Daniel Berris - 4 Sunday after Pentecost. 

Promises are made to be broken… her word is good… He is as good as his word.  All are sayings you might have heard before.  They have some meaning for us today.

These are two themes in the readings today for me– one of promise and one of faith.  I believe these two areas are very much interconnected for us as Christians.

In the Genesis reading, it is the first mention of a promise God gives to Abraham.  He says I WILL make of you a great nation.  Paul refers to it in the Romans reading.  This promise later becomes a covenant agreement between God and Abraham.  When we look at the gospel reading we hear of the faith people have in Jesus.  Matthew the tax collector who follows Jesus when called, the woman who had been haemorrhaging for 12 years and the man who asked Jesus to resurrect his child.

Let’s begin by looking at the promise. A promise has been expressed as a word that goes forth into unfilled time.  It reaches ahead of its speaker and its recipient, to mark an appointment between them in the future.  A promise may be an assurance of continuing or future action on behalf of someone.  It may be a solemn agreement of lasting mutual relationship as in the covenants or perhaps even the announcement of a future event.

You might be interested to know that there is no exact Hebrew equivalent for "promise" in English. The ancient Hebrew word for promise is dabar.  This is a word still used in Israel today.  Literally it is the noun form of the verb "to speak." Or simply the word means, "word”.

This is where our saying “he (or she) is as good as their word” might apply.  When someone says, they are as good as their word; we know that a deal has just been made.  This might have some significance for us as we know that what is at stake is not just something happening or not happening.  There is far more involved.  It now involves the identity of the individual and this is something precious. 

I mentioned before that what God made with Abraham was a covenant.  This is a sort of deal.  It came about not because God forced Abraham into it though.  It came from an act of love on God’s part and Abraham had to choose to believe it or not.

I want to tell you about a fella I spoke to in prison this week.  He was an interesting fella.  Although white, his background was indigenous.  He was a heavy smoker as you could tell from the stains on his fingers.  We talked about his study that he is doing to educate himself, we talked about family and his hopes for when he gets out.  He then told me of various deals he has made with his kids.  I was curious as to why a deal and before I could ask he told me that he makes deals… as promises are made to be broken, you can’t break a deal.  In this man’s life a deal meant more than a promise. 

For the family of this man, it needs to mean something special because of the situation they are all in.  It is something that they all can look forward to in the midst of their separation because the man could not make good on his deal now, it is a deal gone forth in unfilled time.  This man’s word meant something personal for his family and they had to choose to believe it or not.

When the Hebrew word dabar is translated into Greek, the translation reads as a word you might be more familiar with… logos.  Logos is defined as "an expression of an inward thought”….  Jesus was the expression of God’s inward thought of salvation.

If we look at what Paul has to say, we see that the promise was not given to Abraham because he adhered to a set of rules; rather it was because of Abraham’s faith in God.  A faith that knew God was as good as his word.  Faith is an important part in a deal because you have to decide whether to believe the person or not.  Whether to have faith in them, or not.

Now we come to faith and here is where Paul says:

13   For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law… but through the righteousness of faith.

I imagine that this is the same faith that we see in Matthew to follow Jesus, the same faith as the man who knew that Jesus could raise his child and the same faith of the woman who knew that if she only touched Jesus’ clothes she would be made well.  And I imagine in a somewhat similar way, a faith that perhaps this man in jail was asking for his children and family to have in him.  That they would risk believing that what he says, will one day be accomplished.

Paul goes on to say of Abraham that:

²⁰No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, ²¹being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. ²²Therefore his faith  ‘was reckoned to him as righteousness.’ ²³Now the words, ‘it was reckoned to him’, were written not for his sake alone, ²⁴but for ours also.

Whether we have lived a righteous life in God’s eyes will not be based on whether we adhered to a set of rules or doing good deeds (although living out our faith in actions is important).  It will be judged on whether we had faith in believing that Christ is our full and sufficient justification that brings us into an eternal relationship with God.

To live a life of faith is not automatically understood all at once and it doesn’t always come naturally. We must learn and as we learn we will most likely have times of doubt and uncertainty. But those times do not need to cut us off from God. God is a patient, compassionate and merciful father who desires for us to learn to trust him.  To have faith that always makes good on a promise.

It is with deeply theological questions that we struggle to comprehend what God’s promises means for us, but ultimately with child-like simplicity that we will find how to implement them in our lives.

What is a promise God has set before you that you might be finding a struggle?  Something you find yourself having to decide… will I believe in him or not?

I pray that we will be strengthened in our faith as we learn how to trust our heavenly Father and that we might understand the depths of God’s love found in Jesus, the Word that begun as an inward thought and was expressed into our world.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen