Saint Luke's Lutheran Church

As many of you know, I like winter. I like the snow. I like the cold weather. But this has been a long winter - even for someone like me who has an uncommon resistance to cabin fever. I'm ready for the trees to bud and the flowers to bloom. When there is still two feet of snow on the ground in the middle of March, you start to wonder whether winter will ever end. But then last Friday at the Men's Bible study, we noticed for the first time that daylight was beginning to break before 6:30 in the morning, and we saw a bunch of Robins - those red-breasted heralds of spring - frolicking in the tree outside our window.

Winter can be long and hard, but we always know in the back of our minds that sooner or later warm weather will return. We can count on the rhythms of the seasons. We know that spring will always follow winter, and we can look at the calendar to know just about how long we will have to wait.

But what about the seasons of life? What about the winters we face in life when the difficulties and the darkness seem as though they will never end? What about those winters in life when doubt and discouragement leave us straining to see a little light, to catch a glimmer of hope?

It is winter for those in Generation X who were promised the world but discovered that the world they inherited was not all they had hoped for. They are the first generation to believe that their lives will not be materially better than their parents'. It is winter for those middle agers who have lost their jobs or who live with fear of not surviving the next reduction in work force. And it is winter for those older adults who expected to live on their investments as the economic recession continues to mock those voices of optimism that have been predicting that recovery is right around the corner. It is winter for those who hope to live in peace and security. Both for those who are hoping against all hope that the United States will not declare war on Iraq and for those who are hoping against all hope that such a war will stop terrorism and bring peace to the Middle East.

How do we endure these spiritual winters? Where do we find our hope when there is no calendar to show us when March will give way to May?

Our lessons for today tells us of one from whom we can learn something about hope in the midst of winter. He is the father for three major world religions. Both Muslim and Jew trace their ethnic lineage back to this one man, and Christians trace their spiritual lineage back to him as well. His name is Abraham - a wandering Aramean, a nomad who never owned more land than a little field with a cave where he could bury his family, a herdsman who never led an army or a nation, a man whose heroic character came from his trust in God.

Abraham was arguably the greatest man of faith who ever lived. He trusted in God from the time that God called him away from his homeland security in what is now Iraq to the time that God told him to kill his only son Isaac and offer him as a sacrifice to the Lord. When we first meet Abraham, he is already an old man. At the age of 75, Abraham had worked hard all his life and was ready to take life easy. He was a wealthy man who could afford to live off of his stocks and savings - that's livestock, not mutual funds. He and Sarah were entering their "golden years" with everything in order - everything that is except for one gaping hole in their lives, one thing that consumed their hearts with sorrow. They had no children. For years Abraham and Sarah had tried to have children, but it looked like the family name would die with them and that Abraham would have no one to inherit his wealth except for a distant cousin in Damascus. .

Then one day, God came to Abraham and told him to forget about moving into a retirement community. Instead, God promised to take Abraham to a new land and to make him the father of a great nation. It was an offer that Abraham could not refuse. So Abraham gathered up all of his possessions and started out to live as an alien in a foreign land. Then God promised Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and that they would possess this new land forever.

For 24 years, Abraham and Sarah wandered homeless in this new land, living with the promise of countless descendants but without a single son to call their own. Then in his 99th year, the Lord came to Abraham again and promised him a son. Abraham fell on his face laughing. Sarah was 90 years old - the idea that she would get pregnant and have a child was just too incredible to believe. Sarah laughed too, but God said that within a year the sounds of laughter would be replaced with the sounds of labor. One year later Sarah gave birth to a son, and they named him Isaac, which means "laughter."

Abraham was a great man of faith, but his faith was not perfect. Not only did he laugh at the idea of Sarah having a baby at 91, but there were times when Abraham did not trust in the Lord and instead took matters into his own hands. When they first arrived in Canaan and had to go down to Egypt during the famine, Abraham passed Sarah off as his sister because she was so beautiful he was afraid that the Egyptian ruler would kill him and make Sarah a part of his harem. A few years later, Sarah wanted to use her servant girl as a surrogate mother, and Abraham had a child by Hagar. It was in the crucible of these experiences that Abraham's faith was stirred and tested and strengthened until he matured to the point where he was willing to trust God even with his only son's life.

This is the faith God calls us to imitate -a faith that enables us to hold on to the promises of God, even when it means hoping against hope. God's promise to us is not that we will father a great nation, but that we will be part of Gods' people. God's promise to us is not an heir, but an inheritance - an inheritance in the Kingdom of God. God's promise to us is not world peace, but peace with God. God's promise to us is not prosperity, but forgiveness of sins. God's promise to us is not a trouble free life, but an eternal life.

All of these promises are grounded in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Now Jesus died and rose again almost 2,000 years ago, but these promises are not yet completely fulfilled. They are still promises, which offer hope and call for faith. Sometimes these promises seem too good to be true - because everything we know and experience contradicts them, or because the winters of life just seems to go on and on. But God always keeps his promises - no matter what happens and no matter how long it takes. Abraham and Sarah waited 25 years for their first child. The descendants of Abraham waited a thousand years to occupy the Land of Canaan. They waited two thousand years for the promised Messiah.

As with Abraham, so with us God keeps on assuring us of his promises and calling us to trust in them. To stand on these promises, however, requires us to let go of our own self-reliance. For most of us, our first instinct is to trust in ourselves - to rely on our own abilities and our own efforts to protect us, to sustain us, to reach our goals. Then when we fall short, when we fail, we turn to God to help us, and we expect God to fulfill a promise which we never really believed in the first place.

The story of Abraham shows us that there is no need for hopelessness. The example of Abraham shows us how to hope against all hope. Even in the midwinters of life, when springtime seems so far away, there is the promise of new life, the promise of perfect peace, the promise of God's love, and the promise of eternal joy. This does not mean that we can sit idly by and do nothing. But when we trust in these promises, we can take up our cross and follow Jesus. When we trust in these promises, we can loose our life for the sake of the gospel. For our hope does not lie in our own abilities, our hope does not lie in our material wealth or military strength, our hope lies in the God of heaven and of earth and in his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.