By: The Rev. Libbie Weber

Teaching also inspired by Heidi Esch’s painting Zähl den Staub auf der Erde und die Sterne am Himmel (Genesis 13 + 15) [Count the Dust on the Earth and the Stars in the Sky], 2009 For the image, click HERE. ‘There is not a guarantee in the world. Oh your needs are guaranteed, your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock; seek; ask. But you must read the fine print. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch. If you can catch it it will catch you up, aloft, up to any gap at all, and you’ll come back, for you will come back, transformed in a way you may not have bargained for-dribbling and crazed. The waters of separation [Numbers 19], however lightly sprinkled, leave indelible stains. Do you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? –Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Here’s, surely, an understatement: we human beings need life, we truly do. We’re about life; life defines us.

After all, we serve the God of life itself, our loving and magnificent Creator God. And yet we serve Him on His terms, and that takes a lifetime to begin to comprehend. Here is Abram, exalted father, in Genesis 17, hearing from God that, under His covenantal terms, Abram will become Abraham, father of a multitude – and Abram is ninety-nine years old! This makes sense of the sentence, found later in the same paragraph from Annie Dillard cited above, that has haunted me for years: ‘…one day it occurs to you that you must not need life’. Abram is ninety-nine, and as Paul puts it in Romans 4: ‘He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised’. We must not need life on our own terms, but we absolutely, desperately, hopefully need it on God’s terms, and in giving ourselves over to God in faith, we are given it as glorious grace, an astounding gift, which is how it has always blessedly come to us in this fallen world. It came this way before the Fall as well. Let us remember that. Our existence, each breath we take, is God’s grace, His love, to us.

And we have the shorthand for that very creation in this story of Abraham, as cited in Romans 4.17: God ‘…gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’. It is on His terms that we have life. This goes for the ninety-nine-year-old and to ‘…a people yet unborn’, the youngest of the young [Psalm 22.30]. This is what Peter is so outraged about in Mark 8. He is still thinking of life on his own terms, setting his mind on human things and not divine. Wanting to save his own life and not allow Jesus to save it through suffering and death. This week Jesus offers us this same rebuke and turning point, the opportunity to be formed by God’s abundant life, not our own. And that goes for the elderly and those unborn and those in-between, including the sick, the poor, the disabled – all of us! God through Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit gives life to the dead! True life.