February 28, 2010 Genesis 15:1-6 Luke

13:31-35 “A Schlemozzle to
Follow”
Dr. Ted H. Sandberg

“If a schlemiel is a person who goes through life spilling soup on people, and a schlemozzle is the one
it keeps getting spilled on, then Abraham was a schlemozzle.” So Frederick Buechner suggests of
Abraham in his book, Peculiar Treasures. Buechner says, “It all began when God told [Abraham] to
go to the land of Canaan where he promised to make him the father of a great nation and [Abraham]
went.
“The first thing that happened was that his brother-in-law, Lot, took over the rich bottom-land and
Abraham was left with the scrub country around Dean Man’s Gulch. The second thing was that the
prospective father of a great nation found out his wife couldn’t have babies. The third thing was that
when, as a special present on his hundredth birthday, God arranged for his wife Sarah to have a son
anyway, it wasn’t long before he told Abraham to go up into the hills and sacrifice him. It’s true that
at the last minute God stepped in and said he’d only wanted to see if the old man’s money was where
his mouth was, but from that day forward Abraham had a habit of breaking into tears at odd moments,
and his relationship with his son Isaac was never close.
“In spite of everything, however, he never stopped having faith that God was going to keep his
promise about making him the father of a great nation. Night after night, it was the dream he rode to
sleep on – the glittering cities, the up-to-date armies, the curly-bearded kings.”1 Night after night he
must’ve looked at the stars in the sky and been reminded of God’s promise to make him the father of a
great nation, a nation as numerous as the stars in the sky. He must’ve believed that “Someday – who
knows when? – [they’d] be talking about My son, the Light of the world.”
It’s this faith, a faith that God could cause his 90 year-old wife to bear a son, a son which would be the
first of a multitude, it’s this faith which Paul emphasized in his letter to the Romans: “What then are
we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh?” Paul asks. For if Abraham
was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the
scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.’”2
Abraham is held up for us as an example of belief in God by both the OT, and the NT. He’s an
example of the fact that miracles can happen when we believe in God’s power. Too often you and I
believe that the problems before us are too large, the task too difficult, the situation impossible.
Imperfect schlemozzle that he was, Abraham believed that God can cause the impossible to become
not only possible, but ordinary. God can make a great nation to be born from an old man and an old
woman. As Walter Brueggemann puts it, Abraham believed that God can cause a break point between
the exhausted present and the buoyant future.3
The problem is that people haven’t followed Abraham’s example. While Abraham showed that true
1 1. Buechner, Frederick, Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who, Harper & Row,
Publishers, San Francisco, 1979, pp. 3-4.

2 2. Romans 4:1-3

3 3. Brueggemann, Walter, Genesis, (Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for

Teaching and Preaching), John Knox Press, Atlanta, 1982, p. 144.
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faith in God is possible with God’s help, too many have only “talked” about being faithful. This is
nowhere more apparent than when we listen to Jesus lament over Jerusalem. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather
your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
Jerusalem, which was the symbolic heart of all the Jewish people, spurned belief in God, rejected the
trust in God which faith implies, a trust which Abraham exemplified, and instead insisted on believing
only in herself and doing her own thing. It’s this rejection that caused Jesus such deep grief.
Jesus breaks into this lament for Jerusalem because he’s been told by certain Pharisees that Herod the
king wants to kill him. Because we’ve been so conditioned to dislike, even hate the Pharisees,
especially by Mark’s Gospel, it may be hard for us to believe that any Pharisee could be seeking to
protect Jesus. Some believe that the Pharisees who came to warn Jesus were actually just trying to get
Jesus out of their hair by trying to scare him into leaving the country. Some believe these Pharisees
are somehow in cahoots with Herod to get rid of this troublemaker.
This doesn’t have to be true, however. It’s quite possible that there were those Pharisees who,
although not agreeing with everything Jesus taught, could very well have agreed with much, if not
most of what Jesus was trying to do. There were Pharisees who spoke up for Jesus while he was being
tried before the Sanhedrin. In Luke’s gospel, the Pharisees don’t really attack Jesus. Some scholars
believe that if Jesus wasn’t a Pharisee himself, he was much closer to the Pharisees’ beliefs than any
other group in Judaism because Jesus claimed to have come only to reform the law, not to do away
with it. That’s what the Pharisees were attempting to do as well.
But whether the Pharisees were trying to help, or just get rid of Jesus doesn’t really matter, does it?
Except that we might raise a small warning flag here for us not to jump to conclusions. Even with a
group such as the Pharisees, there may have been those who were seeking to truly obey the will of
God, those who saw God at work in Jesus. It’s a good idea if we don’t jump to any conclusions about
who’s on God’s side and who isn’t in our own life.
Back to Luke’s account though. The Pharisees warn Jesus about Herod, and Jesus responds, “Go and
tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and
on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way,
because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’” In other words, what Jesus is
passing on to Herod the king, the sly fox, is that he’s going to continue to do his work on earth, the
work which God has sent him to do, casting out demons and healing the sick, and it’s not up to Herod
to do away with him. That’s left up to Jerusalem, which has his life in their hands – who’s always had
the lives of the prophets of God in their hands. Herod can’t kill him, because that right is reserved for
Jerusalem, Jerusalem which again and again rejected the faith that God offered to them!
It’s when Jesus tells the Pharisees that it’s only Jerusalem that can kill him that he gain is reminded of
the hurt which Jerusalem’s rejection of him and of God causes him. Deep hurts can be kept out of our
minds for only so long, and then someone will say something, and we’ll remember; someone will do
something, and we’ll be reminded; we’ll see a scene that will stir up all the hurt inside us once again.
That’s what’s happened to Jesus here. He was reminded of his mission into the world, a mission
caused by Jerusalem’s rejection of Abraham’s example of faith, a mission caused by the world’s
rejection of the love of God, and this caused him to lament over Jerusalem. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” In this lament of Jesus’, we can
feel the tragedy of rejected love. Jesus cries out for the heart of his people, those who live and
worship in the great Temple, but are so far from the heart of the faith of Abraham. God’s love,
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revealed through the tears and agony of prophets like Jeremiah, has called repeatedly to Jerusalem, but
her people have ignored the cries for repentance. “How often have I desired to gather your children
together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” So much love and
protection and forgiveness and tenderness are offered by Jesus, as they’ve been offered time and time
again, but “you were not willing” to listen and hear and see the heart of God in your midst. Jerusalem
– “See, your house is left to you,” or as the RSV puts it, “Behold, your house is forsaken.” How much
pain is captured in these words.
Jesus carries with him in his heart, like the cross on his shoulders, this deepest grief – his own grief
and the actual and unrealized anguish of the people. This sorrow, so deeply felt, drives him on into
Jerusalem, deeper into the heart of the city and its people, and deeper into the waiting darkness of the
cross. Deep is his sorrow and deeper still is God’s sorrow and anguish. This is divine grief. God
weeps as Jesus weeps, for the people of God have rejected not only the faith of Abraham, they’re now
going to reject God’s only son who was sent for their salvation.
And we know it’s not only for Jerusalem that Jesus weeps! We shudder to realize that Jesus laments
and weeps over all places and over all people who are empty and alone, helpless and exploited, over
all who are beaten down by an individual or by a society that has lots its soul, which has rejected the
love which God has offered. Jesus weeps over Chico and Washington, D.C. and Moscow and Peking,
over Warsaw and Cape Town, over San Salvador and Kabul, over Iran and Iraq, over refugee camps
and confinements all over the world. Jesus weeps over economic exploitation and environmental
destruction. Jesus weeps over the violence in our cities, and the fact that a few party while thousands
starve to death. People the world over weep with sorrow and hurt and pain. How much does it cost
for us to depend upon our own might and power rather than upon God? Surely, Jesus weeps because
that amount will not be spent for bread and shelter and medical care – will be spent instead to provide
us with what is only a false sense of security.
In the Spring of 1985, the Rev. Scott Libbey was part of a small dialogue group visiting churches,
church leaders and mission work in the Middle East.4 He writes: “Our schedule brought us into
Jerusalem for Maundy Thursday. In a powerfully unique way I found myself captured with a sense of
holy presence as I joined a procession that evening moving from a place in the Old City near that
ancient ‘Upper Room’ to the Garden of Gethsemane, where we all watched in the candlelight and
shared together in prayer. And I suspect we all felt the pain and tears of Jerusalem as its lights blinked
in the distance – burdened with the division and heartache of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict .. . I felt
the presence of the one who wept over Jerusalem many centuries earlier – the one who talked about
the ways of peacemaking. We have eyes and we see not! We have ears and we hear not!”
If Abraham was a schlemozzle as Buechner suggests, one who goes through life having the soup
spilled on him, he nonetheless got it right when it came to believing in God. Against all the logic,
against all the rational thinking, he left home and went to where God directed him. Against all
reasonable or sensible expectations, he believed that God would give him a son, and through him
would create a nation as numerous as the stars in the sky. Abraham believed, and therefor offers all of
us a model for what it means to believe.
As a hen calls to her chicks, so God calls to us and to all nations of this world to believe. Jesus
grieves over the death of Jerusalem and all its people, rich and poor, the strong and the weak, the
thoughtful and the indifferent; and only by this divine grief does the resurrection have a chance to

4 4. I have lost the reference to this.

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spring forth with new grace and power. Jesus laments over the city so deeply that he’s driven into the
arms of the waiting crowd who shouted its greetings and at the same time plotted its revenge for his
death. He laments because even you and I too often have been unwilling to follow not only his
example of faith, but even the example of faith shown by old Abraham. We are unwilling to believe
that with God – ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE.
During this Lenten season may we feel the pain of the world and recognize again that too often we’ve
rejected the example of Abraham’s faith. May we, during this season, have our own faith renewed
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord.