Lent is supposed to be the season when we remember the suffering of Jesus, often by bringing some measure of suffering upon ourselves, whether by giving up something or taking something on. Although it was by no means intentional, in the first ten days of Lent I found myself thrown into the depth and breadth of human suffering, albeit vicariously. As is often the case for me, I experienced this vicarious suffering through books. It all started innocently enough...the first book was recommended to me by a friend. I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago in a sermon. The book, called Here If You Need Me, is a memoir by the chaplain to the Maine Warden Service, Kate Braestrup. Braestrup’s husband, a Maine State Trooper, was killed in the line of duty one day. He had planned to go to seminary and become a police chaplain, and after his death, Braestrup decided to go to seminary herself and then became chaplain to the forest wardens who search for people who get lost in the woods or fall down a waterfall or ride a snowmobile onto ice thin. She ministers to those who are intimately involved in rescues and recoveries and to the families whose loved ones have turned up missing or dead. It’s a beautifully written book, filled with painful stories, only a few of which have the kind of happy endings we hope for: the lost child found, the swimmer recovered, the snowmobiler rescued.
Then I heard an interview with an author named Roger Rosenblatt. He too has recently published a memoir and after hearing him interviewed I immediately got a copy. The book is called Making Toast and in it Rosenblatt writes about the sudden death of his 38 year-old daughter Amy, a pediatrician and mother of three children, ages 6, 4, and 14 months. Amy dropped dead one day because of an extremely rare heart condition that no one knew she had. Immediately after she died, Rosenblatt and his wife moved into Amy’s home, and have lived there ever since, helping their son-in-law care for the children. Rosenblatt claims that the one skill he brings to this arrangement is the ability to make toast.
Then, sitting at my daughter’s preschool last week waiting to pick her up, another parent invited me to join a book group and handed me a copy of the next book up for discussion, Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana De Rosnay. That night, eager for a reprieve from the suffering in the other books on my bedside table, I started reading. Turns out Sarah’s Key is based on a true--and truly horrific--event: the roundup of Jewish families in Paris in the summer of 1942. Thousands of men and women and over four thousand children were taken from their homes in the middle of the night, held for six days in an old stadium with almost no food or water, then bussed out of the city into camps. Once there, the men were separated from the women and children and they all lived in squalid conditions for weeks. Then one day, the soldiers gathered up the women and children and separated the children from their mothers using brute physical force and icy cold buckets of water. While the children were essentially left to fend for themselves in the camps, their parents were taken by train to Auschwitz and immediately gassed. Days later, the children met the same end.
At this point, I felt like I’d entered a spiritual boxing ring and the hits just kept coming. How can there be this much suffering in the world? How can human beings treat one another so horribly or even just stand by while they watch their neighbors being dragged away? Why do awful things happen with no explanation at all, at least no satisfactory ones, like when a young mother dies of a rare heart condition? Why is the natural world so terribly indifferent to human beings? Come to think of it, why did two hundred and thirty thousand people die in an earthquake in Haiti, and hundreds of thousands more become injured, disabled, orphaned, and displaced? Frankly, I’m just not sure my faith is strong enough to withstand all these questions.
To top it all off, the words of today’s reading kept ringing in my ears: “And Abraham believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” Just at this moment when my faith felt under assault, here was this age-old story about Abraham, the father of our religion and two others as well, in large part because, in spite of the suffering in the world around him and in his own life, he had faith, he believed that God would fulfill God’s promises, no matter how improbable those promises seemed.
Today’s passage, and particularly verse 6, “And Abraham believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” That particular verse has inspired many sons and daughters of Abraham, including the Apostle Paul, to hold up Abraham (and his wife Sarah, too) as the models of faith. My first reaction to this verse was that of a petulant child. Clearly I didn’t possess Abraham’s brand of blind faith and, frankly, I didn’t want to. There was just too much suffering in the world and I wanted some answers for it. I wanted to know exactly how God was going to fulfill God’s promises to those Jewish mothers and fathers and children, to Amy Rosenblatt Solomon’s daughter and two sons, to all those people in Maine who died in the woods or under the ice, to the people of Haiti. I didn’t want to hear promises, I wanted to see some results!
But then, remembering one of the fundamental rules of preaching--thou shalt know the context of the passage on which thou preaches--I turned back to Genesis chapter 12 and reviewed Abraham’s story from its beginning. And what I found was a profoundly human character whose faith was defined not by blind obedience, but by the courage to take risks and the willingness to make mistakes, receive forgiveness, and try again. You see, once Abraham answered God’s call to leave his hometown and journey with God to a strange land, his life didn’t suddenly exist in a vacuum where there was only God’s love and grace. It pretty much went on like everybody else’s. When there was a famine, Abraham and Sarah suffered right along with everybody else. And in spite of his faith in God, Abraham made some big mistakes in those moments when he doubted God’s promises would come true. Here’s one: when they went to Egypt to find relief from the famine, Abraham passed off his wife Sarah as his sister, allowing her to be taken into Pharaoh’s house, presumably to become one of the king’s lovers, which could really have messed up God’s promise that Sarah would conceive Abraham’s heir. Later, after years have passed since God promised a son and Sarah still isn’t pregnant, Abraham takes an alternative wife and has a son with her, a sure sign of his doubt that God’s promise would be fulfilled.
Abraham is a model of faith for us not because he blindly believed and obeyed God, but because he believed and obeyed God the best a human being can: in fits and starts, with mistakes and do-overs. Even today’s passage shows us this. First God repeats to Abraham the promises made back in chapter 12: “I am your shield, your reward shall be great.” Back in chapter 12, the reward was made explicit: Abraham and Sarah, though barren, would bear a child, a son, and Abraham would possess land that he could pass on through his son to his descendants. And yet, here in chapter 15, after years in which God’s original promise of a child and land has not yet been fulfilled, Abraham is skeptical, so much so that he has taken matters into his own hands. “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.”
That’s when God firmly repeats the promise: “No one but your very own [son] will be your heir...Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able...So shall your descendants be.” Then we hear that Abraham truly believed. He believed, although we aren’t told why. Maybe looking up at the stars reminded Abraham of God’s creative powers. After all, a God who could create the heavens and earth out of nothing could surely breathe life into a barren womb. But then God goes on to repeat the promise that Abraham will receive, in addition to a son, land to possess. And already, just a few minutes later, Abraham’s faith wanes again. “How am I to know that I shall possess this land?” Abraham asks God. What follows is a strange account of animal sacrifice and a deep and terrifying darkness and an awful dream--nightmare, really--about immigration and slavery and centuries of oppression for Abraham’s descendants.
Clearly we are dealing here with ancient rituals that we struggle to understand, but scholars generally agree that this portion of the reading has to do with sealing the covenant, the promise God is making to Abraham. God plunges Abraham into darkness, much as we are plunged--ready or not--into the dark season of Lent, and gives Abraham a glimpse of the future. In this future Abraham sees that it will be hundreds of years before God’s promise of land is fulfilled. Abraham sees that his descendants will know great suffering before they possess the land of promise, but he also sees that they will possess it, in God’s time. And in this strange ritual of animal parts and a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch God seals the deal, letting Abraham know that the promises God has made him will be fulfilled.
Abraham wakes up from that dream knowing two things: his longed-for descendants will suffer greatly and he will not live to see the fulfillment of God’s promise of land, only God’s promise of a son. And despite that great faith of Abraham, his life continues much as it did before, with no child anytime soon for Sarah and great manipulation by Abraham to try to force God’s promises to come true. This is faith, the faith of our ancestors that we emulate. We might want to think that Abraham’s faith was stronger or more consistent, but according to the Bible, it was not. Personally, I take great comfort in that. I hope you do too.
*****
After I took a few days away from those three heart-wrenching books that I somehow ended up reading all at the same time, right at the beginning of Lent, it occurred to me that the books presented two different ways to respond to life’s inevitable suffering. Two of the books affirm that there are times in life when the darkness is so thick there is no comfort, there is no light, not even the pinprick of a distant star. Now for some people, even people of great faith, there are times when this feels true, times when it seems the promises of God are null and void, and there is no hope for the future, no redemption. The third book looks at suffering differently. In spite of her terrible grief at the death of her husband and in spite of the tragedies she has seen as a forest service chaplain, Kate Braestrup is somehow able to trust that there more going on, in her life and in the world, than she can see. With language that is neither preachy nor certain she conveys that even in the darkest moments we can have faith in God who keeps God’s promises, if not today, then some day in the distant future.
“We are all in the gutter,” writes Oscar Wilde, “but some of us are looking at the stars.” When God shows Abraham the stars and promises that his descendants will be that numerous, Abraham has a choice. He can believe only in the reality around him, in human greed and nature’s indifference and a barren future, or he can look at the stars and believe in the promises of God who created the universe out of nothing, and who offers to Abraham--and to us--the gift of faith, a gift we can open time and time again by looking at the stars and trusting that someday, somehow, in God’s time, God’s promises will be fulfilled.
There is an obscure story about King David, another great and yet flawed ancestor of our faith. In this story, David takes a census. Although we aren’t told why this act is an affront to God, it is in fact a grave sin, and David must be punished. In a surprising twist, God gives David a choice of three punishments: three years of famine, three months of destruction at the hands of Israel’s enemies or three days of “the sword of the Lord.” God explains that this will entail a pestilence on the land and the angel of the Lord destroying all the territory of Israel. David chooses door number three, saying: “let me fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is very great; but let me not fall into human hands.” (1 Chronicles 21:13)
Faced with the choice of destruction by nature, human beings, or God, David looks to the stars, trusting in the mercy and compassion of the Lord God, the one who creates out of nothing, who breathes life into creatures formed from the mud, who starts a dead heart beating again, who is gracious enough not to destroy us in our despair. Instead, God offers us the gift of a faulty but persistent faith that our that God will bring us home to the place where God’s promise is fulfilled, whether we reach that place in this life or the life to come. From the gutter of Lent, let us look to the stars. Amen.
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