This sermon is based on Genesis 15:1-6
As we’re still getting to know one another, I thought I might start this sermon by sharing a little bit about my family– specifically, my grandpa, my Papa Jack. Unfortunately, cancer took him when I was around eight years old and my grandmother a year later, so most of what I know about my Papa Jack is from family stories.
When he was a young man, he was a Baptist pastor. He took a job at the Baptist church my grandmother happened to be on staff at as the church pianist. She developed romantic feelings for my grandfather but he, being a man of integrity, told her that he couldn’t in good conscience date a member of his congregation. So my grandmother, being the cheeky woman she was, quit her job and started playing piano at the Methodist church next door. It’s my understanding that they got married shortly after that.
Now, the family story I always heard growing up was that once Papa Jack realized that one child on the way was going to eventually become three children on the way, he couldn’t support his growing family on the meager salary his church paid him. So he left the pastorate and learned the trade of life insurance brokering. He helped create a legacy of careful, responsible, integrity-driven business practices, which he also taught my Aunt Debbie– who eventually became one of –if not the– first female VP of a MetLife branch.
But as I got older, I wondered if there was more to the story about Papa Jack leaving congregational ministry. After I graduated from seminary 2016, I visited my aunt in Texas. I hadn’t seen her in years and she was curious about my call to ministry. We talked late into the evenings about spirituality, divine love, and purpose.
Before I left gifted me one of the most precious gifts I’ve ever been given: this folder of notes about spirituality that my Papa Jack wrote. Reading through it, I think there are some other reasons he left congregational ministry. Many of these notes communicate ideals that I can’t imagine a Southern Baptist church being comfortable with hearing from the pulpit. Reading through these notes is the closest I’ve gotten to discussing theology with my grandpa and I was surprised to find how much of his beliefs resonate with my own today.
He didn’t know it at the time, but he was planting seeds for someone like me to follow him into ministry. He may never know it, but through me and my ministry, his legacy lives on.
You may be wondering why I’m talking about this idea of legacy when our scripture reading for today is about God’s promise to Abraham, that Abraham’s descendants will outnumber the stars in the heavens. On the surface, it looks like a touching story of God promising an older couple that they will indeed have children –and in one sense, it is about that and I don’t want to minimize the miracle of birth. But there’s a deeper meaning here that we often miss when we read this story with our modern Western eyes. In order to understand the significance of what God’s promising Abraham, we need to revisit a sermon from our summer sermon series The Elephant in the Church: we need to revisit Art’s sermon on Hell.
To recap part of that sermon, Art educated us on a couple of theories about the afterlife. One of the things he taught us was how the ancient Hebrew people understood death and the afterlife. They didn’t believe in Hell, but they also didn’t really believe in Heaven. Their concept of the afterlife was this place called Sheol, which we might understand as a final resting place. We could get lost in this rabbit hole for a while, but, in a broad generalization, they believed Sheol is where your soul goes for its final sleep.
As far as eternal life is concerned, there wasn’t really a sense that you’d live forever the way we often picture it with our modern Christian eyes. No time in heaven singing praises around the throne, but no eternal fire and torture either. Just eternal sleep.
So in Abraham’s context, what would eternal life look like? Essentially, the Hebrew people believed you lived on through your children. The family who comes after you are the ones who keep you alive by keeping your memory alive. Without descendants, you would be erased from the collective memory of your people as generation after generation passed. There are few things more detrimental to a Hebrew family of this time than knowing their legacy would die, which is why Abraham is devastated by the thought that one of his servants (not someone related to him) would be his heir.
What God is promising Abraham when God tells Abraham his descendants will outnumber the stars in the sky isn’t just the promise of children; this is the closest thing to eternal life that the ancient Hebrew tradition has. God is promising Abraham that he will live forever through those who come after him. The fact that we are talking about Abraham in the year of our Lord 2024 is proof that God has made good on that promise.
Why did God promise Abraham this?
In this story, God blesses Abraham after two significant events. The first is after God first tells Abraham of his promise in Genesis 13:14-18, where God tells Abraham that his descendants will outnumber the dust of the earth. God told Abraham to walk the breadth of the land to see what he’d been given, so he, his wife Sarah, and his nephew Lot packed up their belongings, left everyone they knew, and went exploring.
The second event was when Abraham rescued his nephew Lot from the kings of Elam, Goiim, Shinar, and Aner. According to Genesis 14, Abraham rallied together 318 men, pursued the four kings across the countryside, and defeated them. Not only that, he recovered everyone who’d been kidnapped– including Lot.
Those two events carried significant meaning, which, it would seem, that God felt merited the reward referenced in Genesis 15:1. According to Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, the Hebrew word for “reward” here is not referring to a prize that is earned –like a medal or a trophy– but a special recognition given to a faithful servant of the king who has performed a bold or risky service.
Moving away from everything and everyone you know on nothing but a leap of faith is a bold and risky service. Putting your life on the line to save another when your own lineage –your legacy– isn’t secured is a bold and risky service. God saw Abraham’s commitment to doing the bold and risky work of faith and honored it by promising him a legacy– effectively promising him eternal life.
Photo by Phil Botha on Unsplash
But today, in a world where we don’t necessarily rely on our offspring to continue the family trade or carry the family name, what does it mean for us to leave behind a legacy? Rabbi Sandra Lawson from Reconstructing Judaism reminds us that, as Judaism has evolved, the religion has expanded its understanding of legacy. In a recent Facebook post, she said, “The idea is that everyone, regardless of their circumstances, has a role to play in making the world a better place, and that this work is a meaningful legacy that can be as significant as having children.”
Popular culture gives us another good understanding of legacy. In his final monologue in the Broadway play Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton comes to this definition of legacy: “It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see”
Abraham didn’t get to see how the descendants promised to him grew the worship of the God he loved so much, even though he participated in the bold and risky services we mentioned.
But the legacy doesn’t end with him. Others stepped into the legacy he left behind.
Moses didn’t get to go to the Promised Land, although he joined God in the bold and risky service of liberating the Hebrew people.
Paul didn’t get to see the expansion of the Church, although he engaged in the bold and risky service of changing his mind about the Gentiles and changing his ministry accordingly.
Rev. Addie Davis –the first woman to be ordained as a Baptist pastor– couldn’t have imagined a world with the number of female Baptist pastors we have now, even though she participated in the bold and risky service of following God’s call on her life to congregational ministry.
The 12 women who met in the powder magazine of colonial Williamsburg nearly 200 years ago to plant Williamsburg Baptist Church didn’t get to see the thriving congregation we have today, even though they did the bold and risky service of starting a church from scratch.
Legacy is planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.
But sometimes legacies get created for sobering reasons. Sometimes, just being who you are in the world is a bold and risky service.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t get to live to see our present-day efforts to embrace racial reconciliation in the church because he was assassinated, but he planted the seeds of a movement that’s continued today through people like Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis and Rev. Dr. Starlette Thomas, director of the Raceless Gospel initiative, both of whom preached from this pulpit earlier this year.
Marsha “Pay no mind” Johnson didn’t get to live to see transgender people become accepted by broader society because of her tragic death, but she led many of the first efforts to secure LGBTQ+ rights in the wake of the Stonewall Uprising. She paved the way for someone like me, who doesn’t present their gender in a traditional way, to step into places as important as church pulpits and as commonplace as grocery stores.
Neither of them people got to see the fruit borne from the seeds they planted. But both of them left behind a bold and risky legacy that directly defines who we –in this space– are as people of faith. Both of them made the conscious decision to live into who God created them to be. They believed a better world was possible. They lived as if a better world was possible. Their legacies help us get to where we are now and give us a framework for the work that still needs to be done.
As we reflect on the violent ways in which their lives ended, it’s a good reminder that not all legacies are good legacies. I speak for myself and I think probably for others in this room as well when I say that there are certain family legacies that end with me. And there are legacies in the big C-church that I believe will end with us. The legacies of violence that led to the death of those I just named. Legacies of exclusion. Legacies of pain.
Even Abraham has parts of his life that are not legacy-worthy. After today’s story, he makes some decisions that harm a lot of people. Because he’s not sure Sarah will ever actually bear children, he impregnates his wife’s slave Hagar. He later banishes Hagar and their son Ishmael into the desert which, without God’s intervention, would have been a certain death sentence. Just because we are in God’s favor now doesn’t mean we’re immune from making mistakes or harming our neighbor.
But funnily enough, I find some comfort in the fact that God doesn’t seem to base Abraham’s current worthiness off his future mistakes. God sees Abraham’s commitment and potential now and honors it with the promise of a legacy. In this story, we see a determination in Abraham's commitment – as well as the determination of the other ancestors I named– that calls us to choose to live into the potential God sees in us.
Their determination reminds me of how Walter Brueggemann describes the nature of Abraham's response to God’s promise:
“The entire passage is one of sharp exchange in which Ambraham stands face to face with God and seeks to refute the promise and resist the assurance. Clearly, the faith to which Abraham is called is not a peaceful, pious acceptance. It is a hard-fought and deeply argued conviction. Abraham will not be a passive recipient of the promise.”
Part of building beloved community is not being passive recipients to God’s promise or God’s call. It’s about thoughtfully considering both the legacy we inherit and the legacy we leave behind. It’s about intentionally living into the potential that God sees in each of us now.
When I step into this pulpit, I’m intentionally and thoughtfully reaping the fruit of the seeds innumerable people before me planted– including my Papa Jack. But by stepping into this pulpit, I’m also intentionally and thoughtfully planting seeds for those who will come long after I’m gone. When you step into this sanctuary, when you step into the fellowship hall to pack dinners for From His Hands, you are stepping into the legacy that those before you left for you to inherit. When you’re gone, others will come and they will continue this holy work. And that matters.
So, Williamsburg Baptist Church, I ask us: whose legacy are we inheriting? On whose shoulders do we stand? What fruit do we get to harvest thanks to the hard work of those who came before us?
But I also ask us this: what seeds will we leave behind for those who come after us?
The seeds we plant matter because we don’t exist in a vacuum. The way we build beloved community now not only affects us, but those who come after us. And the people who will come after us? They will outnumber the stars in the heavens. And I thank God for that.