Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 15:1–6; Psalm 33 (sung); Hebrews 11:1, 8–16; Luke 12:32–40
Church of Scotland, Geneva, Auditoire de Calvin, August 10 2025
In an early scene, Phillip Henslowe, the theatre owner, is explaining to Hugh Fennyman, his financial backer and irate creditor, about the economics of the theatre business: “The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.”
“So what do we do?” asks Fennyman. “Nothing,” says Henslowe.
“Strangely enough, it all turns out well.”
“How?” demands Fennyman. “I don’t know,” says Henslowe. “It’s a mystery.”
In the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, this early exchange becomes a refrain until, finally, it’s what Shakespeare and Viola de Lesseps say to each other before they are parted forever.
We may wonder if it’s really true, given that the film ends “with tears and a journey”, as Viola is carried off to Virginia by a nobleman she doesn’t love. But at least Shakespeare gets to write Twelfth Night.
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If I have a text for this sermon, it must be Paul’s line from his second letter to the young church in Corinth: “we walk by faith, not by sight.” (2 Cor 5:7)
We are not alone in this; Abraham, Luke, and even Jesus of Nazareth are no better off than we.
Abraham didn’t have a map or a GPS when he went into the desert. Jesus didn’t have a crystal ball when he set his face to go to Jerusalem. When Luke was writing his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, he didn’t have a “mirror, mirror on the wall” with which he could hold intelligent conversation. They too walked by faith, not by sight. This is our human condition.
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Our readings from Genesis and Hebrews this morning offer a binocular view of Abraham.
The short passage from Genesis is one part of the cycle of Abraham stories that stretches from the end of chapter 11 to the beginning of chapter 25. These stories are not, in our modern sense, historical. Many of them have the whiff of folk tale or legend. But they tell us, in their own way, of one who is of deep significance to all who trace their ancestry to him – all who call themselves children of Abraham – Jews and Christians and Muslims.
The most basic promise God makes to Abraham is that he will become a great people, and that, through this people, all the peoples of the earth will be blessed. What is noteworthy about the Genesis cycle is that most of the time Abraham has no idea what is going on. But as we heard this morning, he believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.
This is the point the letter to the Hebrews underlines. Abraham set out not knowing where he was going but trusting that God would take him there. He knew that we have here no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come (Hebrews 13:14). We are looking for the kingdom of God.
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To read our Gospel passage this morning, we need bifocals. We need to see the world as it appears to Luke; but we also we need to see the world as it appears to the figure at the centre of his Gospel – Jesus of Nazareth. The world appears differently to Luke than it does to Jesus because Jesus is living before Easter and Luke is writing after Easter.
Jesus preaches the kingdom of God in a quite particular sense and invites us to pray that this kingdom will come.
God is always king: God is the creator and sustainer of all that is, including us humans. But our human world rather obviously doesn’t run on divine lines.
What Jesus is telling us is that God is acting definitively to put our broken world to rights and become openly and finally king. But he doesn’t know precisely how God is going to do this: he doesn’t have a crystal ball. He has some clues, drawn from the Jewish scriptures. He believes that his own fate is intimately linked with the fate of his people and of all peoples. He warns that an out-of-control nationalism will lead to Jewish disaster, as happened in the Jewish revolt of a generation later, and in the Bar Kochba revolt two generations after that, and may well be happening again today. All of this he tells the crowds, and in much more detail he tells in secret to his close followers; and to everyone he says, “Stay awake! Be alert!”
Luke is writing after Easter, when it is clear to him, as it is to the other writers of the New Testament, that Easter changes everything. Where Jesus pictures the coming of God to be king, they think now of Jesus returning to be king. The risen Jesus has ascended into heaven, says Luke, there to be seated at the right hand of God; but here on earth he is not yet openly and definitively king. And that is where Luke’s hearers, then and now, come in.
With Abraham we see the beginning of a covenant people, a community dedicated to God and to serving God’s purposes for the world. The aim of Jesus is to give birth to a renewed covenant people: a community of Spirit-filled followers who will trust in God and love others, through faithful witness, service to the weak and oppressed, making peace, and showing love to all – however unlovable.
That community, in case you haven’t noticed, is us. We still don’t have a roadmap or a GPS, a mirror on the wall, or a crystal ball. But we do know in broad terms the direction of travel. We know where we’re going, and we know the Spirit of Christ is going with us.
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I owe my sermon title to Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century English mystic.
At the age of 30, she is lying at death’s door. Everyone around her believes she will die, and so does she.
But she doesn’t do that. Instead, she has what today we might call a near-death experience. Or rather, 16 near-death experiences: a set of 16 visions that she calls “shewings”, because what interests her is not what she sees but what the risen Christ shows her, what Christ reveals to her.
Julian had always been troubled by sin. If there were no such thing as sin, she thought, we would all be as pure as our Lord created us, reflecting God’s likeness.
“And so, like a fool,” she says, “I used to wonder about this.” Why wouldn’t an all-knowing God have prevented sin? If God had left sin out of creation, it seemed to her, all would be well. “I know I should have abandoned this disturbing line of thought, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. I grieved and lamented this beyond all reason and discretion.”
In the 13th of her shewings, Jesus gave her all she needed. ‘Sin is inevitable,’ he said, “yet all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Let me enter a slight caveat here. Strictly speaking, sin is not inevitable. We, and those who rule over us so badly, can always choose to do the right thing, especially if we take time enough to figure out what that right thing is. Still, sin is highly likely. It’s hard to be human. It’s easy to do the wrong thing, or to do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
What Julian is telling us that, never mind how deep-dyed the world’s sin or our own sins, Christ, and God in Christ, trumps sin.
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What Julian says of sin, we may also say of sickness and suffering. We may wonder why an all-knowing God wouldn’t have prevented sickness and suffering. The short answer, I fear, is that we are not angels, but embodied spirits. Made as we are of frail flesh, we are inevitably exposed to sickness and suffering.
But here we may echo what Julian says. Christ, and God in Christ, trumps sin. Christ, and God in Christ, trumps sickness, suffering, and death.
This is what it means to believe in Easter. This is what it means to believe in resurrection, both now in this life and hereafter.
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When I was a young man and, like all young men, thought I was immortal, I heard an anecdote about an elderly German theologian. On his deathbed, he turned to his wife and told her, simply, “I know I shall be safe.”
Life isn’t like a play or a movie. We don’t have the script in our back pocket. We never know what will happen tomorrow. We never know how the next scene will play out. We do not walk by sight.
But we do walk by faith. Trusting in God and believing in Christ, we may hold with Julian that all shall be well. We have a compassionate God who loves and embraces us. We have a compassionate Christ who enfolds us in his arms. It may certainly be a mystery; but we know we shall be safe.
Further reading
Ben F Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1979)
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (London: Penguin, 1998)
Michael J Gorman, The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant, A (Not So) New Model of the Atonement (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014)
Mirabai Starr, Julian of Norwich: The Showings: Uncovering the Face of the Feminine in Revelations of Divine Love (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2022