No Time Like the Present

Genesis 18: 9-33; 22: 1-14           

Micah 6: 6-8                                 

Acts 17: 19-34                              

Abraham was 75 years old when God first called him to leave his country and his kindred and go to the land God would show him. The call and the promise came late in life for Abraham. He was at an age when, if he were born today, he could already be receiving his Social Security, getting his AARP discounts, and enjoying the leisure of retirement. We can imagine it would have been hard for him to trust in what the LORD was promising him, as a result of his answering this call. But off Abraham went, not knowing what the path ahead of him looked like, not having a clue how God was going to pull off the incredible things God had spoken of – “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”

We can imagine that Abraham did plenty of wondering and imagining himself, as the years wore on and God had not yet gotten about the business of starting Abraham’s descendant pool. The Lord appears to Abraham in a vision, telling him his reward will be very great, and Abraham questions him – what ‘s the point of a reward, when I am still childless and have no one to pass an inheritance on to? God assures him his descendants will number greater than the stars. And so Abraham continues to be faithful, to trust, even though he eventually takes his wife Sarai’s advice, and takes her slave Hagar as a wife, and she conceives and gives birth to Ishmael. Abraham is 86 years old when this happens, so it’s 11 years since he started on this journey of faith.

And now today’s story comes 13 years after that. Abraham is 99 years old. He’s been on the move for God for 24 years now. That’s a long time to be faithful with no sign of action, of outcome, of even beginning to glimpse the start of the promise God has made.

Stop and think a minute about what was going on for you, in your life, 24 years ago……  Now – imagine if God had made a promise to you then, and you were still waiting today to see any sign of that promise taking place. Would you have given up by now? How many times? Would you have attempted to make it come about by your own efforts? What would your relatives and friends be saying if they saw you continuing to trust that someday this thing was going to happen, after all these years? One can imagine that the title of this sermon – “No Time Like the Present” – might have been what Abraham said, out loud or to himself, as he prayed to God every morning, every noontime, every night. Anytime, now, Lord. No Time Like the Present. No Day like Today….

But one day three men show up, and tell Abraham and Sarah that the time is drawing near. And Sarah laughs. But soon after that, she finds herself pregnant, and nine months later, finally, the promised day does come, and Isaac is born, and they name him “laughter”, because of course, it really is hilarious how all this has happened.

And we don’t hear much more about Isaac again until, one morning, the Lord tells Abraham that the day’s plans include him sacrificing his son on an altar. And, in a way that is astonishing to us, Abraham gets up and goes. He obeys, just as he has done each time the Lord has called to him. And at the very last minute, God reveals to Abraham a “way out” – a ram is caught by its horns in a nearby bush, and Abraham is able to sacrifice it instead, and go back down the mountain with his son.

God’s timing is not our timing, and God’s ways are not our ways. It can be hard to wait for God’s plans and purposes to be revealed. God can sometimes seem unknown to us, just like the “unknown God” that the Greeks in Paul’s time had made a shrine for. The Greeks worshipped idols relating to the visible things of earth – believing that if they made those idols happy with them, they would have rain, and good crops, and wealth, and health, and wisdom, and so on. But the God of Abraham was a God they did not know, did not acknowledge, did not understand. And so Paul seizes the opportunity – “No Time Like the Present” –to proclaim that God to the Greeks as the Lord of heaven and earth.

We do not see God as unknown – and yet we can have just as much trouble as Abraham did in understanding what God’s plan is for us, whether we are trying to discern that individually or collectively. But here is the good news – Jesus Christ is our model for living a life in obedience to God. God came to earth to show us what it looks like to what God requires of us – what it looks like to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God, as we heard through the prophet Micah.

These can seem like radical notions – crazy things to do, if we conclude we are to always do them, without condition. We can come up with so many situations and circumstances when it makes no sense to do these things. To love our enemies. To pray for those who curse us. To practice giving our whole selves up in service to God. But these are the day by day practices God calls us to. They give us our daily purpose, even on those days when God’s big plan for us is hard to figure out – when even God seems unknown to us. We can still get up in the morning and spend our day in obedience to God, doing these things.

I heard a story on the BBC radio hour this week about a man named Adriaan Vlok, who lives in South Africa. During the final years of apartheid rule, from 1986 through 1991, he served as the minister of law and order. In this position, he was responsible for upholding the apartheid laws, which included the ability to detain people without trial, to torture and to assassinate those anti-apartheid activists who were seen as a threat to the government. In 1999, he was granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was the only cabinet minister to admit to committing crimes, including the bombing of the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches, even though he considers himself to be a lifelong Christian. In 2006, after having joined the Gideons and, as he put it, read the New Testament for the first time, he committed his life to following Christ. He came forward with public apologies for a number of acts that he had not disclosed before this time. He went to Rev. Frank Chikane, a black pastor whom he had tried to assassinate, and he asked forgiveness in the name of Christ, and he washed the man’s feet. In an interview, he said he did this because he needed to humble himself, to bring himself to see this man and these people of color, whether they were anti-apartheid activists or servants in his household, as equal to him in the eyes of God.

The footwashing was done privately, but Rev. Chikane asked if he could make it public, to help others understand the healing power of humility and reconciliation. But it ignited a public controversy, and Adriaan Vlok found himself being questioned on radio, TV, and newspapers about the details of his additional actions. An article about him tells us this:

“In one interchange before a panel of questioners on a televised talk show, Vlok was pushed on his motivation and his religious identity was scrutinized: - [and these were some of his responses]

"I’m a Christian. … I carry the name of Christ. This is something I had to do.”
“Yes but you were a Christian when you did these things (during apartheid).” 
“I was raised in the Church, but I did not have a relationship with God until about ten years ago.”

 "Then what took you so long?” 
“Who can understand God’s timing? It took a long time for God to deal with me.”

Vlok now lives in a modest apartment and spends each day gathering up leftover food from a nearby bakery and grocery, and delivering it to nearby shelters for persons who are disabled and impoverished.

We know and we don’t know what God is calling us to do. Perhaps we’ve been let in on a glimpse of the big plan for our lives, but we don’t know the details or the timing. Or perhaps we cannot see what the big plan is. No matter what, we do know what God calls us to do each day – to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly with our God. To love our enemies. To love God with everything we have. As we do this, to the best of our abilities, we can know and trust completely that God will forgive our inability to get it right, that God will give us bread for the day, that God will hear our prayers, that God will participate with us in whatever good we try to do, that God will be merciful when we turn away.

There is no time like the present to follow Christ, to change our lives, to love and to serve the Lord.