Abraham
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16
by Rev. Richard Gehring

Over the past couple of months, one of the things that Barb and I have been working on has been coming up with possible names for our baby. We've looked through books of names, marking all the potential ones, choosing our favorites among those and finally narrowing the list down to about four possibilities in each gender. It was at this point that we decided to look at
what these names actually meant in their original languages.

We were pleased to find that some of the names we were considering had pleasant connotations like "peace" and "dawn." Others are fairly neutral in meaning, maybe referring to a particular place or, in the case of one boy's name, meaning simply "male." But there were a couple of meanings that we found rather distasteful. We were quite disappointed, for example, to learn that one of the leading contenders turned out to mean "dark-skinned warrior."

It is a rather daunting task to assign a name to another person, a name that they will most likely carry with them for the rest of their life. Naming is not something to be taken lightly.
And so Barb and I continue to work on our lists, knowing that sometime in the next five months or so we'll have to make some decisions.

I find it very significant, therefore, that in the text Joe just read for us God gives new names to two people. This renaming comes in the context of a covenant that God establishes. This is the second such important covenant in the Old Testament and the second covenant in a row that we are looking at as this is now the second Sunday in Lent.

The passage for today opens as the man then known as Abram is 99 years old. Several chapters earlier he had been called to leave his homeland and travel to a new, distant land that God would show him. He responded to that call and in return had received several promises from God. Now, almost 25 years later and seemingly near the end of his natural life, Abram must have begun to think that perhaps God had forgotten those promises.

Today's passage thus comes as a reaffirmation and formalizing of the covenant of God with Abram and Sarai. I find in Genesis 17 at least four distinct but interrelated promises that God makes. The first and most detailed of the promises is that Abram will yet become the father of many people.

In spite of his advanced age, he and his offspring will still prove to be very fruitful. His descendants will be not merely one but several great nations. God repeats this promise several
times in several different ways in verses 2 through 6. As if to underscore this point even more, God gives Abram a new name. "No longer," says God, "shall your name be Abram (meaning exalted father), but your name shall be Abraham (meaning father of a multitude). All of these reassurances are apparently meant to convince Abram or Abraham that, even though he is
already 99 and his wife is 90, he will still have a son and that son will still lead to more descendants than can possibly be counted.

The second promise, then, is found in verse seven. Here we find a promise to Abraham and his descendants that the Lord will always be their God. We need to remember that Abraham lived in a polytheistic society. The common belief was that there were many gods, each of whom was responsible for a particular aspect of creation or for a specific people. In this covenant, however, the God known as El Shaddai, God Almighty, the one true God who
created heaven and earth, promises to be the God of Abraham and of his descendants.
This God makes a commitment to remain in relationship with the family of Abraham as long as they exist. It is an "everlasting covenant" with all the generations to come after him.

God has already chosen Abraham's children as a special people to whom the will of the only real God will be made known and through whom eventually all nations will be blessed. The third promise made to Abraham is a promise of territory. In verse 8 God promises that the land of Canaan, a land in which Abraham and his household were dwelling as aliens, would one day be held by Abraham's descendants. It's interesting to note that Abraham, in spite of being a rather wealthy man, apparently never owned any land in Canaan. For at the death of his wife, Sarah, he had to go to his neighbors and arrange to buy a plot of ground in which to bury her. So the idea that the descendants of Abraham, a landless nomad, would one day own all of Canaan was nearly as unbelievable as the notion that a couple in their
nineties would have a child. This promise thus serves to underscore the first two. By promising the land of Canaan to Abraham's family God implies once again that they would be numerous, at least numerous enough to occupy an entire country. And at the end of verse eight, the
Lord once again promises "I will be their God," reiterating the long lasting nature of this covenant relationship.

Our reading today then skips to verses 15 and 16 which contain the final promise. Here God assures Abraham that all of the promises that have been made apply not only to him but also
to his wife, Sarai. She also shall be blessed and become the mother of many great nations and kings. Just as Abram became Abraham, so now Sarai becomes Sarah. There is no apparent change in the meaning of the woman's name as both Sarai and Sarah are simply variations of the Hebrew word for "princess." But if Abram gets to change his name, it seems only fair that Sarai get a new name as well.

It appears significant to me that in a society where men were the masters and women little more than property, a covenant would be made that included a woman as one of the primary parties. God says, in effect, that the covenant applies equally to both Abraham and Sarah. Abraham, after all, did have a son by another woman, but this was not the son of the covenant because the covenant included Sarah as well. God desired a relationship not only with Abraham, but also with Sarah. And, by implication, the covenant extends not only to the sons and grandsons and great grandsons of Abraham but also to the daughters and granddaughters and great granddaughters of Sarah as well. Thus we have a total of four important promises made in God's covenant with Abraham and Sarah. But there is something that we skipped. Before any of these promises were made, God made a very simple, straightforward request of Abraham. In verse one God says, "Walk before me, and be blameless." It is a simple statement, but hardly a simple matter to carry out.

Today we remember Abraham as a very upright, faithful servant of God. The Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Rome to follow the example of Abraham: "For what does the scripture
say?" he writes, "Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." (Romans 4:3)

The unnamed author of the Letter to the Hebrews devotes the better part of a chapter to extolling Abraham as an example of faith. In Hebrews 11 we read "By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance;"(11:8) "By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents;"(11:9)

"By faith he received power of procreation, even though he was too old;"(11:11) and "By faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac." (11:17) All of these are, of course, true
statements. Abraham was indeed a great man, a pillar of faith. Yet one can hardly say that he lived up to the command to be blameless. Abraham was still a man with many faults.
In Genesis 12, for example, we find the story of Abram and Sarai going to Egypt to escape a famine. When they get there, Abram lies to the king, telling him that Sarai is his sister rather than his wife in order to prevent Pharaoh from killing him and taking her for himself.

So instead Pharaoh essentially purchases Sarai from Abram and adds her to his harem. This is
hardly the act of an upright man with good family values. Then, in chapter 16, we find Abram doubting God's promise of a son for him and Sarai. So he sleeps with one of Sarai's slaves
and has a son by her. Sarai is by no means guiltless in this affair, either. She initially gives her consent to the arrangement, then becomes jealous when her slave was able to bear
the son that she couldn't. Sarai approaches her husband in anger and, when he says in essence that it's her problem, not his, she mistreats her slave and drives her away.

After all of these soap opera antics, God still makes the promises that we've seen. And how does Abraham, the pillar of faith, respond? Does he offer his gratitude? Does he stand in
awe of God's grace and majesty? No, he falls down laughing. His reaction is found in verse 17, right after our text today. It's so incredible, so ridiculous to him that a 100-year-old man and a 90-year-old woman would have a baby that he laughs right in God's face. And in the next chapter, when Sarah hears the news, she laughs, too. But of course God gets the last laugh when, a year later, Abraham and Sarah did have a son whom they named Isaac,
which means "laughter".

It would be nice if I could tell you that their behavior was altered by their encounter with God, that after their covenant with God was formalized and their names were changed that Abraham and Sarah changed, too. It would be a nice ending if I could say that after God called on Abraham to be blameless that he was.

That would indeed make a nice story, but it wouldn't be true. For in Genesis 20 we find Abraham pulling the very same stunt of passing off Sarah as his sister that had failed in chapter 12.  My point in reciting some of Abraham's shortcomings is not to malign him or to suggest that the New Testament writers were mistaken in their assessment of him. My point is that Abraham and Sarah, like the rest of us, were not blameless. They were human. They made mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes were pretty big ones, too.

And yet God still made a covenant with them. God chose Sarah and Abraham for reasons that I don't think we can quite understand. They weren't perfect people, although they seem to
have been decent enough folks. But for some reason God chose them and made a covenant with them, warts and all. And through Abraham and Sarah all the promises made by God came true.

Abraham did become the father of many nations--not only of Israel by his grandson Jacob but also of Edom through his grandson Esau and of the Ishmaelites through his illegitimate son
Ishmael. And what most people probably don't realize is that Abraham remarried after Sarah's death and had several more sons including the father of the Midianites. Sarah herself was indeed the mother of many kings, although she only had one child herself. All the kings of Israel and Judah traced their ancestry back to her as they ruled over the whole territory of Canaan just as God had promised.

The descendants of Abraham and Sarah were indeed very fruitful as they filled the land of Canaan. But their history is also quite a turbulent one. Esau and Jacob couldn't get along.
Joseph was hated by his brothers. Saul resisted David's rise to the throne. The kingdom split in two after the death of Solomon.

One nation was destroyed. The other was sent into exile, returned, gained some independence and was occupied once again. Right down to this very day the land of the covenant is filled with strife as the children of Abraham--Jew, Christian and
Muslim--continue to battle one another. This was underlined in a horrifying manner this past week as a Jewish gunman entered a mosque built on the very site believed to be the tomb of Abraham and Sarah and opened fire. And on this ground held to be holy by all the children of Abraham, __ of those children were killed by one of their own distant relatives.

But through all of this horror and bloodshed, God has remained faithful. God never reneged on the covenant. God remains to this day the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God of
Isaac and Rebecca, the God of Jacob and Rachel and Leah. Eventually God even showed up in the Promised Land in human form. And through Jesus, a forty-second generation descendant of Abraham and Sarah, God made it possible for all of us to become children of Abraham and Sarah, to enter into that covenant made with them around 4000 years ago.
The promises made to Abraham and Sarah are thus promises to us as well. We, too, can become part of a great nation, the Kingdom of God. We, too, have a place where we belong as part of the church. Most importantly, we, too, are promised that the Lord will be our God, that God desires to be in a covenant relationship with us. In spite of all of our bickering and our misdeeds, God still wants us to share in these promises.

So we enter into the covenant not because we are blameless, although that is what God would like us to be. We enter into the covenant much as our father Abraham and our mother Sarah did, as women and men with faults and shortcomings. We enter into the covenant not always sure what it means and at times even doubting its truth. But still we do indeed enter into the covenant trusting that God will treat us with justice and mercy, and that God will remain faithful in spite of our failings.