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Waiting for Wonder
Learning to Live on God's Timeline
By Marlo Schalesky Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2016 Marlo Schalesky
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5018-2011-3
CHAPTER 1
Who Are You? Identity and Shame
Abram's wife was Sarai. ... Sarai was unable to have children.
— Genesis 11:29–30
BARREN. A HARSH WORD, unkind, unyielding. I shiver and wonder if there was not a gentler way to introduce this woman through whom the whole world would be blessed. The Common English Bible shares my sentiment and softens the blow with "Sarai was unable to have children." The original Hebrew, however, is much less kind: "Sarai was barren. There is no child to her" (my translation).
Why, Lord, why must this be the introduction to Sarai, Abram's beloved wife?
Not beautiful Sarai.
Not faithful Sarai.
Not strong, determined, hopeful Sarai.
Barren Sarai.
Must we really start there?
Somehow, yes. We must begin with the lack, the shame, the hopelessness. We must first accept the barrenness if we are to continue on the journey to the place God promises.
So I grapple with that barrenness. And I see that there are barren places in us all. We have spots hidden away in our souls that are without life, where hope has shriveled and all we want to do is cringe and deny the dryness. There are places of doubt, of despair, of weakness, of shame, of guilt and pain.
We are all barren.
And Sarai gives us hope.
So I'm glad the Bible does not shy away from Sarai's shame. I'm glad it starts with this almost cruel introduction. I'm glad because it tells me that Sarai's journey can be my own. God sees my barrenness and meets it with promise — meets me in the very place where I have the least hope, the most pain, the most shame.
Do I dare embrace my barrenness? Do I dare acknowledge my shame? And in doing so, might I embrace the very promises of God?
For Sarai, it might have felt something like this.
Waiting for Wonder
What would it be like, I wonder, to be described by the very thing that brings you the most shame, the most pain, the most guilt?
"This is my friend, Ann. She screams at her kids."
"This is Tony. He's an ex-con. He killed someone."
"Meet Sue, she gossips."
"Here's Jose, who can't keep a job."
"Amy, failed marriage."
"Ted, out-of-control rages."
"Lisa, molested as a child."
"John, adulterer."
"Maria, quitter."
"Bob, drug addict."
"Rachel, bigot."
"John, attempted suicide."
Sarai, infertile. She has no children.
I don't want to be identified by my failures. I don't want the first thing people know about me to be the very thing I most wish to hide. But that's how the Bible chooses to introduce Sarai. It labels her "barren," then adds "no child" to underscore her pain. The biblical description is stark, harsh.
Why does the Bible introduce her this way?
Expectations
In Sarai's day, the primary role of women was to produce children, particularly an heir. A wife's value to her husband as well as to society was directly attached to the number of her sons. The main purpose of marriage was to procreate, and children were seen as direct proof of blessing from the gods. In Abram and Sarai's faith, the idea of children as a sign of God's blessing came directly from his words to Adam and Eve recorded in Genesis 1:28: "God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it.'" The blessing of children is confirmed again in Genesis 9:7 when God blessed Noah and his sons after the flood, saying, "As for you, be fertile and multiply. Populate the earth and multiply in it." In both Genesis 1 and 9, the blessing is coupled with a command to procreate.
The inability to do so was a source of not only disappointment for the ancient woman but also great shame. She could not perform her duty or call. She was without worth. Sometimes, if a man could afford it, a second wife could be taken to provide children and the infertile wife could be retained. But divorce was considered a viable option for the husband of an infertile wife. In Egypt it appears that the marriage was not even considered complete until childbirth, and the woman could be put aside at any time without a formal divorce.
In Sarai's day and throughout the Old Testament, infertile women were despised, rejected, helpless, and considered cursed.
Given the reproach and societal shame of barrenness, it becomes even more poignant that Sarai is introduced in this way. Commentator John Walton emphasizes this view, saying, "We find out that Abram's wife, Sarai, is barren, leaving the uninformed reader every reason to dismiss that line of the family."
But God does not dismiss them. Instead, he specifically calls them to be what they are least likely to be. He calls the childless, the infertile, the barren to birth a nation through whom the whole world will be blessed. The place in her life that causes the most shame, pain, and hopelessness for Sarai is exactly the place where God makes his wildest, most impossible promises. It's the very place he chooses to work.
I've seen this kind of thing from God before.
Reversals
She sits across from me at Denny's, this mother of a murderer. Tears fill her eyes. Her hands shake just a little. She bears a label that should cause shame. It does cause pain. She who could not save her own son. She who lives with the reality of loss every day. I stab my eggs with a fork. She stabs my soul with a story.
Her story, so unlike Sarai's yet so like it, too.
She speaks of a mother's worst nightmare. She speaks of a son addicted to drugs, of a broken marriage, of grandchildren far away, of broken hearts and broken dreams. She tells of prayers and weeping, of a son's suicide attempt and the institution that followed. She speaks with a pain so deep that I lower my fork, my eggs forgotten.
And then her voice softens. I hear of murder and a son's reckless escape. Arrest, imprisonment, seeking, and hurt. I hear from a mother whose son never left prison. He died there of blood cancer.
She is the mother of a murderer.
She is the mother of a dead son.
She is my friend.
And her life and ministry are filled with beauty and promise I have rarely seen. I know of her passion to reach other men in prison with the love and good news of Jesus. I know how she hugs the unhuggable and brings hope to the hopeless. I know of the men whose lives have changed because they have encountered Christ through her and come to know him for themselves. I know of a young man who is now living with her after his release, a man sporting gang tattoos and a horrific past. But this young man is now focused on saving others from gang life. He would love to have his tattoos removed, but God is using them to reach those whom others can't reach. God is using the marks of his shame, making them into signs of God's purposes.
So I see a pattern of transforming our shame. It is the pattern of Sarai.
I ponder the pattern as this mother tells me what breaks her heart. It is not what I expect. "For me, it is the incarcerated who are doing life without knowing our Lord. Also the ones who have found him after incarceration and their families who have to do life without them. God has taught me so much with having this in my family. My eyes have been opened to so much more than what I would have known. So I thank God for opening my heart so wide."
It is out of a broken heart that God's glory shines. So I must ask her again about this ministry to inmates and their families. I must ask her how she can go into the prisons, encounter her own pain, day after day, week after week, year after year. Why does she bring hugs and the hope of Jesus? How can she, especially in the light of her son's recent death?
She looks at me then with those tear-stained eyes across a table filled with bacon and eggs, toast and fruit. She looks at me and I see these are not tears of despair but of a deep, indescribable joy. It takes my breath away.
Then she says something so simple, so profound that I stop to savor it. She says, "Because their pain is my pain, you know."
And I see. For a moment, I see God's truth so clearly: he is the God who calls us at the very place of our deepest shame, our deepest pain, and transforms that place into something with breathtaking beauty. No one but God — no one but Elohim — would dare do such a thing.
So I look across that table at Denny's and I see the heart of God in the eyes of a dead murderer's mother. I see pain so deep that it has been transformed to glory by the only One who can reach those places in our soul. I see an impossible promise come true. I see the God who calls a barren woman to birth a nation of promise.
I see hope.
God's Specialty
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls barrenness in Sarai's time "an effective metaphor for hopelessness ... no human power to invent a future." To strengthen the point, the Bible chooses to set Sarai's barrenness against the backdrop of her husband's family's fertility. Just a few verses before her introduction, the Genesis account outlines the genealogy of her husband's ancestor Shem, with his grandfather, Nahor, the youngest to become a parent at twenty-nine years old. Later, we read that Abram's brother, also named Nahor, had eight sons by his wife, Milcah, and four more sons through his concubine Reumah (Genesis 22:23–24).
But Sarai was barren. There were no children to her. The New American Commentary notes, "Not only at this point does Sarai have no beginnings, she also has no continuation through a child. The message is thunderous: the woman is a 'weak link,' we would say, in the chain of blessing. Her barren state dominates the Abraham story since the divine promises involve a numerous host of progeny for Abraham."
But God chose Abram, and he chose Sarai, anyway. Nowhere does the text imply that Abram's marriage to Sarai was a mistake. Her barrenness wasn't something God reluctantly had to overcome. Neither did Sarai earn the promises of descendants, land, and a whole-world blessing through extra faithfulness, goodness, or devotion. We know this precisely because the Genesis account introduces her by her barrenness. It says nothing else about her. It only emphasizes her lack, her shame, what she does not have and cannot do. It refuses to soften or shirk away from her barrenness. Instead it confronts it, overcomes it.
The biblical account affirms that God looks barrenness in the face and makes his promises anyway. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he promises because. From the beginning of Sarai's "chosenness," God chose the impossible, he chose to transform, and he chose the redemption of her shame and ours. He did not call a fertile woman to birth a nation. He chose a barren one — on purpose.
"Despite her dim prospects, Sarai emerges by God's gracious intervention to achieve the regal stature that her name 'princess' conveys. She becomes the matriarch of all Israel (Isa 51:2)," says scholar Kenneth Mathews.
And that tells us that God's delight has always been the full, true, complete redemption of the things in our lives that we hate the most, the things that cause the deepest sorrow, the worst guilt, the most agonizing pain. Those are the very things God longs to transform — for Sarai and for us.
Not because we've earned it or done enough to make up for it.
Not because we've hidden it or done a good job covering it up with other good deeds.
Not because we're beautiful or deserving or extra-faithful.
But because somehow this is his purpose. His specialty.
It is who he is.
Who Is This God?
So I wrestle with this vision of a God who allows a woman to suffer barrenness for decades. I ask him why she had to be infertile at all. And I think of a man born blind, a man who could do nothing but beg, could not enter the temple, could not make sacrifices, could not draw close to God in the way that his culture dictated. For decades.
His story is found in John 9. Jesus came upon the blind man. His disciples asked, "Rabbi, who sinned so that he was born blind, this man or his parents?" (v. 2). Surely something as terrible as blindness was caused by someone's sin! But Jesus didn't answer in the way his disciples expected, or as we expect. Instead he said, "Neither he nor his parents. This happened so that God's mighty works might be displayed in him" (v. 3). Blindness was meant to reveal the glory of God. He had suffered for his entire life, and then God took the very thing that caused him the most pain and transformed it to bless not only him but us as well. Millennia later, we still hear the testimony of the man born blind. We are blessed. God is glorified.
And then I think of a Samaritan woman going to a well to draw water at midday, a woman so filled with shame that she did not go to the well in the morning with the other women. Jesus met her there, at the place that epitomized her shame. They spoke of Jacob's well and living water, but none of that changed her. Rather it took Jesus' confronting her shame, revealing that which she wanted to keep hidden, to transform this woman from avoider to missionary. John 4 tells us the story:
Jesus said to her, "Go, get your husband, and come back here." The woman replied, "I don't have a husband." "You are right to say, 'I don't have a husband,'" Jesus answered. "You've had five husbands, and the man you are with now isn't your husband. You've spoken the truth." (vv. 16–18)
As in Genesis's introduction of Sarai, Jesus confronted, without apology, the shame and pain a woman wanted to keep hidden. And this became the exact thing that blessed the others in her village. Verses 28–30 tell us, "The woman put down her water jar and went into the city. She said to the people, 'Come and see a man who has told me everything I've done! Could this man be the Christ?' They left the city and were on their way to see Jesus."
The Samaritan woman went to the well at midday to hide her shame from others. But then that became the very thing she used to bring the townspeople to Jesus. She didn't say, "Here is some-one promising living water," or "Here is someone explaining theology." Instead she proclaimed, "Here is someone who revealed my deepest shame and made promises anyway. Could this man be the Messiah?"
He could, because that is who God is.
This is a God who promises descendants as numerous as the grains of sand to a barren woman.
This is a God who blesses all the families on earth through a woman with no family at all.
He is a God who reveals his glory through an outcast — a man born blind, who could not enter the temple.
And he reaches an entire town through a woman so ashamed she went to a well in the middle of the day.
This is what God does. God chooses us precisely for the places where nothing seems to change and hope is sparse. He is the God who uncovers the deepest places of our shame and pain and promises to bless the whole world right from those very places.
We sit in our barrenness, in our blindness, in our shame. We may sit for a long time. But we do not sit without hope. Like Sarai, we hold the strange, impossible promises of God.
So I look at Sarai and I see my own barrenness. I ask myself: will I set forth on this journey with her to discover a God who promises to transform me to bless the whole world?
Will I dare step forward knowing that the agonies of my soul will be revealed, my pain will have no secrets, and his promises may take decades to be fulfilled?
Do I dare embrace the barrenness and submit to the power of waiting, to the power and promises of Elohim himself?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Waiting for Wonder by Marlo Schalesky. Copyright © 2016 Marlo Schalesky. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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