Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7) Commentary

(Commentator’s Note: A lot happens between Genesis 12 and Genesis 21 but we only have 1 Sunday in the Lectionary to tell the whole story. This commentary intends to tell the whole story, with stops in Genesis 18 and 21.

Pastoral Need

God’s Word has plenty to say about waiting.

The letters of Paul and Peter instruct us to wait. They command, cajole and coax it from us. We are to “wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

And so, here we are, 2000 years later:

Loitering on the edges of a Kingdom.

Delayed.

In limbo.

Deferred.

Expectations

Put off.

Put out.

Put on ice

Or put on the back burner.

Postponed.

Patience strained

by longing.

And by disappointment.

 

Holding

our breath,

our horses,

our fire.

Holding up.

Holding on.

Holding back.

Holding onto hope.

 

Commentary:

Last week the Lectionary text reminded us that all of this waiting begins with a promise.  That, in fact, ever since Genesis 12, God’s people have been a waiting people. We pick up the story with Abraham and Sarai waiting for God to do what God has promised to do.

Abram and Sarai travel to Egypt to avoid famine. On the border Abram turns to his wife and says, “you know, I’ve been thinking about how pretty you are.” (Don’t melt at the romance yet, ladies.) “And how the Pharaoh’s probably going to notice how pretty you are. And then he might kill me to marry you SO what if we tell him (and weirdly this won’t be a lie) what if we just lead with the fact that you are my sister?

And so they do and Sarai gets placed in the Pharaoh’s harem. But the Pharaoh finds out — is properly mortified — and sends Abram packing.

That is *also* Genesis chapter 12.

God makes a big ol’ promise.

Abram sacrifices his wife’s honor, safety and his own integrity.

I wouldn’t say the wait is going well.

Next, after bouncing around from town to town for a bit, accumulating a bit of wealth Abram goes into business with his Uncle Lot until the land won’t support their combined herds and they have to head off turf wars between their shepherds. For the sake of family peace, they part ways.

But, even so, Uncle Lot ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time (as they say) and gets carried off as a prisoner of war in which 4 different kings are arguing over his piece of property. So Abram intervenes, negotiates a hostage release and refuses to take a pay-out and become beholden to these foreign kings.

The wait continues and it is weird.

That was chapters 13 and 14, by the way.

As though dropping in to check up on Abram in his waiting, God reassures him of the promise … and very specifically, the promise of a child, which is good because, how can any of the other pieces of the covenant fall into place without this one?

Robert Alter observes, “Until this point, all of Abram’s responses to God have been silent obedience. His first actual dialogue with God … expressed doubt that God’s promise can be realized.”

The doubting, the uncertainty, all of it seems to be a part of the waiting. And somehow the doubting and uncertainty weighted in the balance still comes out as faith.

Sometimes that’s all faithfulness is: the willingness to hold on through the wait so that the author of Hebrews offers this assessment of our dubious hero: “Abram believed the Lord, and God credited to him as righteousness.”

But Abram and Sarai’s belief is far from perfect, even if God deems it righteous. For in the very next story, the very next chapter, Abram and Sarai connive to fix the problem of their childlessness for themselves. You remember what Abram does to Sarai in Egypt? He has the power to protect her but he steps aside and all but pushes Sarai into Pharaoh’s arms. Sarai now does the same thing to her Egyptian servant girl, Hagar. Stepping aside so that Hagar can be used by Abram. Right after having their faith credited to them as righteousness, we find Sarai all but pushing Hagar into Abram’s arms.

The wait weighs on them.  Abram and Sarah offer, at best, an uneven expression of faith and doubt. Uncertainty followed by covenant renewal, followed by uncertainty again.

God gives a sign of his promise in circumcision.

God uses Abram to intercede again for Lot and the city of Sodom.

Abram again throws his wife at a waiting king to save his own life.

God sends messengers of his promise as angelic visitors to Abraham and Sarah’s tent, who are met by brittle laughter. Sarah’s many disappointments have taught her the folly of imagining the future differently. The folly of hope.

Chapters 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20. 5 chapters — years and years and years — of bumpy, turbulent, uneven waiting. No reasonable reader of the text would give Abraham and Sarah gold stars for their performance. Hard to see A+ work in this mess of doubt and hope.

And yet, Hebrews eulogizes Abram as one who “believed the Lord, and God credited it to him as righteousness.”

So at last we arrive at Genesis 21. There is a lovely nuance in the Hebrew at the start of chapter 21. In English, we read, “Now…” But in Hebrew it reads more like, “Now, where were we? Ah yes, about that promise…”

Biblical scholar Bill Arnold writes, “Although impossible to capture in translation, the Hebrew word order at the beginning of v.1 marks the beginning of a new scene and takes up again a previous subject that has been suspended momentarily … The word order of the opening clause reactivates the topic, closing the distance between the promise and the fulfillment, in order to emphasize the faithfulness of Yahweh to Sarah.”

As Sarah holds her baby, we are told that she laughs, perhaps gently this time so as not to wake the child of promise in her arms. And she acknowledges that those who hear this story, who meet this child and his geriatric parents out in the street someday will laugh too.

In that vulnerable and human moment, the pains of childbirth were replaced with tender joy. The tears of sorrow mixed with tears of wonder. And when Rachel and Rebecca and Hannah and Ruth held their babies, the story of God’s people continued — generation upon generation —

Until another child of promise born in a stable in Bethlehem almost 2000 years ago. A child born after a long wait, a child of promise, not simply the fulfillment of one family’s hopes but the fulfillment of God’s own covenant in Genesis 12, a promise for all the waiting people and the whole waiting world. A promise that is not yet —fully— fulfilled.  So that, especially in the season of Pentecost, those who have picked up the baton of waiting, hear the Apostle Paul’s promise in Romans 8: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.”

The wordless groans of the Spirit accompany the birth pangs of creation, waiting in eager expectation for a Kingdom in which all that is broken will be restored and “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.”

And on THAT day, the Spirit will no longer groan. The Spirit will join in the song that the universe was created to sing. A song of grace and faith, playing quietly below the sufferings of God’s people through the ages. With Sarah’s laughter floating on the descant.