Tissot, James, 1836-1902. God’s Promise to Abram, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55535 [retrieved March 17, 2025]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tissot_God%27s_Promises_to_Abram.jpg.

RCL Year C, Lent 2
Genesis 15:1-12 and 17-18, Psalm 27, Philippians 3:17–4:1, Saint Luke 13:31-35

“And [Abram] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”[1]

Today’s Old Testament Lesson and the Gospel have no formal connection known to me, but their subjects overlap. I want to make a homily by contrasting the subjects and by putting a choice to you. You will need to be an active, if silent, participant to gain any benefit from this exercise.

The subjects appearing in both Readings are belief in God. Abram believes in God, but Jerusalem does not. Who is going to be your mentor, your guide through this Lent and through this life?

The Lord has called Abram from Ur of the Chaldeans (modern Turkey) down to Canaan (modern Israel), and in the Lesson promises him a great reward. Abram, already an old man, asks out loud, how an old man can receive a great reward since he has no heir to receive a great reward from his old father. And the Lord tells him that his own child will be his heir. Abram believes the Lord, and consequent to his act of belief, the Lord makes another promise, Abram’s descendants will inherit Canaan, from the Nile River to the river Euphrates.

Jerusalem, on the other hand, believed not the Lord. Through the centuries it has killed the prophets. Tradition has it that Isaiah was sawn in two. And Jeremiah was stoned to death. Zechariah was murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Jesus points this out in the Gospel today not vindictively but compassionately: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”[2]

I have drawn the contrast between Abram and Jerusalem as starkly as possible, so that you may freely choose to follow Abram’s example. His willingness to believe the Lord is the example for us. Saint Paul uses Abram as a model for Christians in Romans and Galatians.[3]

The danger for Christians is to be lukewarm about the promises the Lord makes to us in Baptism. If we are lukewarm about the promises, we certainly will be lukewarm about the promises made for us in the Baptismal Covenant.

Saint Paul writes in the Epistle today that [the Lord Jesus Christ] will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.[4] That is the tension we are in, that’s the tension of Lent—the humiliation of our wrongdoing and the glory of him who calls us his own for ever. May we never decline to believe or to do what the Lord has made perfectly clear what we are to believe or what we are to do. May we always choose to be his and his own for ever.

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[1] Genesis 15:6.

[2] Saint Luke 13:34.

[3] Romans 4:1-25 and Galatians 3:6-9.

[4] Philippians 3:21.