Belonging by Faith

Genesis 15:1-6
Galatians 3:6-14

The story we read this morning from Genesis
is about God's promise to Abraham that Abraham would have an heir.
Abraham would be a father and a grandfather.
And this promise seemed outlandish to Abraham who had become cynical that he would ever continue a legacy.
And he argues with God in his cynicism. We catch that in what we read.
But God repeats to Abraham the promise: “a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.”
You will have a family old man. You find it hard to believe but with God all things are possible.
And I love the way that Barbara Brown Taylor narrates what happens next.

"….God brought the old man outside,
which means that he was inside before that—in a tent, maybe,where all he could see above his head
was black tarp with a few rips in it.
Outside, Abraham could see a lot more than that.
I don’t know where you live,
but chances are that you cannot see half of what Abraham saw.
At the very least, you have three neighbors who leave their porch lights on at night.
At worst, you live where the lights of parking lots, football stadiums,
tall buildings and billboards cast such an artificial glow in the sky
that you might as well be in a tent for all you can see of the stars at night.
But Abraham could see—not just specks of light in the sky
but the actual colors of some of them—some yellow, some red, some flashing back and forth between blue and green—plus millions of tiny ones so small they looked like phosphorescent clouds.
There were triangles of stars up there,
long rectangles of stars, swirls and rivers of stars up there.
“Count them if you can,” God said, but how could Abraham do that?
Every time he started, one would fall or another would appear.
There was no way to count the stars.
They went on. They went deep and deep.
Anyone who looked into Abraham’s eyes right then could have seen them
littered with stars, as many as would fit on the twin planets of one old man’s eyes.
“So shall your descendents be,” God said.
And Abraham believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness."

(Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Sacramental Sky” preached at Duke Divinity Chapel for the second Sunday of Lent 2011, accessed at http://chapel-archives.oit.duke.edu/documents/sermons/BBT--SacramentalSky.pdf)


Now in the letter to the Galatians, Paul is reminding the people in that church of this moment in history. This moment in Abraham's life.


Because the Teachers who had been pressuring the people to become circumcised, to take on the full identity of the law of Moses, including how they ate, with whom they ate, etc.
These Teachers had been using the example of Abraham.
“Don't you want to be a true child of Abraham?
It's Abraham who is promised the blessing.
You will only take part in that blessing if you become a child of Abraham.” They might say.
And for the teachers, this meant following Abraham in becoming circumcised.


But Paul calls the Teachers' bluff here.
It's true that Abraham was the first in the long line of his descendants to be circumcised and that doing so was a symbol of the relationship with God that Abraham had and the legacy that he would pass down to his children and their children and so on.


But whereas the Teachers point to Genesis chapter 17, Paul points to two chapters earlier:
when Abraham is given the promise in the first place.


Upon what basis was Abraham's relationship with God built.
Was it as in chapter 17 built on the identity markers that symbolized his faith?
Or was it as in chapter 15 built on the faith in the promise
that religious experience Abraham had out in the starry night?


Paul writes, It is the faith, the trust, the relationship that Abraham fostered with God before ever marking himself off as a particular kind of person of faith – it was that existential moment when Abraham believed that God considered him righteous.


And that's what Paul does here. He points back to Abraham and says to the teachers – if you're going to play the Abraham card, at least lets be honest about how God related to Abraham. It was not on the basis of his obedience to God's command, but by calling him into relationship of blessing – a relationship with a future and a hope.


But the teachers were trying to convince the Galatians that it was fundamentally our adherence to the commands that bound us to God.


Our participation in God's community of blessing, our joining in God's promise of healing the world, does not depend on our work, it depends upon our relationship with God and God's promise.


Diana Butler Bass speaks about how for so many centuries the Christian religion has been a guarded fortress of beliefs. Your ticket to entering is your willingness to assent to certain propositions, certain “organized doctrines.”


People leave one church and join another when they start to think differently or believe differently about God.

Church becomes a place to go to have what you believe or don't believe affirmed and to shore up around you those who feel the same way.


But this turns faith from relationship into identity markers that distinguish those who are in from those who are out.


That's not what this new creation of Christ is about.


It's not about identifying yourself by what you believe or don't believe about the world – those things are important.


But it is primarily about being in relationship with God – Belonging.


She writes, 

“There is, however, something odd about this pattern. Other than joining a political party, it is hard to think of any other sort of community that people join by agreeing to a set of principles. Imagine joining a knitting group. Does anyone go to a knitting group and ask if the knitters believe in knitting or what they hold to be true about knitting? Do people ask for a knitting doctrinal statement? Indeed, if you start knitting by reading a book about knitting or a history of knitting or a theory of knitting, you will very likely never knit.”
“If you want to knit, you find someone who knits to teach you. Go to the local yarn shop and find out when there is a knitting class. Sit in a circle where others will talk to you, show you how to hold the needles, guide your hands, and share their patterns with you. The first step in becoming a knitter is forming a relationship with knitters. The next step is to learn by doing and practice. After you knit for a while, after you have made scarves and hats and mittens, then you start forming ideas about knitting. You might come to think that the experience of knitting makes you a better person, more spiritual, or able to concentrate, give you a sense of service to others, allows you to demonstrate love and care. You think about what you are doing, how you might do it better. You develop your own way of knitting, your own theory of the craft. You might invent a dazzling new pattern, a new way to make a stitch; you might write a knitting book or become a knitting teacher. In knitting, the process is exactly the reverse of that in church: belonging to a knitting group leads to behaving as a knitter, which leads to believing things about knitting. Relationships lead to craft, which leads to experiential belief. That is the path to becoming and being someone different. The path of transformation.”  (Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion, pp. 202-203)

Belonging leads to behaving which leads to believing.


Whereas in former times it's been the reverse. You must believe this, then you behave like this, and consequently you show yourself to belong to God's community, ie. The church.


What Paul seems to be saying here is that relationship, one's what of being towards God is first and foremost and foundational.


It is the belonging of faith that is foundational to being a community who live in light of the God of Abraham.


It is a trust that is born in the mystery of the starry night that unites us in our common pursuit of God and of the life of the Spirit.


We become part of Abraham's family by the curiosity, the mystery, the wonder of faith.


And then we walk together in a pursuit of how God would have us live faithfully here and now.


But as we seek to reform ourselves and our community – may we remember the words that were called out in desperation at the height of religious identity wars in Europe in the 1600s:
"In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.”


Abraham, if we follow that story, was not given a creed, a set of doctrines, even a sermon helping him know how to behave. He probably followed the morals that had been given to him from his culture.


Abraham was given a promise. And with stars in his eyes, he believed.


That's the kind of faith Paul's talking about – not an intellectual assent to propositions.
But an experience of the grace of God as we turn to God in renewed relationship.


That experience brings together God's family – and it is a family that is diverse – both Jews and Gentiles – and Gentiles as different as Americans are from Palestinians.


It is relationship to God – faith and trust – that are foundational to this gospel.


Bass writes, “It is also the path found in the New Testament, the Way of Jesus that leads to God. Long ago, before the last half millenium, Christians understood that faith was a matter of community first, practices second, and belief as a result of the first two. Our immediate ancestors reversed the order. Now, it is up to us to restore the original order.”


Let us join together in what we share – in that longing for God, in that longing to heal the world of its divisions and hatred and longstanding resentments and cold wars.


Let us join together in what we share – knowing that by faith we become a family consecrated in mission to help those in need, to feed the hungry, to oppose injustice
and to create gardens of peace in a violent world.


Let us leave behind identity markers and join together in the faith of Abraham.


God will bring blessing through Christ – and that work is already being done by the Spirit through us.


Amen.