God said to Abram, “ I will make of you a great nation….I will bless you…I will bless those who bless you…I will curse those who curse you…In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” I promise your offspring will be numerous as the dust of the ground and the stars in the sky. Promises, promises…
Promises are a basic trust that supports civil society. “Promise Margarine” promises to protect our hearts…We sign promissory notes, marriage licenses, the credit card slip is signed, peace negotiations and promises abound between countries. There is a sense of obligation in honoring promises and shame in breaking them. “Cross my heart and hope to die…”
God’s covenant with Abram was different. God did all the promising and Abraham did not have to sign a thing. He just got his family, his servants and friends together and headed toward Canaan. We call Abraham the father of faith for two reasons. First of all he responded to the call of God to leave and he trusted in God’s faithfulness to the promise. Abrams life was changed as well as his name. We might also dare to say that the call and the promise to Abram also changed God in that God was now committed to a future and a relationship with the one who has faithfully responded.
The classic definition of faith found in (Heb. 11.1) is… Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Abraham had the assurance from God that he would be a blessing and his descendants would be a blessing. In the midst of his doubts and misadventures his conviction grew that God would keep the promise. God saw the big picture and had a greater plan than Abraham could imagine. The life of faith is a process of responding.
That is what it means to be righteous. We take ourselves out of the primary position in our world; we put God first and God’s promises and then we are rightly aligned with God and with each other. We are freed up to recognize that all created beings are loved by God equally. So faith is not like a one-time vaccination - faith is a process that has many pieces needed to complete the whole. Many ingredients like belief, trust, hope, obedience, perseverance and love go into the mixture of faith. I could go on with much more theological reflection about faith, but I like things I can see and touch. Faith is like working a jig saw puzzle or baking a cake.
There is something fascinating and absorbing about a jig saw puzzle. Hospital waiting areas often have a table with a jig saw puzzle on it. People come and go and put in a few pieces. Did you ever set one up and spend days or weeks working on it? One time I stayed up all night. You lay all the pieces out in a jumbled mess knowing there must be a plan because you have the picture on the box. The first thing I always did was to look for the straight edges and try to fit them together so that I could get the outline of the whole picture. Then I would put little clumps of pieces together maybe on the outside of the border - looking for patterns of colors or shapes. Has your life been that way? Some of it coming together over here or a few pieces fitting together over there. But lots of gaps, pieces with strange bumps or rough edges – some pieces never quite fitting?
Just when I would think I was getting it all together, the dog would come along and bump the table or the children would decide to play there and the puzzle would fall apart and have to be reworked. And then finally, the whole puzzle is almost done…and a piece is missing. Have you ever been like the woman searching for the lost coin and turned your whole house - your whole life upside down looking for the missing piece of the puzzle? Hoping against hope you’ll find it to complete the picture?
Then when you do and the puzzle is complete – what a sense of accomplishment! I used the illustration of the jig saw puzzle with a group of senior citizens one day and a man laughed and said, “I still got missing pieces, but that is OK.” Again I was reminded that “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things unseen.” Two weeks ago my next-door neighbor brought me a lovely little cake that she said was an Amish Cinnamon Friendship Cake. It was delicious and when I asked her for the recipe she came over and handed me a sheet of instructions and a gallon bag with some liquidy yellow stuff in the bottom. “This is the starter she said, just follow the directions.” The bag sits in a bowl on the counter and every day for five days you have to “mush the bag.” Then you add some sugar and flour and milk and mush the bag for another few days.
It bubbles up and you have to let the air out of the bag and finally you add more ingredients, take out enough for four more starters, add other ingredients and bake the cakes. I told her I was going to have to quit my job so I could tend this friendship. What an amazing process…it all came together as she said it would and the cakes are delicious. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things unseen.”
Only God has the big picture of how all of our lives will fit together. Only God knows how wonderful the end result will be when all the ingredients are combined. It was true for Abraham and it is true for us. Like Abraham, as our faith is continually tested, shaken and questioned, as it bubbles up – goes flat, as faith is lost and found, may we have the grace to remember that God has kept his promise to us. Jesus is our promise and our hope. Only our Lord can finish the puzzle of our lives. He is the starter and the icing on our cake. Amen