Sermon
of June 12, 2005
Presented by Rev. Chuck Ericson
Scripture lesson: Genesis 18:1-15
“Is Anything Too Wonderful For God?”
Well, about this moment at the first service a cat walked in. Came right down the aisle. I knew because somebody back about where Tom is sitting said, “It’s not a skunk.” It was a black and white cat that walked in. I looked around and indeed it was not a skunk and it walked over to the organ; I hope it didn’t leave anything over there. It walked around and it went back out again. So, we may have another guest again, who knows?
I think that passage we heard about Abraham and Sarah and the promise of a son who will be Isaac is a familiar one to many of us. We might have heard it in Sunday school or you might have heard it before in a scripture lesson or a sermon, or read it if you read the Bible. When that story is told, a couple of different things can happen. For some people, they can become focused on the miracle about this expectation that Sarah, who is thought to be beyond child-bearing years, is all of a sudden going to have a baby. And that becomes the focus of attention of some people as they read it. Now other people who are cynics will look at that passage and say, okay we’ve got to find some kind of explanation. We’ll take our modern medical and scientific knowledge from 2005 and try and apply it back there and make some logical, rational sense out of this apparent miracle to try and explain how this could possibly happen to Sarah when she’s so advanced in years. Often what happens when a passage like this is read is people either say what a miracle, or wait a minute, what’s going on – we’ve got to find some sort of explanation for it.
So because those are the most common responses, I’m not going to do either of those today. I’m going to ask you to just think about one line in there. In the Bible it says in some translations (as this one), “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” And I had to look, because I know that in the Bible I read from at the pulpit, there’s a little “c” there with a footnote and down at the bottom it says “wonderful”. It could be “is anything too hard for the Lord?,” or “is anything too wonderful for the Lord?” I like wonderful. I don’t like to think that it’s such a great thing that God can do hard things; I’m more impressed that God can do wonderful things. So I want to ask you to think with me this morning a little about the wonderful things God does and how they come about. Not the miracle itself, but the way that miraculous, wonderful things come about.
The first thing that comes to me as I went through that story of Abraham and Sarah is that God’s wonderful things come about through common people. At this point, Abraham and Sarah are still promised by God to become the parents of a great nation. They will have Isaac, and Isaac will have Jacob and Esau, and Jacob will have 12 sons that will become the 12 tribes of Israel. But at this point, there’s just the promise of one child before them. So they are not a great nation yet, they are still common people; Abraham and Sarah, here by their tent, by the Oaks of Mamre. And three apparently common people come by, three strangers, and encounter Abraham and Sarah there. A little bit later, it appears that they might have some divine part in them, because when the conversation starts, it says that Abraham is talking to these three men, and the three say this and the three say that. Then one of them says something, and then it says the Lord said. Where did the Lord come from? Well the Lord might be revealed through these three common people. But in any event, they come to Abraham and Sarah as common strangers, and Abraham and Sarah are themselves common people.
As I was reflecting on this, I recalled a column that was sent to me written by Ben Stein. Now some of you may know who Ben Stein is and some of you may not. He was a speech writer for President Reagan; he’s an economist by his education and training; he’s on a very irreverent comedy show called “Win Ben Stein’s Money”. And if that doesn’t ring a bell for you, he’s the kind-of short, gray-haired guy in the Visine commercials where the red washes out; he’s got a beach ball, in case some of you are more oriented towards commercials than President Reagan’s speeches.
Apparently, for some years (I didn’t know this), he wrote a column for E-online (which I don’t ever read) called “Monday night at Morton’s” where he would write about celebrities, the Hollywood people that he would encounter at Morton’s Steak House. He begins his column by saying he ran into Samuel L. Jackson there not long ago, and a short while later rode an elevator with Warren Beatty. But then he changes the tone of his column and said this was his last column because this doesn’t have much meaning to me anymore. He writes this: “A bigger change has happened in my life; I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or a woman who makes a huge wage by memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should look up to.” So he says, about common people, “the real star, the kind who haunts my memory day and night, is the U.S. Soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with an unexploded piece of ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.”
“The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV, but the ones who patrol the streets in Mosel, even after two of their buddies are murdered – their bodies battered and stripped for the sin and crime of trying to protect the Iraqi people from terrorists. We put couples with incomes of a hundred million dollars a year on the covers of our magazines, the non-coms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand guard in Afghanistan and Iraq on ships and submarines near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live.” He’s really put a lot of thought into this, about the people who really matter, the people who are the real stars – the common people in the world; how important they are and how the wonder of God can be revealed, in a way, through common people who make sacrifices and serve humbly without asking a lot in return.
So there’s a connection there I think between Abraham and the strangers and the story we heard a little while ago. But, there’s another part of the story in that I think…
God’s wonder is revealed not just in common people, but in common people we encounter in common circumstances, everyday things that happen in our lives. Again, Abraham and Sarah have not become that great nation. Later on, those who follow them will be people like King David and King Saul, who will live in the great fortified city of Jerusalem, with great riches and great power and armies – and will be doing royal things all the time. Abraham and Sarah are just right here in their very common everyday circumstances. They are by their temporary home, a tent, by the Oaks of Mamre – which I couldn’t find a lot about. I wanted to tell you a lot about the Oaks of Mamre, but I looked in one of my study guides, and it said see Genesis Chapter 12, and I looked up Genesis Chapter 12 where it talked about the Oaks of Mora. It says there are lots of trees that are important in the Bible, and that’s about it. So I don’t have a lot to tell you about the Oaks of Mamre or the Oaks of Mora; maybe somebody else might. In any event, there are some oaks and trees that are of some significance in this common area where they’ve set their tent up. And it’s just kind of an every day situation; Abraham and Sarah are stopped along the way and some strangers come along and greet them. Very common occurrence.
I want to continue with Ben Stein’s article, because it was fascinating to me about his perspective and how much it is so much like what I read about in the story of Abraham and Sarah here. He writes about common situations as well. He says, “I’m no longer comfortable being part of a system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who was eating at Morton’s in a very unusual circumstance, at a restaurant where celebrities go, I don’t want to pretend that it is still a big subject. There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament: the police men and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and cancer wards.” He goes on to talk about firefighters and others who, in everyday circumstances, all day long, are doing things that reflect the wonder of God as people make a difference in other peoples lives as they give of themselves where some of us work, or where some of us go from time to time. It is in those places where the wonder of God is revealed, as common people are found in common circumstances.
Well, there is one more layer to this as I was reading it, and that is that it’s not just common people in common circumstances, but…
Common people in common circumstances who take time to help and be hospitable to others. See, that’s the real key to this story. When these three strangers come along, these travelers to Abraham and Sarah, they have something to tell but Abraham and Sarah don’t know that at that point. They’re just three passers-by and Abraham and Sarah could have ignored them, or could have said too busy. There’s an oasis 20 miles from here or something, but they didn’t. The immediate reaction, if you read that story again, the immediate reaction of Abraham is to show hospitality and help these strangers have a place to rest and have refreshments. He offers water to wash their feet (which was a big deal back then) when you were walking with bare feet or barely held together leather sandals of some sort along dirt roads. To have water to wash your feet after a long travel was really a big deal. He offered them bread and had the calf prepared and everything else. He was so incredibly hospitable and helpful to these people who needed a place to rest and find refreshment, and Abraham and Sarah gave it to them. Don’t forget Sarah, remember Abraham offered it but he told Sarah to go do it – remember that. By being helpful and hospitable, they set the scene for the wonder of God to be revealed, as the message later came forth that Sarah would indeed become the mother and Abraham the father of Isaac, who would be the next link in the chain towards the great nation, as the wonder of God would be revealed.
Well, I’m not reading you the whole article, but he ends up with the same conclusion that Ben Stein does: “I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way: years ago I realized I could never be a great actor, as great as Olivier, or as good a comic as Steve Martin, or as good an economist as Milton Friedman, or as good a writer as F. Scott Fitzgerald, or even remotely close to any of them. But, I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife, and above all a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife, and well indeed with my parents with my sister’s help. I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick and went into a coma, and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the psalms. This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters, that it is my duty in return for the lavish life God has given me. To help others he has placed in my path; this is my highest and best use as a human.”
What a remarkable movement from writing a column about all the Hollywood elite at Morton’s to getting down to helping others is all that matters. It mattered for Abraham and Sarah, and it mattered for Ben Stein. And it matters for us, too. The wonder of God is revealed when we are with common people in common circumstances, and we focus our lives on helping someone, being hospitable to someone, showing someone else kindness.
That’s the good news today. Sometimes I think we imagine that the wonder and awesome splendor of God is somewhere beyond us, and we wouldn’t be able to imagine it, or that all the wonderful things of the world are in Hollywood or Manhattan, all those great, glitzy places. The wonder of God, the place where you can stop and say “is anything too wonderful for God,” happens when we are with common people like one another, in common circumstances, devoting our lives to helping, being hospitable, being kind, and serving someone else. It made a big difference for Abraham and Sarah; it makes a big difference for us, too.