God... and the Expert-Rejected Deal--September 21, 2017
Then [the LORD] said to Abram, “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” 8But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” 9He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” 10He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. 11And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.
As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. 13Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; 14but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. 16And they shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. 18On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates..." [Genesis 15:7-18]
Sometimes, the only thing there is to do is listen. And sometimes that itself is grace.
Like this story here from Genesis. This is the story of God making a one-sided deal with Abraham... and how all Abraham (still going by his earlier name, Abram, here) can do is listen, as God makes all the promises, and gives the farm away to the old childless man.
This is the story of how Abram brings nothing but doubt, and God brings gift after gift, grace upon grace, and offers it up to Abram as a promise with no strings, conditions, or expiration date. It begins here with Abram asking God, "Okay, so back in Genesis 12 you promised me a new homeland, and descendants, and blessing... and so far all I've got is a camel-load of bupkis. How do I know that you're gonna keep your promise, God? How do I know that when you talk big, you will actually deliver?" (You get the sense that Abram had recently been watching the news and seen some elected official deliver a bloviating speech full of empty slogans and finger-pointing with no action right before this conversation with God, perhaps.)
Well, despite the fact that I imagine most of us are too shy to talk to the Almighty with such... chutzpah, let's say... God takes Abram's question seriously and deals with it. "Okay, Abram, you want to know how you can trust that the promise will come true? Let's make a deal..." God instructs Abram to get the traditional, customary components for cutting a deal back in the ancient near East--animals that are to be cut in half in a covenant-making ceremony.
While our symbolic actions for making deals official are a bit less bloody here in the 21st century (we use signatures and dates, and perhaps a notary's official seal if we are being extra official) than they were in Abram's time, the idea is the same: there are certain accepted practices, symbolic gestures, and actions that come to be the accepted procedure for making contracts and covenants. In the ancient world, the process was something like this: two parties (let's call them, oh, say, Party A and Party B) would get an appointed assortment of animals and ritually slaughter them, and then lay the pieces out in two piles over against each other, and then BOTH parties would walk between the pieces, and each one was supposed to say out loud what their part of the deal was going to be... and at the same time, you were to invoke your god or gods, and effectively call down a conditional curse on either party if one side or the other did not live up to their end of the bargain, as if to say, "May my gods do to me what we just did to these animals if I don't live up to my end of this deal." So, if, for example, I made a treaty with you and your city-state to offer you 20 sheaves of wheat in exchange for your protection from the roaming barbarians, or if I promised you could marry my daughter in exchange for a sum of gold coins as a dowry, we would cut a covenant this way. And both Party A and Party B would pass between the pieces, each of them saying out loud what they were going to do for their end of the deal, and each of them calling on their deities to cut them down like these animals pieces if they flaked out or reneged on their part of the deal. Sort of a grown-up, very literal version of "cross my heart, hope to die..."
What's critical here in the set up for this weird conversation with Abram and God is that God proposes this covenant ceremony as a way of assuring Abram that what is about to be promised will come true. It appears God presumes Abram will already understand what God has in mind with these animal pieces. Abram expects, then, that God is about to speak something, and then that Abram himself is going to have to put some skin in the game, so to speak. Abram will have to do something for his part, offer some commitment, give some concessions, or at least speak some kind of allegiance, devotion, or agreement to good behavior there... right?
Ah, but this is one of those times where all there is to do is listen. And where that fact is evidence of mercy.
God, the text says, makes a "deep sleep" fall upon Abram, something that allows the future patriarch to see what is happening and to hear the voice of God, but not to get up and move, or even speak, for his own part. And that's when God starts talking... and Abram just listens.
God speaks a promise as the Party A of this covenant: land, descendants, and blessing for Abram, albeit through a bumpy ride and a couple of detours in Egypt and the wilderness. But all in all, quite a showcase of divine abundance. God says it out loud, while Abram listens, and then God appears as a torch and smoking pot and passes between the animal carcasses. This is one of those moments that would have been shockingly clear to Abram, and to the first tellers and hearers of this story, because basically the Almighty has just invoked a curse on the divine self: "May I be torn apart like these animal pieces if I do not live up to my side of this deal." My goodness--what can it possibly mean that the Source and Ground of all Being threatens self-destruction as a consequence of breaking faith on a covenant? God vows to be torn apart if unfaithful to this contract--talk about a signing statement!
And Abram? He just listens. Still.
This is the wonder of the story. God still has ol' Abe in a trance--he can watch the flaming torch. He can hear the divine voice. In other words, he can listen. But he does not speak. He does not act. He does not shake his head yes or give his permission. He does not offer anything back, and there's not even a bit of fine print about promising to be a good boy from now on. Abram just listens, as God makes all the promises.
That means for this contract, for this covenant, the living God puts it all on the line... and gets nothing back in return. The living God makes a promise--a unilateral, one-sided agreement, that does not depend on Abram. Not on his future good behavior or past rule-keeping. Not on gold stars outnumbering red marks on his permanent record. It is simply a one-sided promise, a deal in which there is no "tit-for-tat" or quid pro quo, but rather all unconditional grace on God's part and only listening on Abram's part.
Wow. Wow. Wow.
There are people in this world who are convinced that the only good "deals" out there are the ones in which I get X in exchange for giving you Y, and that those deals are only "great" if I value the X that I get more than the Y that I am giving up. And similarly, such supposed "experts" on "making great deals" will try and convince you that only people who think in such terms are the Great Deal-Makers of the world.
And then there is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob... the God of Miriam and Sarah and Ruth, too. And here, this God makes an entirely one-sided, unconditional, giving-away-the-farm-for-free covenant... for nothin'. God does all the promising, and that means God does all the oath-making and curse-invoking. Abram? He listens. That's all. He gets to witness God say, "This promise does not depend on what you bring to the table, Abe--this is all me and what I will do for you."
Some might call that a poorly negotiated deal... but the Bible calls it grace. The Bible calls it God's telltale modus operandi. The Bible calls it an unconditional, unilateral covenant. And it is the beginning of the story of the whole "salvation history" of the world, as it were. With this covenant, the story of the universe takes a sharp turn toward restoration and renewal, as God picks a childless old man and says, "I'll change the world with you and the son you don't have yet."
"Why would God be satisfied with such a deal?" some might ask, with the unspoken assumption that God should have renegotiated to get something better out of the deal than... nothing. But that is to misunderstand the whole point--of everything. The "point," you could say, of life, the universe, and everything, the goal toward which all of creation is aimed... is, well, love. And love, as a later apostle will tell us (at every wedding ceremony you will ever go to) that "love does not insist on getting its own way." Love, which is our shorthand for the self-giving impulse that God has woven into the fabric of creation itself, love is the point of everything. God operates on the basis of, and with the logic of, love, which is to say, God isn't concerned with "getting" something in return for goodness--only, rather, the well-being of the beloved (that's us--a whole planet full of us!). So God is perfectly willing to do things and make deals and speak promises that look like nonsense to all the world's bone-headed small-minded short-sighted "experts" who can only see as far as what a deal with get for them, because God is more interested in our good than in impressing people who wrongly think themselves to be experts at making deals.
That's the long and the short of it, really: the whole story of the Scriptures, from Genesis through "Amen, come Lord Jesus!", is the story of a lopsided deal that had no negotiations or back-and-forth of demands and concessions, but only the unilateral promise of God, "I will give you these things--I swear by myself to do it, and I will be torn to pieces before I break my promise." The whole story of the Bible is the story of what unfolds from a promise that would make the experts blush because God doesn't "get" anything for God's side of the deal.
And, of course, the followers of Jesus are convinced that God didn't change tactics after that encounter with Abram and the animal pieces. We tell a story--in fact, we tell it every week in the places where I worship on Sundays--about how that same God took on human flesh, and then took bread and broke it open, and poured out a cup of wine, and told his closest friends something like, "This is me. I am about to be torn open in a new act of divine deal-making. Your job... is to listen. Your role is to receive what I give you. Your task is to receive, now hear closely as I make a new covenant with you." And then Jesus cut a new covenant with the universe--except that by the time Jesus was around, animal pieces had fallen out of fashion for deal-making, and instead, Jesus invokes the curse of self-destruction from a Roman execution stake. The cross is God's way of doubling down on one-sided deals. Rather than saying, "I should have used my leverage to squeeze Abraham for some more concessions for my side... I'll use the cross to get a better deal for myself now!" the Maker of the universe says, "Here once again, I'll do it all... without getting anything in return for myself or my 'side' of the deal. It is finished."
And us? We just listen. We listen still.
These are the upside-down values of the people of God and the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. We celebrate a deal that God cut without getting a single perk or payoff. We dare to practice such self-giving, unconditional generosity ourselves. And we teach both our children and new disciples that sometimes the greatest deal of all is the one the experts all laugh at because it looks like you get nothing in return. That, after all, is the way God saved the world. Our job... is to listen.
Lord God, let us be shaped by your wonderfully strange kind of logic, so that we no longer angle or posture ourselves to get more for ourselves, but simply give ourselves away with the same unconditional love by which you rule and redeem creation.
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