Lent 2, Year C | Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Philippians 3:17-4:1
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
March 16, 2025
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“[Abram] believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” – Genesis 15:6[1]
There are a lot of things in the Bible that make absolutely no sense in the modern world. Sometimes that’s because we reject our citizenship in God’s Kingdom, like the “enemies of the cross of Christ” Paul mentions today in Philippians. But sometimes the ancient customs and culture are just so foreign to ours that the scene is impossible to understand. Take the second half of this morning’s interaction between Abram and the Lord.
Abram asks how he can know that God will keep promises God made in the first half of our reading—those of biological heirs and a homeland for them to inherit. The Lord tells him to gather some livestock, which Abram dismembers, along with a couple of birds, which he leaves whole. The Lectionary skips a few verses foreshadowing the forthcoming Hebrew oppression in Egypt, until this weird censer and torch eventually float their way between the animal halves as the Lord reasserts the earlier promises of land and biological descendants.
I’m not sure anyone today can adequately explain all the details of the scene, but history has left us a few clues to help decipher at least some of what an ancient reader or hearer would have immediately recognized. Back in those days, this ceremony was a form of an oath, the establishment of a solemn covenant—something two rulers might have enacted at a treaty between their peoples. Each party would state their vow as they walked the bloody path in the midst of the rotting carcasses, in essence offering a visual of what the gods and/or the other party had the right to do to them if they or their people were to violate their word. It was sort of a concrete way of saying, “May I be torn asunder and left to the desert scavengers should I fail to keep my promise.”
But even ancient readers would have found this particular version of the ceremony odd. There was a glaring omission: only one party walked this path. The Lord alone made this covenant without requiring anything of Abram in return. It was a unilateral promise established in one of the most solemn manners possible.
Or was it?
Abram may not have enacted any formal ceremony, but he did offer God something in the first half of the passage: “[Abram] believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”
Since this passage is in Hebrew instead of the Greek we normally encounter in the New Testament, I spent quite a while poking at the words, trying to tease out their meaning. After all, we can’t just assume the Hebrew concept of “belief” is the same as the Greek idea Jesus and the apostles were using thousands of years after Abram had lived. I wasn’t getting very far until I remembered that our problematic understanding of “belief” isn’t due to difficulties with foreign languages. It’s an English problem.
We’ve talked about this a few times, so I’ll try to keep the recap short. When John Wycliffe first translated the Bible into Middle English more than 700 years ago, he chose the word “belief” to translate particular concepts from the ancient texts. Despite the upheavals and transformations of the move to Early Modern English a few hundred years after his time and the further tectonic shifts over the ensuing half millennium or so following that, we still use the same term despite having completely changed its meaning. We think of “believing” as assenting to a certain idea as the truth, of agreeing with something we can’t necessarily prove. The Bible, however, is still using the term in the 700 year old manner, when to “be-lief” meant to pledge oneself to someone or something. It held the idea of swearing loyalty, becoming “lief” to one’s “liege,” a Medieval lord or king.
So going with how the Bible uses the term instead of how we do, Abram had indeed already given God the most significant “possession” he could. He had “been-lief,” to mix Modern and Middle English. He had pledged the entirety of who he was to the Lord. It wasn’t until after that moment that Abram had asked for proof of God’s promise, a request to which God responded in kind, using the then-current visual of an inviolable human ceremony to cement their own pledge to Abram.
There are a couple things we can take with us from this encounter, not the least of which is that “God comes down,” so to speak. The Lord chooses to communicate with humans through means that humans can understand, essentially enculturating meaning and intention in a way that makes sense to those receiving the promises. The Lord doesn’t stick to “angelic” languages or celestial-ceremonies to emphasize their point. They take the initiative to break what would be an incomprehensible language barrier so we finite beings have a hope of understanding.
Secondly, we need to take our own pledges seriously. Looking at our Philippians text, Paul isn’t weeping over people overtly opposed to Christian practices. These aren’t enemies of Jesus, per se. In fact, they might be speaking of him very highly. He’s warning of those hostile to Jesus’ cross. These are people who pledged themselves to follow God’s anointed Son-above-all-Sons but reject the path of self-abasement, suffering, and acts of love that Jesus displayed throughout his life-long modeling of God’s example and preferred practices for humanity. Enemies of the cross grasp at the power of resurrection and attempt to wield the authority of ascension while remaining “unrighteous”—unwilling to submit themselves to anything but their own self-interest and ego. These are people who swing the cross like a club, using intimidation, threats, and fear to impose their own sense of moral supremacy on others. They batter people’s hope with the splintering wood and tear out the iron nails only to impale the poor, all the while mocking them to come down from their own crosses, to lift themselves by their own bootstraps, to save themselves from the violence being inflicted upon them. They climb their way to a blood-soaked glory on the backs of the carcasses they themselves have slain.
Beware those who “promote Christianity” through domination, division, and fear. No matter their lip-service, they are no servants or friends of God. They are traitors to the cross and enemies of those who would truly follow Jesus.
We, then, must be ready to take our own pledges seriously. We need to look closely at our Baptismal Vows and consider the implications of “continu[ing] in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers,” of “persever[ing] in resisting evil, and, whenever [we] fall into sin, repent[ing] and return[ing] to the Lord,” of “proclaim[ing] by word and example the Good News of God in Christ,” of “seek[ing] and serv[ing] Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself,” and in “striv[ing] for justice and peace among all people, and respect[ing] the dignity of every human being.”[2]
Think hard before we recite the Nicene Creed this morning. If all you’re doing is assenting to some ideas, those statements are not for you. Don’t treat them like magic words, a list of truths that mystically ready you for the clouds of heaven. The Creeds are solemn pledges. Are you genuinely willing to walk the pathway they define, or do you simply want to assert something that gives you power over others? Do you see the torn sacrifices rotting on your left and right and feel the weight of your words, or is your deepest heart intent on adding to the body count? Will you dare to mingle the blood on the ground before you with that of your own bare feet, or are you intent on trampling down those who would question your ironclad soles?
Are you “lief” to “God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth”? Do you covenant yourself to “Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord”? Are you willing to maintain your own solemn pledge to “the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting”? Do you actually swear and proclaim your loyalty to the reality, mercy, and graciousness behind these things, or do you simply assent to the concepts, all the while living as enemies of the cross of Christ? Are you willing to submit yourself to what’s necessary to be reckoned among the righteous?
“[Abram] was lief to the Lord, and the Lord reckoned that to him as righteousness.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSVue unless otherwise noted.
[2] All from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, pgs. 304-305