Genesis 23:1-12

This most tender of stories gets its pathos from Abraham’s love for Sarah. His love is beautifully expressed at the moment of Sarah’s death.  Abraham and Sarah have lived as sojourners and foreigners just outside the promised land.  Even though Sarah was 120 years old, Abraham is unprepared for her death. Through the tears, some hasty arrangements must be made for her burial.  At this moment of grief, Abraham, the one called upon to be a blessing to every nation of the world, finds that he is the one who is blessed.  This remarkable story pictures how living as a blessing to others, even as strangers in a distant land, circles back as blessing in return.  We do harvest the produce of the exact seeds that we have sown.  Now the owners of the country in which Abraham sojourned give him the burial place for his wife, Sarah, as a response to the way he had lived among them.  How is it that we live as a part of our world?  Our community?  Do we live as a blessing or as a curse?  The enormous consideration for the people of faith in every community is whether we live among people in such a way that God’s vision and promise can carry on into the future.  Do we live in such a way that our hopes and dreams of the future live on beyond our grief and loss?  Hard times, disappointments, and train wrecks are going to happen for all of us.  But God’s vision does not come to an end even when the most tragic events come our way.  Calamity is not the end of the line in this journey of faith. The dream goes on.