A Deal that Changed the World

Genesis 15

I’ve got a deal for you.

I’ve been pretty good to you so far. I’ve always acted quite honorably to you. So, what I want you to do is pledge yourself to me. I want you to promise to always love me. In fact, I want you to promise to always love me and all my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on so that no matter what happens you will always love me and all who come after me.

So here is how we’ll seal the deal. I’m going to take some animals and cut them in half. I’ll make them a heifer, a goat, and a ram. Better yet, I’ll throw in a dove and a young pigeon too. I’ll lay them out on the ground and ask that you walk back and forth between the carcasses. As you walk between the halves of the animals, all I ask is that you promise that the same will happen to us as to those animals if you are ever unfaithful to me and my family. That’s it. Just pledge to be cut in half if you ever stop caring for us.

So do we have a deal?

It sounds like a fool’s bargain. Who would pledge eternal faithfulness to another, while also promising to be cut in two for any violation of the pledge? The answer is, of course, that God would make a pledge like this. God did just this with an ancient herdsman named Abram. This is the central fact at the heart of the faith of most of the people who live on this planet. This very day, roughly 3.14 billion people trace their faith back to this event.

Here is what happened. There was a man who herded animals in ancient Mesopotamia. He and his family would have looked a lot like the Bedouin’s who still herd the area today. He lived as a herdsman among farmers and those two groups never seem to get along. Considering herdsman and farmers give us meat and potatoes, it is odd that they mix like oil and water, but there you have it.

And it is to this herdsman that God speaks a new truth. A truth that is not only life changing for Abram and Sarai. This relationship between God and Abram will change the course of Western Civilization and so alter world history.

There are two truths that Abram learned on his way to becoming Abraham that did not arise in any other religious tradition independently—there is one God and that one God wants to have a relationship with us. While there is much that divides Jews, Christians and Muslims, all 3.14 billion of us believe those two truths deep within our bones. This is the spiritual DNA that traces back to Ur of the Chaldees and God’s beginning of a relationship with our ancestor Abraham. And if I switch back and forth between calling him Abram and Abraham, it is because in the process of the relationship, God changes the names of Abram and Sarai to Abraham (meaning father of many nations) and Sarah (meaning princess).

All of this comes from the covenant God makes with Abram. But it does not start with the covenant. It starts with God’s choice. God chose Abram to become Abraham. God chose Abram and Sarai for a relationship. And so we find a repeating pattern in scripture where God chooses someone, delivers the person or persons out a bad situation to a better one, the person worships and then God makes a covenant. We will find this with Moses and through him with all the Jewish people. Then we will find it again through David, who becomes Israel’s great king and through him to the Messiah, Jesus who takes this covenant and its promises to the whole world.

So while the promise of love and a relationship may start with Abram, it will expand to his whole family and then through them to the whole world. Just as an aside, this particularity is a problem for some of us. Why Abram? Why the Jews? Why Christians? Why one person and not others? And while I could say much more on this, that is another sermon. But suffice for now that I could present another strand that goes through all scripture showing that this choice is not for these people only and that God is reaching out to all. But we see here how God does so at this time through a given person or group. But this is not to the exclusion of others.

But what I want to do now that we have seen how world changing this covenant will become, I want to enter more deeply into the story. Let’s look more closely at our text for today to see what it reveals about this one God with whom we are to have a relationship.

This God allows for our frailties and uncertainties. We see this in that in verse 6 we are told that Abram believed what God told him and God reckoned it to him as righteousness. So God sees Abram as righteous in part because of his faith in God’s promises. But doubt does enter in. Two verses later, we read of Abram looking for some sign or proof of the promise of land to possess. The verse reads, “But he said, ‘Oh Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?’”

It is then that we get the covenant ceremony. In the Ancient Near East, the verb used with the noun covenant was “Cut.” So you didn’t “make a covenant” or “sign a covenant.” You “cut a covenant.” And this covenant will be cut first into the sacrificial animals and then into the foreskins of Abram and his male family members.

Once Abram has made the sacrifices of animals, it is a deep and terrifying darkness that descends upon Abram in his sleep. I have preached before that the major image in scripture is that “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” But that image alone does not contain God and so we find other times when God is described, as here, using the image of darkness. And in these darkness passages, we find someone who thinks he or she understands God, coming to see that there is more to God than he or she can see. While we are given the light of understanding to know something of God. There is still within the divine a deep and dazzling darkness that comes from the fact that there is more depth to God than we can fathom. There is also deep mystery. And God draws Abram into that mystery.

In the deep and terrifying darkness that envelopes him as he sleeps, Abram sees a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch pass between the carcasses. This signifies God making the covenant. In Ancient Near Eastern fashion, God is pledging God’s own life to Abram and his descendants. God promises to die rather than to break his promise to Abram. And we know that God the Son will die to keep the promises in tact.

So this passage which is central to most people of faith in the world takes us into the deep, dazzling darkness of God. Rather than clarifying our questions about Why Abram? Why the Jews? Why Christians? We are given a vision of God’s promise of faithfulness. The certainty we are offered does not answer our questions, but promises that God will be with us in our questions and will draw us more deeply into a relationship that will begin to provide some answers.

I know that this pre-iron age story of the herdsman Abram is very distant from us. And it can sound more like myth than reality. Even taking the story as seriously as I do, I see that there is still a terrifying dream at the heart of it. But the way to make sense out of the Abram saga is not to question whether it happened, but to see that it happens all the time.

The central fact in the story is that there is one God who wants a relationship with us. This is central to the Jewish faith, and our Trinitarian understanding of that “one” God does not keep us from upholding that same truth.

God worked through Abram’s understanding of how promises were made. He used the covenant ceremony Abram could understand to show how bedrock solid the promises of God are. God works through our own culture and breaks into our own lives with that same reality today. God is always breaking in to human history and speaking to the human heart a word of love and a promise of faithfulness.

What God called for in Abram is what God still calls for in us, a response of faith. We are to believe the Lord and he will still reckon that to us as righteousness. This is what getting saved is about and we Episcopalians believe in it too. We know that God asks us to respond to his promises in faith and to claim them as our own. We know that Jesus calls on us to make him the Lord of our lives. And in doing so, he will give us a righteousness we could never earn.

So that fool’s deal that God made with Abram is still an open option. By faith you can lay hold of the promises God has made to you. God has been watching you, loving you, wanting something better for you. And through his word and in today’s worship God is calling you to enter more fully into that covenant. Either through making that first pledge and offering your heart to Jesus or by taking those of us who have made that pledge deeper into the mystery. For no matter how far you have come in your relationship with God, there is still more waiting to unfold. This is the emphasis placed in The Episcopal Church, and other liturgical churches. We believe people come into a relationship with God and we love to see that happen. But we emphasize the ongoing journey that follows. And Lent is a time when we offer ourselves more fully to God and ask God to take us from our lesser certainties into a deeper knowledge.

So no matter where you are, the challenge is to open yourself up to the next steps God has for you. They may be as life changing as the move Abram made from the land of his ancestors to the place God promised. Or the next step may be as simple as realizing that you have not yet arrived at the place God has for you.

But wherever you are and wherever God is leading you, the deal he has offered for most of recorded human history is that he has promised his own life to being faithful to the promises he has made you through his Word. And that is a deal too good not to make.

Amen.