Acts 17--Paul at the Aeropagus

Pray with me please: Lord God, please give me the courage and faithfulness that I need to preach your word to your people.  Amen.

Our passage this morning begins in the middle of what is one of Paul’s most conspicuous missionary endeavors.  Paul is already in the middle of the Areopagus—in the middle of the conversational hub of the intellectual elite of the whole Roman Empire.  He’s in the jewel of academic learning of the whole Western World—in Athens, a city somewhat past the prime of its glory in Paul’s day, but still renown for learning, for philosophy and for culture.  And still today the city of Athens has meaning as being a fountain of Western civilization and culture.  Up to this point in the story, Paul has been exploring the city of Athens and talking with the different intellectual schools—we hear specifically that the Epicureans and the Stoics have mixed reactions to what Paul has to say.  But the Holy Spirit catches their attention—Paul interests them enough that they want to bring him to along to where the philosophers get together to talk shop.  And this talking shop is somewhere between respectable intellectual discourse and something like intellectual gossip and novelty.  Our narrator comments, "Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new."  So these are the leisured, intellectual elite who have time to sit at Starbucks for hours and pursue over the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.   I think we see here that Paul takes these folks seriously—clearly he is engaging with them on a deep level with the things they are interested in, and learns enough about them to speak their language well enough to get invited to where the real action happens at the Areopagus.  But he sees them for the human beings that they are and doesn’t take them too seriously—some of these folks are perhaps just as interested in intellectual novelty as they are in deep philosophical truth.

So, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, Paul begins his speech:  V 23-25 read, “For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, 'To the unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.  The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.”  This is good stuff—we get to see how on earth a trained Jewish-Christian theologian appeals to 1^st century Greek philosophers!  This is definitely a cross-cultural experience and definitely an example of Paul understanding his audience well and speaking to them in ways they can understand.  So specifically in these first few verses, Paul is not appealing to the religious sensibilities of the average joe citizen of the Roman empire--the average Joe goes to the temple and offers sacrifices to appease the anger of the gods, or to ask for favor from the gods, or to discharge his civic duty through piety or prayers for the emperor or city or the state..  Your average joe probably does think of the gods dwelling in temples made by hand.  It may or may not have crossed his mind as to why a deity—a being of supernatural power—would need his food or his service in order to be provided for or taken care of.  But the philosophers—the types of people who are hanging out at the Areopagus—on Mars’ Hill--have talked about it and they aren’t satisfied with popular piety or the religious status quo of their day.  These folks that Paul is addressing here are dissenters—at least in part—from the traditional way of thinking about things.  They are the folks who are more inclined to believe in one god or to believe that there must be an essential unity behind the pantheon of gods in order for the world to hang together and make sense.  And plenty of them—like those in the schools of Aristotle and Plato have already decided that God really couldn’t be a type of being that needed things from human beings.  For these folks, God is not a being who is dependent on human affairs or even necessarily one who is involved in human affairs or cares very much about human worship.  So in Paul’s interactions with these folks—these folks who still pay some kind of lip service to polytheism and what Paul considers idolatry, he finds a point of connection with this questioning and dissenting element of Greek intellectual culture.  It is from there that he starts to tell them the story of the true God, the God of Israel whom these Greeks don't know at all but they have begun to worship, at least in part.

Notice what Paul does and how carefully he speaks to these men of Athens: "as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, [read—idols and altars to Greek and Roman gods and goddesses] I found also an altar with this inscription, to the unknown god."  First of all, Paul references an altar, but not an idol or a statue.  I wonder if it wasn’t an empty altar with no image but only this tantalizing and ambiguous inscription: to the unknown god.  Moreover, it is the very confession of ignorance on the part of whoever made this altar to the unknown god that makes it such a suitable point of contact for Paul.  Whoever decided that this altar should be there was in effect saying, there is Someone, something out there that we don't know about it, we cannot see, and we don't really understand, but we somehow know that this unknown Someone is worthy of our worship.  In other words, Paul interprets the very existence of this altar as a testimony to what he later talks about in Romans 1: “for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.  For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made."  By the sheer creation of the world there is enough information, enough of a trace of revelation, as Aquinas puts it, to know that someone has passed by, someone's creative hand is on the world.  But—and this is crucially important—there is not enough information to identity who this Someone is.  For that, you need something more--you need a story told to you by God himself about who he is, what he has done, and how he plans to draw all people to himself.  And this is exactly what Paul proceeds to do--he tells them the story about who God is.

The first element of this story in verse 24 reveals that God is the creator—he is the one who made the heavens and the earth—so he is Lord, master, ruler of heaven and earth, but he is also the one who made the human race and the one who reigns over history and time and has in his hand the rise and fall of the nations of the earth.  Paul proclaims a universal deity here—this God, unlike all the other gods, knows all the nations, has made every people, and knows their land and their history.  He isn’t a local deity—and the Greeks are used to this—he is not a god among gods.  Again, this is appealing to the philosopher’s understanding of the transcendent god.  They have a sense already--Paul did not have to create this discomfort for them--that there is something deficient among the multiplicity of gods each with their own territory, each with their own limited power that competes with the limited power of all the other gods.  No, this God Paul preaches--the one they don't know yet--is of an entirely different caliber.

            But notice what Paul does not do here.  He does not mention Israel.  He does not even mention the name of Jesus—which is quite unusual for the proclamation of the gospel story, you might think.  Eventually in his story he gets to the part where God has appointed one man (who we, the ones who have been reading the other 16 chapters of the story, already know is Jesus) to judge the world with righteousness—so there is some degree of particularity in this presentation of the gospel—it is certainly not a vague story about vague good news or general benevolence—it is still the story of the gospel about the man God has appointed to judge the world, Jesus Christ.  But Paul does not yet tell them the name of Jesus.  Why not?  Because these Athenians have not heard of Jesus before.  They are not familiar with the ins and outs of the Jewish religion, they don’t know the teaching of John the Baptist the way other Jews or God-fearers that Paul travels to in Acts does—they don’t know or rather they don’t yet believe in anything that would give them a context for understanding a story about the God of Israel, for understanding a story about Jesus.  The first need of these Athenians, then, is to be given a context for talking about and getting to know God, for coming to know who Jesus is.  And that’s exactly what Paul is doing when he tells this more general story of God’s involvement in the world and God’s authorship of history.  We are used to hearing the very specific tale of God’s involvement with Israel—with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—with promises of children and land and blessing.  But Paul knows that God’s very particular involvement with the people of Israel was always leading to salvation being brought to the nations.  The original promise to Abraham is “in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”  So the God who called Abraham and made Jesus the Son of David, Messiah of the Jews and Gentiles always meant to bring his good news and his salvation to this bunch of mostly Greek philosophers in Athens.

We know then—because Paul is telling us—that this God is the God of all human history.  So what is the purpose of the activity of this Creator God--this sovereign Lord of history? What is his purpose in making from one man every nation of the earth and appointing specific times and places for each people?  The purpose is for every one of those peoples and nations to“ seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him."  This I think is the hinge of Paul's message to the Athenians—it is the climactic moment of his introduction of the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ.  And that is the invitation to seek and know the Creator of All.  It turns out that the "unknown God" worshiped by the Athenians is not satisfied with being worshiped as unknown--he wants to be known and he wants to be found.  In fact, that is the very reason why the human race was created--so that everyone might come to know the one who Created them.

The very next sentence is even more encouraging:  Not only does this unknown god want to be known, it turns out this God is actually close by—he isn’t that difficult to be known after all.  He isn’t far away from those philosophically minded Athenians and he is not far from us.  Paul says, "Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for 'in him we live and move and have our being; as even some of your own poets have said, 'for we are indeed his offspring.'"  So there are three incredible elements of gracious good news here!  (One) God wants us to know him and (two) it is not an impossible task!  It is not an epic quest requiring the exploits and adventures of a Greek hero or demigod.  God has already drawn near to us—and it turns out the only reason we exist at all is because we live and exist in him in some way.  God holds our life and our being in his hand, and what do you know, this is something the Greek poets already knew.  This is something they perceived truly about God even though they did not have the gift and advantage of the Scriptures.. . . .  The third bit of good news is the way in which God is close to us--"we are his offspring."  What does that mean?  It means that God isn’t completely alien to us.  We are like him.  We are his children.  There is affinity there.  He intends to know us as a father should know his child.  And here we do find a note of opposition to way the philosophers tended to think about god as remote and distant and untouchable and uninterested in the messy, inferior lives of human beings.  No, it turns out we are the very offspring of God, the deliberate and free creation of an act of love, and that ought to serve as the basis for us to begin to understand what God is like.

And this Paul does use to segue into a gentle rebuke about the idolatry he has seen in the city of Athens.  V29 says: "Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man."  In other words, Paul is saying, "I know you are used to thinking about things in this way, but really, you and I both know better.  If we are God's offspring, we really can't go on believing that these chunks of metal and stone have any significance whatsoever.  If God is God, then he is not the product of any imaginative art of human beings--nothing we make up can really capture his essence and likeness--this business of making idols really doesn't make any sense. You are philosophers—I know you know better than that, I know you are dissatisfied with all of this.”  Paul goes on to conclude his speech in v 31 with a most relevant piece of information: God is commanding people everywhere to repent because he is going to judge the world in righteousness, which means he is going to judge with righteous judgment—not the partial and incomplete justice that we now experience—with the real justice with which only God can judge.  God has been patient with the past chapters of history and with the religious ignorance of human beings, but now he's bringing things to a close.  The second half of v. 31 references Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.  It is as if Paul is saying to them: I know this day of judgment stuff sounds a little crazy, but God proved it to all of us by raising this man from the dead.  And resurrection from the dead of course implies all sorts of vitally important things: it implies Jesus’ victory over sin and death, and his victory over all the powers and principalities, and over all the systems of this world. 

This isn't a cheap gospel of cheap grace that Paul preaches.  It is good news because it is a genuine offer of salvation--it is a genuine call to people to know the living God, to move from death to life.  Paul doesn't avoid the subject of judgment, but he doesn't have to talk down to the Athenians or preach condemnation in order to do it.  Judgment is not bad news.  Judgment is good news because it means Jesus is going to set things right--he is going to right the wrongs of the world and see that the peace of his kingdom, the kingdom of God, is established in the world in the place of the violence and oppression of the nations of the earth.  You will only have a problem with judgment if you want to resist the peace of God or face God on your own terms.  Submit to God's kingdom and you will find that He is your father and you please him by your trust in his Son.  Here we see that Paul is able to be serious and not compromise the integrity of the gospel while still basking in God's kindness and love for the people gathered at the Areopagus.  These things are not in conflict.

The God Paul preaches here really is very kind in the way he deals with our ignorance.  Even though we learn earlier in this passage that Paul is grieved by the idolatry he sees in Athens, he doesn't scorn the people for their mistaken idol-worship.  Instead of laughing at the Athenians for being a bunch of superstitious nuts who even worship a god they don't know at all, Paul sees and perceives the deeper reality of the Athenians' fumbling after truth.  In true Socratic fashion, they know enough to admit their ignorance and the Holy Spirit works through this.  Paul's response is to commend them for what they have recognized--he fans that smoldering wick into flame rather than trying to quench it because it doesn't give off very much light.  Maybe it is no surprise that Paul is humble and winsome in his approach to the cluelessness of the Athenians because--after all, God was kind to him in his own ignorant persecution of the church!  Paul stoned Christians and persecuted the church of God and Jesus still went out of his way to reveal himself and to show mercy to this enemy of his, to call Paul to repentance, to reconcile him to himself.  In Romans 2:4 Paul tells us that it is the kindness of God that draws us all to repentance, and the whole story of Jesus shows us that God's glory is manifested in showing mercy to his enemies.  Paul knows this because he is one of the singular most obvious enemies of God whom God went out of his way to love and reconcile him to himself.  So I don't think it was very hard for Paul to be mindful of the Lord's kindness when he spoke to the Athenian intellectual elites--even the ones who mocked him and scorned him and disbelieved what he said.

In Paul's day, Athens was the intellectual center of the Roman world--Paul was speaking to the cultural and intellectual elite with the same graciousness and kindness and sincerity he showed to everyone else.   In our day, though--we sometimes get scared or intimidated—especially by the culturally or socially powerful—and we get either rigid or cowardly.  We start thinking that being scornful, condemning, critical and harsh of "the culture" is the way to do apologetics and evangelism --if only we condemn secularism enough--if only we tell people that they are godless and immoral or unethical enough--or that they are wrong and their ideas are bad--if only we bully them with our morality or tell them enough bad news, then surely they will convert and be on our side!  . . . Oftentimes we even mean well when we try this track—we are deeply concerned when we see these errors hurting people and we want people to know the truth.  The equal and opposite error is to preach a gospel that doesn’t confront or resist the world system at all, one that is devoid of the particularity of the good news of Christianity.  The first way will assure that no one will ever hear the good news of Jesus Christ as the good news that it truly is.  The other way will assure that no one hears anything at all.  The difficult thing is to be full of grace and truth as Jesus was and to make sure the gospel we preach is fully gracious and fully truthful. 

The middle way here rests on understanding that God himself wins people's hearts through his kindness and through sacrificial love not through condemnation, and that this requires real faith and courage to believe on our part.  God gives a genuine and sincere invitation to us and he isn't intimidated by our sin or the weakness and brokenness that marks human life and culture.  God will deal with our sin, and he doesn’t even have to bully us to do it.  God is not intimidated by American secularism or "godless pagan Europe" or the sin of any other nation or people in the world.  He deals very effectively with his enemies all the time and in Jesus he has a sufficient remedy for the sin of the whole world, and for every manifestation of that sin in that culture, whether it is among the intellectual elite or the poorest of the poor.  God is powerful and mighty to save, mighty to revive, to transform, to call to repentance, period, and we are called to have faith in that.  We have hope because we will never be in control of what God is up to in the world, but we do know that he is in the habit of raising the dead and turning the world upside down.  If he wants to make revival in this nation or China or call Europe back to himself, he will do it.   The nations are in his hand, they are his business.  But having a grasp on God's agenda for the nations is not our primary concern.  Our primary concern is having the courage and faith to peach actual good news to our neighbor and love him to the fullest and to the end. 

And what happens after Paul completes his telling of the gospel story?  More or less what happens to Paul in every city.  Some people believe the good news proclaimed, some laugh at the idea of the resurrection of the dead.  They don’t try to stone him or throw him out of the city—which are some of the more extreme responses to Paul—but normally only Paul’s own people do that, not the Gentiles.  There are a few commentators who believe that these last few verses are indicative of a mediocre response to the gospel, and this method of Paul's is "compromised" because he accommodated too much to the culture.  I don't think there's any textual support for that reading of this passage, and instead this passage is a triumph of evangelism and a model for us for how we can be faithful to the gospel no matter how little preparation we think our audience has for understanding God.  Again, our job is not to be in control of the gospel preached or worry about people’s response to it.  Our job is to be faithful to the good news and the good Lord that we have received and to do our best to pass along that story we live in and by with all the grace and truth we can muster, with God’s help. 

Father in heaven, we praise you for your kindness and goodness towards us and everything that you have made.  We pray you by the power of your Holy Spirit to enter into a deeper knowledge of you and your kindness towards us so we can preach the good news of your salvation and redemption to the ends of the earth, in every situation that we find ourselves, always having a word of grace and truth to offer to the people around us who do not yet know you and are in such desperate need of you.  In Jesus' name and for his sake, we pray.

On Sublimation and other things

   I recently renamed this blog, "Sublimation, et alia" and the title deserves a short word of explanation.  "El alia" is the Latin for "and other things" as you might or might not have guessed.  "Sublimation" is a word that generally means one of three things to people: either it means nothing (of course), it means a special sort of reaction in chemistry (a phase change--solid to gas without going to liquid first), or it means something in psychology, related originally to Freudian thought.  (The usage in psychology being derived from the term in chemistry.)  When I say sublimation, what I mean is something similar to the Freudian term, which probably has its own history in study of aesthetics.  I mean this: sublimation is the act of taking some raw bit of human experience and making it beautiful or beneficial to others by means of reflection and some attempt at word craft or conceptual art.  If you do not believe in or have not been exposed to "conceptual" art--or the art of making thought beautiful, pleasing, and useful, I will ask you to consider reading Boethius' definition of eternity, or to make a study of some work of Thomas Aquinas or Plato.  There are people (commonly called philosophers, although there are certainly other kinds of people who do this work too) who do know how to make thinking beautiful.  I imagine that is why Aristotle thought thinking itself was the highest pleasure of the mind.

A Little Side Quest: Correlating Enneagram and Myers-Briggs

  Two of my favorite play-toys that are my favorite partly because they are useful and helpful and partly because they are fun are the two "personality inventories" called Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram.  I am curious about them both.  They are both helpful to me in different ways.  Myers-Briggs is helpful to me in understanding the mechanism of personality--how exactly thoughts, feelings, and perception goes down in human consciousness.  Its value (as far as I know) is more phenomenological than anything else.  It explains more that you have x or y preference for viewing and interacting with the world not why.  The more serious and formal the study of Myers Briggs the less it claims to be interested in telling you what an ENTP is other than a person whose preferences for cognitive processes stack up in a particular way, beginning with Extroverted iNtuition and ending with Extroverted Sensing.  The more serious one gets about Enneagram on the other hand, the more one learns that the system concerns motive, virtue, and identity more than anything else.  (I am nowhere near understanding why a nonagon is important.  I do understand that number values are employed, not in any numerological way, but because number values are neutral unlike most appellation.)
   So the little pet theory or interest I have is how the two correlate . . . and it would be nice to understand eventually--perhaps before I die--why they correlate.  But if you wouldn't mind leaving a comment telling me what your Myers-Briggs letters is and your Enneagram is, I would be greatly entertained.  From time to time I shall perhaps post some articles or thoughts about why such and such MB type correlates often with an E type.
   If you are interested in playing my little game, but don't know what your MB letters or E numbers are, please see this site for Myers Briggs (I also like this one, but not for its inventory) and this site for Enneagram.  These are my favorites for various reasons.  There are certainly other ones.

A starting example:  The author is an Myers Briggs ENTP and an Enneagram 5.  ENTPs are rare enough that I don't know for sure if I've met another ENTP 5.  The chief irregularity according to the Enneagram theory is that 5s tend to be introverted, not extroverted.  My preference for extroversion is low, but there is no question in my mind that my Extroverted iNtuition vastly outstrips my Introverted Thinking.  It seems to me also that I get less extroverted as I get older.  Also, when I first became introduced to the Enneagram in high school, I misidentified as an 8 (the 5's arrow of integration).  While that seems to bespeak high school as a time of positive integration for me, it also underscores the extroverted dimension of my personality.

Sermon on Genesis 17--Our Hope is in You

This is a sermon I wrote for Trinity Chapel.  It focuses on the place of election and hope particularly in Sarah's experiences in Genesis.  God takes notice of her and he takes notice of you.

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Strength and my Redeemer.

Good morning.  I will be preaching on the Genesis 17 passage this morning.  Our readings from Genesis over the last few days have been concerned with Abraham, our first father in the faith.  In the first 11 chapters of Genesis we see the new Creation of God become subject to suffering, darkness and death because of the sin of human beings.  We see the human family plunged into tragedy after tragedy—starting with the story of Cain and Abel and culminating with the stories of the Flood and of the Tower at Babel—that great bastion of false religious dreams, aspirations, and human pride.  And in chapter 12 we come to the election of the family of Abram by God  . . . we see the beginning of God’s plan of redemption, we see the beginning of God’s self-revelation to Abram, his election of Abram and his family to be made a great nation, to be blessed and honored, to be God’s special people by covenant, and to be the people through whom all the families of the earth would be blessed eventually in Jesus Christ.  

  In the first half of chapter 17, our reading from yesterday, we find God confirming his covenant to Abram and assuring him that he is going to establish his covenant between himself and Abram’s descendants, to be the God of Abram’s descendants, and to give them the inheritance of the land of Canaan.  He also gives them the sign of his covenant, a sign in their own bodies, the covenant sign of circumcision.

And he does something else quite interesting and quite unexpected that is related to much of the narrative of our passage this morning: he changes Abram’s name to Abraham.  On the surface of things, it doesn’t look like a huge difference.  Abram means “exalted father” and Abraham means “father of a multitude”.  But here God is doing something relatively new.  He does something that he did not even do in the Garden of Eden.  And our reading today also begins with a naming or renaming.  This morning, we begin with Sarai who is renamed Sarah.  Both of these names mean princess, with Sarai apparently being an older version of the name.  God specifically calls Sarai by name, renames her Sarah, and tells Abraham that he has taken notice of Sarah and will bless her.  Consider the way that God takes notice of Sarah.  It reminds us of Hagar’s earlier encounter with God in which she insists that God has taken notice of her, “You are the one who sees me,” Hagar says to God.  By implication, the one who sees her when no one else has.

Sarah is an old woman now—a woman with no heir and no children—a woman who would have been considered a failure because of her inability to produce children for a great man like Abraham.  Does God abandon her in her distress?  Does he make his promises for Abraham only?  Or is he rather the God of blessing who seeks to bless all the nations of the earth?  God is the one who time and again chooses to work out his promises in one for the sake of many—here he starts with Abraham, but he sees Sarah, and he blesses her too.

God says, “I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her.  I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of people shall come from her.”  This is the first time that we see Sarah specifically included by name into the promises given to Abraham.  From the beginning of God’s word to Abraham, God Almighty had promised to give Abraham offspring—seed.  But here we see something that was not clear until now—that God had considered Sarah as well as Abraham and when he promised to give Abraham offspring, it turns out that he was choosing to fulfill his promises through Sarah. 

At first, Abraham doesn’t take this too well.  He falls down and he laughs—warring between belief and unbelief—asking if it is possible for people their age to conceive children.  Sarah, of course, will react in a similar way when she overhears the angels speaking to Abraham about the reconfirmation of God’s promises. Abraham protests, asking God that Ishmael be considered the child of promise.  God resists him.  “No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son and you shall call his name Isaac.  I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him.”  He names Isaac, too, perhaps a bit ironically and maybe a bit cheekily to remind Abraham and Sarah of their reaction to God’s promise, though I think this name, “he laughs,” also foreshadows the joy that Abraham and Sarah will have in Isaac.  God promises to bless Ishmael as well, and to make him a great nation: he speaks to Abraham in reassurance, much as he spoke to Hagar so many years before.  But he also firmly tells Abraham what his plans are, and they are to establish his covenant with Isaac, “whom Sarah shall bear to you at this time next year.”  This is God’s plan, not Abraham’s plan, and he has chosen to bless Sarah and her son, Isaac.

I am always struck when I read these passages in Genesis and see God initiating with Abraham and Sarah to give them what they most desire and what they think is least possible.  I also think it is interesting that we don’t really see Abraham and Sarah asking God for very much.  It is possible that they have spent much of their adult lives praying for children, but what we have recorded in Scripture is not their prayers and desires for children (though we see that in other cases in the Scriptures)—but rather God’s insistence that he will give them descendants beyond number.  There is one sense in which God sees them, and is responding to their need and providing them with an heir, but there is quite another sense in which he is also making up an entirely new plan of blessing for them which is good and bountiful blessing beyond their imagination—he not only gives them an heir, he gives them lines of kings and countries, and his blessing and favor and presence as an inheritance.  All this is above and beyond what they dreamed to ask for.  God is good.  He is their father (and ours) and they don’t even have to ask for all this because God sees them wants to give them every good thing—he wants to give them all the good things he has for them.

But he does it in such a peculiar way, and with such peculiar timing!  If God is so interested in the well-being of Abraham and Sarah—if he wants to be their God and wants to draw them into relationship with him and give them what he has, why does he wait so long to fulfill his promises to Abraham?  Why does God let Abraham and Sarah suffer those long years of doubt and privation of a child if he was just going to give them one in the end anyway?

First off, it seems pretty clear that God wanted to make his intervention preposterously and obviously divine.  The kind of intervention that apparently God’s chosen ones laugh at when it is first posed to them.  Both Abraham and Sarah laugh when they first hear that God wants to give them a son in their old age, when it is absolutely impossible and really very strange that they would have children.  It is a little wacky that God would choose for Sarah to conceive now, that he would choose to supernaturally give her the power to bear a child in her old age.  God fulfills his promises in such a way that his people understand that it is the power of God, not the contrivance of man that has fulfilled it.  This is God’s power and God’s wisdom operational, not the wisdom or power of the world.

In other words, God fulfills his promises in a way that includes his people’s getting to know him better.  That is always the aim of the promises of God, because the ultimate gift, the ultimate promise is God’s presence, God’s own self, Immanuel-God with us.  Abraham and Sarah don’t know it yet, but they are being schooled in the ways of God and schooled into knowing that he is the reward and blessing that they are truly seeking, and the thing they truly need.  God gives them a son—but gives them a son in order to create a people who might know him and out of which eventually will come the one man and the one Son who can put all things to right—everything that has gone wrong in the first 11 chapters of Genesis.  God does not bless us in order that we become so cozily content with this life that we forget things have gone wrong and we forget the purposes for which we are made.  We oftentimes forget or are skeptical of God’s desires to be kind to us, to be generous to us, to give us good things.  But on the flip side, we also imagine that when he does give us good things, he doesn’t mind that we are idolatrously preoccupied with them, when he really just wanted us to enjoy them and receive them as a gift from a loving Father.  So, he intervenes in our lives, with blessing and with discipline in order to show us the true life we are made for in Jesus Christ—to let us know that we are destined for something different and for something more than immediately meets the eye.

            This I think is the reason for the renaming.  Though God does choose the names of Isaac and Ishmael before they are born, he chooses to re-name Sarah and Abraham and clue them in on their lives being different and yet the same, and having both continuity and discontinuity with what they have lived previously.   He’s calling them out, calling them both to embrace a new life and a new identity with the God who gives what he has promised.  The naming of names is clearly important in the stories surrounding the birth of Jesus and John the Baptist and it is also clearly important in the book of Revelation, where Jesus makes several promises to the churches concerning names.  He promises to give new names to those who overcome, and he promises to actually write on those who overcome his own name.” (Rev 3:12b-13a)  Both of those junctures are junctures at which life has radically changed for the better because God is doing a new thing, bringing new life out of nothingness and out of death, which is something only God can do.

            The children of God are destined for great things because God has called us and blessed us and made us heirs with Christ and recipients of everything he has, blessing us with every spiritual blessing in Christ.  And he has told us to go, to share his blessings with all the nations in name of God.  It is my prayer for us today that we learn more about who God is and who he is calling us to be, that we walk more deeply into our new identity in Christ, that we recognize the love of the Father which is working in us to give us all good things by the power of the Holy Spirit.

            Father, we thank you that you have given us examples in your word that show us that you have called us to be your people and that you are our God.  Thank you for the lives of Abraham and Sarah and open our hearts to receive from you the fulfillment of your promises to them in Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.