The Election of God’s People: Abraham
1992 (Year C) 1 November / All Saints
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
‘In John and Nellie Bum’s council house, their 14-year-old daughter was bustling about, making tea and sandwiches for the visitors who poured into their home at St Canice’s Park in the village of Eglinton. It was hard to believe that she had just lost her father, and knew that her mother was fighting for her life after loyalists sprayed the Rising Sun pub in Greysteel with gunfire on Saturday night. Gillian Bums is the youngest of the couple’s three children. Her father, who worked part-time in the old Ulster Defence Regiment, was a Protestant, killed by gunmen who claim to share the same faith.
She said, ‘They went to the Rising Sun every Saturday night. They loved the country and western music. These people shot one of their own. They would have shot anybody. You would be ashamed to be Protestant, you really would.’’
Out of the mouths of Babes!
There are times, when I read things like that in the newspaper I’m overwhelmed. I wish I could’ve said it. I wish I had the wisdom, the vision and the courage to say the things that that young person knows. I wish I could express them with such awareness and clarity. Maybe it takes the simplicity of youth but deep down we know we’ll never be able to think them let alone articulate them.
And it’s not just confined to reading things in the newspapers. There have been other times, other occasions working here, when someone has said something which just leaves me breathless. Out of their experiences they have touched something of God and when they’ve said it of course it all becomes clear but they seem to have so much insight, so much faith. It has left me not only humbled but somehow unsettled because I know – unless I’m given grace to learn from them I’ll never get that far.
And if it happens in what we read in the newspapers and encounter in daily life it happens much often when we read the Bible. Today’s first reading just leaves me gazing at my own inadequacy. Abraham makes that tortuous journey, knowing that at the end of it God will require him to sacrifice his only son, the one he loves. The son even has to carry the wood on which he’ll be burnt. Then there’s the question ‘Here is the wood for the fire; but where is the young beast for the sacrifice?’ There’s the binding and the stretching out of the hand and he ‘took the knife to kill his son’. It’s all too much, much too much. No father should ever be asked to do that not by anybody let alone a God who we know to love and cherish us. I know I could never do it. And if that’s what God wants of me then he just better look somewhere else.
It is through such trials and testings, so we are told that Abraham is finally blessed. Because he obeyed the call of God and did not withhold his only son his descendants would multiply ‘until they are as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the sea-shore ... All nations on earth shall pray to be blessed as your descendants are blessed, and this because you have obeyed me.’ The faith and clarity of vision expressed by Gillian Bums aged 14, lived by people here at St Peter’s and recounted in the Abraham story will never be mine. These fine and glorious examples leave me sometimes not only humbled but without hope.
Yet there is hope for those whose faith cannot match these giants.
Ultimately it’s not because of our faith, nor even for the things we have or haven’t done that our salvation depends. ‘It is not for your sake ... that I am about to act’ says God, ‘but for the sake of my holy name’. God’s name, God’s good name, God’s reputation is important to God. It’s as if a family were in a restaurant. The children are tired and don’t act well. The parents are nervous and react. They are tired and don’t do well either. Not much is at stake for the children, because they are just children. But the parents know their reputation is on the line in this encounter. They feel they must act even if they don’t want to. Lashing out at a child in temper might sometimes seem necessary and it might even feel good, but it seldom wins the respect of those who stand and watch. So God found that in order to regain honour, to reassert the holiness of his name, one more thing was necessary. A show of positive power.
God saves for his own sake and so what God says will happen is all positive. I will take you. I will gather you. I will bring you. I will sprinkle clean water. I will give a new heart.
I will put a new spirit within you. I will take out the heart of stone. I will deliver you. I will make you increase. I, I, I, I, I, I – for you, for you, for you. It’s not because I care, because I hurt, because I yearn. All that is finished. In the end there is no appeal to love or fidelity. Now it’s only God and for God’s good name. And to that name, as is most justly due, be ascribed mercy, dominion, majesty and power, henceforth and forever. AMEN