Our passage is either the first of two or the second of three recounting of the giving of the Abrahamic Covenant to Abram the Hebrew, who is not-yet Abraham. In fact, it’s in the final covenant-giving story, a couple of chapters later, where Abram is renamed. Why so many retellings of the same thing? Well, scholars believe that the author of Genesis—traditionally, but probably not actually Moses—that author of Genesis edited together writings from multiple sources. And in traditional Liberal School scholarship—that’s liberal with a capital L, as in a scholarly, not political, movement—the two primary sources of Genesis can be distinguished by the name they use for God. And sure enough, in this version of the covenant, the word “Yahweh” is used, which English translations render as Lord, and which I will not say again, in deference to our Jewish friends for whom the name cannot be said at all. In the final covenant-giving, where Abram is renamed, the word for the almighty being is Elohim, which we translate as God.
Now all this is fine and dandy, and I wouldn’t bring
it up, only it got me thinking when I compared the two covenant stories . . . because
the sources that use “Lord,” our translation of that unutterable name, are
considered to be older than those that use God.
That’s one reason that the first creation story in Genesis, the story in
chapter one, is considered to have been written later than the second one,
which begins in chapter 2, and tells of the temptation of Adam and Eve by that
wily old serpent. In the same way, this
version of the covenant-giving is likely older, and perhaps more primitive,
than the final one.
And indeed, it has a primitive feel, doesn’t it? A dark, bloody and primordial feel . . .
Abram is ordered to perform some acts that are disturbing to our modern
sensibilities . . . he cuts the heifer in half—and I wonder how he got it
done? Did he have a holy chain saw? Bones are tough to get through, ask a butcher
. . . but he cuts the heifer in half, and the female goat and the male goat,
then he lays the pieces against one another—symmetrically, I think, like the
top of a hand-made guitar—look at Jim’s or Bob’s Martin next time they play—or
opening your hands up like this—and then he stood by and waited for further
orders from the Lord . . . and while he was waiting, he shooed off the vultures
and hawks and all the other scavengers that might want a little more protein in
their diets—I love the Hebrew here, which says he made them blow away—but
before further instructions could come, a deep sleep fell upon Abram and a
terrible darkness fell upon him as well . . . and the darkness is so bad it
takes multiple adjectives to describe it, the darkness is terrifying and very,
very deep.
My Hebrew professor, Walter Brueggemann, from whom you
will hear through the magic of video in Sunday School, says that Hebrew is a
language of verbs: to understand what
an author is trying to convey—especially its subtext—you have to pay attention
to the verbs. And right here, we have an
excellent example: the deep sleep falls
upon Abram and the darkness falls
upon him as well . . . the verb is repeated, and in Hebrew, perhaps more than
other languages, the repetition drives the point home. The author wants us to be sure that it’s no
ordinary darkness, no normal sleep, they descend upon Abram as if they are
beasts of prey, come to rip him apart, or like a great weight that falls
crushing upon him, keeping him immobilized . . . they are not normal
conditions, this darkness and this sleep, and because in the ancient mindset
all things—good or bad—come from God, we know where they have come from.
But the verb “to-fall” is not the only one that is
repeated in our passage . . . the reason Abram is filleting the livestock is a response to a promise from God . . . and
the story of how it comes about uses two more important verbs—“to give” and “to
become an heir” swhich can be translated “to inherit”—and it uses these verbs over
and over. The Lord comes to Abram and says:
don’t worry, for I’m your shield, I’ll protect you, and your reward will
be great. (Abram had been doing a little
work for the Lord on the side). But Abram
doesn’t buy any of it, he says—with a fair amount of bitterness—where’s the
evidence? You haven’t GIVEN me a thing, I’m childless and Eliazar of
Damascus will INHERIT. And to drive home
the point, he repeats his complaint: You have GIVEN me no offspring, and so a
slave born in my house will INHERIT. Note the use of the two verbs in both
sentences.
Abram is asking “Where’s the proof that my reward,” and in Hebrew it is wages, “Where is the
proof that my wages will be great?” He
doesn’t believe him, and whereas in the final covenant tale he falls down
laughing, in this version he demands
proof. You haven’t rewarded me before
this, how am I supposed to believe it now? And the Lord—I imagine with a heavy sigh—says
“This man won’t be your heir, won’t inherit,
but a son of your own—and the Hebrew is “out of your inward parts”—a son out of
your innermost being will inherit.” Notice the repetition of the verb for
inheriting, twice in just this one
sentence.
Then God tells him to look up and count the stars if
he’s able to count them—note the repetition of the verb “to count”—and that
thus will be his offspring, they will be as countless as the the stars above,
and to his great credit, Abram believed him, which the Lord duly calculated to
be righteousness.
But that’s not all, as the late-night-TV-hucksters
say, because there is one more part to this promise: not only will Abram’s
descendents be many, they’ll get some land as well. “I am the Lord your God,” God says, “who
brought you out of the Land of Ur to give”—there’s
one of our verbs again—“to give you
all this land to possess” And even
though our translation renders it “possess,” guess what verb it really is? You’ve got it: it’s inherit. What will the Almighty give to Abram? God will give all this land for his offspring to inherit.” And oy vey!
That’s a lot of giving.
So a preliminary guess might be that this passage is all about inheriting, about becoming
an heir on the one hand, and about the fact that God has given the
inheritance—all this land—to the offspring of Abraham who, of course, became
the Israelites, ancestors of the modern denizens of Israel. In fact, this passage is ground central of
the religious claims that have led to much warfare and strife over the years,
and it all revolves around inheriting and giving: the Israelites have inherited, and the Lord
God Almighty has given. And who in the
world could argue with that?
Well, Abram, for one . . . though he believed the Lord
when he was told he’d have lots of offspring, can’t quite swallow the
inheriting the land part. “How shall I know that I will possess it?” And once again it’s the verb inherit
translated as possess. How shall I know that I will inherit it? And that’s
when the Lord—again I imagine
with a heavy sigh—orders up the split livestock, and causes Abram to fall into
a deep and terrible sleep.
And it is when it is fully dark, when the sun has
fallen into total submission, that Abram learns the fate of the butchered
animals: a smoking firepot passes
between the halves of the heifer and the goats, followed by a flaming torch,
and Abram knows that the Lord is there, invisible but present just the
same. And as the firepot and the torch
float eerily between the blood-soaked pieces, he hears the Lord’s voice one more
time: “On this day, to your offspring, I give
the land from Egypt’s river to the great Euphrates, the lands of the Kenites,
the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the
Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” And we’re to understand that with the sliced
animals, God has made a covenant with Abram and his descendants, and in fact the
Hebrew for “to make a covenant” is to cut
a covenant, and indeed anyone of the era would recognize this bloody scene as a
covenanting ceremony, with God as the covenanter, the promiser, and Abram and his descendants the
promisees.
Now, I know the tendency today, in these more, ah, refined times, is to shudder at the
image of the slaughtered livestock, as we imagine the smoky, blood-soaked
scene, and to thank God that it isn’t like that anymore, that we are more
sophisticated, less primitive and well, less gross than that. Then after
thinking this, after shaking our heads fastidiously at all the dark brutality, we
take communion in which we say “the body of Christ, broken for you” and “the
blood of Christ, shed for you” and we
quote Christ as saying “this is the new covenant in my blood,” just like God’s new covenant in the
blood of those heifers and goats. The
origins of our faith are no less bloody than those of the Hebrew faith, all
those thousands of years ago, no matter how
we have smugly modernized it.
In fact, that’s why we read this at Lent, because the new covenant in Christ’s blood bears a
striking resemblance to the old one in the heifer’s and goat’s. And we’re supposed
to correlate the two, meditating upon the sacrifice of the animals, and
comparing them to that of our Lord.
But the heifer and the she- and he-goats aren’t the
only sacrifices in our story, are they?
What about the sacrifice of those whose land the proto-Israelites usurped? What about the Kenites and the Kenizzites and
the Kadmonites? What about the Hittites
and the Perizzites, the Rephaim and the Amorites? The Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the
Jebusites? What about their sacrifice, which was as unwilling
as that of the livestock? In our
passage, God promises the Hebrews their
land, which means death for an agrarian peoples. And it wasn’t all second-hand, through the
potential loss of their land, either.
The Bible says that the Hebrews invaded
these peoples to seize it, and this meant loss of life. Listen to this excerpt from the Book of
Joshua, describing what happened during the invasion take some of that land,
what happened in Jericho after the
walls came a-tumbling down:
“They”—that’s the Israelites, led by Joshua himself—“They devoted to
destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young
and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” And when
they take the city of Ai, they do the same thing, and it is written that “The
total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was twelve thousand—all
the people of Ai.”
Sisters and brothers, at Lent we are to meditate on
our part in the salvation story, and upon the sacrifice of God’s son so that we
might be free from the bondage of sin.
But at this Lent, I invite you
to think upon the other sacrifices, unwilling
sacrifices, so that peoples and nations can have their way. I invite you to think about the sacrifices
for that first covenant, the innocent lives lost so that Israel could have
their land, and whether perhaps in our Scripture—with all its talk of God giving the land to the Hebrews to inherit—there isn’t just a touch of
justification for actions that a loving God would never condone. I invite you to think about the ongoing
conflict in the Middle East, and how the lives of Palestinian and Jewish people are still being
sacrificed, in part, for that covenant.
But lest we concentrate on the systemic sins of
others, and ignore I invite you to think about our own sacrificial offerings .
. . the lives of people sacrificed in wars using Christianity as an excuse,
from the first Crusade, where 30,000 Jews and Muslims were slaughtered—ten times the number lost at 9/11—in the
name of Christ, to the slaughter of heathen
Indians in South America—supposedly to bring them to God!—to the sectarian
violence of Northern Ireland. I invite
you as well to think about how Western societies sacrifice whole classes of people for the comfort and
wealth of others, people who work for minimum wage at multiple jobs,
sacrificing their lives and the lives of their children so we can have cheap
goods and services, the employees of the Wal-Marts and K-Marts who go without
health care and other benefits so we can have low, low prices, and so CEOs can
acquire even more gold in their parachutes.
Philosopher and theologian René Girard has said that Western culture is sacrificial
in nature, and at this Lent I invite
you to consider what that means, and what our part in that systematic sins we
play. And doing that, think on the
differences between those sacrifices—most of them unwilling—and the one we
await, that of Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen.
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