Earl Marcus Wiggs III Memorial Service

Last week we began this extended look at the story of Abraham and Sarah with God’s call to Abraham to leave the land of his kindred and his father’s house and journey to a land that God would show him, with the promise that his offspring would be as numerous as the stars in the heavens and that all people would be blessed through him. This morning we confront the central conflict within this promise of God, which is that Abraham and Sarah have no children, and in their advanced age have no hope for one. And so they are faced with the question of faith that ripples through the pages of scripture into our own lives and the world as we know it: can we trust in God’s promises of a future that seems impossible in the present?

When I meet with engaged couples in preparation for their wedding day, I often share Wendell Berry’s words about marriage from one of his beautiful essays. He says in marriage we must understand that we’re not just joining ourselves to another; “We can join one another only by joining the unknown…What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you—and marriage, time, life, history and the world—will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.”¹