For those of you who were not here with us last week, we are entering into a series of sermons this winter and spring about core Christian beliefs, exploring what Christians here at Knox believe about God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Last week we looked at the core convictions about God expressed in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis; I summed them up to say that God creates the world out of love, God loves creation so much that God grants human beings their freedom, and God puts a rainbow in the clouds as a sign that even in the storms of life, God’s love will never fail. Creation is about God’s enduring love.
Today, we move to Genesis 12-50. These are stories of our biblical ancestors. These folks may be in the Bible, but they are regular human beings through whom God’s work comes to life. The points I will make is that God’s love is for everyone. First: we see this with individual people, like you and me: that though we are never perfect, and often deeply flawed…God’s work happens through people like us, and that is true of your life too. And second, that God’s love is not confined to any one race, ethnicity, nation, or even religion, but is for all people.
Let’s start with a look at the individuals and families through whom God is at work in Genesis. This is a family history. So to make it real, you might imagine yourself with these people I’m about to describe around the table at Thanksgiving. I want to take a few minutes to describe how human these heroes of the Bible are: here’s a quick highlight reel—don’t worry if you don’t know all of these names and their full stories; you’ll get the point.
The story starts with Abraham and Sarah; immediately after we meet them, Abraham takes Sarah to Egypt and there he lies about being married to her, because though this puts her in danger, it may save him from harm. Quite a gentleman. Sarah is far from perfect herself; when they has trouble conceiving, she pressures Abraham into sleeping with her maid Hagar in order to secure an heir for herself. It’s no surprise that this plan doesn’t go well and eventually their children, Isaac and Ishmael, divide the family for good.
In the next generation, their son Isaac and his wife Rebekah have two sons, Easu and Jacob. In a move of classic and common family dysfunction, Isaac and Rebekah play favorites with their sons, each choosing one; the result is that Jacob cheats Esau out of his inheritance, and Esau then drives Jacob from home threatening to kill him if he returns.
Esau and Jacob will eventually reconcile, but before that while Jacob is out running for his life, he comes to know a man named Laban; Laban will eventually become Jacob’s father in law…twice…because he agrees to let Jacob marry his daughter Rachel…but only after he tricks Jacob into marrying his daughter Leah first!
Joseph is the youngest child of Jacob’s marriage to Rachel. You may have a good impression of Joseph through your memory of the story about his many colored coat. But Joseph’s story is messy too. The coat is another classic tale favoritism, and causes Joseph’s brothers to fake his death and sell him into slavery in Egypt. There, Joseph takes this long family history of lying, exploitation, rivalry, and greed, and makes his family’s way of life into government policy: Joseph stores up grain for the Pharaoh, keeping it a secret from everyone else that a famine is coming; and then when a famine comes, he sells it back to the Hebrew people until they have nothing left to pay for it but their freedom—and they all become the Pharaoh’s slaves.
These are the progenitors of our faith.
And you thought there was some unresolved tension at your Thanksgiving table!
Now that I’ve thrown a lot of mud at this poor biblical family, let’s remind ourselves of some highlights:
Abraham and Sarah are the very first people to receive God’s promise to make of them a great nation: to take them from being a nameless people and help them to know that they belong to God; and Abraham and Sarah believe in this mission and in each other so much that they take everything they have and they move their family across the desert in pursuit of a dream—they are the very archetype of faith.
Their children and grandchildren makes mistakes and compromises along the way because they took seriously their role as the stewards of this dream; they will stop at nothing to remember the dream and see it realized. Even several generations later, Joseph knows from a young age that God is with him, and even when life orphans him, and then enslaves and imprisons him, he has the faith to keep believing that God has a purpose for his life; and when fate finally brings his deceitful and murderous brothers before him again, he has the grace to forgive them and to restore the family to unity.
I don’t believe in talking about “Good People” and “Bad People,” and neither do I believe that the Bible wishes to do that. And in hearing these stories from Genesis, I hope we start to see one of the things that is so important about these biblical characters and their stories: they look a lot like us—you and me. Complicated people who are a mixed bag of our best and worst decisions and a lot of in between; which is a valuable insight about the Bible…because then we can start to see ourselves as children of God, broken, imperfect, and blessed as we are. Human beings are complicated. And God can work through every one of us. No matter how bad your luck has been or how stupid your mistakes, God is still at work in your life. These stories invite us to believe that.
And then there’s the other thing these stories tell us about God: that regardless of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, national origin, or anything else that might separate human beings from one another: God’s blessing and life with God is for ALL of us. Where did I come up with that? This is stated clearly in Genesis 12, in the very first verses we read this morning that introduce us to Abraham and his family as the family of God: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you…” it begins. And it ends, “…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” All the families of the earth shall be blessed. God does not exalt one family or race or people at the expense of others, but so that they all might be blessed because all of humankind are the children of God.
You might remember my mentioning that Abraham, along with Sarah and Hagar have two children, one is Isaac—the other is named Ishmael. Ishmael becomes the patriarch to whom the Muslim tradition traces its origins, two billion faithful followers of God in the world today who trace their lineage to the same foundations as the Christians and the Jews. God’s love is for all of us, together, something we frequently forget, with tragic results.
So God’s love is for Muslims, Christians and Jews, and people of every faith. God’s love is for people of every different nation, race, and color. God’s love is for people of differing gender identities and sexual orientations. God’s love is for immigrants who live in fear because of their nation of origin, and for folks struggling with their fear of immigration. God’s love is for students at Harvard who are being watched because they are Muslim; and God is with Jews who fear antisemitism. God’s love is for Christians too, in churches of every type, liberal or conservative, or in between, where people struggle to worship together amidst their differences.
It seems the only thing we don’t ever get to say is that God’s love is just for people like us!
I think you see where I’m going: the misconceptions are all around us, but our religious tradition is clear: God’s love welcomes all, and no class of people is better than any other. This is a core value of our faith.
So those are the two points for today: that God’s love is for all people—all kinds of people, and that God’s love is for you; no matter your family or personal history, or your greatest and most shameful mistakes, God’s love is still at work in your life.
I wonder how many of you are thinking of the history in your own family or your life, the moments of brokenness, dishonesty, regret, grudge holding, worse…that have caused you to wonder if God’s love is still at work in your life? I wonder if you are thinking about brokenness of our world, the divisions between races and classes, nations and culture wars that threated to divide us every day. Is it possible that God can still be at work?
These stories in Genesis answer with a resounding “yes.” What can separate us from the love of God? Will family dysfunction, deceit, trickery, betrayal, violence, division, or separation? By no means! Will national origin or race, the people we call partner, husband, or wife, the house we gather in as we pray to the God who created us—by no means! If these cadences sound familiar, that’s becuase we’re accompanied also today by Paul’s words from Romans 8: If God is for us, who is against us? Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I do love the story of Joseph in particular. His arrogance about that coat his father never should have given him divide him from his brothers, land him in slavery and then eventually in prison. He had every reason to question God’s existence, but he kept getting up each day, exiled in the land of Egypt, believing God must be up to something good. We meet people like this sometimes—they aren’t just in the Bible. Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth century English mystic lived in a time of social unrest and Black Plague that decimated her community, almost took her own life, and she became famous for her prayer which she shared frequently with all who would hear it: “All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Do you know someone, have you met or read about them, whose sense of hope and God’s presence seems to persist even in the face of great hardship? Look for them, for they are there; be thankful for them and follow their lead. Life is hard, but God is with us.
God is with the human, the broken and the sinful, from every background race and clan. Life gives us plenty of reasons to doubt. But God’s love endures in all circumstances, and among every people. This is what we believe. Amen.