By: The Rev. Victor Lee Austin
The first sermon I ever preached was on this passage. It was my seminary CPE summer, at a hospital in Albuquerque, and I had but a few minutes. I began with Abraham as an old man with an old wife, a man who had received a promise from God; but despite the passage of much time, that promise had not been fulfilled. He now,
obedient to a mystery, lays out a sacrifice he has prepared, and spends the rest of the day waiting.
Hospitals, I said, are places of waiting. We have promises. We do things that we are told to do. And then we wait. How will it turn out? Will there be healing? If not, will there be a new way of coping with something that we have to live with? Or are we coming to the
end-is this waiting of ours the last thing we will do?
I know that many people reading these words have labored long because of God’s call to them to serve life in a special way: to care for human life from its tiny beginnings to its natural end and to try to awaken others to all this. And, after these labors, there is also
the call to wait. As with Abraham, the waiting can be marked by sleep and even “a dread and a great darkness.” Will people come to cherish and protect life? Will our society change? Or will it turn out to be that our waiting was . . . the end?
After the sun had set, out of the darkness the Lord spoke to Abraham with words of renewed hope. He repeated the old promises which, being repeated, were thus made new. Abraham was encouraged. He continued.