Abraham Part 9 - Isaac's Birth

Many years ago I read this supposed love-letter in a book that was a collection of Graffiti. It made me smile then, and is still makes me smile now.
 
Gloria, I love you.
I would die for you.
I would walk through fire for you,
swim raging torrents for you,
walk to the ends of the earth for you.
My love for you knows no bounds.

See you next Thursday outside the chip shop.

But only if it’s not raining….

Love, Nigel.

 
A promise is only ever as good as the one making the promise.

Somehow, I’m not quite convinced that Nigel will be able to deliver on his promises of undying love.

But if I could boil the story of Abraham down to just one principle to take away and live out of, it would be that our God keeps his promises, but he keeps them in his own time.

This whole journey that Abraham and Sarah had made began with the promise of land and descendants. And now, twenty five years later, Sarah is finally blessed with the son that she yearned for, in little Isaac.

And as is the way of these things, I’m pretty sure that the minute she set eyes on him, all the rest was forgotten. Not just the pains of labour, but the pain of the previous quarter of a century of childless waiting. It would have melted away like snow on a Spring morning.

Small wonder she laughed with joy. After all those weary years of trying, failing and almost giving up hope, God had finally kept his promise.

But he’d kept it in his own time. And that’s an important lesson for us too.

“Remember this, dear friends” says the Apostle Peter in his second letter to the churches “With the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness”.

Peter’s reminding us that God alone sees the full picture, and God’s plan unfolds according to his timing and not ours. It’s easy to get discouraged when things don’t happen the way we want them to and when we want them to, but that doesn’t mean that God isn’t interested and involved. It might just mean that the timing’s not right yet.

Bob and Barbara were Canadian Missionaries working with a lost tribe in East Africa, and after 12 years living among them, learning their language and their ways, they finally led someone to Christ - the chief's son. After that taboo had been broken, others followed and before long the missionaries had many folk to disciple and their little congregation began to grow.

 

But not long afterwards, both were struck down with a mystery illness that left them so incapacitated that they were confined to bed not just for weeks, but months.

 

All they could do was lie there, praying for the new believers and the church, and asking for healing, but God didn't seem to answer those prayers. And Bob and Barbara eventually returned to Canada, defeated and confused.

20 years later their son, Nick, returned to Africa on business trip and he made a point of visiting the village where they had worked. To his astonishment, he found a thriving church there.

The missionaries leaving had been a catalyst, and the local Christians realised it was up to them to be living out their faith and reaching out to others.

Instead of dying, the church had turned around. It came good. But it came good in God’s time.

And we see that pattern again and again in the Biblical narrative. 25 years for Sarah to fall pregnant. Generations and generations, including a spell in slavery, before Abraham’s descendants would finally settle in the Promised Land.

Judges, Kings, Exile, Return, Rebuilding, Occupation – all played out over centuries and centuries. And then 400 silent years between the Old and the New Testaments in which the word of the Lord was scarcely heard.

Unpromising times. Seemingly God-forsaken times. A nation’s equivalent of Sarah’s 25 years.

But after all of that, came the Messiah; and the one who went before him to prepare the way – John the Baptist. Another son born to ageing parents who’d given up hope of having children.

And John’s particular call was to prepare the way in the desert for the Christ, and for his message that God’s time had come and God’s kingdom was at hand.

The barren womb, the barren desert, the barren landscape of dead religiosity coming to life – because God had made promises, and now was the time of their fulfilment.

On this first Sunday in Advent, it’s part of our tradition that we revisit the themes of time and waiting and hope. And we switch to the liturgical colours of dark purple because prior to the arrival of the light, it’s dark. And it’s the times when we’re in the darkness that most test our faith.

Advent is all about waiting and there are so many things we might be waiting for this morning; and so much unspoken restlessness in our waiting.

For some, Sarah and Elizabeths’ stories might be just too close to the bone. Where is this God who seems to spend a good amount of time in the Bible opening or closing wombs? Why do our prayers for a child seem to go unanswered?

Others, maybe, are waiting for change – change in circumstances, or an attitude, or the tone of a relationship. We sense that we can’t be happy unless things change but we’re not quite sure what that change might look like, or if it can even happen. We feel lost in the middle of a life we cannot control.

Some are waiting in the hope of health – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. We know the pain that we carry and the scars that others don’t see. Is this as good as things are going to get, or does God have more and better for us in the years ahead?

And some of us are living in our own end-time; more aware of advancing years and diminishing capability than we’d like to admit.

But the Advent message, springing to life in the fallow wombs of Sarah and Elizabeth, given voice in the prophesy of Isaiah, is that God’s life and God’s way can flourish even in the barren places of our lives.

“The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.

Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.

And a highway will be there; it will be called the way of Holiness. The unclean will not journey on it; it will be for those who walk in that way.

They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads.

Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away”.

You are right to hope and pray for the things you desire, but I cannot promise you that prayer will bring you the child, or the relational happiness, or the health, or the good end to your days that you hope for.

But I can promise you that if you traverse the terrain of your own wilderness in the company of God, life will spring up all around you in ways that you would never have dreamt of.

In this season of Christ’s Advent, may we learn to wait patiently for whatever God, in his wisdom and his timing, has for us. And may we, like Sarah, find only laughter and joy at the end of our waiting.