When God Does Not Say "Yes"

Genesis 12:1-9    Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you…”

What must Abram’s mindset have been as the Lord issues this command? Abram is old, his wife, Sarai, is old, and they are settled in comfortable circumstances. They are living in what we would call their golden years, and it is certainly not a time to start packing up a household, packing up one’s life, not a time to move to some new and unknown land.

But there was a terrible emptiness in Abram’s life, and a great sorrow in Sarai’s.  To be childless, to have no legitimate heir, was a tragedy in ancient times. Sarai was considered barren, and to be barren meant that, as a Jewish woman, Sarai had failed in her most important role in life. Back then, as it was for many centuries and in many societies, a woman’s chief role in a marriage was to bear children, especially an heir. Sarai must have blamed herself for this seeming great failure, and it would have had a real effect on her feelings and self-image.

And now, God shows up with an order and a promise. “Go”, God says, leave everything you know, and, speaking directly to Abram, in words that of course affect Saria, I will make of you a great nation…. 

It is God speaking, but surely Abram and Sarai must have had their doubts. Children – at their age?  Later in Genesis we are told that Sarai actually laughed.

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.”

What must life have been like for Matthew, a Jew, but also a tax collector, despised by his fellow Jews because he is working for the enemy, for the Romans. We hear that word so often in reference to Matthew, “despised”, we may have forgotten what it meant for him.

It didn’t mean that people merely disliked him. He was seen as a traitor, was considered ritually unclean, and was excluded from synagogue leadership, and often disqualified as a witness in court. He and his family belonged nowhere – not to Roman society, nor to that of the Jews. True, he had wealth and status, but he was socially isolated and morally condemned.

And just as we are about to hear the Pharisees criticisms of Jesus treatment and acceptance of Matthew, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in and knelt before Jesus, saying, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.”

Again, we are introduced to a person suffering from stresses and emotions we can barely imagine. This man’s child has died, but here he is, asking Jesus to come and bring her back to life. Think of how desperate he must have been, a leader of the synagogue, coming to this very controversial rabbi and asking Him for help. Yet, even as Jesus rises to go with this distraught father, the hem of His garment is touched by someone else seeking His healing.

Different stories of very different people, all with one thing in common – they are all desperate. 

Abram is helpless, while Sarai is hopeless. This must have been a continuing state in which they lived their lives because, as far as they were concerned, Sarai was too old to bear a child, and that was that. That door had closed forever. God’s promise must have wreaked havoc with feelings perhaps long buried.

Matthew must have lived his life in the kind of conflict that arises when one has too much worldly wealth, but somehow has been excluded from the friendships and community that we all rely on for support. He had chosen the path of financial security, but found himself an outcast amongst his own people. Think what it must have meant to Matthew to have the kind of acceptance Jesus, a fellow Jew, has offered him.

And what about the father of the dead girl? When you talk about finality, death has to be it. And yet, here is this man, an elder of importance in the synagogue, begging the controversial Rabbi to come and bring his daughter back to life.

These are extreme situations, all of them happily resolved. And yet, we’ve all had our desperate days. Many of us have experienced war, sickness, heath issues, the birth of a disabled child, the aftermath of a serious accident, the death of a loved one, sometimes someone seemingly far too young to go home to God, and for us the resolution has not always been happy.

When we have unhappy endings, as human beings we react strongly. We may strike out in anger, and disbelief, turn on God and demand to know “why?”. We prayed, we went to church, why did this happen, what reason can God give us? Look what God did for Abram and Sarai, for the leader of the synagogue, for the woman suffering from hemorrhages – so why not for us? This is often when we stop going to church, stop believing, and give up on God entirely. This is the saddest and most sinful outcome that can occur. This is total despair. But we often despair, because we do not understand what Jesus has told us.

The happy resolutions we see in today’s lessons, often lead us to believe that what we hope for, if we do all the “right things”, we should get. In our epistle today, Paul tells the Church in Rome, “Hoping against hope, [Abram] believed that he would become “the father of many nations.” And, by golly, that’s what happened. So why don’t or didn’t our hopes come to fruition?

This is when we have to face the fact that often we do not think or ask as we have been taught to do by Jesus. What we hope for, and probably pray for, is our agenda, but not necessarily God’s agenda. You may remember we are taught to have a fear of hell and the hope of heaven. Heaven is where our true hope lies. We find it difficult to accept what that means, which is that what happens here on earth is in God’s hands. Even more difficult to accept is that we may never know why things went as they did.

We may never understand why there is war, or a child is born disabled, or why there was such a terrible automobile accident. We aren’t promised we will get answers or explanations, rather, we are promised heaven and, in this life, the joy and peace of setting our hearts there. Accepting this is one of the hardest and sometimes most painful things we are called to do. It doesn’t mean we stop praying, or asking, it means we accept we aren’t the ones in control.

When what happens in our lives does not seem to reflect God’s Love, while we struggle with our wants, needs, worldly hopes and emotions, we need to remember that real Love, the Love Jesus has for us, is not an emotion. It is a promise. As we slog through our daily lives here on earth, we are to set our hearts on Him, and allow Him to heal our hearts and souls. For this we have to relinquish control and our expectation that things should go exactly as we want them to. Our job is to obey and remain faithful.

There is a wonderful poem, The Call of Abraham, by Fr. Killan McDonnell, OSB. In it, he imagines Abram’s response to God. Remember, Abram is old, settled, and has accepted things as they are. He is disappointed, but he is faithful.

Part of the poem goes like this. Abram is speaking.  “I hear ‘Go.’ At seventy-five, am I supposed to scuttle my life, take that ancient wasteland, Sarai, place my thin arthritic bones upon the road to some mumbled nowhere?” And for a while, Abram continues to rant at God, for the preposterous command to “go”. But in the end, after he has vented his frustration, he surrenders. “God of the wilderness, from two desiccated lumps, from two parched prunes you promise to make a great nation. In me all peoples of the earth will be blessed. You come late, Lord, very late, but my camels leave in the morning.”

Let us pray:

Heavenly Father, when our hearts long for one path, yet You lead us down another, when we pray for one outcome, but You ordain another, it is hard to let go. Our minds wrestle with questions, and our spirits feel the weight of surrender. But we know Your wisdom is higher than ours, and Your love for each of us is deeper than we can comprehend. Teach us to trust that every “no” or “not yet” is wrapped in Your goodness. Give us the courage to release our plans and desires into Your hands, the patience to wait on Your timing, and the faith to believe that You are working all things for our good. Even when we cannot see the full picture, help us rest in the truth that Your will is perfect, Your ways are just, and Your Love can heal our souls. In Jesus’ name, Amen.