For the last couple of weeks, we had been hearing from Paul’s second letter to the Church at Corinth in our first readings in our daily masses, hearing about the advice he was giving to one of the early Church communities that formed after Christ’s death and resurrection in that first century. In that letter, Paul reached out to the Corinthians in the midst of the day-to-day struggles and challenges they were having in their community of faith. This week we hear from the book of Genesis about God reaching out to Abraham and establishing a covenant with him. In the days when the Early Church was growing and developing, particularly in the second century AD, the philosophy of Gnosticism was also gaining in popularity. Gnosticism, which was eventually declared a heresy, claimed that salvation could be gained through secret knowledge. Gnostics believed that the material world was evil, being inferior to and in opposition to the spiritual world. Gnostics also regarded the Old Testament as a embarrassment to the Christian faith, as a record of a nation bound to crude, superstitious beliefs about God and creation. In hearing the details about the story of Abraham, I thought about how our Christian faith sees the continuity of God’s activity and interaction with humanity and with creation, how God’s redemptive action is spread over the trajectory of the history of the nations of Israel, of how God at work in the prophets and patriarchs of Israel laid the ground work for the arrival of Jesus and his ministry. In the covenant with Abraham, God reveal himself in the midst of human history, a process that continues today. Even in the midst of Abraham’s disagreements with Lot and in his decision to move, he gave thanks to the Lord in the midst of his reality, building a temple to the Lord, displaying the faith and trust he has in God. As God kept his faithful promises to Abraham and his descendants, God remains faithful to us.
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