Genesis 17: 1-8 Sermon
Have you heard the debate about whether or not we are a “Christian Nation”? Senator Obama started the fight, citing the great diversity of religions in this country make us not exclusively a Christian Nation, but a Christian nation, a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, and so on. Senator McCain shot back that we are specifically a Christian nation, citing the way our founding fathers set up this country. The political debate is trying to shape our very relationship with God. But to understand our relationship with God, we have to understand that we are in covenant with God.
Presidential elections are a lot like biblical covenant making. I was listening to election coverage this week and they were talking about each party building their party platforms, the positions and stands and goals that they will bring to the electorate at their conventions. Senators McCain and Obama build on this. Both want our votes.
They promise us things in exchange for our votes. And they spend a lot of time ridiculing the promises of their opponents and promoting their own promises. The model of the covenant, the contract we make at an election, is not just implicit in the form of an election; it is also explicit in the rhetoric.
But election campaigns aside, I think the church should be deciding whether we are a Christian nation or not, not the politicians. But to be a Christian, much less a Christian nation, demands that we are in covenant with Christ, in covenant with God, that we have a relationship with the Almighty. We have to understand that covenant. Presidential politics is a vague copy of this much more fundamental relationship we are called to.
That covenant we have with Jesus is bound up in the words God uses to review God’s covenant promise to Abram. He says, “I am God Almighty, walk before me and be blameless.” Abram needs a reminder. The first time God came to him was twenty four years earlier, when he was seventy five. Now he is ninety nine. Time catches up with all of us.
Our responsibility in the covenant, because Abram’s covenant still informs us, is to walk before God and be blameless. Jesus allows us to do that, but we will get to that point in a moment. God goes on to outline God’s side of the covenant. First, Abram’s descendants will not just be numerous, but exceedingly numerous. And it won’t just be one nation, but it will be a multitude of nations, and not just a multitude of nations, but a multitude of kings will come from his progeny as well.
This event was so monumental that Abram’s name was changed. He was Abram, which means exalted ancestor, and he becomes Abraham, which you can see in footnote ‘h’ means “ancestor of a multitude”. And the crowning glory is that God will be in covenant with each generation to eternity. All this will take place in the Land of Canaan, the land promised in the covenant.
We cannot fulfill either part of our side of the covenant. We have not walked before God since Adam and Eve committed Original Sin. And because of that sin, we cannot be blameless. By ourselves. But we can fulfill our side of the covenant in Jesus.
Jesus’ death and resurrection have made us blameless before God by the gift of God’s grace, if we call on him and surrender ourselves to Jesus as our Lord and Savior. In that surrender, we will be converted, we will be born again, we will become Children of God, heirs with Jesus, the oldest child of God, to God’s glory and eternal wonder.
And it is by grace that we can walk before our God, forgiven when we sin, taught by the words and deeds of Jesus recorded in the Bible as to how we should behave, and indwelt by the Spirit that will continually bring us closer to our God.
And when we do that, God will make us numerous as Abram’s descendants, we have become many nations, we have given rise to many kings and other leaders of great power. The Christian faith is the largest religion on the planet. But more important then any of that, God has been with us through each generation.
And just before ascending into heaven, in Acts 1 verse 6, 7, and 8, Jesus spread the Promised Land to encompass the whole world when he told his disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea, and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Well brothers and sisters, we are at the ends of the earth and we share the covenant that God laid before Abraham. And we are living in a nation where the Presidential election is shaped with the language of a covenant between ‘we the people’ and the leaders we will elect. And they debate in front of us whether we are in fact a ‘Christian nation’.
So how do we answer that question as the church? Well, we who know Jesus as our Lord and Savior, who are members of the invisible church that stretches to the hearts of all who truly believe, we are children of the covenant, we are part of the multitude of nations promised to Abraham, we are part of the Christian nation.
But in that context, the Christian nation is a nation of all Christians everywhere. What about the question of America? Are we, as the nation of the United States of America, a Christian nation? How do we respond to the political rhetoric? How do we respond to the questions the media continues to ask?
I think the media idea of being a ‘Christian nation’ is a political one, edged to win votes. Our founding fathers were Christians, and Senator McCain is right, their faith informed the creation of the US, but they set up this nation as secular in outlook to end the religious wars that were still being fought in Europe 250 years after the Reformation. Our nation is majority Christian, but we are tolerant of, we welcome other faiths and we will imprison fellow Christians who would impede their ability to worship in their own way. Senator Obama is right recognizing that there is Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, all intertwined in what this country is.
Let us recall that we are children of living God, living in covenant with God, walking blameless before God because of the grace given in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, indwelt with the Holy Spirit to live as God wants us to, and called to carry that faith to the rest of the world.
Amen
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