2 Lent B March 1, 2015
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie G. Hutson
Genesis 17: 1-7, 15-16 + Romans 4: 13-25 + Mark 8: 31-38
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God who creates us, Jesus who saves us and the Holy Spirit who empowers and enlivens us. Amen.
On Friday the Internet lit up with the news: Leonard Nimoy had died. Mr. Spock from Star Trek was gone. I mentioned to Katy that I had watched Star Trek and loved Mr. Spock and she was aghast to realize that I watched the original Star Trek. Yes, I am that old. At the very same time she was grappling with that realization, I was sitting in front of my computer screen trying to write this very sermon. And I realized that “live long and prosper”, the Vulcan greeting that characterized Spock, wasn’t all that different from the covenant that God was making with Abraham and Sarah in our reading from Genesis this morning.
You might remember that our Old Testament reading last Sunday was also from Genesis and also involved a covenant, only then the covenant between God and humanity, through Noah. And if you remember the story of the flood, you also remember that there was a visible sign of the covenant, which was??? (A rainbow)
In today’s reading from Genesis, there is again a covenant between God and humanity, which comes into being through Abraham and Sarah. But before we look at what that sign is, let’s re-cap the first reading just a bit.
Abram had lived long, and so had his wife Sarai, when our reading from Genesis begins today. He was 99 and she was up in years as well. So the Lord appears to Abram and says “I am El Shaddai” which is translated in our reading today as God Almighty, and I’m going to make you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. You, Abram! And this will happen through your wife Sarai, who up until now has been utterly unable to bear a child for you. And what’s even more remarkable is that this covenant will be an everlasting covenant, through you and your offspring and after you throughout the generations. Throughout the generations.
Now, I want to go back to that exchange Katy and I had in the office on Friday….when I said I’d been a Star Trek fan she asked if I meant “The Next Generation” which of course I did not. But “The Next Generation” was what came after the original series.
Now I realize that tying Star Trek to the covenant story might seem like a weak argument or even a slippery slope – but bear with me. Because the understanding of wisdom and covenant lasting through generations is an old understanding. It’s not a twentieth century construct. It would have been incredibly important to Abram and Sarai that God’s covenant was not just for them but was also for future generations.
The Church would do well to learn from Abram and Sarai in this way. The mission and ministry that we are about today is the genesis, if you will, of what will be here for generations to come. What we do now we do first and foremost to give God glory. And we do it so that our children and their children and the children of all generations to come after them will have a place to worship, to learn about God and the stories of the life of Christ. So that there will be a place in the Broadview neighborhood of Northwest Seattle where Jesus is worshipped and where his teachings are passed on. That’s not so hard to imagine, even in a congregation just 63 years old. You have watched generations grow in knowledge and love of Christ in this place. You have watched children become adults and you have welcomed their children in this place. You have raised up pastors and a deaconess from among the children here.
So what we do now, our ministry now, focuses not just on us, but on the generations still to come – on the children who will gather here in ten years or twenty years or fifty years.
In our second reading today we have Paul’s take on the story of Abraham and Sarah. Paul is writing to the church in Rome and he’s using the example of Abraham and Sarah as an example of faithful living. Because the covenant we read in Genesis today wasn’t the first time God had covenanted with Abram to be the father of many nations. God had in fact told him this before. And Paul writes “Hoping against hope, Abram believed that he would become the father of many nations…He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body which was already as good as dead or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what God had promised.”
So, what was different this time? What convinced Abram that this time God was really going to follow through and make Abram the father of many nations?
The difference was that God and Abram and Sarai all received new names. For the first time in Scripture, God refers to Godself as El Shaddai, God Almighty. And no longer would Abram be called Abram, but he would now be Abraham and Sarai would become Sarah. Literally, having a new name would be the sign of the covenant. It would be the name changer. Like the bow in the sky, the sign of the covenant would be the name they were known by.
Have you ever known a person who changed their given name…their first name? I went to seminary with a woman who was a survivor of terrible abuse. She changed her name from Kim to Imani, which in Africa means faith. From the time she changed her name, she said, she was no longer defined by what had happened to her in the past. She was defined by the faith she had in God and that God had in her. Today she is living into her name, leading a church and many social programs in upstate New York. Because the sign of the covenant between her and God is her name change.
The same is true for us. When each of us came to the water of baptism we were given a new name. No longer were we just Julie or Katy or Steve or Donna or Paul or Jed….instead we became Jed, child of God…Paul child of God…Donna child of God…Steve child of God….Katy child of God…Julie, child of God. And that name change stands in each of our lives as the sign of the covenant God made with all of humanity through Abraham and Sarah and the generations to follow. God’s everlasting covenant. God’s covenant with us. And the covenant is that God Almighty , El Shaddai, would be our God. The God to all generations. No one was left out of this covenant. There were no exceptions. El Shaddai would be God of all generations.
I have to return to the Star Trek story one more time. Because once I’d latched onto this idea that Live Long and Prosper was something like a covenant, I decided to dig a little deeper into the story. And Katy was glad to help. It was Friday and we were a little bit distracted in the office. Plus I’d really hoped that in the Star Trek story Spock had undergone a name change at some point. That would have clinched it in this sermon for me. However that was not to be. For the record, Spock has an obscure, very hard to pronounce first name. But these two things reminded me of covenant and Star Trek and God’s faithfulness to all generations: first, in the story: “Spock sacrificed himself in 2285 to repair plasma conduits that allowed the U.S.S. Enterprise and its crew to escape from the detonation of the Genesis Device by Khan Noonien Singh; his radiation-wracked body was consigned to space but landed on the newly formed Genesis Planet and began regeneration.”[1] And secondly, the actor Leonard Nimoy learned this signal in church, in the temple, where the Jewish worship leaders were chanting prayers over the generations gathered there….that God is faithful….that God’s covenant is for all generations. And that, is the good news, for this and every day.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Yahoo.com