Pastor Lisa Horst Clark

October 6, 2019

Genesis 17:1-10, 15-17

The Sign of the Covenant

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.’ Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, ‘As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.’

God said to Abraham, ‘As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised.

God said to Abraham, ‘As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.’ Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, ‘Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?’

Message

Barbara Brown Taylor tries to name all the ways she has known God and found spiritual practices, especially outside of the church, and she names that “most of my visions of the divine happened while I was busy doing something else.  They happened to me the same way a thunder storm happens to me or a bad cold or the sudden awareness that I am desperately in love.  I play no apparent part in their genesis; the only part to decide is how I will respond.  We are going to have so many calls through this month it will be glorious, since there is plenty I can do, namely to make them go away.  I can (1) figure I have had too much caffeine again, (2) I can remind myself that visions aren’t true the same way that taxes are true or the evening news, (3) I can return my attention to everything I need to get done that day.  These are only a few of the things I can do to talk myself out of living in the house of God.  Or I can set a little altar in the world or in my heart; I can flag one more gate to heaven, one more patch of ordinary earth where the divine traffic is heavy, when I notice it and even when I do not.”

We are going to be talking about call this month and the ways we hear the call of God to participate in the work of the world of creating the Kingdom of Heaven and today we are starting not with the “what” we are supposed to do but the “who.”  Not what we are called to put our efforts behind but who is the one who is calling: a call to relationship, a call to faith.  Some folks in the scripture, prophets and saintly folks, have one big vision of God: they hear a voice, they make their objections on the spot until we finally end with a “yes” and they set about the big epic work of God in certainty and faith.

Abraham’s story is a little different.  Abraham, in this story it says that scripture, it took four times of God coming, four sets of promises, proclamations of the covenant God was making with Abraham and Sarah before Isaa