The beginning of the Abraham saga (Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7)

We skipped seventeen chapters of Genesis to leap to the story of Abraham and the visit my the three men/angels/the Lord as Abe hung out by the oaks of Mamre. That's quite a jump. Let's fill in what we missed.

After the two creation stories we have Adam and Eve out in the world with their two sons, Cain,  a farmer, and Abel, a rancher. At least that's how we see it in Texas. When they offer their sacrifices to God, it seems God prefers meat to veggies, so God accepts the lamb chops from Abel but turns down Cain's brussels sprouts. Cain is angry, and quite frankly I don't understand God's capriciousness. But that is no excuse for Cain to murder Abel. Cain is sentenced to wandering the earth, divorced from the field which he polluted with blood, but defended by God from any who would take vengeance.

Adam and Eve have another son, Seth, and Cain and Seth get married, though we don't know where they found wives, given that the only people in the world besides them were their own parents. There's a gap here. We'll keep going anyway. Now we get the first of many genealogies in the Bible. We tend to gloss over these long lists of names, most of them foreign and meaningless to us. But genealogy is important in the Bible for a couple of reasons. They mark the passage of time. They connect important characters. But most of all they lend legitimacy to characters. They answer the important question: who are your people? This is a tribal society, and genealogy defines one's tribe, and one's most important identity is the tribe. They are your roots. We might well notice that people lived a really, really long time. For instance, Adam was 930 years old when he died. We might not take this literally.

God is getting fed up with people living so long, and so he decides that 120 is going to be old enough from here on out. There was another race of beings on the earth, the Nephilim, who were apparently somewhat superhuman, so that when women married them, a mixed people were born, the heroes that were of old. The scripture is not clear except that God was not pleased in the least, and decided to wipe the slate clean and start over.

We all know the story of Noah and the Ark, or at least we think we do. It is a much darker story than what we should be telling to children at bedtime.One young mother, who had read this story to her young child, was disturbed when her child asked how God could kill all the little babies, who hadn't done anything wrong. It's a valid question. The God portrayed in these early chapters of the Old Testament is a God perceived through the lens of a tribal society. Their experience of God is as one who is learning how to be God through trial and error. This is a God capable of grief, anger, regret, and reevaluation, not the impassive and immutable god of other cultures. This God will soon evolve into a God who invests fully in intimate relationships with individual human beings and who chooses a single people to become the sign to all peoples of God's love for all creation. After the destruction of all life on earth, this God expresses regret and promises never to extinguish all life again. This God is fully on board with Plan B.

Chapters 10 and 11 are more genealogy with an interlude for the brief story of the Tower of Babel. It seems that if you get enough people on earth and they all speak the same language so they can plot and plan, they will once more get about the business of taking on for themselves the role of God. This time by physically climbing into heaven. God has a more creative solution this time and simply scatters them and makes them unintelligible to each other. The second part of the genealogy is the bridge that connects Shem with Abraham.

Out of nowhere and with almost no introduction God calls to Abram and Sarai to leave everything behind and head off into the desert towards promises that sound too good to be true: innumerable offspring even though they are already senior citizens; God's blessing so that they will bless the world; and a land to call their own. So the wandering begins. There is a famine, so they go to Egypt for food, and Abram passes Sarai off as his sister, exposing her to the dangers of Pharaoh's harem. For this God punishes Pharaoh, who had no idea what was going on. To top it all off, Pharaoh had already given Abram all sorts of riches in exchange for Sarai, so they take off enriched by his risky duplicity. Abram doesn't look so good here. Abram's nephew, Lot, was with them as well, and had so many grazing animals that the two men separated, Lot taking the land of Jordan and Abram the land of Canaan, near the oaks of Mamre, at Hebron. Lot is kidnapped, and Abram rescues him.

What happens next is unclear. Abram is met by the king of Salem (from which the name Jerusalem is derived) Melchizedek, and blessed by him, the high priest of God Most High. Abram gives him one-tenth of everything, which becomes the standard for the biblical tithe. There is only one other oblique mention of Melchizedek in the OT and no extra-biblical mention of him, so he remains a mystery.

In chapter 15 Abram takes up the issue of the unfulfilled promise of a son, suggesting that he name his servant Eliezer as his heir. God tells him no, that he will have his own son. The Lord makes a covenant with Abram, who has sacrificed a number of animals to him.

In order to have a son, Sarai suggests that Abram try with her Egyptian slave, Hagar, and Hagar gives birth to Ishmael. But strife builds between Hagar and Sarai. God repeats the promises to Abram, who is now 99 years old, and spells out the covenant that will be marked by circumcision. Abram and Sarai's names are changed to Abraham and Sarah as indication of their acceptance of this covenant.

This is where the three men/angels/the Lord stroll up to Abraham as he is lolling around under the oaks of Mamre.

In the Beginning...(Genesis 1:1-2:4a)

In the beginning, the very beginning, the only thing that was was God's presence with whatever the material of chaos was, and it was God's breath, both blown and spoken, that began the transformation into the universe we know.

This is the first of two creation stories, which the redactors (editors) of the Bible have deemed complimentary to each other, first a poem about how Creator God came to order the universe out of the will of God's overflowing love, the second a myth about why the world, and especially human beings, fall short of an ideal that dwells within our abilities to imagine. As we'll be talking about myth as we read further in the Old Testament about times and characters who are pre-historical, let's remember that myth is, in the words of John Polkinghorne (who is both a physicist and a priest), "not a fairy story but a truth so deep that only story can convey it." (Testing Scripture: A Scientist Explores the Bible, p. 23)

Although this story is first in the Bible, it was written later than the story of Adam and Eve, probably in the time of the Babylonian Exile (586-536 BCE), when the Jewish people had been hauled off by their mortal enemies and were struggling to hold onto the essentials of their faith while unable to worship by sacrificing animals at the Temple in Jerusalem. As God creates everything that God creates, the culmination is not only human beings, male and female, in the image of God, but the Sabbath, the day on which God rested in perfect relationship with all creation. The day God took to delight in the work of God's hands. Sabbath is the point of the story.

We all know the problems this story has caused because some people take it literally. Actually, the fundamentalist interpretation of it is a modern phenomenon. Until quite recently people were perfectly content to accept such stories as metaphorical and deeply symbolic. Polkinghorne writes, "The sad irony of so-called 'creationism,' based on a fundamentalist biblical literalism, is that in fact it abuses the very text that it seeks to respect, missing the point of what is written by mistaking its genre...It is a theological text whose principal purpose is to assert that nothing exists except through the will of God." (p. 22) Genesis was never meant to be a scientific treatise. It, like the rest of the Bible, is an expression of faith as experienced by the human writers who testified to their experience of God.

Genesis 2:4b-3:24, the story of Adam, Eve, the forbidden fruit, and the serpent, comes from an indeterminate date and historical context. It is considered to be part of the Yahwist tradition, which precedes the Priestly, the location of the first creation story. Just a few things about this story -- The first human being is neither male nor female, simply 'earthling' as adam means from the earth. When the woman is created, that is when he becomes male. Clearly God loves these little creatures, even after they have transgressed the only law they were given. They were asked to care for the garden, so they worked from the beginning, but even when they are cast out, God makes them little fur clothes and sends them into a world of abundance.

What they do to get in trouble is to listen to a voice that is not God's and to choose to follow their own desires rather than trust in God's grace. The story is not an account of a historical event, but rather a reflection on how people are. In the Jewish tradition there is no such term as 'the Fall.' Within the garden the people are unconscious, but people are conscious, able to distinguish between good and evil, and not always predisposed to choose the good. This story sets the scene for the whole rest of the Old Testament, in which the Jewish people again and again choose to follow their own wills rather than to obey the single foundational commandment of God, to worship only the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Telling stories!

It's only a little after 8:00 in the morning and it's my day off, but I'm aware of all the storytelling that has been going on around me in just the little time I've been awake. John Bennet and I have shared our expectations for our days as he left to go to work and we're planning on our grandson, Arthur, and his parents joining us for supper. The video I sent my sister of Arthur eating his first corn on the cob the other night is a visual form of storytelling -- hilarious, by the way. Talk about baby-crack! You should have seen him grab it with both hands when he thought it was going away. But there I go.

We turned on the Today Show, and the first story I heard is that it is fall just about everywhere but here, and our story is that it is only going up to 96 today. Aaaaah, cool breezes. I saw the story of the motorcyclist being dragged out from under a burning car by strangers who risked their lives and have a story to tell. A man in England has adopted a duck. The newspaper is telling the stories of politicians, of fire victims, of the ACL festival, and movies to see or to skip.

The thing is we're not intimidated in the least by telling each other stories. Or are we? The reason that we at St. Alban's are taking on this project is that it seems that many of us are extremely intimidated by the challenge to share the most important story of all, the story of God's love for all creation expressed in the incarnation, life, friendships, healings, teachings, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. And all the marvelous stories of the Old Testament that lead up to it and the stories of the New Testament that result from it.

We'll be focusing on learning these stories in church on Sundays and with the story-books that we will take home each week. The reason for this blog is to fill in the gaps. To place the stories in their context. And to help us learn, not only to tell the stories with even more relish than we'll tell the story of the next rain shower, but to have confidence in their relevance to the lives we are living. 

The plan is to blog once a week on the story we will be reading in church on Sunday. I'll be back with my thoughts on the first creation story in Genesis a little later. I'll appreciate your reflections, and we'll see how it goes.