Friday, August 6, 2021
A tree
Closer is still a tree,
Is still a tree,
Is still a tree,
And Always Remains a Tree, Bark and All.
So we, too, always remain sinners.
Genesis 17:1
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless.
Matthew 5:16
In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.
Words of Grace For Today
Abram is, best estimate, a conglomeration of actual historical figures, collected into one archetypal character, our ancestor. Whether the stories belong to one man or many different people, at 99 Abram is old. God did invite Abram to walk before him, and Abram was by God’s grace alone, blameless at that time.
Abraham would go on to cheat, lie, covet, commit adultery, kill (or at least plan to kill, and his own son no less), … a good archetypal character. Doesn’t matter if it is one person or many people’s stories gathered under one name. This is true about Abram: God love him and Sarah. God did exceptional things for them, gave them land and descendants, when they were nomads who left home, and cheated their way to some kind of security, passing Sarah off as a sister, and then exactly their hosts honour and wealth when he treated Sarah as Abram’s sister instead of his wife. They used Sarah’s handmaid as a surrogate ‘wife’ for Abram to secure themselves God’s promise of descendants, and then set Hagar and Ishmael packing into the desert wilderness to die when they did not need them anymore, when God provided Sarah a son, Isaac.
Abraham and Sarah certainly were not ‘blameless’ before the Lord, the Lord who knows everything.
St. Paul had it right, Abraham was reckoned to be righteous by grace through faith. God made Abram blameless before God, and God blessed Abraham and Sarah with all they had.
The danger for us when we forget is that we assume God made Abraham and Sarah perfect people … so we think we can become or be made (even by God) to live blameless for the rest of our lives, or even for a day! We cannot.
God alone makes us righteous by grace alone (that is by God’s doing to us as a free, undeserved gift) through faith.
If we think Abram or we can be righteous on our own, we have to live in great delusion, disconnected for our own reality, and we have to try to remove anyone from this real world who knows and will say honestly how broken we really are. It’s impossible except by faking it and becoming truly evil.
The effort to be perfect after our baptisms has been embraced by many Christians, as a way to control others. It’s all a lie … a huge lie that has lived for many generations.
Christ gives us a little light. Just a little light. And the Holy Spirit keeps it burning in spite of all the sins we commit. We cannot choose to be blameless. We can choose to not hide the little light that Christ gives us. We can actually let Christ work through us in all our days, and pray for forgiveness each morning, noon and night.
Or …
Well the other choice is nothing less than living a deluded, dangerous, and evil life … which God surely knows about and will judge those who so choose to live this delusion.
…
We choose to let our lights shine, Jesus’ lights given to us to carry through our days … not so that people will we awestruck by our having these lights. Rather we choose to let these little lights shine so that others will give God praise, adoration and worship.
People will say: God chooses those sinful people to carry Christ’s light to the world. The wonders done cannot be because of those people. It has to be God’s doing. They will worship God for God’s great works in us good sinners …
and …
They will know that God can work such wonders in their own sinful lives as well.
(That’s carrying the light of Christ for others to see!)