The promise is God’s power and will to create a new future sharply discontinuous with the past and the present. The promise is God’s resolve to form a new community wrought only by miracle and reliant only on God’s faithfulness. Faith as response is the capacity to embrace that announced future with such passion that the present can be relinquished for the sake of that future.
-Walter Brueggemann
After Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden, the Story turns bleak. We aren’t long out of the Garden before there is murder. Brother kills brother. We’ve said that when we reject God’s Story and attempt to write our own that terrible things happen. The eating of the fruit, brother killing brother, these are but the beginning. Generations pass, and no one is listening to God the Director. The evil that happens from seeking to live in a world of our own making instead of a world of God’s making multiplies and piles up. As the Characters in our Story multiply and divide, so does their wickedness. Finally, God has enough. The Director, who is ever trying to get his Actors and Actresses to follow His script, decides that He is going to fire everyone except this Noah. And by fire, I mean let go in a very permanent way. So, God floods the world, intending to purge it of its evilness. Only, after the whole thing is done, God realizes that the problem that his Actors and Actresses have with going off script isn’t one that can be fixed through destruction. It’s a heart problem, and heart problems must be dealt with in very different ways.
So, God blesses Noah and his family, and they are fruitful and multiply. Soon enough, the world is back to its old ways. While people are multiplying, so is evil. It seems that things were reverting to the way they had been before God provided order, before God set the stage and formed characters. The world was headed for chaos. Barrenness seems to be the first stop toward chaos.
This is the world in which our next set of Characters find themselves, one of barrenness. After the Flood narrative, we find a very specific shift in the story. The Story moves from a general narrative about all of humanity to a specific story about one particular family. It is with this family that we are most fervently concerned.
It is the story of Abraham and Sarah, the father and mother of the people of God. But, as the text in chapter 11 so causally reminds us, they were unable to have children. Now, the thing about barrenness is that it is the complete reversal of what God has intended for this Story and for the Characters who play in it. The goodness of creation is tied to its ability to be fruitful and multiply. Without this ability to produce and reproduce, given to us by God to be sure, the Story cannot go on. As barren parents die without someone to carry on their name, their story, so will God’s Story cease.
This barrenness that plagues Abraham and Sarah is the result of our going off script. It is the result of doubting that the Story that God has written for us, that the directions that God gives us, are good and life giving. Barrenness doesn’t enter the Story because God wants it to be there. Barrenness enters the Story because we fail to live in the world as the kind of characters God would have us be.
It is into this barrenness, into this story, which cannot have the possibility of an ending without a miracle, that God speaks a word of promise. God comes to this couple and declares that Abraham and Sarah will become a great nation. How can this be? Abraham and Sarah are old, and as the story wears on, will only get older. How can children be born to such old people, people who have tried for so long to have children? It is little wonder that Sarah laughs when she hears that she will indeed have a child.
But it is here that God’s promise and call is uttered amidst barrenness. This call to Abraham is made by the same power that called the world into existence. It is the same power that shaped the barrenness of nothingness into something that would proclaim the glory, majesty, and power of God. The one who is now offering the promise of life, who is issuing the call to follow, is the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17).
And so, God is now calling Abraham, in his barrenness, saying, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen. 12:2-3) Notice the constant use of “I”. If there is any hope, it is in the promise of God’s action and working. The promise is that that the future will be new and bright, that it will be very different than the barrenness of the past and present.
This time God isn’t creating the universe. This time God, through His promise and call to Abraham, is creating a new community, a new family. It will be through this family, through the children of a barren couple, that God will work God’s creative powers to reshape, reform, restore, and redeem the world that has gone so far off script.
But, the Story is not complete with just the promise and call of God. There must be a response on the part of Abraham. There must be faith in the one who issues the promise and call. Later on in the Abraham story, we will hear bits of conversations that occur between God and Abraham, but not now. Abraham, confronted with his own barrenness and the reality of the promise and call, obeys. The text simply says in verse 4, “So Abram went, as the Lord had told him….”
This story of the call of Abraham is our Story too. If we are honest with ourselves, we are all barren. While we might be able to have children of our own, we are all incapable of bringing our own story to life. We are incapable of taking the mess we have inherited from this world and working it into anything that might resemble goodness and fruitfulness. And so, God comes to us with the same promise and call that God came to Abraham. The promise is that God is working in the barrenness of the world to bring about life. The call is for us to join with the church, the continuation of this new family that began with Abraham, in its work as it is empowered by Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. But we must respond with the faith of Abraham.
As the Story unfolds it might seem that things do not improve. But what we believe, as followers of Jesus Christ, is that God is always faithful to God’s promise. If only we will be faithful in our response to God’s call.
Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation, a Bible Commentary for Teaching and
Preaching (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982), 106.
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