Unprecedented

Unprecedented

Mark 1:1-11[1]

This is the time of year when people think about what will be “new” about the “New Year.” But for those of us who have made more than a few trips around the sun, turning over the calendar may just mark another day. We may find ourselves thinking along with the “preacher” of Ecclesiastes that “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl 1:9). Or to put it in a more familiar way, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” It’s the moral of the story of Sisyphus, the mythological Greek figure who thought he could outsmart the gods and even cheat death. As a result, he was sentenced to push a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down again, over and over and over. In both cases, the idea is that all our efforts are in vain.

This sentiment has been around for a long time—for millennia in fact! The myth of Sisyphus goes back to ancient Greece, and Ecclesiastes may be one of the older books in the Hebrew Bible. And yet, there are genuinely “new” things that happen for some of us. Students graduate from High School and move on to the next level. Or they complete their studies and start a career. Couples get married and start their lives together. Or they have children, which changes everything! Those are exciting times for all who are involved. But after a while, even a “new” career falls into a routine. Couples and even families can deal with the same thing. As the years continue to roll around, they may start to feel like every year turns into a repeat of the last one. Monotony sets in, and that leads to boredom. Our flourishing entertainment industry gives ample evidence of the fact that many of us, despite whatever “new” things come our way, feel like our lives are just an endless loop of the same old thing, day by day, month by month, and year after year.

To some extent, that’s a normal part of our human experience. Seasons come and seasons go. We rely on that. Our days and nights and weeks and months and years tend to follow a pattern. That’s not all bad. It’s comforting to know, for example, that the sun will actually come up tomorrow. Having a “normal” life gives us a sense of stability. But when stability turns into monotony, and boredom sets in, we can find ourselves struggling with the idea that none of it really matters. And that leads to despair, a state of mind and heart and soul that results from losing hope that anything we do or say makes any difference at all. More than that, despair cancels out any kind of faith: in God, in life, in the future, in anything. When we lose hope, and we lose faith, we also lose the heart and the will to truly live and love and find joy in doing so.

The message of the Bible, despite the pessimistic declaration of the “preacher” of Ecclesiastes, is a very different one. As the prophet Isaiah declares in the name of the Lord, “I am about to do a new thing” (Isa 43:19). In fact, the new thing that God promised to do would change everything. As the prophet said in the name of the Lord, “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind” (Isa 65:17). In that setting, the prophet was primarily talking about what God was going to do to set his people free from their captivity in Babylon. The promise was that God was going to change everything; in fact, God’s work was going to change even the heavens and the earth! As we’ve discussed, when the people returned from exile, the reality they faced wasn’t as “new” and as all-encompassing as they expected. There was a lot that stayed the same.

Some might think that God didn’t fulfill his promise after all. But the reason why things didn’t turn out quite the way they expected was because God wasn’t finished fulfilling his promise. The “good news” that the prophet Isaiah proclaimed almost three thousand years ago was a sweeping vision that included all God has in store for his precious creation. And, of course, the essential piece of that “good news” had to do with the birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus Christ as Lord! We get a glimpse of that “good news” in our Gospel lesson for today. Not only does Mark tell us that the events surrounding Jesus’ birth were part of the fulfillment of God’s promises through the prophet Isaiah. He also demonstrates in several ways that the story of Jesus is the “good news” about the “Son of God.” Now there had been others before Jesus who were called “sons” of God, but Jesus fulfilled that role uniquely.

That’s the point of the affirmation that the Gospel of Mark opens with: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1:1). One of the ironies about Mark’s Gospel is that the only person who truly recognizes Jesus as the “Son of God” is the Roman Centurion who witnessed his death on the cross. Nobody else truly recognizes Jesus as the “Son of God” in Mark’s Gospel. I think the reason for this is that Mark believed people could only truly understand what it meant that Jesus was the “Son of God” in light of the fact that he suffered and died on the cross. In that day, “Sons of God” were supposed to do miraculous deeds, draw huge crowds of followers, enjoy tremendous success, and be recognized by one and all! “Sons of God” in the ancient world were the “stuff of legend,” the focus of mythical stories. But Jesus demonstrated that he was the true “Son of God” by following through with God’s purpose: he took all the suffering of the world onto himself by dying on the cross.

As important as it is that Jesus was born as “God-who-is-with-us,” as important as it is that Jesus died as “God-who-is-for-us,” as important as it is that Jesus was raised to new life and ascended to the right hand of God to reign over all things, as Mark reminds us, this is the “beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The change that God made in Jesus was only the beginning. The work of fulfilling the promise of making a whole new heaven and a whole earth would continue through the first Christians, as the New Testament tells us. Through those who were bold enough to declare the news that in Jesus Christ God had begun working to change the whole world, the “good news” continued to be fulfilled in the lives of all who heard the message and took it to heart.

I think what I want to emphasize today is that the “good news” is that God isn’t finished with his work even now. The “good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” is still in the process of being fulfilled. And God will not stop working to make all things new until he has changed everything and everyone by the power of his unfailing love. To those who say, “there is nothing new under the sun,” I say that through Jesus Christ God is continually doing something new among us, even now. To those who say, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” I say that it’s time to open your eyes to see the light of God’s love in Jesus Christ that is still shining on us all to this day. To those who say that the promises of the Bible are just a lot of wishful thinking because life doesn’t ever really change, I say that it’s time to break the chains of hopelessness and despair. It’s time to open our hearts to the faith that the God who loves us will not stop changing everything until his work is finished, and it’s time to celebrate with joy the signs of God’s work that are all around us. In Jesus, God did something truly new and unprecedented. And he continues to do so among us and through us to this day.

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[1] © 2024 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 1/7/2024 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

You Will Live Again

You Will Live Again

Ezekiel 37:1-14[1]

  At some point in life, many of us lose hope. We find that, whether due to our choices, or due to circumstances beyond our control, the ground has given way beneath our feet, and we have been swept away to a place where we feel completely and hopelessly lost. That experience of being lost is part of life. I think it can feel so hopeless because when you feel lost, really lost in life, it can seem like you will never find your way again. It’s hard to hope when fear and sadness, loneliness and uncertainty are your constant companions. You wonder whether you’ll ever find joy and peace again.

  It would seem that the people of Israel felt that way during their time of exile in Babylon. They were a whole world away from everything that was “home” to them. After spending not only years but decades in a place that was very foreign to them, it makes sense that they felt lost and hopeless. That was the whole reason for Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. As the Lord speaks to the prophet, he says that the vision of new life was intended to address the fact that “the whole house of Israel” was saying “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely” (Ezek. 37:11). 

  Into this despair, the message that the Lord had for Israel is that nothing and no one is ever beyond hope! Think about the lesson for today: what could be more hopeless than dried-out bones. How can bones come back to life again? What possibility would any of us see for God to bring new life? And yet, before Ezekiel’s eyes, God gives new life to those lifeless bones. And the message that God has for the people is that “I will open your graves of exile” (Ezek. 37:12, NLT) and “you will live again” (37:14). It was a dramatic demonstration that nothing and no one is beyond the hope of new life—not even those who have felt lost so long they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be home. 

  It may be dawning on some of us that we’re in a situation similar to the people of Israel. Extended isolation can push our ability to hold onto hope past its limits. We don’t know how long this form of “exile” will go on. It may go on so long that we begin to feel lost; lost to ourselves, lost to life, lost even to God. But one of my favorite themes of Scripture is that those who feel lost are never lost to God. In story after story, somehow, God always finds a way to give them life again. I believe that still holds true today. No matter how hard it may get, the promise of scripture is that no one is ever beyond hope. No one is ever lost to God. Even though we may feel lost, we can trust that we are not lost to God. No matter what our circumstances, we can hold on to the hope that in his time, and in his way, God will bring new life to us all. We can hold onto God’s promise that we will live again.

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[1] ©2020 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 3/29/2020 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

You Are Mine

You Are Mine

Isaiah 43:1-7[1]

Among the fears we can deal with in our lives, the fear of rejection can be one of the most devastating. For some of us, that fear is only a “what-if” possibility. But for many of us, it comes from our life experience. We have actually experienced rejection by those who we thought would give us love: parents, spouses, children, family, or friends. It is one of the most painful things I’ve ever had to endure in this life. Many of you have had your share of rejection, and I think you might very well agree. When you go through rejection once, or twice, or perhaps more than that, it ingrains in your soul the fear of being rejected again. And fear is something that keeps us from fully living our lives.

I think part of the reason why the fear of rejection is so powerful is that it affects us so deeply. At the core of our being, we long to feel safe and secure in the knowledge that there is someone in this world who will always love us, through thick and thin, come what may. When we think we have that kind of love, and we find ourselves rejected by the ones we thought we could depend on, it makes it hard to trust that we will ever be safe or loved again. No matter how kind, no matter how affirming, no matter how loving someone may be, the thought is always lurking around that they could change their mind and walk away.

Our Scripture lesson from the prophet Isaiah for today is one that was addressed to a people who very likely felt rejected by God! They were people who had lost everything: homes, lives, land, and even in some cases family. They had been forced to leave it all behind. When the prophet spoke his message, they were living in exile in Babylon, far from anything familiar. I would imagine it was hard for them not to feel rejected by God. Though their faith may have been shallow, they had believed that with God on their side, they were safe from having to suffer the kinds of things they had gone through. But the Babylonians brought them to a rude awakening.

One of the Psalms sheds light on how the exiles must have felt. Psalm 137 is one of the most bitter laments in the Bible. In it, the Psalmist recounts how their captors asked them to sing the songs of their land and their faith. But the response was “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps. 137:4). In the devastation they felt, they had “hung up their harps” on the willow trees and instead of singing they sat and wept by the rivers of Babylon (Ps. 137:1-2). In fact, the end of the Psalm is one of the most disturbing expressions of the desire for revenge in the Bible. While they asked the LORD to remember and avenge them, I would think that a significant cause of their bitterness was the feeling that they had been rejected by God.

Into the darkness of their despair, in the name of the LORD the prophet assured them that, regardless of what they had been through and in spite of what they might be feeling, God had not rejected them. The prophet called on them not to fear, and promised in the name of the LORD that “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you” (Isa. 43:2). That probably sounded hard to believe. They had been through the waters and had felt overwhelmed. They had been through the fire and had very likely been burned.

In the face of all that they had been through, the basis for this promise was who God was and what God had done. The prophet called on the people not to fear the flood or the fire because of who God is: “the LORD … who created you” and “the LORD your God, …, your Savior” (Isa. 43:1, 3). The God who had created them in the first place was the same God who had proven that he was their Savior many times. But perhaps more importantly, he was also the God who loved them. In the midst of their heartbreak, he was the God who declared: “you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you” (Isa. 43:4). Because of that love, he was also the God who had “called them by name” and had declared definitively: “you are mine” (Isa. 43:1).

From a real-life perspective, you can’t go through a flood without getting soaked through. And you can’t go through a fire without at least smelling like smoke, and maybe even getting singed. The hard truth about life is that bad things happen to good people. And at times it can be so tragic as to leave us wondering whether there is anyone out there who knows us and cares about us, including God! The many holocausts that we have witnessed through history are prime evidence of that hard truth. But the promise is not that we will never suffer, but rather that these hardships will not consume us. And the reason for that is that God promises, come what may, that “you are mine.”

The fear of rejection can make life just as bitter for us as it was for the Jewish exiles in Babylon. And there are some experiences that are so tragic we can also wonder whether God has rejected us. But the promise of Scripture is that no matter what we may go through in this life, God has declared to us, “you are mine.” Nothing can change the fact that God has claimed us as his own out of his unfailing love for us. In case we have any lingering doubts, God himself came among us in Jesus to make clear once and for all that he is our Savior. In Jesus, God demonstrated once and for all, out of his unfailing love for us, that he has claimed us as his own. The God who created us and the God who saves us is the one who has declared forever: “you are mine.”

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[1] ©Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 1/13/2019 at Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

Only Believe

Only Believe

Mark 5:21-43[1]

There are some experiences in life that take us to the very edge of our ability to cope.  You lose your job and wonder how in the world you’re going to find another one. Or you learn that the cancer has metastasized. Or you look at the person you’ve shared your life with and realize that it’s over. It may take a while, but in situations like that, the stress you feel can easily push you beyond the limit of what you think you can endure. We have a word for it: finding yourself at the end of your rope. Most of us either have faced or will face this kind of situation. And, unfortunately, when that time comes, our faith can seem pretty empty.

Our Gospel lesson presents us with a couple of people who had reached the end of their respective ropes: a father whose daughter was dying and a woman whose life had been almost literally consumed by her illness. The lesson begins with a prominent man in the community coming to Jesus and asking him to save his daughter. As they were on the way, however, a woman who had been afflicted with an illness for 12 years came and touched Jesus. The woman was so desperate, she believed that all she needed to do was touch Jesus’ clothes, and she would be healed. And in fact, she was! Jesus told her that it was her faith that healed her. 

It’s hard to know what it was she believed in. The fact that she thought she would be healed if she only touched Jesus’ clothes makes it sound like she had some kind of magical view of who Jesus was and what he could do for her. But I think more important is the faith and the courage it took for her to take the step of venturing into the crowd and reaching out to touch Jesus. Her particular illness rendered her, for all practical purposes, an outcast. She was perpetually “unclean,” and therefore unable to take part in any of the normal activities of life, even the worship of God at the synagogue! Rather than giving up, she had the faith and the courage to seek the one who was healing people in God’s name.

Unfortunately, although the father came to Jesus first, during the time Jesus was healing the woman, his daughter died. One would think that would be the end of it. But Jesus told the father, “Do not fear, only believe” (Mk. 5:36)! That seems to me a strange response to death.  Normally we would say something like, “I’m terribly sorry for your loss.”  Or “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.” But to say, “Do not fear, only believe” strains the imagination. The fact that he, an influential leader, came personally to beg Jesus for healing suggests that he was just as desperate as the woman. What was this father supposed to believe in now that his daughter was dead? 

I think the answer has to do with the whole purpose for miracles in Jesus’ ministry. They were not meant for show, or to convince skeptics, or to gain notoriety. They were acts of compassion in response to human need. But they were also more than that. They were individual demonstrations of the new life of God’s Kingdom. So in a very real sense, what Jesus was asking this grieving father to believe in was that God had begun working to make all things new already in the here and now. And that Jesus was the agent through whom God was bringing this new life into our world. And that somehow all of this would make a difference even for him.

What do we believe in when we reach the end of our ropes? Many of us these days have a hard time believing in miracles. When life brings something so painful, so devastating that it feels like you’ve gone beyond what you can humanly endure, what then? For many of us, if we’re honest, we’d have to admit that our faith tends to evaporate. But is there some way to face that kind of devastating loss without giving up our faith? I guess what I’m asking is what we can believe in when it seems like we have nothing left to believe in. 

We may have to start with the people around us.  We can believe in the people who continue to show us love and compassion and support—those who walk with us through the valley of the shadow of death. That’s something we can believe in. And we may also have to take a hard look at ourselves. When we go through our own end-of-the-rope situations, we can believe that our life isn’t over. One chapter may be coming to a close, but as it does, it opens the way for another chapter to begin. Ultimately, however, I think what we can believe in is that the one who has carried us from the day of our birth will continue to carry us all the days of our lives. We can believe that God can and does bring something good from what seems to be our worst nightmare come true. We can believe that God is working in and through all the heartbreak and suffering in this world to make all things new. 

There are times in our lives when things happen that press us to our limits and beyond. When that happens, we have a choice.  We can pull the covers over our heads, isolate ourselves, and try to escape from it all. Or we can embrace what we’re feeling and move forward in faith that God has a future for us. Just because we experience devastating loss doesn’t mean our lives are over. It could very well mean that our lives are just about to truly begin!  If we can only believe, and open our hearts to see the new possibilities, it may just be the greatest miracle of all!

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[1] © 2018 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 7/1/2018 at Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

Nothing Lost

Nothing Lost

Ezekiel 37:1-14[1]

  At some point in life, many of us will lose hope.  We will find that, whether due to our choices, or due to circumstances beyond our control, the ground has given way beneath our feet, and we have been swept away to a place where we feel completely and hopelessly lost. From the days of Homer’s Odyssey, this theme has been the subject of poetry, novels, plays, and even films.[2] The experience of being lost is part of life.  I think it can feel so hopeless because when you feel lost, really lost in life, it can seem like you will never find your way again.  It’s hard to hope when fear, sadness, and pain are your constant companions, and you wonder whether you’ll ever find joy, peace, and love again.

  It would seem that the people of Israel felt that way in exile. They were a whole world away from everything that was “home” to them.  I’m sure after spending not only years but decades in a place that was very foreign to them, it was difficult for them not to feel lost and hopeless. In fact, that was the whole reason for Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones.[3]  As the Lord speaks to the prophet, he says that the vision of new life was intended to address the fact that “the whole house of Israel” was saying “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely” (Ezek. 37:11).  We don’t really know how long they had been in exile when the prophet received this vision, but it’s likely that they had been there for perhaps 15 to 20 years![4]  They had felt lost for so long many of them had probably begun to forget what it was like to be “home.”  It’s no wonder they had given up hope!

  Into this despair, the message that the Lord had for Israel is that nothing and no one is ever beyond hope!  Think about the lesson for today: what could be more hopeless than dried-out bones. How can bones come back to life again? It would seem that there was nothing left to which God could give new life. And yet, before Ezekiel’s eyes, he sees new life come to those lifeless bones. And the message that God has for the people is that “ I will open your graves of exile and cause you to rise again.” (Ezek. 37:12, NLT). It was a dramatic demonstration that nothing and no one is beyond the hope of new life--not even those who have felt lost so long they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be home. [5]

  If there was ever anyone who deserved to feel lost, I think it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Bonhoeffer immediately began to oppose their propaganda, even though he put himself at great risk to do so.  He took part in forming an underground community known as the Confessing Church, and illegally ran a seminary that was closed and relocated several times. Although he had two different opportunities to leave Germany, Bonhoeffer decided that he had to share the fate of the church in Germany if he were going to have a role in rebuilding it after the war.[6]  And as a result of his work with the German resistance movement, he was arrested on April 5, 1943, and was held in prison without trial until his execution on April 9, 1945.

  It’s hard for me to imagine how hard those two years must have been for him.  Yet, even in a Nazi prison, Bonhoeffer was able to maintain his hope.  In a letter in which he described the difficulty of waiting in prison without any prospect of release, he reflects on the words of a German Christmas hymn.  In one verse, the Christ child says to all those who suffer: “Let pass, dear brothers, every pain; what you have missed I’ll bring again.”[7] Bonhoeffer concludes from this “that nothing is lost, that everything is taken up in Christ, .... Christ restores all this as God originally intended for it to be.”[8]

  In a very real sense, many of us have experiences in life that can push our ability to hold onto hope past its limits. Our forms of “exile” can go on so long that we can begin to feel lost; lost to ourselves, lost to life, lost even to God. But one of my favorite themes of Scripture is that those who feel lost are never lost to God.[9] In story after story, somehow, God always finds a way to bring them home again. I believe that still holds true today.[10] There are all kinds of ways we can find ourselves lost in this world. And some of us have to endure that “exile” so long we may lose hope of ever feeling at home again. But the promise of scripture is that no one is ever beyond hope. No one is ever truly lost to God. Even when we may feel lost, we can trust that we are not lost to God. No matter what our circumstances may be, we can hold on to our hope that in his time, and in his way, God will bring new life to us all.[11]

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[1] © 2014 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 4/6/2014 at First Presbyterian Church of Dickinson, TX.

[2] Among others, James Joyce patterned his Ulysses (the latinized version of the Greek name Odysseus) after The Odyssey; Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain bears some similarities and was called an “American Odyssey” by the New York Times; Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions draws on both Ulysses and The Odyssey; and the 2000 film by Joel and Ethan Coen, “O Brother Where Art Thou” is loosely based on The Odyssey.

[3] Cf. Katheryn Pfisterer Darr, “The Book of Ezekiel,” New Interpreters Bible VI:1503: “Their hope has perished; and without hope, they might as well be dead.  The future, ..., seems as barren as the past years and present experience of exile.” Cf. also Walther Eichrodt, Ezekiel, 310-11, “The despair of the exiles meets here with something much more than a mere superficial word of comfort. Ezekiel does not see any less sharply or realistically than the rest of his fellow countrymen the utter ruin to which Israel has been reduced.  He therefore demonstrates to them that under such conditions the sole basis of hope lies in the superhuman and miraculous power of his God, ... .  All that has been said about the way in which such a God will accomplish salvation must be seen against the background of well-justified desperation on the part of man.  That desperation can only admit itself to have been overcome when it meets with the Lord of life in all his mysterious power.” (emphasis added)

[4] On the dating of this oracle, cf. W. Zimmerli, F. M. Cross, F. M., & K. Baltzer, Ezekiel: A commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, 245-46, 258.

[5] Darr, “Ezekiel,” NIB VI:1504: “When we raise our vision to look beyond what our mundane eyes can see, we watch the impossible happen through God’s eyes.”

[6] Cf. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, 655.

[7] Cf. Peter Frick, Bonhoeffer’s Intellectual Formation: Theology and Philosophy in His Thought, 29. It is Paul Gerhardt’s hymn, “Frölich Soll Mein Herze Springen.”

[8] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 169.  He also says that this is related to the idea expressed in Ephesians 1:10 of the restoration of all things.

[9] Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.3:771: God’s “omnipotent mercy rules over all without exception, … no matter how lost they are they are not lost to him.” (emphasis added). Cf. also Barth, Church Dogmatics, 2.2:29: “God Himself in His freedom has decided that [man] shall stand, that he shall be saved and not lost, that he shall live and not die.”

[10] Cf. Darr, “Ezekiel,” NIB VI:1504 where she quotes Elie Wiesel to the effect that “every generation needs to hear in its own time that these bones can live again.”

[11] Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 209: This is a new promise of life, for it is no longer attached to the condition of a possible repentance, but promises a creative act of Yahweh upon his people beyond the bounds of the temporal and the possible .  Cf. also Paul J. Achtemeier, Romans, 134: “Only when the power of sin, ..., has been overcome by the greater power of God’s Spirit, working through his Son, can people trapped in that life be free to pursue another kind of life. ... But once the Spirit, working through Christ, has broken that power, a new world is born and a new life is possible (vv. 9, 11a).”

Crossing Over

Crossing Over

Gen 15:1-12, 17-18; Phil 3:17-4:1[1]

As I mentioned last week, the spiritual life is a pilgrimage for us all. I think we are all ultimately on the same journey, but our paths can lead us in very different directions. Some of us seem to make a beeline for God. For others, I think that the journey can be a very long one. For many people in this world, the spiritual path is difficult and painful. They seem to be on a path that will only let them believe what they can see. Unfortunately, when that is the case, people can find themselves locked in the despair “vicious circles” of shame and violence and death that seem to dominate this life.[2]

And yet many of those who are on this path seek to break out of the bondage of these vicious circles through individual effort—whether by seeking to achieve and build up, or by asserting the freedom to corrupt and tear down. In particular, it seems that our culture delights in what Paul could call “glorying in their shame” (Philippians 3:19). As a people, we have taken that phrase to new depths; we invent new ways to “glory in our shame.” But we don’t stop there—we seem to be “hell-bent” on spreading our degradation, humiliation, and shame throughout the human race. The end result of the path that only believes what can be seen is a picture of disgrace that is bleak and utterly devoid of hope.

As we consider the Scripture lesson from Genesis this week, I think it is impossible for us to fully appreciate the disgrace of barrenness in the world of Sarah and Abraham. They had set out on what must have seemed to their friends and family to be a “fool’s errand” based only on a promise from God. After many years had passed, God appears to Abraham to remind him of the promise, but it seems that the years have taken their toll on his faith. Abraham says, “Sovereign Lord, what good will your reward do me, since I have no children? (Genesis 15:2, TEV). To him it would seem that he and Sarah were stuck in what was to them a vicious circle of barrenness and mortality, which meant that they had no real future and therefore no real hope. In some way, however, God was able to break through Abraham’s fears and doubts and shame, and Abraham crossed over to faith.

I think the story of Abraham gives us an excellent example of the role of faith in our salvation. As we mentioned last week, Paul said that we must confess “Jesus is Lord” and “believe in our hearts” that God raised him from the dead. We talked about the first dimension last week. But why is it so important for us to have faith in order to experience God’s salvation? Well, I think at least part of the answer is that faith enables us to move out of the essential hopelessness of a world that believes only what it can see and that consists of the eternal return of the same thing.[3]

We don’t really know what happened to Abraham on that starry night that enabled him to take the step of faith. Did the sight of the beautiful night sky with its vast array of lights somehow reassure him that God “calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17) and therefore that God was able to do what he had promised” (Romans 4:21)? [4] It’s hard to say for sure. But somehow, God was able to break through Abraham’s shame and doubt and fear and lead him to “trust God’s future” even in the midst of everything that contradicts it here and now.[5]

Essentially, God intrudes on Abraham’s shame and hopelessness with a promise—an outlandish promise that had no possible way of being fulfilled from a human point of view. But this promise enables Abraham to look past his hopeless barrenness to a different future.[6] In the same way, the promise of the God who keeps all promises can lead us to a faith is able to see through the vicious circles that seek to dominate our lives to the truth that hopelessness is where God works best.[7]

This is something of what Paul has to say when he addresses those who were “glorying in their shame” in his day and time. In contrast to those whose “god is their belly,” Paul insists that the transformation God instigated through Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection to new life is one that is changing us all.[8] As he says elsewhere, “Everybody dies in Adam; everybody comes alive in Christ.” (1 Cor. 15:22, MSG). Paul can speak of this transformation as if we all had died with Jesus on that cross and we were all raised with him to new life on that first Easter.[9]

Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, we have all crossed over—from shame, and death to freedom and life! And that means we have crossed over from shame and despair to hope. So if that’s true, why is it so important for us to take the step of faith? Because it enables us to actually make the journey from hopelessness to the freedom that comes from “trusting God’s future.” Faith enables us to move beyond believing only what we can see to believing that God is a God who brings hope out of hopelessness and new life out of death.[10] Faith enables us to move out of the essential hopelessness of our world and to step into the “glorious liberty” that God is bringing to the whole creation through Jesus.[11]

It is a different path, a whole new way of life that sees the possibility of new life in every death, sees the light shining in the deepest darkness, and sees hope in the midst of despair. It is not naïve about the vicious circles that are so prevalent in this world, but it recognizes that their power is a broken one, and that their days are numbered

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[1] © 2010 Alan Brehm. A sermon preached by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 2/28/10 at First Presbyterian Church, Dickinson, TX and at A Community of the Servant-Savior Presbyterian Church, Houston, TX.

[2] Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, 293-94, 317-18, 329-32; cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 87-89

[3] Cf. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, 116: “Barrenness is the way of human history. It is an effective metaphor for hopelessness. There is no foreseeable future. There is no human power to invent a future.”

[4] Brueggemann, Genesis, 143. He defines faith as “a certitude that is based not on human reason but on a primal awareness that God is God.” With reference to Abraham, he continues, “The same God who gives the promise is the one who makes it believable” through “the new awareness that God really is God.”

[5] Brueggemann, Genesis, 145: faith means “to trust God’s future and to live assured of that future even in the deathly present.” Cf. also ibid., 118, where he points out that Just as Sarah and Abraham had to leave the world they knew for a country they didn’t know, so for us “such departure from securities is the only way out of barrenness. … To stay in safety is to remain barren; to leave in risk is to have hope.”

[6] Brueggemann, Genesis, 117. He says that the promise “asserts the freedom and power of God to work his will among the hopeless.”

[7] Cf. Brueggemann, Genesis, 116: “barrenness is the arena of God’s life-giving action.”

[8] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 3.2:187; Cf. Declaration of Faith, 4.5, which says, “His resurrection is a decisive victory over the powers that deform and destroy human life.” Cf. also Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 26-27, 28, 30, 32-33, 182, 188-89, 220, 223, 254, 256; Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 33-34, 85, 88; Moltmann, Church in the Power, 98-99, 191, 197.

[9] I would argue that Phil. 3:21 is not just about the physical transformation of our bodies from mortal to immortal, but about the total life transformation that is underway even now. Cf. James D. G. Dunn, “1 Corinthians 15:45—Last Adam, Life-Giving Spirit,” in The Christ and the Spirit, vol. 1, 263; Lucien Cerfaux, The Christian In The Theology Of St. Paul, 178-89, 228-29. With all due respect to John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries XXI:110; Gordon D. Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, 382-83; and Gerald F. Hawthorne, Ralph P. Martin, Philippians, rev. ed., 233.

[10] Cf. The Study Catechism, question 81.

[11] Cf. Declaration of Faith, 8.2. Cf. Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 31-34: “the spell of the dogma of hopelessness—ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing)—is broken where he who raises the dead is recognized to be God. Where in faith and hope we begin to live in the light of the possibilities and promises of this God, the whole fullness of life discloses itself as … a life to be loved” by embracing all things and all people with this love that effects a “creative transformation” of all things.