"Like Abraham"

Texts: Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

In the day of Michael Jordan mania, a commercial captured the fantasy of thousands of playground basketball warriors. It’s 15 years old now. Maybe you remember it. "Like Mike, if I could be like Mike." That was the refrain. "I wanna be, I wanna be, I wanna be like Mike." There was footage of Jordan driving the lane, tongue hanging out, soaring to the hoop, improbably passing the ball from right hand to left and flipping it to the glass for a layup; then a shot of Jordan playfully guarding a 4-year-old dribbling a basketball half as big as he is; then Jordan hitting a last-second, game-winning fadeaway jump shot; then a clip of some middle aged, sweats-wearing guy on a playground attempting a Jordanesque ball-around-the back lay-up but dropping it and looking like a klutz because, though he wants to be like Mike, he’s not.

The commercial ends with Jordan laughing, hanging with the kids and Jordan drinking Gatorade. "Be Like Mike," the screen says. "Drink Gatorade." It’s a great commercial. Great for the way it captured the dreams of a generation of girls and boys who went to the hoop with tongues protruding because that’s how their hero did it. If you want to learn basketball, there’s no better example than Michael Jordan.

To learn well, we need examples. You want to write well? Read Emily Dickinson. You want to cook well? Look to Julia Child. You want to dance well? Watch Baryshnikov. You want to act well? Watch Katherine Hepburn. You want to sing well? Listen to Pavoratti. You want to paint well? Study Rembrandt.

You want to live in faith? Well, that’s much harder. Who has mastered faith? Excellence in faith is hard to quantify. You can’t measure faith as you can a pitcher’s ERA, a golfer’s handicap, a company’s earnings. Numbers and stats can’t define faith. Living by faith isn’t glamorous or obviously faithful. Modern icons of faith--people like Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King or Dietrich Bonhoeffer--to look into the true nature of their faith is to learn their doubts, fears, their feelings of inadequacy just as much as their conviction.

But Apostle Paul’s got an example for the way of faith. If you want to learn faith, Paul says, you wanna be, you wanna be, you wanna be...like Abraham. Paul wrote to Christians in Rome, telling them the gospel--that power of God in Jesus for the salvation of all people. Paul was a faithful Jew, serious student of the scriptures, so it’s no surprise that to Paul, getting at God’s saving work meant Abraham would have to come up. If you’re going to tell God’s promises and what it means to trust them, eventually you have to get to Abraham.

He’s famous, of course. Famous for being the patriarch, the one in whom all the nations of earth would be blessed. Famous for his listing in that Letter to the Hebrews faith Hall of Fame: "By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going." Remarkable. A man of his age stepping into the unknown--going to an unknown country at the word of a largely unknown God. Now that’s faith, we say. But if we think Abraham’s faith is athletic, gutsy, heroic, an impressive work, Paul’s about to straighten us out.

Six weeks back all of us reading through the Bible this year came to Abraham’s story, the same one we read today. Out of the blue, God speaks: "Go from your father’s house...to the land that I will show you." Abraham goes and we’re amazed. What faith! But the deeper we get in his story the less impressed we are. I heard about it from our Bible readers. About Abraham passing off Sarah his wife as his sister, letting her get taken as the wife of a Canaanite king--imagine the implications and you’re probably correct. He does just to save his own hide--not just once, but twice! What kind of faith is that?! No way is it righteousness! And how he agrees to father a child by Sarah’s slave Hagar when Sarah’s womb remains empty. That’s not faith. People told me, "Abraham’s faith seems more like mine than like hero’s faith." Faith that falters, that doubts, that has its moments but most days hasn’t got its "A-Game."

Think about Abraham this way, as the mere human addressed by God, the one God promises blessing but oh so human in the way he obeys...now we’re starting to think like Paul. What are we to say about Abraham, says Paul? Let’s start with what the Scripture says: "Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." Here’s the great thing about Abraham: God came with promised blessing and, hearing the word of promise, Abraham received it as true. Abraham is commendable--the one to be like--not because he had lots of faith to give God. Abraham is the example of faith because he trusted God when he had nothing to give at all.

Remember how things are when God comes to Abraham. When God speaks promises—"I’ll make you a great nation"—Abraham and God have got no history. Old man Abraham’s got no track record of trust, no resume of moral living. He could have been worshiping a tree on a hill for all we know. Yet into this empty account faith and faithfulness, God makes a huge deposit. God says, "Your name shall be great."

It’s something like an employer that comes to a guy on the street and says, "I’m hiring you. In fact, I’m making you head of my company. With you at the helm, I’ll make business boom." And prior to talk of wages or the nature of the work, she writes a check too large ever to be spent, and puts it in his hand. The guy looks at the check. It says, To the order of: And there’s the worker’s name. In the amount of: 1 bazillion dollars! Stretched across the check are one bazillion zeros. The worker thinks, I’ve shown this employer nothing! There’s no way I’m worth a sum like this. And how do I know she’s good for the money? If she is, I’m taken care of forever. Not just me, but my family and the whole world for that matter! But is the promise true? That’s the real question, isn’t it? Is the promise-maker trustworthy? Is she good? Is it really true that, no matter his job performance, the check won’t bounce?

At this point, Paul would remind us that such a situation is not the way of the world because, in Paul’s words, "to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift, but as something due." It how things are. You put in the hours and you get paid for them. It’s the way of the world...but not the way of God. God doesn’t pay out like the world does. God blesses Abraham when he has no works to be blessed for. God blesses Abraham though the wages he’s really due aren’t blessing but death--as Paul will say in chapter 6, that for all of us who are sinners--Abraham and all the rest of us who fall short of God’s glory--"the wages of sin is death."

But God doesn’t pay fair wages. God pays gracious wages, ridiculous wages, wages of a bazillion zeroes stretching from here to eternity. "I will make of you a great nation," says God to Abraham, "and I will bless you...and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed." Out of the blue. No ad in the classifieds. No resume requested. God goes to Abraham, promises blessing, and Abraham--this guy with no ground of worthiness on which to stand--Abraham trusts that God will do it. That the check will cash. That the promise maker is good, trustworthy. That’s the faith of Abraham. Before Abraham takes one step toward the place God will show him, he trusts God’s promise is true and that, says Paul, how he is righteous.

It’s hard to talk about faith. If you’re like me, most days you wish you had more faith than you think you’ve got. More trust in God’s provision. More certainty that the place God will lead you will indeed be a place of fullness and life. More conviction that God is there in a chaotic life and our tenuous world, there bringing about some kind of blessing for us and the nations.

I’ve been reading a series of essays in a journal I receive, essays offered by artists and writers in response to the some of the recent books attacking the enterprise of faith. These essayists were asked, Why believe in God? Filmmaker Wim Wenders wrote one of the responses. He talks about taking the question around with him, asking it of himself as he brushed his teeth: "Why do you believe in God?" On his bicycle at a red light: "Why do you believe in God?" At the airport, waiting for a connecting flight: "Why do you believe in God?"

"The answer is never the same," he says. "Depending on where I am and how I feel, on who I imagine I’m answering to, the response changes. Is that a good sign or a bad sign? Shouldn’t my answer always be the same?"

He ponders this a while, imagines what he might say to a person who has no faith, wonders if one’s faith can truly be explained at all. Then he asks the question one more time, sitting in a field, letting the sun shine on his face. And finally, his real answer comes: "Why do I believe in God, Wim?"

"He called me by my name."

He did. That’s all I can say in the end.

I am thankful for that every day.

Grace.

That is the faith of Abraham. Acceptance of God’s promise that rests on grace and is guaranteed because the promise maker is God. Faith isn’t about believing particularly well, or even about following God especially well. Faith, the faith by which we are made right with God, is simple recognition that God came to us, found us in our wandering, spoke our name and announced our blessing. We heard God say it, our name together with the blessing of grace and life a bazillion miles wide, and we said something like, "Thank you." That’s faith. That’s the faith of Abraham. That’s the faith that’s full of eternity, full of right standing with God, fully backed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It’s good to have examples. In the ways of faith, we’re blessed to have Abraham whom God called by name. That’s all we can say in the end. Of Abraham, of us. God called us by name. He did. It’s something to be thankful for every day. Grace.