Sermons

---

I Give Up
August 27, 2000
Sermon series on Trees of the Bible
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
   
Genesis 12:10-20 & 13:1-18

This morning, we again touch on our August theme of “trees.”  We’ve looked at Psalm 1, the tree planted by streams of water.  We’ve looked at the fig tree that Jesus cursed, and at the sycamore-fig that Jesus called Zaccheus out of.  Today, our story contains a familiar tree…the oak tree.  Now, in Hebrew there are a number of words which can mean “oak,” and perhaps this is why our NIV Bible prefers to use the word “great trees,” but most translations say “oak,” and refer to a strong, sturdy, stately tree.      

Genesis 13:1-18

Bruce Larson once said that “When God really wants to teach us something, He sends us on a trip.”  It seems that this was the case with Abram.  It was indeed God who was sending him on a trip.  It was, in fact, God who not only sent him but gave him promises that no man had ever received.  Promises like “I will give you this land.”  “I will make you into a great nation.”  And “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

We need to remember that Abram, later renamed Abraham, is perhaps the greatest hero of the Old Testament.  When the writer of the letter to the Hebrews lists  “the Faithful People’s Hall of Fame,”  Abraham gets three separate mentions.  Paul talks extensively about Abraham in Galatians, as does James.  Abraham is the Father of Faith. 

Knowing this, there are two different stories for us to consider this morning…and we want to consider them together.  The first one Angela read a few minutes ago.  I have titled it “Abram Fails Miserably.”  Abram is camped near Bethel, where he enjoys close intimacy with God.  He builds an altar there and worships, calls on the name of the Lord.  But a famine in the land drives him to Egypt.   

Though Abram is close to God, called by God and accompanied by God…he is dreadfully afraid of what could happen to him in Egypt.  He is married to a beautiful woman, Sarai.  And Abraham is afraid that the Egyptians will kill him in order to acquire his wife.  So, he comes up with this ingenious plan to protect himself.   “I know…if we call Sarai my sister, then the Egyptians can have her and they’ll treat me well on her account.” 

Abram’s shrewdness DOES prosper him with economic wealth.  The Pharaoh of Egypt takes Sarai into the palace as one of his wives, and rewards Abram well.  But somehow Pharaoh finds out about Abram’s deception and recognizes that God is intervening on Sarai’s behalf.  The pharaoh shows a good deal more moral courage than Abraham ever does by freeing her…and gives Abram a well-deserved rebuke as he sends them off. 

What kind of man would sacrifice his own wife, his own marriage, his own morals in order to save his own skin?  Abram knows he has been a worm.  Some “father of faith.”  His first test on the journey, and he has failed miserably.

Now the second story, immediately following.  We can call it “Abram Succeeds Marvelously.”  Abram returns from Egypt, and slinks back into the same spot near Bethel where he had worshipped and been close to God.  He tries to reset himself, calls on the name of the Lord again. 

After he is there, it becomes quite apparent that Abram’s thriving flocks and herds and people are too big.  His nephew Lot also has large herds, and large herds require land.  There is a limit, especially with other people also living nearby, to what the land can support.  And the two families begin to get into arguments.  What will Abram do now?  Simple.  Abram is the man of the promise, Abram is the elder, and Abram is Lot’s uncle.  All of the rights, all of the privileges, all of the power sits in Abram’s hands.  All he has to do is decide what the absolute choicest land is and claim it as his own.  This time he can watch out for himself with a clear conscience.  Lot can go scratch out a living on whatever is left over.  It’s simple, cut and dried.  Except. 

Except that Abram apparently learned something from his time in Egypt.  Something very important.   Abram isn’t going to act out of self-preservation,  rights or entitlement.  Instead he throws up his hands and says, “God, I give up.  I tried being shrewd and wise and I blew it.  So now, I’m going to just trust that since you’re the one who called me on this trip, and you’re the one who made the promises…that you’re going to be faithful to those, that you are trustworthy.”   And so Abram calls Lot his nephew over, puts his arm around his shoulders, walks to a spot with a great lookout and says:  “You know, nephew,  this quarreling and conflict isn’t good.  And there really aren’t enough resources for us to stay together.   Let’s part ways for the sake of peace in our  family.  So you choose.  Take the land you want.  If you go right, I’ll go left.  If you go left, I’ll go right.  Your choice.”

Lot can hardly believe it.  He looks up and makes his choice.  As Frederick Buechner says, Lot “took over the rich bottom-land and Abraham was left with the scrub country around Dead Man’s Gulch.”  Abram has come a long ways in a short time since he fell on his face in Egypt.  He is throwing up his hands and saying, “Lord, I give up.  I tried it my way, tried to outfox everybody and be wise as a serpent, and I failed miserably.  You do what you want.  I’m just going to try and trust you here.”

These stories are all about trusting God.  We talked about trust last week in reading about Zaccheus stepping out of the tree when Jesus called. And because of that, I tried to get away from this topic all week as I studied and prayed.  But after purposely trying to talk myself out of it for half a day, I realized that I couldn’t get away from it.  And so if you’re here today, I’m going to assume that one reason God has you hear is to get you to consider what it means for you to trust God in your life.

Here are some of the things I think Abram learns in these two stories:

a) There are things more important than possessions.  One of them that is affirmed for Abram is that family unity, that relationships with people are more important than things.  Abram plays the peacemaker, at great financial cost to himself.  Surely if he exercised his rights, his net worth would be better.  Better land means more water and better eating, means better herds and flocks.   By giving Lot the choice, Abram removes this issue.   I have talked with more than one family when a household must be dismantled after a parent dies.  It can be extremely divisive and ugly.  Sibling issues that have lay dormant for decades pop up as things are split up.  People are afraid they won’t get their fair share, that they’ll be stepped on if they’re too nice.   And those things may indeed be true.  But Abram says “God, I’m going to trust that I’m living under your promises.  And because I am, I can look at this situation and say “I believe that God will take care of me…therefore, the unity of this family is more important than the dollars and cents involved.” 

b) There are things more important than getting what we have coming to us, what we think we are entitled to.  One of them is living in a spirit of generosity.  Not just generosity because of the amount of the gift, but a pure generosity. 

A friend just told us a wonderful story that involved her brother-in-law.  This man was laid off from his work, and he and his family had to put their house up for sale with the plan of moving into a small apartment.  Before the “For Sale” sign could go up in the front yard, a neighbor came over with a proposition.  He would buy the house from them, and rent it back to them at whatever they could afford.  When they were back on their feet, he would sell it right back to them.  Any rent they had paid would go against the final sale.  It was a beautiful thing to do.  It wouldn’t maximize an investment, wouldn’t increase the portfolio, in fact would cost him something.  Generosity normally is costly.  But generosity also changes lives. 

I wonder what Lot was thinking as Abraham said, “Here, you take the pick and I’ll adjust.”  I wonder if he was looking for some angle Abraham was taking, some scheme, some fraud, some way he would lose on the deal.  It was too good to be true.  But Abram’s action says, “I know that God is leading me, and I’m trusting in his promises.  And that’s more important than me orchestrating a result that will benefit me first.”

c) There are things more important than looking wise.  Trusting in God means living unafraid to look foolish.   It means looking foolish sometimes.  On the windowsill above my desk I keep a little quote from Bill Hybels that says, “Lord, if you want me to look foolish, if my looking foolish would enlarge the kingdom in some way…then just do it.” 

Every time we extend ourselves to someone who doesn’t reciprocate, every time we decide to talk about Jesus, every time we feel prompted to talk with someone we don’t know, every time we respond to the call to pray out or speak out or sing out in worship because the Spirit moves us to, every time we look to the interests of others before our own…we run the risk of looking foolish. 

Abram’s actions with Lot undoubtedly looked very foolish to those around…perhaps even to Lot himself.  Abram, great patriarch of Israel, fount of wisdom…gives up the pick of the land to which he was fully entitled.  But Abram was trying to operate out of trust, trust that walking with God was more important than how he was perceived.  And in fact, that God can work through a willing and apparently foolish person easier than through a closed and apparently wise person.

All of these are ways that Abram was living for the promise, trusting that God’s choice of him was more important than anything else.  Walter Brueggemann says Abram is choosing “to disengage from the present barren way of things around him.  The promise of God jeopardizes everything that the world holds dear.”   

I looked around for some kind of evidence in our culture this week to for what the world holds dear…it’s not hard to find.  It seemed especially visible on Wednesday night…with the entire country tuned into “Survivor.”   How many of you watched?  No, be honest!  It’s quite a phenomenon actually, people battling each other to be the last one on the desert island, cutting each other’s throats and stabbing loyalties in the back in the name of the $1 million dollar prize, in the name of the future income their fame would bring, in the name of looking good on national TV.   

I read the paper the next morning.  The Times said the winner was “the man who many fans had come to loathe as a symbol of cold-blooded self-aggrandizement.”  Some of the more marvelous statements afterwards:  “I regret trusting Sue, being vulnerable to her.”  My favorite was:   “If I ever pass you along in life again and you are lying there in the road dying of thirst, I will not give you a drink of water…I will let the vultures take you and do whatever they want with you. 

If the incredible success of “Survivor” reflects anything of what our world holds dear, it’s a scary thing.  The values communicated by “Survivor” reflect the Abram story in Egypt,  but nothing of his actions with Lot.  

As it turns out, Lot makes a poor choice, choosing to live in a place that reminded him of Egypt, choosing to be near Sodom and Gomorrah, which will be disastrous for him.  As for Abram, God reaffirmed the promises of land and offspring to him, and Abram’s family moved near Hebron, where there were a number of great oak trees.  And it was there that Abram would buy land, would entertain angels, would hear God, would have his son born, would bury Sarah and would be buried himself…as would Isaac and Rebecca, Leah and Jacob.  Near those oak trees, God’s relationship with Abraham is played out through the generations of his family.  It was around that group of oaks that Abraham continued to live out his trust in God’s promises.

So often when we talk about how OUR life would look if we lived more by faith, more trusting…it seems that we end up saying, “If I were to trust God, I would end up being a missionary in Africa, or a nun, or heaven forbid, a preacher.”  Abraham’s story challenges me more to trust in the everyday, for the long haul.  What does it look like to trust in our lives each day?   Not trust in whether or not we get a parking place, but trust that God has us on a journey and wants to be with us and teach us at every step.

What would life look like if we said, “Lord, I want to live in the light of your promises.  I believe you have reached out and claimed me.  I believe that you want me to see you as I take the bus to work.  As I wrestle with my kids.  As I meet someone walking the dog around the block.  As I go on vacation…what do you want me to see?  Where will you stretch me,  or encourage me?  Lord, I know you have me in relationship with this person for a reason…what is it?” 

I’ve tried to ask myself those questions this week.  I had lunch with someone I meet with about once a month, a man in his sixties who has followed Christ for many years.  And as we chatted, I had this sudden insight of  “I’m trusting that this is where God has put me for the next hour.  Why?  What do I need to learn from our time?”  And it struck me that God had me with this man to soak up some of the passion he has for Christ right into his retirement years.  

I had another experience of being frustrated during a day that was absolutely packed from beginning to end, with hardly time to draw a deep breath (who is in charge of my schedule, anyway?). And I became aware that my frantic spirit was going to ruin the day.  I felt like God said, “You need to trust me that I’m in this busy day.  Take a deep breath, and look for what I have for you in each situation…they are not just routine, and they are not accidents.”

And so Abram goes to live among the oak trees at Mamre.  I imagine him going out one night in the dark, and sitting down among the oaks.  I imagine him hearing the wind rustling the leaves of the trees.  I imagine him seeing the stars, thinking about the promise that his descendants will surpass that uncountable number. 

And I imagine him reflecting back over these two events of his life.  The first, where he screws up and fails miserably, only to find that God is with him anyway.   We call that grace.  We see it in the One called Jesus, the Christ, who came on our behalf even when we could see no further than the end of our own nose…or life. 

And the second experience, where he succeeds as he chooses to trust God’s care more than anything that the world could ever offer.  And finds that God again is there.  I imagine Abram, as he reflects on God’s unfailing presence in his life, in success or failure, getting down on his knees, eyes wet, overwhelmed as he begins to worship…there among the oak trees.