Living the Promises
May 24, 1981
Do you remember when you were little and you really wanted to make a big promise to keep a secret or to do something? Just a little "I promise" would not do. It had to be "cross my heart, hope to die." Where I come from we had a further verse: "Cross my heart, hope to die; stick a needle in my eye if I lie.' Ugh! And when super-dooper promises were required of you or you really wanted someone else to keep your secret, there was the ultimate question: 'Will you promise with your hand on a stack of Bibles?" Then after all that promise protocol, did you ever have a buddy break a promise with the justification: "It didn't count because I had my fingers crossed.”
Even as children we sense already that promises are pretty serious business. How we make, keep, and break promises is as a revealing litmus test of what kind of person we are as I know. How others keep or break their promises to us has much to do with the particular blend of agony and ecstasy we experience in life.
So, today, attention is on living the promises, living in the web of promises which hold our lives together, if they are to hold together and not fall apart. Our attempt will be to display the multidimensional-multifaceted nature of promises. There are promises we make to each other: marriage promises, vows to be good parents when we baptize our children, promises to live a Christian lifestyle when we join the church, oaths to be honest and humane when we begin our professions and jobs, all sorts of promises we make to each other with or without formal ceremony or contract. Interwoven in living our promises to each other are the promises we believe the mysterious source of love and life, God, has made to be with us in our living and dying.
The entire Old and New Testaments deal with the ways God has promised to be the protector of his people and the struggle of his people to live up to the promise of acting like his people in life. The English word "testament" comes from the Latin word "testamentum" which comes from the Greek word "diatheke" which means "covenant". And a covenant is nothing more or less than a "promise". For the Hebrews the promise began with the saga of Abraham, an almost anonymous Aramean living in an ancient distant place called variously Haran and Ur of Chaldea. Somewhere back in time and memory this old man Abraham felt compelled to leave his familiar surroundings and strike out to an unknown destination called Canaan. There he and his barren wife Sarah would become the parents of uncountable descendents. Genesis says very simply: "Abra went." He went despite what others no doubt said, because he was convinced that it was God, not insanity or senility compelling him. He believed that God had made a promise to him, and he lived that promise. And that made all the difference between his remaining an ancient anonymity and his being one who inspires us now even over three thousand years later. The whole Bible is an expansion and unfolding variation on the theme of God's promise to give his people a life worth living, a life with meaning and purpose, not pain free by a long shot, but a life with a point to it if his people will only trust him.
Jesus deepened and extended the promise. Not only did he proclaim God's promise to sustain us in life, he showed that we can even trust God with our deaths, that God's promise to take care of us cannot be stopped by the grave. In his own way, Jesus came to say: "God doesn't cross his fingers with us!"
Jesus like Moses, Abraham, the prophets and all the rest made it clear that humans keep their side of the bargain and promise with God by keeping their promises to each other. The ten commandments are simply the ways God's people live with each other and him in response to God's promises.
A look now at the geography and topography of the promise land you and I inhabit:
(1) PROMISES ARE HARD TO KEEP AND HARD TO BELIEVE. That "profound" statement comes as no shock; it is just the way it is. But because promises are so hard to keep and believe is the reason we must struggle to keep and believe the promises of our lives in order to live with a little grace and joy.
The Genesis writers amaze me with the stark economy of words they use to express the most momentous situations. "Abraham went, as the Lord told him..." All the emotional, spiritual, and physical strain of leaving the known and going into the unknown capsuled in "he went". Upon arriving in the new strange land of Canaan, we learn: "At the time the Canaanites were in the land." So simple, we almost miss it. But here again is capsuled a vast chunk of the test and pain the Israelites faced for years to come. There were other people already in the land who were not so glad to have them there. They fought, maimed, and killed each other.
Many times because of internal and external enemies the Israelites wondered if God was really keeping his promise to be their God and protector. Because they had trouble believing God's promises, they had trouble living their promises with each other. Amos and Isaiah bewailed the crookedness in politics and business of that day. Jeremiah almost lost his life because he dared to criticize the king for trusting chariots and swords – the Palestinian Pentagon – more than God. We learn that the "haves" of that day like the "haves" of ours were just as prone to curse, blame, and ignore the "have-nots".
Thus, the ones who kept believing God's promise and lived like it with each other, believing that he was real made all the difference. I think of Job, sick and grief stricken, angry at God, but never quite willing to give up his Lord. Whoever Job was,he struggled his way to the realization that before you give up on God because life is too short or painful, you must thank God for that life in the first place. Life is the basic ingredient for all promises! For him, like us, it was hard to trust God's promise to care for us when so much seems to contradict and mock that promise in experience, but keeping that faith makes all the difference. Job discovered that even when God seems like our enemy, the strength to keep on keeping on ultimately comes from him.
Not only is it hard to live the promises of God, it is difficult to live our promises to each other. In his novel, Gateway to Heaven, writer Sheldon Vanuken deals with the meaning of marriage promises through the young husband and wife, Val and Mary. Deep problems understandably arise after Mary has a brief affair with another person. Yet they work their way back to each other painfully and beautifully. One of their learnings is that marriage promises mean that you are faithful to your marriage even when you don't feel like it. If people always felt like being faithful, felt like being patient, felt like being affectionate, felt like working on relational problems, then there would be no need for marriage promises in the first place. It would all come naturally. But life recreating marriages do not come naturally and effortlessly. They come because people work to keep their promises to love and cherish each other even when it seems like an uphill battle. Mary decides: “The whole point about commitment is that it is a gift from one person to another. Its sole purpose is to give another person something to depend on. If the commitment ends when the one who gave it falls in love with someone else, then it never meant anything in the first place.... Commitment is a gift requiring an act of willpower."
It is easy to fall in love. People do it every day. But the art and challenge of staying in love is an everyday matter of recommitting yourself to your promises to another person. Marriages get in trouble not only because one person has an affair with a lover but often because one or both of the spouses have an "affair" with their job, hobby, community activity, sport, or even the children which makes the other spouse feel, sadly, secondary.
It strikes me that Val and Mary learned how much keeping their promises to each other really meant to them because of their experiences when those promises were temporarily broken. Vanuken, a Christian writer, is certainly not encouraging people to break their promises to each other so they can dramatically recommit themselves. Yet he is pointing to something that the Bible and experience teach. Sometimes, the points in life when we are the closest to giving up on each other or even on God because we have betrayed a trust or been betrayed can be the painful points where we break through to each other and God in ways never known before.
To lose a relationship or almost lose it can teach us how much it means like nothing else. The shambles of broken promises and doubts in life may be God's building blocks for getting us closer to him and each other.
So, whatever your promise pressure point is today: you have betrayed or been betrayed; problems with marriage, parent, or job promises; trouble trusting God, here is the news. If living these promises is difficult for you, then nothing is particularly wrong with you, you are in reality. Keeping on keeping on with each other even when promises have been broken is a part of living in the difficult promise land of life.
(2) Sometimes we decide that because life is so chancy, we will give up trusting anything or anyone. But that is a fallacy. NO ONE LIVES WITHOUT PROMISES. THE QUESTION IS WHOSE PROMISES YOU LIVE BY. We all live in a promise land. We all decide that something promises to make our lives worth the effort. Who's to blame? Hollywood or Madison Avenue advertisers? I don't know. I guess it really doesn't matter. Point is that most of us believe that if we look good and have enough possessions, then we will be happy. Oh, I know we don't say it. But we live it. So we give our lives to that promise. And when the wrinkles come and the stuff isn't quite that satisfying, we wonder who let who down. We go to church but worship at the bank. We sing about everyone being God's children, yet treat people who don't meet our standards like stepbrothers and stepsisters. We pile into church on Easter, but we spend the rest of the year being too horrified to think about, much less face, our fear of death.
So maddeningly simple: Abraham's God says to him and us, "Trust me, move in my direction, and blessings will flow along with the pain." Living God's promises, trusting him, means a certain kind of lifestyle: ceasing our mania for creature comforts and struggling instead to comfort God's creatures on earth, forgiving and loving others instead of using and getting even with them, worrying about the necks of others and trusting God with saving our own necks. Promises...promises... they are all around. The question is whose promise will you trust your living and dying to? The God of stuff, the God of the big number 1, or the God of Jesus Christ, Abraham, and the rest? How you choose is a matter of your life and death.
(3) FINALLY, WE MUST FACE THAT WITH OUR LIVING AND OUR DYING, ALL WE HUMANS HAVE TO GET THROUGH ON ARE PROMISES. Will I live up to my promises to you, will you live up to your promises to me, and can we trust God to live up to his promises to us? Can we forgive each other and accept God's forgiveness when we let our promises falter? All we have are promises; life offers no guarantees. Whether we bet our lives on stuff, self or God, we live by faith in something. And true enough, we can get by, at least for a while, trusting the promise of possessions and promoting number one, but what I can get by with a while with my living quickly drops away when I face my dying.
In that famous 14th chapter of John's gospel are promising words which have comforted and intrigued millions: "Let not your hearts be troubled... In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?" As with living, it is with dying, as God said to Abraham, Jesus says to us: "Trust me." It is not easy. And on some days it seems kind of crazy. But Christ asks us to believe the promise that in the end is God not death and darkness.
John Claypool has written a little book entitled Stages which is an exploration of the developmental stages humans go through dealt with from a Biblical perspective, (the best perspective I have found for living life.) He relates the comments of a man who was facing death from a terminal illness. His words, I think, offer a model for what trusting God's promise to care for our dying as well as living looks like: "You know, I am amazed at how all of this is working out. I have always wondered what it was going to be like to die, but lo and behold, it is not all that unusual. Death has turned out to be an old acquaintance in different garb. For years now, I have undergone experiences like this. From my earliest days, I had to learn to let go of some things in order to get some of the things I did not have. This is what I did the day I started to school or left home to go to work or launched out on a new career. It turns out I have died a thousand deaths across the years, and in all of this I have learned something: EVERY EXIT IS ALSO AN ENTRANCE! You never leave one place without being given another. There is always new life on the other side of the door, and this is my faith as far as death is concerned. I have walked this way before. Death is an exit, to be sure, but at the same time, it is also an entrance.” To this I think I hear old Abraham leaving Haran saying "Amen!" To this, I think I can hear Jesus on Easter morning saying: "Amen!" And to this I ask you and me: What say you? Amen...I think...I hope? What's more, this is not just a faith to die by, but one also to live by.
It's so difficult to keep and trust promises; we aren't sure whose to believe and which ones to keep. Yet our promises... the ones we make, the ones made to us, the ones coming to us from the mystery of God...are all we have. All we have to live by and die by.
Robert Frost was right when he said: "I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep." God help us live the promises. Amen.