“Due to a connection issue images from worship are not available until 20:50; the entire audio is available.”

A few weeks ago, I wrote a Children’s Worship Hour lesson for today’s text from Genesis. I typically look at the passage that will be preached on a given Sunday, find a good version of the story in one of the Children’s bibles from the collection I’ve curated across the years, and then work from that story to put together a teaching moment, a game and a craft for our 3-5 year olds. The supplies for these lessons are put together in buckets for our Firecracker and Sparkler classes by Jan Wilson, whose 20^th anniversary at Northminster we are celebrating this week, and those who volunteer, or are sometimes voluntold, with our children lead them in the lesson while we are in Big Church. Our hope is that by teaching the same text to our youngest children that is preached with the grownups, we are creating space for continued conversations about the text when we leave worship each week.

There are some passages in scripture to which it is difficult to say “This is the word of the Lord,” and even more  so, “thanks be to God.”

*Due to technical issues, audio does not begin until the choral anthem.*

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