The Origin of The Good News

June 29th, 2014
4th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 8, Year A
The Rev. David Kendrick

I don’t know if this will come as a confession, or just a surprise, but here goes.  If you ask me my favorite book of the Bible, I suppose I should probably list one of the Gospels as number one.  And that would be a tossup between John and Mark.  John’s is the most mystical and spiritually profound of the four.  Mark’s is the most direct and the most human portrait of Jesus.  But after the Gospels, by far my favorite book of the Bible is Genesis.  And by the time we finish hearing from Genesis this summer, I hope I can help you understand why.

Genesis is the “origin”--not so much the beginning, but the origin of the Good News, or Gospel.  It is the soil from which God's eternal purpose for the human race first began to sprout.  When exactly that was, we don’t know for sure.  The first ten or so chapters of Genesis are pre-historic, before human beings began to record their doings and happenings.  There is no written record of how the world was created, no written record of the first humans, no written record of their first moral choices.  And truth be told, the early chapters of Genesis about the creation, the fall and the flood, are similar to other myths in the ancient Middle East.  But while those myths portrayed many gods fighting each other and human beings as their collateral damage, to the people of Israel was revealed the truth that creation is not an afterthought of the gods, but the loving expression of one God who saw that everything created was, and is good.

And in this Origin of the Good News is also the truth of what happened, prehistorically, when the first human beings realized that they had been created, and had a choice, to trust their creator and each other as creatures of God, or not to trust.  The rotten fruits of that mistrust down to this day testify to the choice that was made, and dramatized in the Garden of Eden.  First and foremost, sin is alienation from God and each other, estrangement between God and each other, and at its worst, hatred of God and each other.

So what was God to do?  Start with one man and one woman.  As their story has come down to us, their first names were Abram and Sarai, later changed by God to Abraham and Sarah.  And the story of our redemption begins with this one man and one woman, when Abram heard God say to him: “Leave your land, your family, and your father’s household for the land that I will show you.  I will make of you a great nation and will bless you.  I will make your name respected, and you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, those who curse you I will curse; and all the families of the earth will be blessed because of you” (Gen. 12:1-3).  God’s hope is that this one family will become a clan, then a tribe, then a nation, by which all families and nations might be reconciled to God and to each other. 

But for all this to happen, this one family must learn to be a model of trust in God and trust in each other.  This one family must learn how to listen for the thin, quiet sound of God in the world around them and in their hearts.  This one family must learn how to love each other and not treat the other as thing to be manipulated or overpowered.  Over the next several Sundays we will follow this family through the generations: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and his brothers.  More often than not, they will fail in their God-given task more than they succeed. But succeed they must.  For how else could this Church succeed in its mission if this family fails in its mission?

“What is the mission of the Church?  The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.”  That’s our marching order from the Book of Common Prayer’s Outline of the Faith, commonly called the Catechism.  Where does that mission to restore unity between all people originate from?  “All the families of the earth will be blessed because of you.”  Our mission originates from, finds its genesis in, the call from God to this one man Abram that came perhaps 4,000 years ago. 

It has taken nearly 4,000 years for humans to grow in their understanding of this mission, which must be kept in mind when we come to today’s reading from Genesis.  Before it was called Israel, in the time in which Genesis was taking place, it was called Canaan.  As archeologists have excavated Canaanite towns, they have found at their city gates the skeletons of many infants, all in one place, evidence of child sacrifice.  And while the Old Testament Law explicitly bars child sacrifice, we also read of how some Israelite kings in desperate times took desperate measures with their sons.  There was a time when human beings, perhaps even those close to the Hebrews Abraham and Sarah, believed that it was the will of God, or the gods, that nothing, not even those things most precious to us, should be withheld from them.

The Book of Genesis was most likely written after the Israelites had ceased to be nomads, and had established themselves as a kingdom, with enough time and resources to write down the stories they had had inherited from their nomadic ancestors.  All of which is to say that these words are the record of a conversation between God and this one family, this one clan, this one tribe, this one nation.  God revealed as much as people could comprehend within the limitations of their culture and understanding.  Then those people read back to God what they had heard, and so the conversation continued.  At one time, otherwise sane human beings thought they heard God, or the gods, demanding their children.  And yet, years before it was written down, the Israelites handed down a story of how they came to realize, through this father and son, that God wants our obedience, not our sacrifice.

Yet, at the same time, God needs a people whose chief loyalty in this world is to God, above blood, above coalitions of self-interest, above even tribe and nation.  Most English translations don't translate the Hebrew word at the beginning of this reading that means, more or less, "please."  God does not command Abraham to do anything.  God asks Abraham to trust that God will provide whatever is needed for Abraham and Sarah to become a blessing to all.  And Abraham understands that, at least in part: "God will provide himself with a sheep for a sacrifice, my son," Abraham answers Isaac.  Abraham seems to have understood that God needs nothing for himself from us, and that whatever we have in this world is not earned in a transaction with God, but comes by grace alone.  But God does need to know whether this human can be trusted with the mission to bring all people to the knowledge of the one God, and to find their unity with that one God.

"I will bless you richly and I will give you countless descendants, as many as the stars in the sky and as the grains of sand on the seashore," God says to Abraham in the verses after our reading: "All the nations of the earth will be blessed because of your descendants, because you obeyed me.”  And so here we are, Abraham's descendants by faith, entrusted with Abraham's mission, to restore all people to unity with God and each other, through Christ.  I confess that in my first years as a priest, I was enamored of helping parishes discern their mission statements.  But we don't need to figure out our mission.  Our common mission is already In our Book of Common Prayer, and it is as old as the mission to which God called this one man and one woman some four millennia ago.  How we execute this mission in our small neck of the woods will take some discerning.  But as God blessed Abraham and Sarah in their old age with a son, and have them children beyond their imagining, so God will bless us in our old age.

The obstacles remain, for us and for Abraham's descendants.  Over the next several weeks, we will hear those obstacles, very similar to those ones we face: internal doubts; mistrust of others, even those closest to us.  Much of what we will hear of this family will sound just like our dysfunctional families.  Will they become a united family that becomes a united nation in which all the families and nations of the earth are reconciled and find eternal blessing?  Stay tuned.