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Abraham is the central character in the First and Second Readings appointed for today. The Apostle Paul calls Abraham "the father of us all," which is the theme of a thought--provoking book by Karl--Josef Kuschel. Kuschel is a professor of ecumenical theology at the University of Tuebingen. The title of the book is Abraham: Sign Of Hope For Jews, Christians And Muslims. The book is an appeal to peoples of the three great religions to search their heritage to understand how Abraham should be a common point of reference for them. That is most important in a world of hostility in which the tensions between the peoples of the three religions are intensified with increases of fundamentalism and extremism. Kuschel demonstrates how Abraham, a Chaldean, was made a Jew by the Jews. Then Christians made Abraham a Christian. The Muslims counted Abraham a model Muslim.

Instead of each religion claiming Abraham exclusively, it is important that they recognize that within their own traditions Abraham is regarded as being hospitable to all peoples. It would be on the basis of their commonality that the three religions could explore future relationships and overcome the hostilities and prejudices that separate them. While each religion would most certainly keep their special identities, each would also find in Abraham an openness and inspiration for negotiations for peace. Kuschel calls his program "An Abrahamic Ecumenism." The Roman Catholic Hans Kung and the Egyptian Anwar Sadat were very much attracted to his proposal. Certainly the Apostle Paul left room for that kind of negotiation in his understanding of Abraham.

Abraham, The Chaldean

The First Reading today is a brief account of how the call came from God to Abraham originally. As usual there are those scholars who would say that the existence of an historical Abraham is questionable. However, the traditions surrounding him are so well developed as to make the theory of a non--historical Abraham out of the question. At the same time, we do not have any way of discovering at what precise date the call from God came to him. Nor do we have any way in which we can establish how it was that Abraham made the move from the Ur of the Chaldees to Mesopotamia. We are told that his father Terah took Abraham and his daughter--in--law Sarah to go into Canaan. However, when they got to Haran, they stayed there, and Abraham's father died there. It was then that Abraham received a word from God that he should go unto Canaan (Genesis 12:1--2). How that word was delivered to him we do not know.

Jimmy Carter tells us that he got the word to run for the presidency of the United Sates of America one day when he was sitting at poolside in Atlanta. He had a similar impulse to run for the governorship of Georgia and won. He felt he had served well as a governor and could do the same as president of his nation. He looked over the field of candidates and felt he could do better than any of them. He felt called to do so. Did Abraham go through a similar kind of reasoning? Did he decide that the idols that he and his family had been worshiping in the Land of Chaldea did nothing for him? The book of Joshua said that he had been an idolater (Joshua 24:2). Did he become a monotheist because it just made good sense to disown the kind of problems idolatry created and also failed to solve? The tradition and stories about him suggest that possibility. He is pictured as a wise and sensitive judge of human nature, a good administrator of great wealth, and an extremely devout man.

Idealizing Abraham

Two Jewish historians did their best to establish the fact that Abraham was a model of faith for all the world. The two historians were Philo and Josephus, contemporaries of Jesus. Philo was born to wealth in Alexandria, one of the centers of Grecian culture. Philo made the effort to demonstrate that Abraham was a world citizen. As a Chaldean, Abraham was not a Jew but a Gentile. He was a model believer with a faith in the Creator of the universe. As such, he was a model of faith and reconciliation within the Hellenistic or Grecian culture. The other historian, Josephus, was born to a wealthy family in Jerusalem. He, too, emphasized the fact that Abraham, a non--Jew, became the progenitor of Israel. Josephus was taken to Rome as a prisoner, but ended up in the court of the Emperor Vespasian as one of the emperor's favorites.

Josephus did his best to demonstrate that Abraham arrived at his monotheism through philosophical and scientific observations of the creation or nature. Because of these scientific and spiritual insights Abraham also highly influenced culture. Josephus noted that when Abraham was in Egypt, he introduced astronomy and arithmetic to the Egyptians. For Josephus, Abraham represented the best in social and learned behavior. In the Roman Empire of his day, Josephus was bent on demonstrating how the faith of the conquered people of Israel could speak to the most sophisticated and learned people of the empire. Both Philo and Josephus did their best to explain the faith of Abraham as reasonable and philosophical results from the observations of nature. Both make much of the fact that Abraham observed much ritual, spiritual, and social behavior which had not yet been formulated as the Hebraic or Jewish code.

Luther's View

Martin Luther had problems with any efforts to demonstrate that faith is born out of our own reason. Though he was highly appreciative of the work of the philosophers who wrestled with the questions of the universe, he disqualified them for their efforts to describe God. We do not come to faith in the true God apart from revelation. As Paul says, people by nature do not discern the spiritual things of God. At the same time Luther had trouble with people who claimed a direct revelation from God by the Spirit. He called them the Schwaermerei, the "enthusiasts," people who, he said, swallowed the Holy Spirit, "feathers and all." So Luther had trouble with Abraham. How did God come to him? How did the word, the call, come to him from God? Luther was convinced that the word had to be ministered to him. Someone had to instruct him and inform him.

Luther took a hard look at the table of the generations in the eleventh chapter in Genesis. He calculated from that material that Abraham was a contemporary of Shem, a son of Noah. Luther surmises that it was Shem who was the preacher or teacher for the idolater Abraham. It is either Shem or someone whom Shem sends to Abraham to bring him to repentance, to disown his idols, and to embrace faith in God. That certainly is a wild guess on the part of Luther. However, it does represent his conviction that God had not left God without witness in the primitive records we have about the beginnings of the very faith which we espouse. God does have to work through people. God relies upon people to make the witness. That had to be true when God dealt with Abraham. What is so striking about the call to Abraham is that God calls an idolater. The call is unmistakable, however. The call is radical in its demands. In order to know, appreciate, and believe what God intends for Abraham he must leave his homeland, his relatives, and his father's house. It were as though the word was that if Abraham remained where he was, he would not be saved. He had to be separated from his former way of life.

Paul's Concern

Since the call of God did come to Abraham in such a dramatic form, the tendency is to focus on the obedience of Abraham as a great act or deed. Perhaps most of us in this highly mobile age know what is demanded of us when we are called upon to make a move. It could be downsizing, a merger, or a failure in business that may necessitate having to make a move. Or it could be a challenge through a career change, upgrading a position, or an offer to new leadership that could call for a move. Such changes call for a total review of one's situation, family obligations, and community involvement. The whole family might have to work at making a final decision whether one should leave one's present environs to take on the new position. We certainly would see that as work. On the other hand, there are moves that people make without having to give much thought or work as to whether one should move. If the environment itself becomes a threat, one does not have to think much about making the move. We know of communities that have been disturbed by pollution or radiation. Some have been threatened by erosion. Others may have been disturbed by social problems, such as a drug culture. In those instances the decision to move has been made for them.

Abraham's call begins on an emergent note. The decision has been made for him. He must move beyond the idolatrous culture and home in which he has been living. It was the Apostle Paul who wanted people to understand this most clearly. Both Jewish and Gentile Christians should understand that the initiative for Abraham's calling came from God. It was by grace that God came to deliver Abraham from his environment to begin life anew under the promises of God. Paul does not mention an Hebraic tradition about Abraham which says that Abraham was thrown into a fire, because of his protest of Chaldean idolatry. Paul may not have known of that tradition which adds that Abraham was saved because of his protest. If Paul did know about it, he would not have counted it as a work of salvation for Abraham. Paul uses Abraham as a prime model of how people are saved by grace.

Not By Works

Paul is most explicit in saying that works had nothing to do with Abraham's standing before God. It was in this essay Paul wrote to the congregation at Rome that Paul wanted to teach as clearly as possible how it is that people are saved. Paul was not only aiming at legalistic religion insisting that we make ourselves acceptable to God by our piety and our works. Paul knew that to be a normal and natural tendency. We are filled with the urge to please others in order to be liked. We constantly ask ourselves how we are doing. Paul makes note of that. In the world the pattern is "to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due."

In the world you have a right to expect payment for your wages and boast about it. You can even ask for a raise if you think you deserve it and are bold enough to do so. However, do not try that with God. In the first place, you have not done enough or done well enough to merit God's approval. Paul handled that in the previous section in which he showed how we all fall short of the glory of God. However, here the emphasis is on the fact that God does not establish relationship with us through the law or works. What God does is make an offer of love and grace that is too good to refuse. The story about Abraham is about promise and faith. The promise God made to Abraham was that he "would inherit the world," says Paul. Now that kind of promise did not come by the law. For if it did, Abraham and his descendants would have been wiped out, for the law could only condemn idolaters. On top of that, if people become heirs of the world by law, then "faith is null and the promise is void," says Paul.

Counted As Righteous

Paul points out that in Abraham's case the promise was both valid and effective. God promised Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation and in him all the nations of the earth would be blessed. What a promise! Why wouldn't Abraham bite on that? Yet he did have to leave his homeland, culture, and relatives. He did have to believe that he would be a father. Yet there were no signs of fatherhood being very likely in his case. He already was very old, and his wife Sarah was barren. Time was passing him by. The years passed into decades, and still Abraham had no heir. God was willing to renew the promise to Abraham. With no heir, Abraham offered the suggestion that he make a steward in his home his legal heir. God vetoed that proposal. Instead God assured Abraham that he would have his own heir. Then God suggested that Abraham look at the sky to count the stars if he was able, because his descendants would be that numerous. Abraham believed God, and the writer says, "And the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness" (Genesis 15:6).

The writer noted that God now looked upon Abraham, the sinful idolater, as righteous. The one who had been committed to a life of worshiping idols and living life on those terms is now regarded by God as one who is God's righteous and holy child, a son of God. It was all by faith. Abraham had not lifted a hand to make this a possibility. Paul says with good reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, to those who share the faith of Abraham. Paul says this promise includes us. Abraham is "the father of us all." Paul says we believe in the same God as Abraham. It is the God "who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist."

The Offer Is Universal

Paul's application of this truth about the faith of Abraham was to help both the Jewish and Gentile Christians in the congregation at Rome to know that they were made one, or united, by their common faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. They believed that the promise given to Abraham came to its fulfillment, was incarnate in the person of Jesus, and was played out in the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus could say that Abraham had seen his day and believed in it (John 8:56). In this Lententide we concentrate on the meaning of the Passion of our Lord. We would not be able to understand that, if we did not know about the history of salvation God had initiated with the faith God created beginning with Abraham. Nor could we understand the benefits of the Passion of our Lord as extended to us if it were not offered to all. That is the clincher for Paul.

Paul draws out the fact that though the promise was given to Abraham, it was intended to be passed on and extended to all. Paul quotes again from Genesis, "I have made you the father of many nations" (Genesis 17:4). As it is, the promise is universal. In the later chapters of Romans, Paul points out that the promise of God and the Covenant of God had never been revoked as far as the Jews are concerned. Therefore they can still be saved if they share in the faith of Abraham in the promise of God. We began by noting that Karl--Josef Kuschel has proposed that Jews, Christians, and Muslims could find commonality in the faith they have come to know through Abraham. He called it an "Abrahamic ecumenism." Paul helped us to understand that to be true if we are talking about faith in God that is shaped alone by the promise of God as we know it in Christ Jesus. We would scuttle any proposal that suggests one must add elements of law and fulfillment of the law that makes null and void faith and the promise. However, we welcome all who can confess that, like Abraham, we are saved by faith without the deeds of the law.