Rev. Kevin Pleas

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-17a March 8, 2009

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, "I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous." Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.

God said to Abraham, "As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her." The Abraham fell on his face and laughed.

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If there is ever any question in your mind about whether or not God can use people in the advanced stages of their lives, you might find this morning's story worth remembering. This passage is actually the third time that God has appeared to Abram with the promise that he would be the founder of a great nation. Beginning in Genesis chapter 12, God comes to Abram while he is still living in "his father's house" in Haran. "His father's house" is a way of saying under his father's authority; which probably meant his life was something like Prince Charles, waiting around to become king. Abram was 75 years old at the time. Charles is only around sixty, but I'm sure he would just as soon not wait so long. At any rate, at God's bidding, Abram leaves his ancestral home and travels to the land of Canaan with his wife Sarai, and settles in to wait for God to fulfill the promise.

Eleven years later, Abram is 86 and he and Sarai have yet to conceive any children. They had come to the conclusion that what God really meant was for Abram to found his great nation with Hagar, Sarai's slave girl. Hagar conceives and bears Abram a son whom they name Ishmael. Abram now has a male heir and all seems to be right with the world. But, 13 years later, God appears yet again, announcing that Ishmael was actually not the one he had in mind. Sarai herself, already 90 years old, was to bear him a son whom they would name Isaac, and in the process their names would be changed to Abraham and Sarah. You can hardly blame Abraham for falling on his face laughing. I'm sure the writer meant to suggest he was laughing for joy, but there is a bit of absurdity in it as well. For the record, historically speaking, this story represents the point of division between Judaism and Islam. The Jews trace their origin through Isaac to Abraham and Sarah, while Muslims see themselves in the line of Ishmael, from Abraham and Hagar.

A good many years ago, I told this story one Sunday morning in my first church. Afterwards, a church member came up to me and said, with some irritation, that it was ridiculous for me to suggest that Abraham and Sarah were actually in their nineties. I responded that it didn't seem all that fantastic considering that Abraham's father lived to be two hundred and five and Noah didn't even start building the Ark until he was in his upper five hundred and nineties. Of course, all of this was before the invention of calendars. And in any case, taking all the details literally doesn't seem to be the main point.

Like many of the good old stories of the bible, I've repeated this one a number of times over the years. But, despite how familiar it has become, from time to time something new jumps out at me. This time, I was particularly struck when God says to Abraham, "Walk before me, and be blameless." That word "blameless" just kept bouncing around in my mind until I decided to look into it. Turns out, in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which we have in our pews, the word "blameless" appears 45 times. Yet, when I checked it out in no less than five bible dictionaries and commentaries, I couldn't find a single reference to that word. I suppose everyone finds the definition so obvious they don't feel a need to define it. But I'm a little pickier than that, so I started paging through all those forty-five occurrences of the word to see how it was being used in context.

What I found is that the word blameless, in the bible, is associated an armload of other words. Those who are blameless are also said to be upright, righteous, walking with God, kept from guilt, fearing God, turning away from evil, just, not perverse, innocent of great transgression, walking in God's law and statutes, doing no wrong, holy, pure, without blemish, irreproachable, undefiled, separated from sinners and sound of spirit, soul and body. The bible, it turns out, has a great deal to say about what it means to be blameless. It just doesn't do it directly.

So when God says to Abraham, "Walk before me and be blameless," apparently, what he has in mind is that Abraham keep himself in a perpetual state of innocence, purity and holiness that will be irreproachable. So, great, we have a definition. But holy cats, who on earth would ever be able to pull it off." Well actually, the bible says that a number of people managed it. Noah was "blameless in his generation." David was blameless in the sight of God's angel Achish. Job was "blameless and upright, turning away from evil." Daniel was saved from the lions because he was blameless, and Paul's righteousness under the law was blameless (in his own opinion, that is). Naturally, God is blameless and Jesus was "without sin," which is essentially the same thing.

The interesting thing is - apart from God and Jesus - all these other "blameless" people in scripture manage to demonstrate a collection of decidedly human failings. I think particularly of David, who, to name only one instance, had Uriah, a captain of his army, murdered so that he could take Uriah's sexy wife Bathsheba, who he had already gotten pregnant, into his harem. I don't know about you, but I would have a hard time calling that blameless.

The fact is, despite the bible's assurances, none of them were entirely blameless, and none of us are either. There's a great story that's been going around on the web along these lines.

In a trial, a Southern small-town prosecuting attorney called his first witness, an elderly, grandmotherly, woman to the stand. He approached her and asked, "Mrs. Jones, do you know me?" She responded, "Why, yes, I do know you, Mr. Williams. I've known you since you were a boy, and frankly, you've been a big disappointment to me. You lie, you cheat on your wife, and you manipulate people and talk about them behind their backs. You think you're a big shot when you haven't the brains to realize you'll never amount to anything more than a two-bit paper pusher. Yes, I know you."

The lawyer was stunned. Not knowing what else to do, he pointed across the room and asked, "Mrs. Jones, do you know the defense attorney?" She again replied, "Why yes, I do. I've known Mr. Bradley since he was a youngster too. He's lazy, bigoted, and he has a drinking problem. He can't build a normal relationship with anyone, and his law practice is one of the worst in the entire state. Not to mention he cheated on his wife with three different women. One of them was your wife. Yes, I know him." The defense attorney nearly died.

The judge asked both counselors to approach the bench and, in a very quiet voice, said, "If either of you idiots asks her if she knows me, I'll send you both to the electric chair."

Far from being blameless, most of us would much prefer not to have the bright light of day shone into the darker corners of our lives; which is probably why we become so defensive whenever someone points even the least little finger in our direction. Because we know, full well, that we are not blameless, our knee-jerk response to being blamed, for virtually anything, is to try to shift the blame off in a different direction.

Some of you will remember that fabulous scene from Stephen Sondheim's play, "Into the Woods." The play is absolutely brilliant. Sondheim took several of the great fairytale stories and blended them all together into one. The characters of Jack and the Beanstalk, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Repuntzel and the others all come together in one great blended narrative that is a marvel to behold. By the middle of the second act, things aren't exactly going well. Jack's travels up the beanstalk have brought a giant into the land who is destroying everything in her path. In response, all the characters come together to play the blame game. Jack begins with:

"But it isn't my fault. I was given those beans! You persuaded me to trade away my cow for beans! And without those beans there'd have been no stalk to get up to the Giants in the first place!"

Then the Baker chimes in "Wait a minute, magic beans for a cow so old that you had to tell a lie to sell it, which you told! Were they worthless beans? We're they oversold" Oh, and tell us who persuaded you to steal that gold.

And then they all get into the act and begin pointing fingers in every direction. "See, it's your fault. - No! - So it's your fault - No! - Yes, it is! - It's not! - It's true - Wait a minute, but I only stole the gold to get my cow back from you! - So it's your fault! - Yes! - No, it isn't! I'd have kept those beans, but our house was cursed. She made us get a cow to get the curse reversed! - It's your father's fault that the curse got placed and the place got cursed in the first place!

If you haven't seen the play, do yourself a favor and see it. It's one of the greatest play's I think I've ever seen and it has so much to say about our human condition.

In his book "Your Erroneous Zones," Dr. Wayne Dyer says "All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty of something by blaming him, but you won't succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy."

I agree with him; blaming doesn't help. Yet we all do it. We all play the blame game, and part of the reason is that we truly think that God wants us to be blameless. In Matthew, Jesus makes a statement that gives us no end of discomfort. He says, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." He might just as well have said, "Be blameless, as your heavenly Father is blameless." But while I'm perfectly willing to admit that God deserves that title, I don't, and I know myself well enough to realize that I never will. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't try to live our lives above reproach, but at the end of the day, there are just too many ways for us to fall short. No matter how much I do, no matter how much I commit myself to the life of faith, no matter how much I beat myself over the head for not being good enough or try to shift the blame on to someone else, at the end of the day, all by myself, I will never be blameless, and neither will you.

But, the point of all this is tucked into that last line, "all by myself." The whole point, I believe, of Jesus telling us to be perfect is to get us to recognize just how imperfect we really are. It is to give us a clear understanding of how pointless and hopeless it is to try to make ourselves right with God, without God's help. It can't be done! Jesus says, "Apart from me you can do nothing." Apart from God, that is, all our best efforts are doomed to failure. Yet, all too often, we live in the delusion that we are supposed to, all by ourselves, make ourselves blameless.

As long as we are so deluded, we will continue to drag around the weight of our own guilt, and go right on blaming others for our own mistakes. Don McCullough, in an article for Discipleship Journal, shares a John Killinger story "about the manager of a minor league baseball team who was so disgusted with his center fielder's performance that he ordered him to the dugout and assumed the position himself. The first ball that came into center field took a bad hop and hit the manager in the mouth. The next one was a high fly ball, which he lost in the glare of the sun - until it bounced off his forehead. The third was a hard line drive that he charged with outstretched arms; unfortunately, it flew between is hands and smacked his eye. Furious, he ran back to the dugout, grabbed the center fielder by the uniform, and shouted. 'You idiot! You've got center field so messed up that even I can't do a thing with it!'"

People, life is messed up, so much so that sometimes we just can't do a thing with it. One thing we can be sure of is that playing the blame game doesn't help. Neither carrying around the weight of our own guilt nor trying to shift it on to someone else will improve the situation one little bit. What does help is trusting that Jesus has taken the blame that separated us from God upon himself. What does help is knowing that, all by ourselves, we were never meant to be blameless in the first place. It is only in the blamelessness of God that we can ever hope to walk before God and be blameless.

Amen