Whose side was God on?

Abraham had a problem. His first wife demanded that he send away his second wife. Sarah, the first wife had given her maid Hagar to Abraham, and he had taken Hagar to be his wife, Sarah now refers to her as ‘this slave’. Not only does she want to send away the slave-wife, she also wants to send away Abraham’s first born son, Ishmael, the child he had with Hagar, at one time Sarah had wanted to make Hagar's baby her own, now she wants him sent away. Ishmael was fourteen and had been mocking his baby step-brother. Sarah gave as her reason for asking that he be sent away that there would be conflict over inheritance. That might be a reasonable fear, fratricide was fairly common where inheritances were involved.

Three persons were involved in this problem: Abraham was the person with power, Sarah was the person with position, Hagar was the person with nothing (except an unwanted son and a history of making trouble). In the problem situations you have dealt with or are still dealing with, which person do you identify with? Whose situation is most like your own situation? Abraham had made a great feast to coincide with the weaning of Isaac; baby’s were nursed a lot longer than nine month so Ishmael who was 14 when the baby was born may have been 15 or 16. The feast should have been a time of joy and celebration, instead Abraham began to grieve because of the trouble between his two wives. It still happens today; family celebrations are outwardly happy but there is often a secret weeper and sometimes a quarrel erupts that makes all the members of the family sad for many years.

Whose side was God on? That question is too simple Here we have three people, all with some degree of trust in God; would God be siding with one person against another? The language of the Bible is that God is ‘for’ those who trust him. That includes all three people.

In my branch of the Universal Church we often encounter problem situations; when we do, we remind each other to approach cautiously and not to react in anger or haste. Caution is needed because it is important to fully understand the problem before applying a hasty solution. All the involved parties come together, to talk honestly and to think and to wait for insight. At times like this when the ‘for’ and ‘against’ parties come in humility and honesty and recognize that they need more wisdom than they have, I feel as though I am watching a miracle. Of course in any democracy the people who are ‘for’ and the people who are ‘against’ meet together peaceably and sometimes with honesty and humility – that doesn’t make it any less of a miracle.

I want to ask you, which causes the most problems? Is it the original action (the one that caused the problem in the first place) or the reaction to the problem? A wrong solution often produces more damage than the original problem. Even in a family row where only words are used, violent speech is responded to with more violent speech and the conflict soon tears apart the threads that bind families and friends together.

“It can’t come out smelling like a rose.” This was said to me when Davd and I were working with a problem in Teen Challenge, the organization that helps teen-agers come off drugs. The problem was that two teen agers who had had a baby together desperately wanted to marry and raise the baby. To do this they would need to live with the parents of one of them and get a lot of help from both families. The parents didn't want to start looking after new children before they'd got their older children through school. The boys parents didn't like the girl, and the girl's parents despised the boy. While we were struggling to get some help for the teen-agers somebody dismissed all hope with the remark that, "It can't come out smelling like a rose, because it was started wrong in the first place." Discouraged, the girl returned to her parents, the baby was given up for adoption, the boy sent to relatives in another state and both young people carried on with their education and prepared themselves for the opportunities life might present to them. Since then I have discovered that even the toughest problems can come out smelling like a rose. In my congregations there have been parents and grandparents who have sacrificed time and money to help young couples marry or to help single mothers raise children, The young parents learn (eventually) to be grateful for the help they receive, the children grow up with a host of relatives and become delightful people. Teen marriage can last: among the ladies of my church women’s fellowships there weree a number of women who had been married when they were sixteen or seventeen and stayed married all their lives. Grandmas look forward to living a life where they can do the things they couldn't do when they had children, but many of them willingly give up that prospect and start again to raise a family; only this time it is some one elses child. One of these grandmothers told me that there are many different problems faced by the two generation gap and the grandparents dis-similarity to younger parents. None of those women wanted to start raising a family again, but when their sons and daughters returned home with babies many of the older women made the sacrifice. I know those children, most of them grew up to become to be charming people.

People love to voice their opinion and give advice, their advice usually take the shape of offering a solution. It is always a bit of an insult because it suggests that the person with the problem isn't capable of arriving at their own solution. Sometimes we can't tell other people about our problems because shallow solutions and unhelpful advice will just make us more miserable and irritated than we already are. .

In this case Abraham received advice from a different source. God gave him some advice which surprises us and we don't very much like. Abraham however had learnt to have confidence in the voice that instructed him and he does what God directs. Early next morning he gives food and a container of water to Hagar and sends her and her son away, out into the wilderness.

Laughing with Sarah

I started preaching when I was 9, it didn’t matter that no one was listening; I lined up several empty chairs, stood in front of them and began my first sermon.The first time I actually had an audience was when I was 14, the young peoples’ group at church asked me to speak for 5 minutes. I preached regularly after that, at youth group meetings and women’s meetings. Someone once asked David how he felt about ‘letting his wife’ preach, he replied, “She was preaching when I met her, and I knew there was no stopping her.” Actually he was my greatest encouragement, all through our lives.I met David when I was 13 and he was not quite 16. When we met we had both already privately promised God, that we would spread the news of his salvation. David knew that God wanted him to be a missionary, I knew that the urge to preach was coming from somewhere outside of myself. Our pastor-friends advised us that all we needed was a good understanding of the Bible and the various experiences of church life that we could learn at our local church. After working under our pastors' directions and studying in the local church we were considered equipped and sent to Japan as missionaries. David and I still longed for more knowledge. When we had been married for 25 years, while we were living in America, we finally got the chance.I enrolled in college first and David the year after. It was while we were in college that we met Presbyterian Christians, and discovered that their way of being Church fitted with our way of serving and preaching God.In 1979, aged 51, I was at last judged ready to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA. The local Presbytery members would pray. and ‘lay-hands’ on me, and through faith, accompanying the action, the Holy Spirit would fit me for serving the congregation. The date of the ordination service was set, I had invited the speakers and all that remained was to choose the hymns. While I was choosing them David phoned me; he asked if everything was going according to plan and I replied ‘Yes, it’s actually going to happen.” Even before I put the phone down something else happened: I began to laugh, peal after peal of laughter, coming so fast I could scarcely breathe and all the while tears poured down my face. I couldn’t control it. Sober-faced, serious minded Jessie was having hysterics. I didn’t try to stop, because it felt like all the struggles to makes grades and pass exams were being wiped away. The laughter felt like a door had opened and I had gone through and entered into a new space. I continued to laugh and laugh for a long time. When I finally wiped my eyes and took a long breath I decided that I had something in common with Sarah. Sarah had said, “God has made me to laugh so that all who hear me will laugh with me.”Sarah was ninety years old when she said this. I wonder; had she stopped laughing in her old age? If she lived today she might have; life seems to get sadder as we get older: friends die, pleasures like eating whatever we fancy, running and exercise are discontinued, hearing seeing and moving get difficult. There are truly fewer reasons to laugh.We try to compensate for the lack of earthly joy by substituting spiritual joys, and there are many of these, but the choice is not an 'either or' choice. It can be both. God sent Ruth a daughter-in-law and a grandchild, Abraham married again after Sarah died, Anna saw the answer to her prayers. Until the perfect day dawns and the shadows flee away we live according to the promises, knowing (because we trust God) that they shall surely come true. The various answers to prayer that we experience reassure us that God is indeed with us, and for us. Because we know this; it will come about that sometimes and oftentimes, sober-faced Presbyterians, serious minded Lutherans, and industrious Methodists will join the Charismatics of the Church and laughter will ripple and spread. The enemies of the Church will hear it and wonder about it, the enemies of man-kind will hear it and wish that they could laugh too. It may be that when they hear the laughter they will grow wistful and wonder across their territorial lines, looking for us, asking if it is true that happiness can happen to humans. Let us laugh.

Small Requirements

It should have been a wonderful evening; but before Abraham and Sarah had time to share their excitement and anticipation, God decides to include Abraham in matters of state. He takes Abraham into his confidence and tells him what he intends to do about the cruelty that has gone beyond restraint in Sodom.

God was not willing, the prayer book tells me, to be God without us. He did not need us because he does not have needs, but he chose us, he chose to make us partners in his activities. Now he confides in Abraham, because, says God, I know him: that he will follow the way of Jehovah and train his family and household to do righteousness and justice even after he has passed on.

What a little thing! Training his family and the people he employed to walk in God's path, to do right and be just. Because of this God treats Abraham with respect and the way is open for God to fulfill all his promises to him.

Isn’t this the sort of thing that every good parent tries to do? It seems a bit basic and we would have expected God to be using a different assessment. Moses, Daniel and David were men of courage who led a nation and confronted emperors. In contrast all God looks for in Abraham is the ability to train a family group in the ways of Jehovah.

When I worked with a group of American men and women the women were uncomfortable with my calling to be preacher, they told me that all God required of me was to raise my children well. Maybe they were right. At the time all I could see was that one generation would devote themselves to their children who would devote themselves to their children. What about the other people I asked, the ones whose parents had not been able to train them right, couldn’t I include them with my work of parenting? Now I look back with concern, would it have been different if I had followed the example of my American women friends and devoted myself to children and home? Would I have known how to do it well? Parents, at that time, had little more than customs to equip them for the work of parenting. Now children blame their parents for the difficulties they have had growing up. They say their parents were too severe or that their parents damaged the child’s self-esteem. Looking at it that way God seems to be requiring a lot from Abraham.

Even the male members of faith might have a problem with the simplicity of God’s requirement of a life centered on worship and revolving around training family and household to wak in the path of Jehovah. I can imagine the men asking if God wouldn’t prefer them to lead a nation, establish a new denomination or at least discover some startling new truth in the Bible.

There is a curious statement in the book of Hebrews; the writer says that in a way the Levite great great great grandsons of Abraham were included in Abraham’s action when he gave a tenth of his gains to a priest called Melchizedek. The writer is interested in proving that there can be other priests besides the sons of Levy. I used to concentrate on finding who Melchizedek was and overlook the strange statement that if Abraham did it, then in a way his descendents did it! Now I’m fascinated with that casual statement; have we in some way unknown to us passed onto our children through many generations our patterns and values?

Our generation has recognized that we are in some way inheritors of the miss-treatment of the Indian nations and the enslaving of the African nations, and that we bear some limited responsibility to try to correct what our ancestors did. Therefore when we strive to do right and be just and walk in the way of The Almighty do our descendents inherit that from us? Will a godly lifestyle pass onto future generations something that will be healthy and satisfactory and form a platform for developing the likeness of God in humanity? If that is so, and since God is faithful, it seems likely, then our living has already born fruit.

I like to form theories about why God waited so long to give faithful, long-suffering Sarah her own baby. Of course this proved that the birth was miraculous and the baby a special gift of God. But did God have another reason for waiting? Was it only when Abraham and Sarah became old that they had the experience and self-discipline to inculcate in Isaac a life-style acceptable to God? We, who have become old, have experiences and learning to pass on to our grandchildren.

But even though the aged have gifts to give to their descendants, how do we give them? Since the sixties youth have not learnt from their parents but from their peers, our experience and wisdom are discarded. Our only hope is that God will bless us by calling our children and grandchildren to himself in some way they will not resist. In spite of the indifference of a younger generation and in spite of the barriers to sharing our experience of God (Don’t force them, don’t embarrass them, you’ll drive them away etc.) God may choose to bless our remembered lives by revealing himself to our grandchildren, perhaps this is likely since God says that because Abraham follows the way of Jehovah and trains his family group to do so, he can fulfill his promises to Abraham.

So from the life of Abraham we have gathered at least three principles for the work of growing old with God. First: God has called us his friends and wants to involve us in his activities. Second: intercessory prayer is perhaps the most valuable work we can do for the world. Third: what God requires of us is: to train our families to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God.

Genesis 18.verse 18
James 2 verse 23
Micah 6 verse 8

Praying for people who don't deserve to be prayed for

God had not said he would destroy Sodom and Gomorrah; he had only said he would visit them and know. Abraham interpreted that to mean that he would destroy the city, why did he think that? Because Abraham knew what continual and destructive evil was being practiced in those cities. But now God was visiting those cities to ‘know’ what they were doing. It was C.S Lewis who first made me aware that although it is important for people to know God it is much more important to be known by God. What God would know about the two cities would cause him to end the cruelty and corruption that was breading there. What God knows about those who have trusted in him for salvation is that they are his.

Abraham begins to negotiate with God. Earlier Abraham had prayed for Ishmael and God had accepted and granted that prayer. (Are today’s Christians praying for the descendents of Ishmael or are we just hoping for their defeat?) Now Abraham begins to intercede for the wicked cities. God actually encourages him by agreeing to every request Abraham makes. This encouragement signifies that God is willing to be entreated on behalf of others, we call it intercessory prayer; it is what Jesus did and is doing for us. Abraham’s prayer for Ishmael was the first recorded prayer of intercession.

I want to ask you why Abraham didn’t want the city destroyed. Our practice has been to remove anything that could spoil or destroy, we kill rats, remove rotten fruit from baskets of good food, we lock away the people who may hurt society, and kill our enemies. Why didn’t Abraham think the world would be better off without the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah who had broken the honored code of protection of guests and hospitality to travelers, intended mob rape and determined to kill Lot when he tried to prevent them? I ask you, what was Abraham thinking of? Didn’t he want to purge out the evil in order to preserve society?

Did Abraham have the notion that if there were fifty righteous people in those two cities then the presence and lives of those people would rescue the city from the evil of the rest of their society? It’s preposterous but I think it is true. It only took one prophet to convince Nineveh to change. Daniel’s one action convinced King Nebuchadnezzar that God is truly the greatest of gods, the Lord-Over-Kings. Daniel’s three friends convinced the king that their God should be honored throughout the nation. Jesus said that his followers were the salt of the earth, meaning people who stop the spread of decay

If this is true, then our goal should not be to destroy the people who threaten society but to work together with God for their transformation.

Abraham is called ‘The friend of God’ I think it is because his prayer coincided with the great purpose of God. God is not willing that any one should perish but he is willing that everyone should come to him to receive light, and transformation.

Our grandchildren echo this prayer: God bless Granddad and Grandma, they lisp as they say their prayers before they go to sleep. God hears the prayers of children, and grants them. That’s one reason why you and I are so blessed today.

I look back and wonder what I did to deserve all the happiness I have had, and then I remember that I didn’t deserve it. God granted it to me because other people prayed for me. There was an army of relatives, pastors and teachers daily praying for God’s blessing on my life. How well their prayers have been answered.

What a great work this is, to pray for other people and to unite with God in his intentions and purposes, to ask for the gift he wants to give, to call down his blessings on other people. The wonderful thing about prayer is that long after we have left this life, God will still remember those prayers. The work of changing society through prayer has been entrusted to the friends of God. Particularly it is available to older people because they have time to pray. The ability to pray is not hindered by lack of energy, inability to drive, shortage of funds. Intercessory prayer, the greatest work of all is wide open to all who wish to participate in it.

One of the pastors in our presbytery once amused me by telling me the many ways he was able to augment his legal salary whilst managing a Nine-Eleven store. Listening to him I thought that it must have taken an unusual miracle to change him from a man without much of a conscience into a dedicated pastor. I asked him how he came into an obedient relationship with God; I expected a dramatic story, but he simply answered, “A praying mother, one day I acknowledged that what I was doing was wrong, and asked God to change me.” So simple. So sublime.

Genesis chapter 18 verses 20 – 33
2 Peter chapter 3 verse 9
Matthew chapter 7 verse 21

A part of my own story

Like Abraham and Sarah I also thought it was too late to receive something I desperately hoped for. It wasn’t a baby, we’d had four of them, it was a house; a nice comfortable labor saving, pretty home. Why did I want pretty things, I am a pastor and vanity is not suitable to the life of a pastor. But I couldn’t help it, I longed for comfort, convenience and prettiness.

Our house in England, the one that was our dream house, was let out through an agency, after 12 years the agency wrote and suggested we sell it. We did and what we did with the proceeds was pay off our debts. Two of us going through college and seminary had used up all the proceeds of that little dream house – I cannot describe how disappointed I was. Through another 12 years I watched the price of houses increase, until they were far beyond the possibility of our ever being able to buy again.

I really disliked living in church-owned houses, ‘manses’ they were called and considered to be rent-free but because we lived in them without paying rent, that amount of money was deducted from the salary paid to us. That meant that when we retired we would not have a paid-up or partly paid-up mortgage but would have to go on paying rent out of our pensions. ‘Do you know, said one of my members, people are actually paying a hundred thousand dollars to buy a house! who could afford to pay that much?”

As we drove past the new houses I sadly reminded myself that we were too old now to save that much and would never own our own home again. Still I couldn’t help looking and one day I took David to see the nicest little condominium I had ever seen, it was priced at one hundred thousand dollars. David and I had most of our life served small congregations on small salaries, but in recent years David had been serving a seven hundred member church. That congregation enjoyed doing good things for their three pastors; they had paid part of David’s salary into a tax exempt savings account ready for when he retired; and he had reached the age when he could draw it out without paying tax. The amount they had deposited came to exactly the amount needed for the down payment; ten thousand dollars. My two aunts had died leaving me one thousand dollars between them – just enough to pay closing costs and pay for the built in appliances.

The monthly mortgage payments were almost too high for us; we had to spend very carefully. I never imagined that we could ever have them all paid off, but they were. Our eldest son who was single at the time, volunteered to send us extra money which we paid into the mortgage, rapidly reducing the interest. I remember our amazement when we passed the line where most of the monthly payment goes towards the premium instead of into interest. Over the years we put extra money into the mortgage and just before David died the amount owing on the mortgage became quite small. Who would have imagined that we could pay off a hundred thousand dollars in such a short time? Now that I have finally retired I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to own a house mortgage free. Especially when every time we passed a housing development I had said to myself, “It’s too late; we’ll never own our own home again.”

Laughter and lies

It was Abraham who named Isaac, but God who chose the name. The name means laughter: Does God laugh? Well… Jesus wept with Mary and Martha,. Since he is the revelation of God perhaps God laughed with Sarah and Abraham when they laughed and laughed at the joy of holding Sarah's own baby son. I think he did. God’s purpose and desire for humanity is to bless them; to make them happy, and on this occasion when his purpose was so clearly achieved I believe he laughed. The New Testament says that the Master of the faithful servants says to them, “Enter into the joy of thy Lord.” Joy will surely involve laughter. Sarah said, “God has caused me to laugh so that all who hear me will laugh with me.” There has been a lot of amazed and joyous laughter since that time. You probably remember when you joined in the laughter of the blessed.

They had laughed before, laughed in bitter resignation and hopelessness, God had not been angry with either of them. Sarah had laughed silently within herself, but God had heard the laughter. Reassuring isn’t it, when we laugh in bitter resignation or laugh at the impossibility of something God hears. Do I believe that? Yes I do because there have been so many things that God has granted although I had not verbally expressed them. My marriage was one, both David and I fought to remain single so that we could be utterly absorbed in the work of the word of God, I suppressed every desire to marry, but I was completely in love, and both David and I had been lonely in our childhood. I still look back at the impossibility that David should have accidentally come to my town and stayed when he was on his way somewhere else. Through 55 years of marriage we were completely suited to each other.

Perhaps it was because the laughter was inward that Sarah thought she could deceive herself and her maker, and say that she did not laugh. I like the way God asked Abraham why Sarah had laughed, it makes it obvious that Abraham had not shared with Sarah the news that God had appeared to Abraham and told him that Sarah would have a baby. Following the custom of the time she was not included in the conversation but God asked where she was and included her. Being included is a way of being loved, respected and recognized; it is life changing.

Sarah lied, to God; the Bible does not leave us to wonder why but tells us clearly that she was afraid. It is a terrible thing to lie to the creator because it involves lying to ourselves first, and if we lie to ourselves then we do not have the ability within ourselves to know our own truth because we are so busy hiding part of it. Sarah was a believer, she had acknowledged without anger that God had withheld the joy of having babies from her. So what would happen now that she had both laughed and lied in the presence of .God? “Yes, you did laugh.” Was his response and that was all, no anger or vengeance. But what we do know without doubt is that whether we laugh within ourselves or cry within ourselves, God hears.

God understands that we are humans, with finite minds and limited understanding of the nature of deity. He is gentle and patient, but that he doesn’t mean he accepts our unbelief, instead he help us believe. For Sarah the help began immediately and she never had occasion to doubt.

Earth rings with laughter, peals of joy, relief and amazement, ring through the universe and reach the ears of angels. People who had thought that they would always be sad and lonely laugh with each other. People who have been despised laugh when they are respected. People whose lives have been arrested, turned round and changed, laugh with amazement. God hears and rejoices; his good purposes are bursting through the gray mists of earth and drawing us into his eternal joy.

Matthew 25 verse 21
Palm 126.verse 2
Psalms 2 verse 4, 37 verse 13, 59 verse 8
Genesis 17 verse 19
Genesis 18 verses 9 to 15

Re-inventing yourself at ninety nine

Well no, Abram didn’t re-invent himself. God did, he gave Abram a new name, and turned Abram’s household into a nation.

How about us today? Can we be re-invented in our old age? God took something that Abraham had been doing for years and changed it into something greater. Like this: Abraham had been leading his household in worship ever since he built his first alter in Canaan. In Abraham’s old age God turned that household into a nation. They were not all blood relatives of Abraham but they all accepted the sign of the agreement between God and them. Like Abraham they were gentiles but by entering into the covenant agreement with God, and accepting the sign of that covenant, they became part of the covenant nation.

To apply this to us today I ask, is there something you’ve been doing for years that God could use in a slightly different way? Of course there is, we hear continually of people who when they retire, take the skills and talents they have acquired and use them in a slightly different way, often they are pleased, fulfilled and gratified with what they are able to accomplish after they’ve retired.

Changing your name is part of re-inventing yourself also. Abraham’s new name meant ‘Father of a multitude, he received it when he was the father of only one child.’ If he’d given himself that name, we’d say that he was exercising great faith. However it wasn’t Abraham but God who chose that name, God was demonstrating his own confidence in his own word.

Most of us gained a new name when we began to be called Granddad and Grandma. David and I refused those names, they made us feel old. It is only now when I’ve had the name for over a quarter of a century that I begin to see possibilities. I didn’t see them by myself either; it was my grown children who helped me to see that being a grandparent could be a calling. I still have so far to go and so much to learn about my new name.

God gave Sarai a new name too, looking it up in Strong’s Hebrew dictionary I had the good fortune to notice ‘Sar’ before I turned to ‘Sarah’; as many of you know, ‘ah’ is the suffix which indicates a female noun. Sarah is the feminine of Sar and Sar is shown by James Strong as meaning a head person, captain, general, governor, keeper, lord, master or prince. The popular explanation of Sarah’s name is princess, but her name can also mean, woman-captain, woman-general, woman-governor. I prefer these meanings because it shows God’s estimation of Sarah was not that of a princess, who is often powerless over her own life, but that of someone who could lead and make decisions.

In between instructing Abraham about these two great make-overs God reminds him that he is going to have a son by Sarah The Elderly, only God doesn’t call her that. Abraham, the newly named Father of a Multitude laughs: “It’s already too late,” he reminds God, “she’s long passed the age at which women can become pregnant.” Resignation and hopelessness produce hollow laughter. God goes on to tell him that great things will happen to Ishmael also, and Abraham apparently forgets to tell Sarah about the promised child.

Cora, a member of the first church I was pastor of, questioned one of my sermons. You say that we all have gifts and talents, she said, I have none, I’ve been a widow for years so I’m not a home maker, my only child lives far away so I’m not a parent, and the only skill I learnt when I was working was a skill that is redundant now. That was Cora’s opinion of herself. I visited her when she was in hospital and prayed for her, after I had finished Cora took my hand in both of hers and began to pray out loud, she thanked God for my helpful sermons, for my love for the congregation, for my hard work and imagination with the children. Now tell me she had no gifts! In that first church no one loved me very much, I was a woman minister in the days when people thought the Bible said women should keep silent (the other women were not very silent on that topic) I had followed a dearly loved man who had been there 25 years and I was not doing anything as well as he had done. “Cora, your prayers are your gift,” I said, “furthermore your appreciation of me has strengthened me.” Perhaps Cora’s gift was more valuable than all the other gifts in that church, to me they certainly were. Her continued appreciation and encouragement remained with me through the years. She stood at the head of the church steps and wept the day I left, and the memory of those tears reassured me in the following days when I thought I had failed at the work of being a pastor. Genuine appreciation, encouragement and thoughtful prayers; I do believe they are the greatest gifts anyone can give and although we have less energy and our memories become a little slow, these gifts are still available for us to practice and distribute to those around us.
Genesis chapter 17
STRONG’S HEBREW AND GREEK DICTIONARIES
By James Strong Published by Hodder and Stoughton Limited, London EC4

Promises, Promises.

I was listening to someone bring their appeal for help to the mayor of the city where she lived. Her group urgently needed some documents from a certain department of the city government and that department had verbally agreed to their request but had never given them the documents they needed. Her wording was a little unfortunate,” Please pay attention to us and give us your promise of help” The chairman was really ticked off. He asked the speaker if she was suggesting that the city council wasn’t paying attention, and reminded her impatiently that the city had already given a promise of help. The woman would have left feeling belittled except that another member of the board spoke up and thanked her for what she was doing and encouraged her to continue. The lesson could be that when we approach people who think themselves important we shouldn’t try to communicate our distress but instead express much gratitude and include a little flattery. .

If God were like that city council he would have given one promise to Abram and expected Abram to be content with that and remain confident through a long unspecified waiting time. God is not like that. He repeated his promise to Abram at least six times. (Six times that we know of) before the birth of Isaac. How nice you say; if only God would give me promises and repeat them. But God has; his word is full of promises from beginning to end. Every promise is available to you, because we are all God’s chosen people. Chosen meaning that God chose us before we chose him. Even before you see the fulfillment of those promises you can appropriate them and as you do so they will begin to be fulfilled. .

With the promise came instructions. First God instructed Abram to leave where he lived and go to place God would show him. When he got to that place God instructed him to walk about the land that his children would inherit. We have already applied this instruction to ourselves, firstly God calls us to begin a new life with him, and next he encourages us to explore all the different aspects of our life with God. The third instruction is to walk before God and be perfect.

That word ‘perfect’ really had me worried. In my thirties it caused me to feel guilt, failure and fear because I knew I was not and could not be perfect. I came into contact with a group of earnest Christians who really thought that they, but not me, were sinless. Later I realized that a person who imagines they are sinless does not understand what sin is.

A good translation of the Hebrew is to walk before God in integrity. Now there is word I can love! Occasionally we meet people who are genuine; their genuiness shines through all their actions. We can trust what they say, and we see that they are the same person in public as they are in private. They don’t have a division between what they do in worship and what they do at work. They have no private agenda but reveal their intentions in calm and clear conversations. Their emotions are neither suppressed nor out of control. Some of the pastors who cared for David and me when we were growing up were people like this. We can all be like this because it doesn’t mean we have no faults but that we can be open about the faults that we have rather than try to hide them.

When you were little did you ever have a Sunday School Teacher, or grandparent who in their effort to control your behavior warned you, “God is watching everything you do, he’s writing it down in his book” I rather shocked my well meaning grandma by replying, “He better be watching, that’s what he promised to do.” What a shame that people tell me their first impression of God was an angry God ready to jump on them. But then I stop and ask myself did they really believe that or are they just using that as an excuse for not liking God.

‘Walk before me’ has been translated as ‘walk in my presence.’ That is very consistent with the Hebrew. To walk in the presence of God is to be always aware of him. To scrutinize our own behavior by asking: is what I am about to do going to please God or offend him?

I feel that these three instructions roughly correspond to stages in our spiritual development. First of all we respond to God by stepping out into a new kind of life, a life shared with him. After we’ve been in this life a little while, God encourages to explore spiritual life, to see how many different practices and aspects there are and to have spiritual adventures. Then as we are becoming familiar with the spiritual life comes this instruction to always be aware of God’s presence, to subject our actions to the searchlight of his love and intelligence. I like the way the King James translates it, ‘walk before me’ because in another place God says to the huge army of pilgrims, I will go before you but also be your rear guard. That’s reassuring because if we begin to be open transparent people acting all of a piece with our hearts and our faith we might sometimes be in danger. For instance because we refuse to hate the people who do wicked things we may become very unpopular with the people around us who are reveling in hatred. (I recently heard a candidate say, The Christians want to hug terrorists, we want to kill them.) To refuse to hate and fear may make us very unpopular and that is why I like the translation that suggests that God is at my back as I walk before him. It’s the act of terrorism I hate, not the person, I don’t want to kill the terrorist I want the terrorist to stop doing terror.

The occasion when God gave the instruction to live in his presence with integrity was the occasion when God gave to Abraham his new name and instructed him how to place a sign on all the males in his household. That sign showed that they were children of God’s treaty with them. Ishmael also received this sign, making him also a child of the Holy treaty. God always keeps his end of the covenant.

God’s fourth instruction was the one that makes us shudder and we will come to that later.

When David died I could not endure the empty quiet house, I asked another widow how she managed and she replied, “Well, I live with God.” To walk in God’s presence is to have him with us in the awful empty places but also to have him with us when our baby grandchild looks into vacant space and laughs as though she sees something we cannot. To have him with us whether every one disapproves of us or whether everyone approves of us. It also means that we can scrutinize their disapproval or approval and ask whether it is deserved. If we have the answer in our hearts that what we have done is something that is honorable and fair, then we do not need to hide from the blazing light that shines in and around us as we walk with God.

Genesis 17:1
Isaiah 51:8 and 12
Version: God's Word Parsons press, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Why don't they grow up to be like us?

Did God love Abraham more than he loved Lot? Do Grandparents love one child more than another? Should they?

If you extend the family circle wide enough you will usually find a difficult family member, someone who doesn’t make good choices and can’t develop healthy habbits. Abraham didn’t have to extend his circle very far; he had a nephew, called Lot, who kept on making the wrong choices, and needing help. Did Abram become intolerant of Lot?

In the past strict parents, drove the pregnant unmarried daughter out of the houses, rather than bear the shame, (and the expense?) Today the young pregnant unmarried daughter often runs away from loving parents. Sometimes the parents want to raise their grandchildren themselves, and some daughters run and hide rather than let that happen. Then there are the young sons who drive too fast, don’t pay their tickets, drive without licenses, don’t make car payments and borrow their parents car to drive out of state, after a long time the son returns home but the car never does.

What would God do? I ask the vexed relatives of difficult people,“But I’m not God.” they reply. No, you’re not, I reply, but if you’re looking for an example of good parenting he’s the best model to pattern your actions on.

I’ve known a great many difficult family members; caring for them as a pastor was not hard. Often difficult relatives are charming, interesting and flattering towards everybody but their own family. It was easy for the church to pray for these difficult people, to write to them and want news of them. But usually it was not the church who paid the child support and court costs. Abram was the one who had to pay the costs. He had to bring his domestic army and engage in a dangerous battle on behalf of Lot who would not have been captured if he hadn’t been living in the wrong place to begin with.

Lot wasn't a bad person, we can only guess why he liked living in a place that tormented his righteous soul by lawless conduct. Was he weary of sheep and shepherding? Did he want to be a part of the progress that was happening in those cities? We don't know. What we do know is that he wasn't bad but just made bad choices. Three times the apostle Peter calls him 'righteous Lot' and contrasts him with the people he was living amongst. Jesus talked about the days when Lot was alive and compared them to the last days.

Lot's willingness to appease a crowd of angry men by offering to allow them to have sexual relationship with his two daughters was evil. Even though the code of honor at that time was to protect your guests with your very life. We rise up in angry condemnation, and so we should. We consider ourselves moral but are there evils that we subscribe to because they are accepted and widely practiced?

‘What makes him/her act that way?’ Say puzzled grandparents? They ask, because they believe that if they could only find out what went wrong they could put it right. They so much want the difficult relative to change and become a relative that they can be pleased with.

Lot didn’t change. Consider the chances he had, the experiences which should have turned him around: he was taken captive but his uncle rescued him, the town where he lived was utterly destroyed but angels came and warned him to leave town. Still Lot didn’t change, the angels told him to run to the hills for safety, but Lot said he'd like to live in a town, he chose a little town and something there made him so afraid that he took his two daughters and went to live in a cave. Some times grandparents have to accept that the difficult family members are not going to change a whole lot. Once that fact is accepted it’s easy to love the difficult person just as they are without trying to fix them or force them to change. I used to advise grandparents to just accept that some people can’t please their relatives and to do what God does, love them as much as if they did.

How did God love Lot? Let me tell you about God’s love for Lot. When God was about to destroy the town where Lot lived, God thought about Abram and sent angels to bring Lot out of the town before the destruction began. Lot’s daughters got him drunk, and when he was drunk, they went into his bed and had children by him. This disgusts us so much that our tendency is to think that this is the end! We imagine that from this day forward neither God nor Abram will have anything to do with Lot or his daughters and certainly not with Moab or Ammon, the children born of incest. Yet Moses tells us that when he led the escapees from Egypt towards the land that God had promised to give to them, that God warned him not to trouble the Moabites nor to harrass the Ammonites because the land where these two tribes were living was land that God had given to them, "I have given that land as a possesion to the descendants of Lot" was the message Moses heard from God. Before Israel entered into their land of promise, Lot's descendants were already living in their given land. They had done battle with some tall and strong inhabitants before they took that land.

Seemingly ungrateful, foolish, relatives are loved by God. God gives inheritance to their children as well as to the children of Abram. Because of your love and care and prayers the difficult relatives are remembered in times of danger and his/her children provided for and protected by God.

What remains now is to heal the sadness of grandparents who love the grandchildren and nieces and nephews and cousins and second cousins who didn’t grow up into the kind of adults that they hoped for. To comfort them by reminding them that God remembers and will remember their labor of love. To encourage them to follow God’s example and remind them that God helps those who try to imitate the way he loves

2 Peter 2: 7,8
Hebrews 6:10
Deuteronomy 2:9 & 19
Ephesians 5.1

Priestly Grandparents

Abram returned with the men he had rescued from invading armies and with the property that had been retrieved from the raiders. He came back to the place where the men and materials had been stolen. Rulers and citizens greeted their rescued relatives, and hoped for the return of their property.

Into this scene comes a priest, a priest bringing bread and wine.

In the 12 months I spent being a chaplain in Methodist Medical Center St. Joseph. I was always a priest coming into the scene. There were many scenes, once in a moment of shock a mother let her baby slide out of her arms I was there to pick up the baby, (she wasn’t hurt) and hold it . I was there to stand beside that mother while she heard the news that one of her children was terribly injured. I stayed there, doing nothing, except holding the baby and being there. A year after, I met that mother and she told me that it had been truly helpful to have a person who was obviously a friend materialize at that time.

I was a priest who came into the hospital room when the lights were still on at 2 a.m. who listened to fears without saying that they were groundless. I was a priest when an angry visitor attacked the security guard and the guard sent for a Chaplain because he was too sorry for the distraught visitor to escort him out of the building. I was a priest who came out of the corridor into the room where a mother held her new-born baby for the only two hours it lived.,

I was a priest not only because the New Testament says we are all priests but because the Church had piloted the Chaplaincy program and because that hospital authorized me to represent the Church Catholic to everyone in the building.

As a pastor people came to me; as a chaplain I went to them. And the coming into their presence was, to me, always a sacred re-enactment of the Son of God coming into the world to seek and to save.

A priest doesn’t just come personally into a scene; a priest is a representative of the Most High God, and of the Church. When the priest comes in so does the power of the Church that trained and approved and authorized that action. Within that authority are contained the prayers of the church that authorised the mission. When a priest is present both the power of Christ and of His Church is present with his representative.

At Abram’s hour of triumph a priest was present. Unlike my hospital patients and staff, Abram was not in need of comfort and friendship. He was a winner returning in victory, he was neither sad nor suffering. (Unless you can call having a nephew who didn’t know how to choose the right place to live, suffering) But it was appropriate that the priest should appear at Abram’s time of triumph because he was there to mediate God’s blessing to Abram and Abram’s praise to God. Abram was already blessed and had the promise that he would be even more blessed, yet he accepts the priest’s blessing. He recognized that to be involved with this representative of God was to be blessed. It's still the same; you can refuse the blessing, but you can’t avoid it, it comes with the priest.

And whose priest is he? This land was already filling up with immigrant tribes, each praying to their own tribal god; is he a priest of the sun, or the moon, or the stars? No he is the priest of the God who possesses Heaven and Earth. Interestingly enough the people with many gods knew the priest Melchizedek’s God as ‘The Most High God’

So Abram wasn’t alone in his worship of the One God. There were others. The self-revelation of God had only just begun, they knew so little, but they knew that the One God was the great God. How did they learn it? By the telling of stories, the stories Seth told to Enos, and Enos told to Cainan, and Cainan told to Mahalalele, and Mahalaleel told to Jared, and Jarad told to Enoch, and Enoch told to Methuselah, and Methuselah told to Lamech, and Lamech told to Noah. And then the process began all over again because Noah told Shem, Ham, and Japheth. May I ask who you are telling the story to? It seems a priestly task for grandparents, especially because grandparents can add their own part of the sacred story to the great story.

The priest has 3 major tasks: to offer the sacrifice, to be a mediator who introduces God, to man and man to God, and to keep the records of the sacred story. God has made those who trust him into a nation of priests, and everyone who trusts Jesus has the privilege of carrying out those same priestly duties.

In the days when the Church called everyone a priest according to the New Testament but did not help women to carry out all of the priestly tasks, I understood that I had inherited the New Testament priesthood of all believers; but I was compelled to recognize that no one was very interested in helping me immerse my life in that calling. So I initiated an agreement with God, that I would be his minister and the world would be my parish. It sounds spiritual and enlightened, but it was lonely and I lacked sufficient training, not that I let that stop me, I lacked the support of other ministers. There was a lot of evidence that God accepted my ministry, but if the Church had authorized it sooner it would have been a much stronger ministry.

Recently, desperate about the duties we are not emphasizing in the church, I have had to begin another lonely crusade. Whenever I meet someone who appears by dress or speech to be a Muslim, I feel compelled by my understanding of the New Testament to tell that person that I am a Christian and I love Muslims. Again, because I am alone in this aspect of the priesthood it feels clumsy, lacks support and would be so much more effective if the Church had authorized me to say it.

I still visualize that scene: the noisy crowd, weeping their thanks and shouting their joy at seeing their sons and brothers return home, the rulers meeting Abram, and into it all walking the priest of the Most High God. Abram receiving the bread and wine and then Abram, the members of his army, the priest, and perhaps a few others, praising God for the victory he had granted. I would like to be an authorized priest again