in chapter 12 and goes on for a few more chapters beyond today’s reading. One of the ways to read the story of Abraham and Sarah is as a story about trust. Abraham and Sarah show great trust in God at the start of their story when they leave behind their family and their home on a wild promise that they would become the ancestors of a great nation. But the rest of the story can be seen as exploring the question of God’s faithfulness to them. For in chapter after chapter this promise fails to materialize. Abraham and Sarah call to God and God keeps assuring them that it will pass. At one point, in chapter 15, God tells them to look up at the stars and try to count them. You will have more descendants than that, God proclaimed!
We might not quite grasp the immensity of what God is saying here when we look up at the night sky, with all of the city light here in Eugene and Springfield, we cannot see too many stars. But this past week, I went on a mini-pilgrimage with some of the youth and their leaders, and we went out to the desert late at night and we had the opportunity, the privilege, to see the stars in their glory,
to catch a glimpse of some meteors falling, and to gaze at the milky way, that great blob of stars that make up a portion of our galaxy. As I stared in awe at the stars, I thought about this promise and how remarkable that must have been to Abraham and to Sarah.
This storyline about God’s trustworthiness in the promise of descendants continued last week in the story we heard about the three visitors and Sarah laughing. And it will continue again in the coming chapters. Through this story in all of its fits and starts, we learn, with Abraham and Sarah, that God is trustworthy, that God will be faithful to them and to us. God’s faithfulness might not always look like we want - we might even laugh at the way it comes about - but God is faithful.
Today’s first reading from Genesis is not about that promise per se, but it can still be understood as a story about learning to trust in God. Rowan Williams, the theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury, argues that as Abraham haggles with God in this story, Abraham is learning “bit by bit” with each bargain lowering that number that God really is trustworthy to be merciful and just. God is faithful to God’s promises, not just in the matter of the particular and personal promise to Abraham and Sarah, but in these weightier matters of justice and righteousness. God is trustworthy.
Trust seems to be in short supply these days. Survey after survey shows that people have been losing trust in the institutions of our society for decades: government, business, nonprofits, even churches. I am not here to defend these institutions. In many cases, these institutions have absolutely done things to lose our trust, and they need to do some things to rebuild trust. But I do worry about the impact on our ability to trust in general and the implications of that. Surveys also indicate that we do not trust each other – our neighbors and our fellow citizens as much. And how does that general distrust impact our ability to trust in God? Have we lost the ability to trust?
This pandemic certainly has not helped our ability to trust as it has tried its hardest to draw us away from one another, to make us see each other as a threat. Trust is critically important to our lives and our faith. Trust is the sun around which faith, hope, and love orbit. To have these three great virtues or gifts, require us at some level to trust. To trust in God, to trust in each other. If we want to realize that prayer that Jesus teaches us in our Gospel today for “thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” requires us to have trust. I do not have answers, only questions. How can we practice trusting one another? How can we deepen our trust in God? (Or maybe for some of us, how can we learn to trust God again?) The Abraham story today shows us that trust is not built by avoiding questions, in just wishing it to be so and magically it will be, but in learning bit by bit, sometimes through the questions – sometimes really tough questions – that someone is trustworthy.
Abraham and Sarah learned about God’s trustworthiness, and so did Moses and all of God’s people out in the wilderness. Ruth learned to trust in God through Naomi and Boaz. David learned to trust God when facing lions and giants and friends. The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not be in want, he is supposed to have said at some point after having figured this out. Or maybe he wrote those words to help convince himself of its truth. Mary learned to trust in God as she pondered each little incident of her son’s childhood in her heart. Jesus learned to trust in God when he went out in the wilderness to face those forty days of temptation, a trust that laid the necessary foundation for his journey to the cross. It is almost as if we have to learn in each generation to trust. Trust is not a given, but something we have to work out bit by bit, like Abraham and Sarah. We must discover as they discovered that God is faithful. God is trustworthy. Amen.
