Walking In Faith

Romans 4:13-25

10.22.2023

It is not often that the words of scripture for the week come in such close proximity to the world in which we find ourselves staring at. Not often that the story of our own faith intersects with the challenges and struggles being experienced by another people in another part of the world. Not often that the words jump off the page and seem so real. And yet. And yet this is where we encounter these words from the Apostle Paul to the church in Rome on this day. Words in which Paul, struggling with his own Judaism at the time following his conversion on the road to Damascus, tries to recast the story of Abraham and the commencement of his journey into the unknown with the journey that we all must take to one extent or another. And in doing so, we are all magically, mystically transported from this sanctuary in which we are all occupying and back in time and space to the area of the world that is garnering the whole of the world’s attention some seven millennia before the present to a moment in which all of history is bisected into before and after. Before God first spoke to Abraham and told him of the mighty nations that would arise from his (at the time) nonexistent progeny and after when Abraham stepped out into the great unknown with little more than his family, his possessions, and his faith. Before Abraham explained to his understandably confused spouse that God had told him that they were going to need to leave their lives of relatively wealthy comfort and security and commence a trek that would take them to a new land that God had given them. Before Abraham unhitched his last animal and led it on the first of many, many steps in which he would cross through foreign lands and encounter leaders who were not necessarily happy about his presence, where he would birth not one, but two religious traditions that would come to be known the world over, the second of which would give rise to the largest faith of the present moment, where he would birth not one but two sons who would struggle against God and their father for acceptance and life and dignity. And after, when he would never look at grains of sand blowing across the floor of the desert or stars in the deepest part of the night sky again without thinking about God’s promise to him and his movement out of faith and into the new course of human history that God was offering him. And Paul knows all this. Paul knows all this because he was both a highly educated Jew, coming from the most elite of the Hebrew traditions, and a Roman citizen with all the protections and advantages that come with holding that status. And yet, as he wrestles with his own bisection of history and making sense of all of it, he lands on a curious concept that will enliven the future of the Christian faith from then until the end of the age. For though the law was given through Moses to the people of Israel, and though they heard the word of God coming off the pages of their (and our) scripture, Abraham sensed something different stirring in his own soul, a sensation that came prior to any official canonization of any set of words on the page. Abraham had faith. Faith, not in anything he could logically deduce from his situation. Truth be told it probably would have made more logical sense for him to stay exactly where we was, tend his flocks, wait for his wife to give him offspring to whom he could leave the whole enterprise someday, and rest on the laurels of whatever successes his hard work had afforded him. That sort of trajectory makes all the sense in the world for a wealthy landowner who wants nothing more than to live his life to the fullest that he can imagine. Yet, Abraham had a stirring in the base of his soul, that part of all of us that we can only ever touch when we push aside all the rest of the pieces of us and get to the part of our being that is wholly holy, untouchable by anything else, that connection that we maintain to God and through which God speaks, God leads, God dwells, and God a’lights. Abraham experienced that piece of him that is unaffected by the desire for safety, for security, for wealth, for prominence and rather continually sings the same song that Isaiah heard while dwelling in the Temple of the Holy One some thousand years later, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” And as Abraham heard it, he felt both a calming presence and a deep dissatisfaction with the current moment. As he heard it, he felt a striving to be the vessel for God’s actions in this creation wholly unconcerned with the ramifications of whatever God would ask of him. As he heard it, he felt a certainty that he knew what he had to do. So it was that he stepped off in faith and bisected history with three of the great faith traditions of the world emerging from his faith to live in their own faith united in lineage and united in God. For just as study and debate and disputation of the words of the Torah lead some of our siblings to a greater sense of peace and shalom. Just as prayer and pilgrimage and praxis lead some of our sibling to a greater sense of peace and salaam. So, too, do we find our purpose, our light, our life, in a faith wherein just enough to match the size of a tiny mustard seed can empower such a request as casting a large mountain into the ocean. Like study, like prayer, like practice and charity lead our siblings to a greater knowledge of the will of God, so, too does our faith justify us in the presence of God now and into whatever future God has laid out for us.

I said at the beginning of this mediation for the morning that rarely does the scripture that we read align so well with the events of our world as do our words this morning for in them, we are reminded that halfway around the globe from this place, our siblings in the faith are fighting one another, are struggling against one another, are killing one another with no easy or permanent answers readily available. And it is easy to feel powerless in this situation in which groups of peoples that we don’t really know all that well are engaging in a conflict that is informed, empowered, ensconced in a battle that has been going on in one form or another for well over 1,000 years. In my class at Bellarmine this week, this point was proven as we had just spent the last couple of sessions reading the Torah, the Talmud, and the Qu’ran and were now availing ourselves of our newfound knowledge to talk about how to use interfaith dialog to speak to issues like this and one student offered up an answer from one end of the extremes while another retorted with an answer from the other extreme and for the next hour my job was little more than refereeing a verbal ping-pong match that left me with an overused neck and no closer to an adequate and peaceful solution. And such confusion, such polarization, such challenge can leave us feeling like there are no real ways to advance forward either over there where even getting food, water, and medical relief seems a mountain too high to climb or over here where the massive scale of it all seems like it would be too much for the wisdom of Solomon much less for folks like us. And yet, out of the clouds, out of his soul, out of his spirit, out of the silence, God spoke to Abraham and asked him to step out in faith, to place one foot in front of the next and trust that God would see him through to a new dawn of not one, not two, but three religious tradition that continue to inspire the world even though, at times, we fail short of our own call to faith.

For this is our true call, while we may wish that things are different in the current moment, our call is always to work for the next one. To embody and strive for peace in our own minds, our own souls, that we might encounter the world, exactly as it is, broken and beautiful, sinful and saved, reckless and redeemed, and return to no one evil for evil. That we might, in our own place and own time, create ripples of peace and love that will intersect with one another and make a web of care, concern, compassion that intercepts cycles of violence and strife and turns them back with interlocked circles of hope and light. That we might unite our one grain of spiritual sand with all those who are following in the footsteps of the Messiah on the scales of the world that the next time we find ourselves in this place, peace might overcome war, that the swords of war might be beat into plowshares that will feed the hungry of the world, and that we will, as a community, as a religion, as a people commit that we ain’t going to study war no more. That we might be inspired just as our spiritual father was inspired to take a singular step into an unknown future with our arms opened and unclenched that we can encounter the other in our midst with a handshake of solidarity or the embrace of sisters, brothers, comrades in the struggle. That we might be the hands and feet of the savior, taking on the burdens of a world that is hurting and on fire and offering the balm of Gilead, the living waters that come from a well that will never run dry, and reconciliation of all the world back to God. In the name of the one who saves us from ourselves and prepares us for a world in need of reconciliation, redemption, reformation, and love. Alleluia, amen.

Image-Lodovico Cigoli, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1607