Christ Cathedral

Old Testament - Genesis 12:1-4a
Psalm 121
New Testament - Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
Gospel - John 3:1-17

"Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness."

As an aspiring rebel in my early teenage years, I looked on my great-uncle Ron as someone who had life figured out. He was a high school dropout, but he was also a millionaire. He had a collection of antique hot rod cars. His gun cabinet could make a lifetime member of the NRA drool with envy. He worked on the team which designed parts for the original space shuttle program. Then, there were the countless stories that began with a poker game or last call at a bar. They were great stories-all of them true, I hasten to add-and most of which I will never dream of telling my children.

This sort of awe and wonder I felt for Uncle Ron when I was a teenager has a lot in common with most people’s appreciation of biblical characters. We hear the stories of people like Abraham and David, or even someone like Nicodemus, and it’s easy to make these people into something like spiritual superheroes. Officially, these people are human beings, but in truth, our perception of them changes them into superheroes. It’s easy to see how this happens.

Consider how Abraham enters the narrative of Scripture. In today’s lesson, he is practically summoned onto the page by the voice of God and told that his descendants would alter the course of human history: "God 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 you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.’"

It’s hard to imagine a more heroic introduction. God reaches into his hat and pulls out Abraham, a wandering Aramean, and tells him to get moving. He has plans for him; plans to make him great. As we read on, Abraham does some things that would make anyone marvel. He has several interviews with God, sometimes making covenants, at other times playing "let’s-make-a-deal" with God over the fate of ancient Palestinian cities. He arms three hundred of his agricultural employees and mounts a successful commando raid to rescue his nephew from a group of local warlords.

The problem with such a list is that it gives us the impression that following God is about being an extraordinarily spiritual person, and preferably someone with the resources to support a small private army. This approach to biblical figures distorts our view of how God works in the world. No matter how great someone seems, even someone like Abraham, it’s important to remember that God has been dealing with people in more or less the same way for a long time. Abraham was a wealthy and powerful man and most of his deeds-like traveling a thousand miles by caravan or rescuing his nephew from bandits ---had a lot to do with the physical resources he had at his disposal.

I have no doubt that God used Abraham, but he didn’t expect Abraham to do things that he was not equipped to do. Abraham’s extraordinary life did not, however, hinge on his feats of military prowess or his extraordinary journey. The extraordinary feature of Abraham’s life was the fact that he not only heard, but heeded the voice of God. Unlike crossing a desert or waging a private war, letting God direct one’s life does not usually require the kind of capital that Abraham had at his disposal.

Most people at this Cathedral have had long lives of following God, and my guess is that many of you have experienced moments when you felt and believed that God was talking directly to you. I know that I have. The first time I had one of these moments came when a friend introduced me to Fr. Don Owens, the Episcopal chaplain at the University of Oklahoma. As we were being introduced, a voice in my head told me, "You can be an Episcopal priest." I am convinced that it was the Holy Spirit speaking to me about the direction that my life should take.

Perhaps for you it was a job change or the decision to get married or to have children. It may not have even been a momentous thing, but when you hear the voice of God, it seems like just the thing to point you in a better direction. Perhaps, we would be better off if we looked at Abraham’s call in such a light, instead of imagining that Abraham’s relationship with God was so different from ours.

Did Abraham hear the voice of God? Absolutely. Did he hear it in a way that is entirely different from the way we hear God? I really doubt it. Abraham was great, not because God spoke to him, but because he listened. Then, he acted on what he heard. If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense.

Abraham’s family had been shuffling around the Middle East for generations. The eleventh chapter of Genesis describes how Abraham’s father had left Ur of the Chaldees intending to go to Palestine. Along the way, he stopped in a village named Haran, which is near the border between Turkey and Syria. The family settled there for a time, but after his father died, a little voice in Abraham’s head told him, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you."

Considering that Terah, Abraham’s father, had originally intended to go to Palestine, I suspect it did not take much for Abraham to carry on with the journey his father had himself intended to make. Abraham was from a wandering family, and it seems perfectly normal that a son would take up his father’s unfinished journey.

So, what was it like for Abraham to hear the voice of God? I suppose that it was a lot like the voice I heard, in Norman, Oklahoma nearly 15 years ago. No one else heard it, no one else could confirm it, but I am convinced that I heard the voice of God. In a similar way, something convinced Abraham to carry on from Haran to Canaan, and he carried with him the deep conviction that if he followed this voice, God would bless him.

Along the way Abraham did some great things, but if we only see the positive side of Abraham’s life, we have not been very keen observers of his or any human life. The further we look into Abraham’s life, the more human he becomes. It’s a bit like my relationship with my Uncle Ron. As I got older, I began to see that Uncle Ron’s life wasn’t quite as charmed as it had once seemed. He had marriage troubles, with more than one wife. He also lost a lot of his money on imprudent adventures that just happened to strike his fancy. He could be a little cantankerous. My childlike adoration of a superhero faded, but I loved my Uncle until the end. For all his faults, I will remember him best not for his mistakes, but for his kindness to me.

A quick reading of Genesis shows that like my uncle’s life, Abraham’s success was tempered with a fair amount of failure. He tried to pass his wife off as his sister to save his own neck. He risked life and limb for an ungrateful nephew, Lot, who probably should have been left to learn his own lessons. And finally, Abraham got tired of waiting for God to give him the heir that God had promised to give him through his wife, so he had a child with his housekeeper to hedge his bet.

So where does that leave us? Abraham, Uncle Ron, a favorite priest from one’s childhood, will all begin to show their humanity with the passing years. Our heroes fall to the earth because it is the only place where they can teach us something. Abraham has to lose his status as a spiritual superhero for us to see him as a model of faith.

When we realize that Abraham is more or less like us, when we realize that we can hear the voice of God as clearly as Abraham heard it, then it is possible for us to believe that God is speaking to us just as he spoke to Abraham. In this light, we see that God still speaks to his people and directs their paths. The real difference between us and Abraham is determined by how attentive we are to the quiet prompting of the Holy Spirit and how surely we believe that it is nothing less than the voice of God.

"For what does the scripture say? ’Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness."