Promises and Paradoxes

Scripture: Genesis 23 and Hebrews 11: 8-16

Sermon: Promises and Paradoxes

Topics: Grief, Promises, Paradoxes

Preached: Woodlawn CRC, June 14, 2002 pm

Rev. Mike Abma

Genesis 23

Sarah lived for one hundred and twenty-seven years; this was the length of Sarah’s life. ²And Sarah died at Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan; and Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. ³Abraham rose up from beside his dead, and said to the Hittites, ⁴‘I am a stranger and an alien residing among you; give me property among you for a burying-place, so that I may bury my dead out of my sight.’ ⁵The Hittites answered Abraham, ⁶‘Hear us, my lord; you are a mighty prince among us. Bury your dead in the choicest of our burial places; none of us will withhold from you any burial ground for burying your dead.’ ⁷Abraham rose and bowed to the Hittites, the people of the land. ⁸He said to them, ‘If you are willing that I should bury my dead out of my sight, hear me, and entreat for me Ephron son of Zohar, ⁹so that he may give me the cave of Machpelah, which he owns; it is at the end of his field. For the full price let him give it to me in your presence as a possession for a burying-place.’ ¹⁰Now Ephron was sitting among the Hittites; and Ephron the Hittite answered Abraham in the hearing of the Hittites, of all who went in at the gate of his city, ¹¹‘No, my lord, hear me; I give you the field, and I give you the cave that is in it; in the presence of my people I give it to you; bury your dead.’ ¹²Then Abraham bowed down before the people of the land. ¹³He said to Ephron in the hearing of the people of the land, ‘If you only will listen to me! I will give the price of the field; accept it from me, so that I may bury my dead there.’ ¹⁴Ephron answered Abraham, ¹⁵‘My lord, listen to me; a piece of land worth four hundred shekels of silver—what is that between you and me? Bury your dead.’ ¹⁶Abraham agreed with Ephron; and Abraham weighed out for Ephron the silver that he had named in the hearing of the Hittites, four hundred shekels of silver, according to the weights current among the merchants.

17 So the field of Ephron in Machpelah, which was to the east of Mamre, the field with the cave that was in it and all the trees that were in the field, throughout its whole area, passed ¹⁸to Abraham as a possession in the presence of the Hittites, in the presence of all who went in at the gate of his city. ¹⁹After this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah facing Mamre (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan.²⁰The field and the cave that is in it passed from the Hittites into Abraham’s possession as a burying-place.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION — ABRAHAM’S GRIEF

We are all acquainted with grief. We all know sorrow. This is the price we pay for love. For if we love someone and they pass away, we grieve. If we care deeply for someone, and they die, we mourn. William Gladstone, Prime Minister of England in the mid-19^th century, once remarked that you could measure a society’s respect for humanity by how they dealt with their dead and you could measure a person’s respectability by the way they cared for their loved ones. Abraham cared. When Sarah died, she was treated neither as a burden nor an inconvenience. Abraham mourned her – literally it means he took time to remember this woman who left her homeland with him, who was willing to lie for him, and who, in her old age, made him the father of Isaac. Abraham mourned her and he wept over her.

And then it was time to make funeral arrangements. Sarah needed a place to be buried. She needed a place that would be known by the grand children and the great grandchildren. It couldn’t be any old place or any old hole in the ground. In his book, The Undertaking, Thomas Lynch, the poet/funeral director, writes about the difference between a coffin and a casket. A coffin, he notes, is a very utilitarian word. It describes a rather narrow box with 8 different sides which follow the contours of a body. It has one function, to carry a corpse. A casket, however, is rectangular in shape. It suggests something more than utility. The word casket suggests something about the contents. It implies that it is carrying something precious. Lynch then notes that casket is to coffin what tomb is to cave, and grave is to hole in the ground. And so, Abraham was not simply looking for a cave. He was seeking a tomb, a place to lay Sarah, for she was precious to him.

ABRAHAM’S PROBLEM

There was, however, a problem. Abraham did not own any property. He was, by his own admission, a stranger and an alien – literally a resident alien. Like all resident aliens, this made his legal status vulnerable. He was also a tent-dweller – he had no fixed foundations tying him to this world. So he approaches the Hittites to acquire property — a cave that will become a tomb.

What follows is an elaborate land-deal. It sounds so polite with the Hittites first saying to Abraham, “You are a prince of God in our midst; in the choicest of burial places bury your dead. None of us will refuse his tomb for burying your dead.” The politeness continues when Abraham requests to buy a certain cave from Ephron,

Ephron says to Abraham, “No, my lord, listen to me. I give you the field, and I give you the cave that is in it. I give it to you in the presence of my people. Bury your dead.” But Ephron wasn’t giving anything away for free. When the negotiations finally get down to stating a price, Ephron gives an exorbitant price. He says, “the land is worth 400 shekels of silver – but what is that between friends?”

Mark Twain tells a story that is almost the opposite of Abraham’s. This is the story of Jacops the coffin-maker in his book Roughing It. Apparently Jacops was waiting for old man Robbins to die and he couldn’t wait to sell him a coffin. Finally, after waiting for days around old man Robbins house with a coffin ready to sell, Jacops says to the old man, “Listen, I’ll sell this coffin to you for only $10 dollars. If you use it and don’t like it, you can always bring it back and I’ll give you a full refund plus another $25.” Old man Robbins makes the deal, buys the coffin, and leaves Jacops thinking he is too clever for his own good. Not long after this, Jacops hears old man Robbins has died. He decides to attend the funeral. He sees the coffin in the front of the church. But suddenly, the lids pops open, and out climbs old man Robbins. He wasn’t dead after all. The first thing old man Robbins does is walk up to Jacops and say, “I don’t like that coffin much. You owe me $35.”

Twain, of course, turned the tables.

The reality is, when grieving, no one wants to haggle. And neither does Abraham. He says twice that he is willing to pay the price, the full price. And Ephron the Hittite, gets the full price and then some. Given that another field in Jeremiah 32:9 sells for only 17 shekels of silver, it does seem that 400 shekels is a steep price — especially after Ephron made it sound as if he was going to give it away.

PROMISES

How can we read this story without feeling somewhat sad and sorry for Abraham. He loses his wife. Then he must pay an inflated price to bury the body of his beloved. What makes it even more poignant is when we remember all the promises God had made to Abraham. God repeatedly had made promises to Abraham that he would have offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky. He repeatedly made promises that Abraham would have land, lots of it. In fact, when we read the Abraham story, it is filled with promises of land:

12:7 to your offspring I will give this land.

13:14 all the land you see I will give to you and your offspring … Go, walk through the length and breadth of the land, for I am giving it to you.

15: 7 I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.

15:18 To you and your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river Euphrates – the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonite, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.

17:8 The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you.

Did you notice the verb used in each of these promises?

Each time, the word is, I will give …. Or I give …. I give you this land.

It is the same Hebrew verb, natan, each time.

It is also the same verb that Ephron uses when he says “I give you this cave, I give you this field. I give it to you in the presence of my people.” Ephron’s polite talk simply allowed him to get a big price.

But what about God’s talk? What about his promises? Those promises of land started when Abraham was 75 years old. Now here he is, 137 years old. He had been hearing these promises of land for over 60 years. And still he had not received any of it, not even enough to bury his beloved wife.

PARADOXES

That is the paradox of Abraham. Such great promises and yet in his lifetime they are hardly realized. Promises to have offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky, and yet, he has only one son with Sarah, Isaac. And even that son’s life was almost taken in the previous chapter. Promises of possessing land from Egypt to the Euphrates, and yet, the only land he possesses at the end of Sarah’s life and his own is this tomb, for which he has to pay top dollar.

The paradox of Abraham is that all these great and weighty promises are hanging on such thin strings – one only son, one small burial plot.

For centuries, people have made the mistake of thinking the promises were all about blood – the family line of Abraham. That the promises were all about land — real dirt and desert. There is a reason the Jerusalem newspaper is called Ha aretz meaning, land. There is a reason Rabbi Haim Druckman proclaimed, “Just as it is forbidden to give up one letter of the Torah, it is forbidden to make concessions on one foot of the land of Israel.” For them the promises are only about actual land for the actual blood descendants of Abraham.

Is it all about family? Is it all about land? When we are facing death and looking back on our lives, trying to find meaning, trying to find purpose, trying to make sense of it all, will it only make sense if we have family and land? Will it only make sense if our progeny is prolific and our property is extensive? Is the meaning of life and the meaning of death to be found in family and in land, in blood-lines and property-lines?

Isn’t the story just before this one – the story about Isaac almost being sacrificed — isn’t that a story that makes clear that the meaning of life is about more than family, more than the blood of Isaac? And isn’t this story — about Abraham having to pay a big price for a small piece of property — a story that the meaning of life is about more than land? If blood and land represent the meaning of life, then Abraham, in his old age, had a right to be depressed. But the meaning of his life was not in the blood of Isaac, and it was not in the dirt of the promised land. The meaning of his life was in God, and the faithfulness of God.

The book of Hebrews is a book that talks about promises, these Old Testament promises. It talks about how Abraham really heard and really understood the promises. It tells us that for Abraham the promises were about more than earthly posterity. The promises were about more than earthly property. If that is all they were about, then death would still have the last laugh, for death separates us from family, and death puts us under the earth, not over it.

But the promises are about more than family and land. Our sons and daughters, our grandchildren and great grandchildren, our lawns and gardens, our fields and our caves, these all act something like sacraments. They point beyond themselves to a more excellent consummation. They point ahead beyond this life of tents to a city with a foundation that is Christ the Lord. The theme of the book of Hebrews is that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of all the promises. Therefore, to be with Christ is to be in the land promised to Abraham, to be in Christ is to be in the family promised to Abraham.

The mystery is that Abraham so many years ago had some sense of this, for Jesus himself said that Abraham saw the day of his coming on the horizon, and this alone is what made Abraham rejoice (John 8:56). The book of Hebrews says that the thing that makes Abraham so special is that he hardly received any of what he was promised, and yet he believed – he was sure of what he hoped for, certain of what he did not see.

FAITH

Faith is a funny thing. I remember visiting an old dutch immigrant just before he was scheduled for by-pass surgery. He was a man as tied to his plot of land and to his family as any one I have ever met. And now he was facing surgery and the possibility of death. Normally he was a man of few words. But that day he talked. He talked about faith. He said that he had always thought that faith was a little like a bank account. Over the years you make steady deposits and it grows. But then he noted that he was discovering lately that faith really wasn’t like that. Now, at age 75, he wasn’t sure if his faith was any deeper or any more certain than when he was 35.

That is the way life is. Life is not a greenhouse for faith, it is a testing ground for it. Faith is a matter of promises and paradoxes – the promises seem so big yet in this life we can realize so little of them. No one gets to the end of their life and says, “I’ve had everything I ever hoped for.” No one gets to the end of life and thinks, “All my dreams have come true. All the promises that have ever been made to me have been fulfilled.” Life isn’t like that. In the end, it may seem like we have so little – no more house, no more health, the kids don’t visit much anymore. When we come to the end, it may seem as if all we have ever believed is hanging on a thread, a very thin thread.

But when that thread is Jesus Christ,

The promises are sure

The future is secure

And he will pull us into the promised land.

Amen