Genesis 18: 1-15 & Romans 5L 1-5
Corrie Berg
June 18, 2023
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It is a joy to preach this morning. I have served here first as the Director of Children’s Ministry and then in Educational Ministries for the past 12 years. In two weeks, after one last round of VBS, I am wrapping up my time in this position and next month moving down to the Washington D.C. area to live again with my husband, Shane, who has been working there this past year and a half.
This is a big season for each member of our family. So many endings (our youngest graduated from high school, middle son graduated from college) and beginnings (youngest going to college, oldest going to grad school, and grad school for me too). Next fall, I’ll begin a Master in Christian Practice at DDS — a hybrid degree, some classes on-campus and some remote.
But this morning, I am grateful to be right here, right now, with you all, my church family.
I love a good story, and Bible stories, family stories, great stories from literature, have been foundational to my formation. When I was a child growing up in Jamestown ND, Every summer our family would drive from North Dakota to Colorado Springs, Colorado to visit family and our family cabin. Sometimes we’d do the 800 mile drive in one big day, sometimes two shorter days. But whatever the configuration, the trip, to me, seemed endless. Our Volvo station wagon did not have air-conditioning. It did have sticky blue vinyl seats and a family dog panting dog breath over your shoulder mile after mile.
To help pass the time, at some point on each trip, our dad would tell stories, stories of his under-supervised, childhood in Colorado, high school humiliations, college trials, European vacations on a $1/day (it was the early 1960’s), terrible first jobs, epic mountain adventures and many (maybe even more?) mountain misadventures. He seemed to have story after story ready to roll. These stories, of course, made the hours traveling down those straight midwestern two-lane highways pass a little quicker. But they also taught my brother Mark and me about failure, our family, the places we’d been, and the places we were yet to go.
I remember these stories. As I quietly listened from the backseat of the station wagon, summer after summer, my dad’s stories became my stories and gave me a sense of history, of belonging, of calling, and of faith.
Through my work in educational ministry, I now have had the joy of telling the stories of our faith to the children of this church and community. During each season of small groups, I’ve led an after-school group of about a dozen older elementary and middle school kids. This past Lent, like many of you, we read parables – those are the stories Jesus told. It was all going swimmingly – Parable of Lost Coin. Lovely. Parable of the Lost Sheep. Moving. Parable of the Seeds and Soils. So much to say! – until we hit the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. That’s the parable where an owner of a vineyard throughout the course of a day hires a bunch of workers. At the end of that day, regardless of when they were hired (at 6 AM, noon, 3PM or even 5PM) or what they did, all the workers received the same pay.
When we got to the end of the story, the circle erupted in outrage. They cried “That’s not fair,” and “It’s like when I’m the only one who works on the group project but everyone gets the same grade!” One fellow savvily noted that if this “everybody getting paid the same” was the deal, he was joining the 5PM-ers. Elizabeth Steel and I tried to explain, “This parable is not an HR manual but an illustration of God’s extravagant grace.” But those kids were not buying what we were selling.
They had gone from passively receiving a story (like young me in the backseat of the family station wagon or the little ones who sit so attentively for the Time with Children) to actively wrestling with it, talking to the characters, second-guessing the outcome, trying to figure out what the story teaches — and THIS IS AWESOME. We want our kiddos to take these stories so seriously that they grapple with them – just like the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel and demanding a blessing in Genesis. We want them to explore and question and discuss. The disciples questioned Jesus all the time!
Our first scripture lesson for today is another great story from the book of Genesis, Genesis 18. Earlier in chapter 12, God formed a relationship with Abram, soon to become Abraham. God chose he and Sarah to be the great patriarch and matriarch of the family of God and promised countless more descendants than there are stars in the sky. As I described to the young ones, decades passed, Sarah and Abraham aged, and no babies came. I did not include that at a couple points, Abraham and Sarah became impatient, tried to jump start the promise, and get things going. Abraham asked God to accept his trusted servant Eliezar as his stand-in heir. No go. Sarah encouraged Abraham to father a child through her servant, Hagar, to complicated results.
But as we were reminded today, at 90 Sarah finally had a child, they named him Isaac.
The promise was fulfilled, despite Sarah’s profound discouragement, bitterness, and loss of hope. Nothing is impossible with God.
Sarah is an imperfect hero, and I empathize with her. It’s hard to have endurance amidst affliction and positivity in the face of failure. It’s difficult to believe in an ancient, outdated promise. Sarah’s skepticism seems reasonable and hard-earned and squares with our own experience of this broken world. This side of life, not all prayers are answered.
In the years that I’ve served this church, I have organized a lot of programming, told dozens of stories, led events and trips, hosted groups and gatherings. You all have been so gracious to me. Several have commented on my cheerfulness, can-do attitude, and pluck. But here’s the deal. Before each of these events, programs, trips, gatherings, whatever…. I struggle with Bad Attitude (capital B, capital A). Bad Attitude.
It happens one month before VBS when craft supplies are backordered, registration numbers are low, and a few key spots still need filling. It happens the week before Craft Fairs when the crush of Advent overwhelms or at 2:00pm on Friday with the endearing mayhem (mostly) of Club 3-4-5 descending in a few hours. It happens when I’m trying to figure out how to tell a story from the Bible, a book not at all written for children, to children.
I become a version of Sarah. “This program is not going to work. It was a dumb plan in the first place. Who came up with this idea? I am TOO OLD for this.”
In those moments, frustration, discouragement, and doubt overwhelm.
Here’s where stories of our faith can become more than stories we’ve received and even more than stories we wrestle with. They become models for getting perspective, changing behavior, and, yes, finding paths forward.
If Sarah, despite profound disappointment and bitterness, emerged from her tent to welcome strangers, prepare the feast, and show hospitality to weary travelers, then I can send out a few more invitations, get the goldfish ready and plan some games. Who knows? The Lord just might show up at Club 3-4-5 tonight.
As the people of God, we are blessed with a whole big book, page after page of stories that, all together, tell the story of salvation. Stories of folks, not that different from you and me, called by God to spread the message of the saving love of God in their community and context. Stories of folks who hear and believe and wrestle with the promises of God.
We are called to honestly tell these stories to our children, to tell these stories to ourselves, to really hear, interact, grapple with, and learn from them. We learn, of course, through the witness and teachings of Jesus, but we also learn from the deeply human stories of our imperfect forebearers – Rebecca, Jacob, Abigail, David, Mary, Peter, and Sarah. It’s a messy family of faith.
Our Christian story is particularly remarkable, friends, in that we already know the ending. Of course, we know that Sarah gives birth to Isaac and begins a People called by God. We know that these People of God, tried and failed, tried and failed, to follow God’s plan. We know that God sent his only son Jesus, born of brave Mary, to spread love, forgiveness, and the Good News to all people. We know that Jesus was killed and raised from the dead on the third day by God, defeating sin and death forever. We’ve told these stories, read these stories, heard these stories. We know how they end.
But here’s what else we know. We also know the ending of this great, ongoing, story of salvation. We are told the ending right from the start. The Gospel of John begins with the biggest spoiler of all time.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
Today’s passage from Romans by Paul, states as a theological principle what our story illustrates.
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
Paul’s words are often read as encouragement or advice, a Bible verse you post in your kitchen or at your desk to keep you going.
But they are not merely aspirational or inspirational.
They are declarative of what has already been done.
Because of Jesus, we have peace with God.
Our faith in Christ will not disappoint.
Hope will not put us to shame.
The Ending is already written.
It reminds me of those interviews that happen when a truly excellent TV series wraps up. The cast, the writers, the producer come together to talk and reflect on the characters they played, the story arc. The best writers often say, “We knew how the whole thing would end right from the beginning, but we didn’t know exactly how we were going to get there. Over the past 5 seasons, support characters grew into main characters, initial plot lines petered out, and new surprising ones emerged.
But we always knew what the last shot, the last line would be.”
In today’s story, we find Sarah’s at a point in her story when faith is faltering. She is overwhelmed with suffering, endurance has run out, hope has, so far, brought disappointment and shame. Despite all this, the promise was fulfilled. God’s plan kept going. God’s plan keeps going.
True hope is not the naive belief or expectation that life will be free of trials, loss, and disappointment. True hope is the sure knowledge that we know the end of the story and that it will be a triumphant, joyful end. This is long-term, long haul, end times hope. As the People of God, we know, even when we don’t feel it or can’t see it, that Goodness is Stronger than Evil, Light overcomes Darkness, and Hope does not Disappoint.
We boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
I heard a quote a few years back that has stuck with me.
It pops up in TV shows and movies, and is attributed, eclectically, to John Lennon, Oscar Wilde, and, most reliably, to Brazilian author Domingos Sabino .
Given its wobbly provenance, please forgive additional edits (with gratitude to the Apostle Paul).
Through the faith of Christ, everything will be alright in the end.
If it’s not alright,
It’s not the end.
Amen.