When God speaks to Abram, for good and for ill, he responds faithfully. We hear how he is called out to a strange place, a new place, so that a new thing can happen, and so that he can become a new person, to be Abram no more, but Abraham. Abraham, too, will be a faithful man. When God tells him to sacrifice his son, he proceeds with the intent to do exactly that. When God tells him to offer a ram instead, he does so.
The faith of Abraham, of Abram, is simple and direct.
He must have missed the mark, somehow, in the incident with Isaac. I can’t quite stomach that God really wanted to see just how far Abraham would go.
So it is that God makes covenants with Abraham, setting out laws and agreements and shared understandings that become the Law as Paul writes of it in Romans. This gives some tools for knowing, say, that God will not ask you to sacrifice your children. If that is where God seems to be calling you, you can be certain that you are mistaken.
The Law has a way, as laws always do, of creating compliance rather than righteousness. The legal system we have today is often less interested in whether the right thing ultimately happens, but whether the right processes are observed by the right people in the right way.
You can do great evil to a person, and be regarded as innocent under the law, so long as you choose to do it in the right way.
Compliance is not the same as faith. Abram was not faithful because he went wherever the Wind seemed to blow, but because he lived his life in God’s sight. In some deep way, Abram understood something about the nature of his existence, and his relationship with God, and this knowledge meant that he lived for a Promised Land he had never seen. He set aside the expectations of the world to which he was born and tried to live for something else. He went beyond the land of his country, his kindred, and even his father’s house, for something else.
Christ speaks about this way of being in our Gospel this morning as being “born from above.”
We all know very well our worldly circumstances and what they demand of us. It is clear which laws make claims on us, and we know what those around us expect for us to do. Nations call people to serve, to offer of their work, even their lives, and people listen. There is the coercive call of exploitation by those who would like us to enrich them. We may even get lost in trying to reduce our pain through drugs and destructive relationships. This way of being is our birthright.
So Jesus says that we have to understand ourselves not in terms of the material circumstances of our birth, but the country beyond all countries which is our home. We must understand that we are in the sight of God, and that everything we do is of consequence. We are not being tested, being asked to perform good works for their own sake, but are being invited to live for what really is, rather than continuing to surrender and succumb and submit to things that are passing away. Life is from God, and we are God’s own, and our lives play out in the bounds of that country. We are not strangers to God, but are ever walking in God’s sight.
We are called to a life of faith, and that faith is not a matter of what laws we choose to believe in, nor our compliance with the duties with which we are burdened. Faith is a matter of orientation, of knowing that we are held in the hands of a God who is faithful, and that this is as true for our dearest loved ones as it is for our most hated enemies, and even for those to whom we are utterly indifferent. God is not indifferent. God does not hate. God holds all in all, faithfully.
You have been called out to this land that claims you, and you have been born to the Kingdom much more truly and profoundly than you have ever belonged to the World. Life is an opportunity to live out, with the rest of God’s creatures, the reality of our being, the faith that is in us, our deep and enduring awareness of the presence of the God who made us. This calls us, probably, to more kindness and love than the World would allow, and that’s just as well.
This is where we are called, and it feels uncertain to that part of us that wants to know conclusively, and therefore to master, what it means to be righteous. We want laws and clarity and good works that we can just do without thinking, and that have a sure reward. We want ways to make the pain decrease, if only for a moment, and for the anxiety of our hearts and heads and souls to be calmed. We want to know that we will be okay despite everything else that seems to constantly be going wrong.
God’s promise is simpler, which is that we were always okay. Even in our most afraid, we are not far from God. In the depths of our suffering, we are still not alone, but Christ has been there first. Everything of who we are and who we might be is held and loved in God forever.
The calling of our lives is to get back to that place where we know that our Creator is with us, and that we are not in charge, and that we do not have to try to engineer our own immortality and our own salvation. We already have the gift of eternal life, and we are already loved by the ground of our being. So it will always be.
So may you let yourself hold a simple faith in the God who always holds you. May you love as God first loved, and live as Christ has lived. May you listen to the One who calls you, and set aside the demands of a world which would devour you. May you share in the faith of Abraham, and simply allow yourself, even now, to be.