Genesis 23, Hebrews 11:8-16 "A Better Country" Scott Hoezee

A friend of mine who is a Lutheran pastor always opens his pre-marital counseling sessions with something he also typically makes a point of saying at the actual wedding ceremony. Usually, of course, the people wanting to get married are young folks sometimes not-yet 20 years old but these days more often in their early- to mid-twenties. They are bright-eyed, romantic, bursting with the promise and possibilities of youth. Still, my friend looks pastorally into those lively, shining young eyes and says, "If you stay true to your nuptial vows, then in all likelihood the day will come when one of you will bury the other. You need to know that up front. You need to be ready to commit yourself to the kind of love that will let you carry on that far." Now I've never been in the study to witness this pastor saying this to anyone, but if I could be a fly on the wall, I would imagine I would notice a slight shadow falling across the faces of those starry-eyed lovers.

When we live our lives by promises, we of necessity need to look far beyond tomorrow or next week or even next year. When we live our lives on the wings of the kind of future, eschatological hope proffered to us in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, we know all along that we are taking a journey whose path will in all likelihood wend and wind its way far beyond our own graves. We embark on a sacred journey whose destination is the glory of God's kingdom but we none of us can know whether anything remotely like the fullness of that kingdom will be something we will ever experience in this life.

Tonight we come to what is for all intents and purposes the end of not just this recent sermon series on Abraham but to a significant ending of the Abraham cycle of stories. Two weeks ago we looked at what everyone agrees is the shattering climax of this tale when Abraham took his son, his only son, Isaac whom he loved, and was prepared to sacrifice that promised child on Mount Moriah. God didn't let him go through with it, of course, but instead heaven itself heaved a huge sigh of relief over how far Abraham had come since Genesis 12. God is so overjoyed with Abraham's level of faith that near the conclusion of Genesis 22 God makes one last and grand reiteration of the covenant promise.

As we saw, that chillingly climactic chapter concludes with the lovely image of father and son walking away from Mount Moriah together once again. Basically, that concluded the story of Father Abraham. Indeed, most commentators think that chapter 23 contains little more than a few necessary, but theologically unimportant, little narrative housekeeping details. Sarah and Abraham have to die as does everyone, so reporting their deaths needs to be in Genesis, but it need not be freighted with any greater meaning. In fact, some commentators think that the main thing you can glean out of Genesis 23 (if there is anything to be harvested here at all) is perhaps some insight into ancient Middle Eastern practices of buying and selling real estate.

But if that is all there is to learn from this chapter, then this sermon can end right here as none of you came to church this evening to learn something about the Hittite "art of the deal!" By now, of course, you know that last Tuesday, despite what I read in the commentaries on my shelf, I did not decide to switch passages but to stick with Genesis 23 for this evening. But you notice that I also added Hebrews 11, not because I think there is nothing to learn from Genesis 23 by itself but because I believe that the famous chapter of Hebrews 11 helps us to understand what Genesis 23 is finally all about (and it's not just about Hittite styles of wheeling and dealing!).

So let's look at this chapter and eventually let our thoughts slide into the words of also the author of Hebrews. In a way, we are this evening engaging in a kind of mental and spiritual time travel, slipping from a commonplace incident from 3,000 or so years ago into the New Testament era, into this present moment, and ultimately beyond that, too, all the way into God's promised future.

Genesis 23 begins this journey of time travel with the stark reporting of Sarah's death at the startlingly ripe old age of 127. She is dead and so she needs first to be mourned and lamented and then, of course, she needs to be buried. But that's when we find out the first striking truth as Genesis 23 divulges it: it has now been about sixty-two years since God first called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans, promising him progeny and land, offspring and a large country that he and his descendants could call their own. Well over half-a-century has passed since then. But even after all that time, guess what? The man to whom God promised the moon and the stars still does not have free and clear title to a single parcel of real estate! The promised son had been born and was now about 37 years old himself. Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac were a far cry from that "mighty nation" God had gone on and on about for decades, but at least Isaac was a start. Considering that he had been such a miracle child of Abraham and Sarah's extreme old age, Isaac's very existence seemed to mean more than just any old child's life would mean. If God could do that, then somewhere down the line maybe that great nation as numerous as the stars in the sky might come to be.

Maybe. But having offspring and descendants had been just half of God's covenental deal with Abraham. The other part involved a land to call their own, and although Abraham and Sarah had lived in Canaan for many, many years, they had thus far never really progressed beyond being tenants and squatters on someone else's property. Sarah's death at once brings this fact out into the open even as it forces Abraham to do something about this situation lest he have to bury the love of his life on someone else's land.

And so Abraham goes to the Hittites, apparently the rightful owners of that portion of Canaan. He goes to some of the landed aristocracy of the day and has to beg to purchase the deed and title to a piece of property. The negotiations that ensue are curious and seem to be filled with some gestures and words that were perhaps standard practice. The owner of the land in question, a man named Ephron, at first acts as though he simply would not hear of accepting a penny from Abraham. For his part, Abraham appears to know that he is supposed to refuse this faux generosity until finally Ephron says, "Oh very well then, what's 400 shekels of silver between friends?" The answer to that question is "A lot!" What Ephron asks of Abraham amounted to nothing less than a small fortune.

In return, however, Abraham gets what is described here as a pretty sizeable chunk of land. Significantly, we are told two things by the narrator: first, we are reminded in verse 19 that this purchase was for a part of the land of Canaan. Now technically, mentioning this was unnecessary. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the geography of that region would know instantly that this purchase was in Canaan. It would sort of be like my telling you, "We bought a piece of land along the Muskegon River, which is in the state of Michigan." Well, you all knew the Michigan part already--including that detail was superfluous. But in Genesis 23 the narrator hammers home the fact that this was in Canaan because that was the land of promise. Hence, this pricey purchase--so commonplace and mundane a transaction on the surface--is actually very, very meaningful because it was Abraham's first real foothold in the country God has been promising to give him all along.

The other significant detail is that the land Abraham bought for Sarah's grave was near Mamre, which you may recall is the location where Abraham received the three divine visitors as we read about it in chapter 18. Yahweh himself was one of those visitors that day. And so Mamre became the place of a significant revelation. It was the place where the promise of a son was repeated for the last time before the son was actually born about a year later. It was the place where Sarah's cackles of laughter at the hilarious absurdity of it all re-enforced why they had to name their baby "Laughter," Yizaq.

There were, in short, happy memories associated with Mamre and so, fittingly, it became Sarah's resting place in the middle of Abraham's first-ever acquisition of property in the Promised Land. But it was his dear wife's death that brought that purchase about. Abraham had to bury the love of his life for the promise to begin moving forward. Two weeks ago we noted that the near-death of Isaac, and the foreshadowing phrase that God himself would provide the sacrifice, told us that the final fulfillment of God's promises to this world would not come easily or cheaply. In this Lenten Season, we are keenly aware of how salvation has indeed been purchased in blood.

So in Genesis 23 the fulfillment of the covenant lurches forward but not without grief, sadness, and the death of a dear wife. And where did this all leave Abraham? It left him a lonely widower, the father of a lone, as-yet unmarried son, both living on a modest tract of land that, although maybe a start, was still a long way from the fullness of all God had promised. And of course it is just here that Hebrews 11 comes in.

Because the simple yet sometimes overlooked fact of the matter is that you can trace the Abraham story all the way to its conclusion and still you discover that Abraham, and now Isaac, had to live by faith alone every bit as much at the end of it all as a man called Abram had to do in those first hours after God had initially called him way back when in Ur. "These people were still living by faith when they died," Hebrews 11:13 reminds us. They did not receive the things promised to them and, in truth, never came anywhere close to receiving them in this life. Instead they saw them and welcomed them from a distance despite the fact that their very belief in the promises of God made them misfits for the time being.

We've all heard the old barb that the problem with religious people is that they are so heavenly minded as to be of no earthly good. Karl Marx epitomized and axiomized that belief when he famously derided all religion as being the "opiate of the masses." Religion, Marx thought, was like a narcotic, a drug, used to so completely numb people's sensibilities that in this life they would not stand up to injustice. With the hope of a better life in heaven by and by, Christian folks are passive, biding their time, twiddling their thumbs, and just waiting for God to come pick them up.

Marx was wrong about all that for lots of reasons we won't go into tonight. Still, when you embrace the promises of God's future the way Abraham did (and the way we Christians now do in Christ), there is a sense in which you become, as Hebrews 11:13 puts it, "aliens and strangers on earth." You look at life differently than do others. You lament things that others don't even seem to notice, you take great joy in activities that others think are foolish. You come to church to worship God, even though, as Bill Gates recently said, such a use of a Sunday morning seems wasteful when there is money to be made and so very many other pleasures in life to pursue at that hour of the week.

It is wrong to let our kingdom mindset (and its undeniable future dimension) become an excuse for inactivity in this life. True enough. But it is also inevitable that having God's gospel promises burning in your heart will make you out-of-step with a good many people around you in society. Abraham was like that, too. But the same faith that made him a bit of an oddball also gave him a window on glory.

Princeton professor Donald Juel once made the comment that on the surface of things, when God calls a person out of the blue the way he once called Abraham, it looks like the greatest thing in the world. Getting singled out by God Almighty himself for something quite special in the grand scheme of cosmic salvation looks as wonderful as suddenly finding out you won the lottery or something. But it doesn't take too long in Genesis before we sense that even a millennia or two before Jesus came to this earth, the truth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's famous line was already evident: When Christ calls a person, he bids that person to come and die. The cost of discipleship is being asked to live by faith in a world where most everything you can see with your eyes seems calculated to cast that very faith into the most dire of doubt.

When God calls you by grace, you suddenly find your whole life staked to a passel of promises and yet for your whole life they mostly remain just that: promises. We keep journeying toward what Shakespeare once called "the undiscovered country," by which he meant the future. Along the way we do, blessedly enough, see many evidences of God's presence, love, grace, and care. But at the end of the day, when our lives draw to their close whenever that may be, what we still cling to in hope are the promises of God--promises which we hope will become a reality for us beyond the grave because for this life, there's still no escaping that grave.

But we resist such a scenario. We wish that the roads of the saints listed in Hebrews 11, including chiefly Abraham, had been smoother, we wish that their vision had been clearer, their sense of ultimate fulfillment keener. And we think this way probably in the hope that maybe our life's journeys will be smoother and more fulfilling, too. We're not promised that, though. We're called to follow where God leads and to be Christ's witnesses even as we all along the way cling fiercely to the promises.

Like Abraham and any number of others you could name, so also with us: having been given this calling, we know that we may not be in for an easy road. We are strangers and aliens in this world. We are journeying toward an undiscovered, but better, country whose truth and reality we believe on faith but in which we most assuredly do not fully dwell yet. With the Holy Spirit in our hearts we may be closer to the reality of God's kingdom than were those who came before Pentecost, but there is a sense in which we also glimpse the things promised from a distance.

But still there is that faith, itself a gift of Pentecost--a faith that transforms us. I mentioned a few minutes ago that after Sarah died, what we have at the end of Genesis 23 is just a widower, a single son, and one small piece of just-purchased Promised Land turf. If you take away Abraham's faith, and the God in whom Abraham placed that faith, then what you have at the end of Genesis 23 is pretty pathetic. That's why we dare not lose sight of that faith.

I know I mentioned it once before, but it is for this reason that I have always been fond of Frederick Buechner's closing words from his character sketch of Abraham in his book Peculiar Treasures. Buechner uses updated imagery to imagine a very old Abraham near the end of his life attending some kind of very small family reunion. All through the years, Buechner says, in spite of everything, Abraham had never stopped having faith that God would make him the father of a great nation.

Night after night that was the dream he rode to sleep on, seeing in his mind's eye glittering cities, great armies, curly-bearded kings. Finally, you can almost picture Abraham posing for a family portrait, his small clan gathered round. They were not a mighty nation--not by a long shot, yet you'd never know if it you looked into Abraham's eyes. Glazed over by cataracts and tired from having seen altogether too much of life in this rough and tumble world, those eyes nevertheless sparkled with a faith in something deeper. Abraham's eyes seem to say, "My family will be great, just you wait. My God's promises will come true. And someday, who knows when, but someday they will all be talking about my great, great, great-grandson, the one they'll call the Light of the world." Amen.