From the Sunday Note, with additional thoughts…
The Lord God took Abram outside and said,
“Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can.
Just so,” he added, “shall your descendants be.”
Abram put his faith in the LORD,
who credited it to him as an act of righteousness.
He then said to him,
“I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans
to give you this land as a possession.”
“O Lord GOD,” he asked,
“how am I to know that I shall possess it?”
He answered him,
“Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat,
a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.”
Abram brought him all these, split them in two,
and placed each half opposite the other;
but the birds he did not cut up.
Birds of prey swooped down on the carcasses,
but Abram stayed with them.
As the sun was about to set, a trance fell upon Abram,
and a deep, terrifying darkness enveloped him.
When the sun had set and it was dark,
there appeared a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch,
which passed between those pieces.
It was on that occasion that the LORD made a covenant with Abram,
saying: “To your descendants I give this land,
from the Wadi of Egypt to the Great River, the Euphrates.”
1st Reading for Sunday, Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18
Abram’s story is everyone’s story. A young man or woman leaves their parents’ home and sets out to find a land, a new life, even a new name—in short, a story of their own. Something deep within whispers a promise to them as they set out, and as they go (and in the very going) their story is revealed to them as they slowly become who they are meant to be.
We hear just a small slice of Abram’s story in our reading. He does not yet have his name “Abraham” that he will receive later, nor a son he will be promised later, nor has he yet had several other enlightening meetings and experiences with the voice he understands to be “God-who-is-leading-me” his LORD. Abram trusts the Voice of the LORD and listens. The LORD makes a commitment to him.
The “form” –the outward showing—of the LORD’s commitment is handled in the fashion of the culture of that place and time by what is called “cutting a covenant.” The commitment of one person to another or of two to each other was a solemn event of sacrifice. The parties would sacrifice animals, cutting them in two and then walking between the halves. This created an oath that bound them together upon pain of being cut in half as the sacrificial animals had been if they do not keep their oath. God is represented to Abram by the smoke and the fire that mysteriously pass between the sacrificed animals.
Notice: we are not told that Abram walks between the animals, but only God. So it is God who binds himself.
Here God commits himself, on oath, to fulfill certain promises to Abram. (First, an heir, who will turn out to be his son, Isaac, and a vast land for all his heirs, which would be fulfilled by the borders of Solomon’s kingdom).
Considered over the Old and New Testaments together we see this as a divine pattern—God commits himself to us, first and completely, upon His own Word, and then invites us to respond with trusting faith. We cannot put God in our debt. He has given everything to us to begin with—we can only be thankful (or not) responding with trust (or not) and faith (or not). Abram will be given many opportunities to live out one or the other of these responses as his life continues. At least one of those opportunities he mucks up pretty thoroughly; others he handles with insight, care, and generosity. Gradually he becomes as faithful to the LORD as the LORD has been to him. That is the pattern for every fulfilled human life.
For further reflection:
God has already “cut a covenant” with each of us. We know who the “sacrificed Lamb” is–he died for us even while we were yet sinners. He is “pre-bonded” to us, if we will only recognize and accept it. His sacrifice is applied to us in baptism, and then we are invited to partake in the covenant celebrating feast–the Eucharist. God is still fulfilling his promise to Abram, the promise to give him offspring as numerous as the stars in the heavens, all spiritually rooted in what happened between “the Wadi of Egypt to the Great River, the Euphrates.”
Right now it is rooted in both this world and the next, preparing to be transformed into perfection upon the Lord’s return.