(Adapted from a sermon preached at Victorian Pastor’s and Lay-worker’s Retreat, June 2008)
Photo: From Flickr
In the prayer of the church each Sunday we envision the church and its work in words something like these “we pray that the light of Gospel may spread throughout the world bringing many people into your kingdom”.
A splendid vision, but does it and will it really happen? Is there really a tomorrow for the church? Is there a tomorrow for our church? The statistics continue on their downward curve, don’t they?
In this reading from Romans 4, Paul describes Abraham facing up to the same questions: “Is there really a future? Will I have heirs? I know God promised but that was a long time ago, and well, nothing is happening yet … and now that Sarah is past it, and I’m as good as dead, there’s the question of not only when, but how? Is there really still time?”
Humanly speaking, we the church might well ask these questions too. Yes, we trust and believe, but lets face it, time appears to be running out.
Like Abraham, we turn our eyes to God. We do all the right things – we trust in the Word and Sacraments, we seek to be faithful, upholding our biblical integrity and our confessional unity. And we try to communicate with our culture. We work hard. We pray.
But when will things change? When we will we see progress?
As I continue to baptise children into the kingdom, I often ask myself: will these new heirs and heiresses of God’s glory ever inherit it? Will people of their generation grow into their faith? If so, how? We cannot see how things might change for the better. Shrinking resources, and falling numbers continue … This is reality. You know because you live with it, too.
Paul’s main intention in this passage, however, is to remind us of another reality – the unseen, yet powerful, reality of faith. Faith in God. Faith in his promises, and therefore faith in the future, especially the future of the church.
In verse 18 here, Paul describes how Abraham hoped against hope. Theologian and teacher, Martin Franzmann, describes the meaning of this phrase beautifully. He says that Abraham’s hope fled from all human possibilities and hopes, and flung itself alone into the arms of God’s creative power. Abraham did not hope on the basis of signs that things were looking up. He did not hope in his own or in Sarah’s fertility. He hoped and trusted in God, who calls into existence things that are not – fully convinced (Paul says in verse 20) that God was able to do what he promised.
We too hope against hope. We dare not place our confidence in the signs of growth we see here or there in the church. We dare not rely on programs or packages. We dare not rely on our theological ideas and opinions.
The Word of God rather invites us to lift our eyes up higher to realise that God’s options for building His church are infinitely more and greater than ours; that his will and plan to produce Sons and Daughters of Abraham is beyond our ability to imagine. The possibilities and potential, when God is involved, are endless. Sometimes in ministry we become so practiced in the “art of the possible” we forget that for God nothing is impossible and that he can, and does, do “abundantly more than we are able to ask or think”.
Hoping against hope – hoping in God in this way (rather than falling into that so subtle shift to hoping in ourselves) – we like Abraham, can rest in the promise that has been given first to Abraham, then to us: you will have many descendents. There will be children of Abraham, through Jesus Christ. The church will continue because, like the Word that calls it together, it lasts forever.
Paul tells us that Abraham grew strong in his faith, as he gave glory to God. Abraham, in his impotence (quite literally), gave glory to God. The poorer and weaker he realised his position was, the more he clung to the promise, and the more God was honoured as God.
Faith grows where no other living thing can grow, in the dark.
We too believe and trust in a future that we cannot foresee. God’s plan to keep his promises in and through us in the church may not be like anything we would design. The God who calls into existence things that do not exist, may do his work through means and in ways we have not yet dreamed about. His creative plans for the world have a way of coming gloriously out of left field:
- as they did when he burst through the barriers of human visions and expectations, to make barren Sarah a mother in her old age;
- as they did when He himself was nailed to a cross and rose again three days later;
- as they did when the wind and fire rushed through the crowd on Pentecost day;
- as they did on the day when you were baptised and became yourself an heir of Abraham, one of those promised descendents, a child of promise, a child with a future.
Like Abraham, the church lives by the Word, in faith, and has its life and does its work through this faith. Our faith in God’s future for the church is reckoned to us as righteousness before him. And so we find ourselves drawn through Christ into the mysterious presence of almighty God. In this place we see that the future of the church is the future of God himself.
It is he who has hold of our church. Who knows what will happen next?