Sermon by Dr. George Bryant Wirth
September 14, 2008
CHRIST AT THE CENTER: THE FAMILY OF
FAITH -
FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION
Scripture:
Genesis 15:1-6, Hebrews 11:8-12
INTRODUCTION
As you know, the theme for
this new church year is “Christ at the Center: The Family of Faith,” and at the
beginning of our journey, we’re focusing on some of the family stories from the
Book of Genesis.
Last Sunday we talked
together about how God called Abraham and Sarah to leave
Abraham’s part of the
covenant was to believe God and to be obedient and faithful to Him, and that is
how this story about The Family of Faith begins.
I
Now, the next time God
appears to Abraham in a vision is recorded in Genesis 15, where God renews His
promise and assures Abraham that the promise will come true: Do not be afraid (the Lord tells him),…I am
your shield and your reward will be very great (Genesis 15:1). But Abraham, in his old age, starts to ask
some questions: O Lord God, what will You give me?
For I continue to be childless…You have given me no offspring.
So God led His servant
outside that night and said Look toward
heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them…so shall your
descendants be. And the Bible says
that Abraham believed the Lord and the
Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness (Genesis 15:6).
Our friend Barbara Brown
Taylor reminds us in a sermon about this story entitled “The Late Bloomer”
(“Gospel Medicine” by Barbara Brown Taylor, page 36) that “Sarah…had not been
in on the midnight summit” (between God and her husband), and knowing that
Abraham was pushing eighty and she was just nine years younger, there was some
doubt in Sarah’s mind about the promise coming true. And then it happened…”
Barbara Brown Taylor
describes it this way:
“For two dozen years Abraham and Sarah
had lived in the promise, led by the delicate threads stitched through their
hearts. For two dozen years they watered
every seed that fell upon their paths without losing sight of where they were
going or what had set them on their way.
There were lean times and there were fat ones, but insofar as they were
all God’s times, they were all good times, rolling out ahead of the old couple
like a red carpet for them to walk upon.
And never did this seem more true to either of them than the spring
morning of Sarah’s ninetieth year when she came into her husband drying her
hands on her dress and said (with stars in her eyes), ‘Abraham, I have
something to tell you’” (From “Gospel
Medicine,” ibid, page 41)
If you read on to Genesis 21,
that’s where you’ll find the birth of Isaac and the turning point in this
story. Because through those three
Biblical characters – Abraham (which in Hebrew means “Father of a multitude of
nations”), Sarah (which means “Kings of peoples shall come from her”) and their
son Isaac (which means “Laughter”), from the three of them, The Family of Faith
was Born.
Now some of us might wonder
why God waited so long to bless Abraham and Sarah with a child…just as we
wonder why every birth doesn’t turn out the way we had planned and hoped
for. Someday when we get to heaven, I
think we will know more. But here on
earth, every baby born is both a miracle and a mystery.
Years ago I told you the
story about a young boy who had chosen a subject for an essay in school – the
mystery of life. He read up on the
subject and had plenty of literature that dealt with it, and he had become
rather proficient on that subject, but he wanted some first-hand information
from his own family.
And so he went into the
living room one day and asked his mother, “Mom, where did I come from”? His mother, who wasn’t quite ready for
question, answered “Well, a stork brought you dear.” Rather impatiently, he said “Then Mom, where
did you come from”? She replied “Well, a
stork brought me too, dear.” The boy was
frustrated so he went into the kitchen and found his grandmother and said
“Grandma where did you come from”? And
in keeping with the “family answer” she said evasively “Well, a stork brought
me child.” Completely exasperated, the
boy went up to his room, sat down and began the essay this way: “There hasn’t been a normal birth in our
family for three generations.”
Just so, in the mystery and
the miracle of the birth of Isaac, The Family of Faith was born. God only knows how that happened. Even though they counted years differently in
those days, Abraham and Sarah were “long in the tooth,” and they had been
around for years. It was God’s doing –
the beginning of The Family of Faith.
And that family, as you know,
has grown much larger down through the centuries, From Generation to Generation, just as the Letter to the Hebrews
describes it in chapter 11:
By faith Abraham received the power of procreation,
even though he was too old – and Sarah herself was barren – because he
considered God faithful who had promised.
Therefore…descendants were born, as many as the stars of heaven and as
innumerable grains of sand by the seashore (Hebrews 11:11-12).
And through our faith in
Jesus Christ, we can claim the promise is true, for you and I as Christians
belong to that family of faith too. How
do we know that is so? Turn with me in
your pew Bibles to Matthew chapter 1 and look at the genealogy, which begins
this way:
An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the
son of David, the son of Abraham.
Abraham was the father of Isaac… (all the way to the end)…and Jacob the
father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the
Messiah. So all the generations from
Abraham to David are fourteen…and from David to the deportation to
And now we can say, “From the
Messiah to our generation, two thousand years.”
You see, the promise and
covenant given to Abraham and Sarah and then to the chosen people of Israel,
the Jews, has been fulfilled through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus,
and revealed to Gentiles since the first century A.D., which today includes you
and me.
Just as it was with Abraham,
what God requires from us is that we believe and entrust our lives to Him in
obedience to His will and His way, and as Christians, that we receive the gift
of salvation through the life-giving, life-changing revelation of God in Jesus
Christ our Lord. And so The Family of
Faith has continued to grow From Generation to Generation.
II
Now, I have heard it said
that “Christianity is always one generation away from extinction,” meaning, I
think, that if we don’t spread the good news about Jesus Christ to others and
fail to pass the faith on to our own sons and daughters, then gradually but
inevitably, the gospel story will die out.
A slightly different way to
describe it is the familiar phrase “God has no grandchildren,” meaning that
just because our forbears were Christians does not automatically guarantee that
we will be believers too.
Most of us would agree that
is true, for each of us and all of us must make the decision to follow Jesus
Christ as Lord and Savior of our lives when His call comes through to us. Some of us affirmed the faith by a gradual
process, being baptized, going to Sunday school, and then publicly declaring
our commitment in confirmation, while others of us were converted in a more
sudden and dramatic way like Saul, who became Paul after his Road to Damascus
experience.
But how many of us here today
can also say that it was a grandparent or a father or a mother who opened the
door which brought us to the Lord? I
asked that same question at the Vespers Service this past Tuesday evening when
I preached in the chapel of
“After vacation was over, the Sunday
school teacher asked her students how they spent the summer. One young boy’s reply went like this…
‘Every summer we go to visit Gramma
and Grampa. They used to live here in a
big brick house, but Grampa got retarded and they moved to
They live in a place with a lot of
retarded people where they ride three wheeler tricycles. They go to a big building called a wrecked
hall, but if it was wrecked, it is fixed now.
They play games there and do
exercises, but don’t do them very good.
There is a swimming pool and they climb into it, but just stand in the
water with their hats on. I guess they
forgot how to swim.
As you come into the place, there is a
doll house with a gate and a man sitting inside. He watches all day to see who is coming and
going. They all wear badges with their
names on them. I guess they don’t know
who they are.
My Gramma says Grampa worked hard all
his life and earned his retardment. I
just wish they would move back home. But
I guess the man in the doll house won’t let them out.”
Well, we laughed the other
night at
“God has no
grandchildren”? In one sense, strictly
speaking, that is true. But the reality
for so many of us is that we wouldn’t be here in this church today without the
spiritual guidance and influence of a grandparent or father or mother who
helped to raise us in the faith.
Dr. Rufus Jones, a Quaker, a
professor of religion and an author who had a profound impact on the last
generation, wrote these words which I have shared with you before:
“I am most of all thankful for my
birthplace and early nurture in the warm atmosphere of a spiritually-minded
home; thankful indeed that from the cradle I was saturated with the Bible and
immersed in an environment of religious experience and reality. It was by God’s grace that I was born into
that great inheritance of wisdom and faith, accumulated through generations of
devotion and sacrificial love. I can
never be grateful enough for what was done for me by my forbears…they produced
the spiritual atmosphere of my youth. I
became heir of a vast invisible inheritance.
And there is nothing I would ever exchange for that.”
Remember: Abraham and Sarah
were up in years when the Lord called them to begin The Family of Faith. And all these generations later, we as
parents, grandparents and great-grandparents in our families, together with
preachers and Sunday school teachers and youth ministers and leaders in the
church – all of us have the opportunity, as it says in the Book of Proverbs, To train up our children in the way they
should go, and when they are old, they will not depart from it (Proverbs
22:6), and that is a promise we have taken to heart in this congregation.
CONCLUSION
Dr. Will Willimon, former
Dean of the Chapel at
“One man got up and declared ‘I was a
Methodist for 38 years before anybody told me about Jesus.’ Now what he may have meant to say was ‘I was
a church member for 38 years before I really experienced my faith and decided
to live it.’ I can understand such a
delayed response.
But I cannot understand the attitude
which I think this man meant to express – that he was just beginning to hear
the truth about God. And I wanted every
person who had endured him all of those years growing up in Sunday school,
every preacher who had tried to preach to him, every (grandparent and parent)
who had tried to witness to him about Jesus, to rise up and ask the question,
‘What do you think we were trying to tell you for 38 years?’” (From an article entitled “Remember Who You
Are” by Dr. Will Willimon, Upper Room Press, 1980)
My friends, in our families
and in this church, we have the opportunity to tell and to teach our children
and young people about the Lord Jesus Christ, and to share His love with them
and with one another. That is not only
our opportunity, that is our God given responsibility in this church as sisters
and brothers in The Family of Faith. And
as we do that, God has promised us that the faith will continue to grow and
will go from generation to generation to generation.
In the name of the Father,
and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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