The expanding promise of God

There is a sentence in our Genesis 12 reading today that our faith often falls short of.

God is asking Abram to leave everything — his country, his kindred, his father’s house — and walk toward a land he cannot see. The call is dramatic. The obedience is immediate. Abram packs up his household and goes. Altars get built. The story moves.

But before any of that — before a single step is taken, before any structure exists to carry or contain what is beginning — God says this:

“In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

All the families of the earth. Not the families that get it right. Not the families that pass the right tests or hold the right beliefs or trace the right lineage. All of them. The promise is made before Abram has done anything to earn it, before anyone has had the chance to determine who qualifies. It is the close to this incredible blessing from God, and it is extravagant to the point of being almost unbelievable.

The history of the people of God, from that moment forward, is largely the history of trying to contain that promise. To clarify it. To establish, in an orderly way, which families exactly are meant, and which are perhaps included only in a general sense, and which will need to meet certain conditions before the blessing applies.

But this promise, like the Spirit of Pentecost, like the living water, was never meant to be managed. It was meant to keep revealing itself beyond the boundaries people put around it.

By the time we reach Matthew 9, these management structures are well established.

Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners and the Pharisees want to know why. His answer is not an apology. It is a quote from Hosea: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”

That word — sacrifice — carries a specific weight in Hosea. The prophet is not condemning religious practice. He is naming a temptation that lives inside every religious community: the slow drift from the purpose of the practice toward the protection of the practice itself. Like the cistern from a few weeks ago, the boundary that was meant to serve the community becomes the thing the community serves. Jesus quotes Hosea here not as a critique of Judaism but as a warning he is issuing from inside his own tradition — a warning every tradition, including ours, needs to keep hearing.

Mercy, not sacrifice. The keeping of relationship over the keeping of categories. And then, almost immediately, a woman in the crowd tests whether he means it.

She has been hemorrhaging for twelve years. To understand what that means you have to understand what twelve years of ritual impurity cost a person in this world. It is not only a medical condition. It is a social and religious verdict. She is unclean. Anyone she touches becomes unclean. She cannot participate in the life of the community, cannot enter the spaces where the holy things happen, cannot be touched without contaminating the person who touches her. She has spent everything she had trying to be healed through the proper channels. Nothing worked.

Twelve years of being told your body makes you a problem. Twelve years of existing at the edge of the community — close enough to see what you’re missing, excluded enough to be reminded of it constantly.

If you want to know what that feels like today — some of us may already know or know someone who understands. Understands what it is to sit in these kinds of pews for years wondering. Knows what it is to keep hoping that one day someone will say out loud, boldly, what you have spent years trying to believe: that the promise includes you, too.

The woman does not petition. She does not wait for an advocate. In one of the boldest acts of faith in the gospels, she comes up behind Jesus and touches the fringe of his cloak. Jesus stops. He turns. In Matthew’s version of this story, there is less information, less noise from the whole scene. No crowd pressing, no bewildered disciples. Just Jesus. Turning, seeing her, saying:

“Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”

Daughter. She has no name in this story. Matthew never gives her one. For twelve years she has been known by her condition — by what her body does, by the category the law puts her in. She is the hemorrhaging woman. She is the unclean one. She is a problem to be managed and a boundary to be maintained. And Jesus looks at her and says: daughter.

Not: you are healed, you may go. Daughter. A word that does not describe a condition. A word that describes a relationship. Not a new truth, but an old one said aloud. Whatever the structure said about you, you have always belonged to God.

Her faith did not look like certainty. It looked like reaching. Like pressing through a crowd toward someone who might, possibly, see her differently than everything else had. Like touching the hem of a garment in the hope that the promise — all the families of the earth shall be blessed — might, against all the evidence, include her.

It did. It always did. Jesus did not expand the promise to make room for her. He reveals that she had been inside the promise all along.

I want to be honest about where I am standing when I preach this. This week, I received a phone call from someone who, after driving by our Montezuma sign that proclaimed that one could “catch God at the coliseum” for Pride this weekend, wanted to know what kind of God I know that would be at such an event. And while my brief conversation with him tells me that we certainly don’t agree on the answer, I think he named—unintentionally—the question that these texts are asking: where, exactly do we think God is? And where do we think God is not?

You see, I don’t preach this as someone who has paid the cost of that kind of exclusion. But I am preaching it as someone who has become convinced, from reading these texts, from attempting to pay attention to where the Spirit is moving today, that the God who showed up for a woman whom the community had placed outside the circle is the same God who shows up at Pride. And that whenever the church acts as though belonging is ours to distribute rather than God’s to declare, it has forgotten the promise God made to Abraham.

June is Pride month, and I want to say this plainly: the question these texts are asking is not whether this is a place where all are welcome. The question is whether we understand that the belonging of any one person is not ours to grant. It was promised by God before any of us got here.

Over the next two Sundays we will follow this story from Genesis further. We will sit with Sarah laughing at the tent entrance, overhearing a promise she was not invited to hear. We will follow Hagar into the wilderness — cast out by the covenant household, alone with her dying son — and we will watch what God does there.

The story gets harder before it gets easier. But the thread running through all of it is the same thread that is here at the beginning, spoken before a single step has been taken:

All the families of the earth shall be blessed.

The promise is not ours to control. We did not make it. We cannot revoke it. We can only decide, one story at a time, whether we are the structure that contains it — or the people who keep following it out to the places that challenge and surprise us.

The woman in the crowd made her choice. She pressed through. She reached. And Jesus turned, he saw her, and he called her daughter, reminding her of what had been true before she touched his cloak, before twelve years of exclusion, before anyone called her unclean: she belonged to the beloved family of God.