Genesis 12:1-9
Bethel and KUMC, June 8, 2008
Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD
I was thinking this week, in light of Bethel’s 190th anniversary, of how congregations of all ages tend to go through life cycle changes -- periods of growth and decline, dying and resurrection, times of inward turning but also times of being called to practice faith in more daring ways. Unlike any other institution in our culture, when it comes to the Church, it’s crucial to keep the present in broad, historical perspective, so as not to lose sight of the big picture of what God is doing, for we should never confuse our experience of time with the divine calendar and purpose. I’d forgotten until I heard Dan this morning, that the Methodist Church had hosted us in the 19th century and now again in the 21st, and I guess ours is just a relationship predestined!
But we all know, that as we age, so does the Church, and we know that the church or any one particular congregation, is always just one generation away from extinction, that each person who stands and makes promises to God about membership bears equal responsibility with others to ensure that there will be more anniversaries still yet to come.
“For better, for worse,” familiar words spoken during the marriage ritual, a little reminder that the life course often sends a variety of aches and pains, joys and gladness our way. Perhaps, when we pass 50 as I just did several months ago, many of us can relate to the following twists to several familiar hymn titles:
Precious Lord, Take my Hand and Help me Up
It is well with my Soul, but my knees hurt
Nobody knows the Trouble I have Seeing
Just a Slower Walk with Thee
Count Your many birthdays, Name them one by one
Go Tell it on the Mountain, but speak up
Give me the Old Timer’s Religion
Blessed insurance, Jesus is Mine
Guide my O Thou Great Jehovah, I’ve forgotten where I parked
Certainly we all can agree that humor is one of our best friends as we all face the aging process or as we deal with loved ones who are old or getting old. Nonetheless, it’s interesting how we, as a society, often employ various euphemisms to speak of old age. Since we are, by and large, a youth-obsessed and-youth consumed society, with everything from advertizing to the latest fashion, from leisure pursuits and entertainment to vocabulary taking cues from what young people are saying, what they do and desire and what they will pay for, the word “old” has also become something of a dirty word, signifying something or someone who has become useless, depleted, beyond their prime.
So, we substitute gentler sounding words like elderly, senior citizens, older adults, golden years, as we try to remove some of the social stigma and negative connotations attached to old age.
But, lest we forget, throughout much of history, the gifts of wisdom and endurance signified by living into one’s old age meant that this was a period of life prized far beyond all other life stages. Why, then, do some consider it an insult to be referred to as “old,” if indeed, that is the truth of where we are on the life’s journey? From a Christian perspective, the high quality of life, incredible health care, financial security, and modern conveniences that American society affords the old, means opportunities for generosity and gratitude that were simply inconceivable to the majority of earlier generations of folks in their final years of life. Now, I know growing old has its downsides, but surely if there ever was a prime time in history to be able to grow old with grace and dignity and thanksgiving, this would have to be it.
Abraham, Genesis says, was 75 years old when he heard the Lord call out his name, summoning him to depart from Haran, to go to the land of Canaan. It was to be, for him, a completely new experience, a kind of second chance at life, an archetypal journey for all, whether old or young, who dare step where he walked.
Who would have thought that anything good could come out of a 75 year old man with no children and whose wife, Sarah, was barren, a sign in the ancient world that one’s life had not been blessed, that you were not only infertile but there was no hope that your lineage and name would endure another generation. God says to Abram: leave country, kindred, and house behind -- journey where you’ve never been before.
If ever there was in scripture a call both counter-intuitive, even ludicrous, here it is. Yet Abram responded in obedience. No complaints or excuses; no, “why don’t you check with so and so first” not even a “no, I’ve already served my time.” Truth is, at 75 years of age, Abram welcomed this new call of God, even though it meant everything about his life would have to be turned upside down.
Abraham had to conquer at least three fears in order to leave behind his settled, comfortable existence in Haran, venturing forth to the land of Canaan, the destination of God’s call.
First, there was fear of the unknown, fear of all of that which lay outside his control. It’s the primal fear we all face that keeps us stuck in Haran. Conventional wisdom says, play it safe; don’t take risks; be cautious; or in that favorite word of our time and culture, be “conservative.” But nothing could be further from the truth of what the bible teaches, especially through the lens of Abraham and his life and what God did with him in his old age and with his postmenopausal wife. In leaving Haran for Canaan, he had to embrace ignorance, the simple truth that he did not know what the future held; he had to practice trust in the unseen and unknown, which is to say, he practiced faith.
Several years ago, a writer for NPR’s All Things Considered, Bruce Feiler, left his home in New York City, and went to the land of the Bible to retrace the footsteps of Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs. He describes his experience in Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land through the Five Books of Moses. A Jew in name more than practice, he writes: “Mine was the generation that could have it all. Our ethos was built on the belief that we could control everything: our bodies, our minds, our bank accounts. Got a problem? Change channels, switch jobs, take a pill, go to the gym. Our bibles were our Day-Timers. Our god was self-reliance.”
But visiting the archeological sites where God spoke to people like Abraham, holding a handful of dirt from the holy land, putting his foot into the dead sea, Feiler felt something ancient stirring inside of him. He remembered that this very passage from Genesis 12 was the one he had read at his own bar Mitzvah years and years before. Abraham, he realizes, had never heard God before. He didn’t know who or what God was. He didn’t see God. But suddenly, this voice says “Go, and Abraham goes.” The voice was such a powerful thing that Abraham had no doubts. He had only a faith.(p.33) that summoned him to go forth in search of the promise that he knew only God could give.
The power of Abraham’s story did something quite profound to this Jewish man from New York City, for the land and those sacred stories of his youth began to move inside him at a deep, spiritual level. More now than a reporter or a writer, he became a pilgrim seeking, as did Abram of old, the fulfillment of God’s blessing and promise.
Geographically, the call to Abraham was to leave Haran and his prosperous life within the lush, fertile fields of Mesopotamia, that area otherwise known as the Fertile Cresent , that land of the mythic Garden of Eden, the land of rivers and water abundant, and to go to Canaan, to the semi-arid region known in southern Canaan as the Negeb. The route he followed was likely north through the Fertile Crescent, down into Palestine, and through the old Canaanite communities of Shechem and Bethel, finally ending up southwest of the Dead Sea in a semi-dry grassland suitable for grazing his sheep and cattle. By leaving his home behind, Abraham learns utter dependence on the divine initiative and promise.
Theologically, the Abram narrative, beginning here in Genesis 12, marks a decisive shift in what God is doing in history. Chapters 1-11 record humanity’s sinfulness and rebellion against God – from the story of Adam and Eve’s disobedience and expulsion from the Garden through the story of that ancient tower or ziggurat known as Babel where God’s anger confused human languages and scattered the people. It’s the shift from the primordial story of humanity’s origins to the particular history of Israel, from the history of curse to the history of the blessing. In a way, the call of Abraham is the theological hinge, opening passage through the doorway of sin into the covenant of grace.
And Israel’s first patriarch, who at 75, would seem to have the most to fear about leaving the security and stability of Haran, obeys God, departing for the unknown.
A second fear Abraham overcame was fear of the stranger. He left behind what he had and moved toward what God had promised, and as he did so, he entered a new land inhabited by people he did not know.
Previously in Genesis, God had scattered the people following their feeble attempt to build a temple-tower to reach into the sky, an attempt to become like the gods; now, God begins to reverse that myth of scattering with a promise to unify, to reach out with the divine embrace to enfold everyone, for as he tells Abraham, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Abraham lived and prospered in this new land, this land of promise and he and its inhabitants learned mutual coexistence. That’s one reason I think we hear the Lord repeating again and again in our Old Testament scriptures: Israel must learn to accept the stranger and the foreigner and the alien who lives among them, for whether it was Haran, or later Egypt, Abraham and all his descendents were at one time strangers in a strange land.
So it should be for the church as well. It is our fundamental calling, to welcome others, because either we or our ancestors before us were once, likewise, immigrants and foreigners seeking a new home in a new country. At 75 years of age, we might not expect someone to be intentionally going around making new friends, to be about breaking down the walls and assumptions dividing people, but that’s precisely what Abraham went forth to do as he traveled to the land of promise.
The Apostle Paul in Romans is even so bold as to say that Abraham is the Father of us all, an interesting image to linger over since three of the world’s great religious traditions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – claim Abraham as a spiritual forbearer in our respective faith traditions. That is, over 2 billion of the world’s population owe some form of special allegiance to Abraham. Perhaps even in our own day, the divine promise is coming true, that through Abraham, all members of the human family will experience the blessing of knowledge and relationships with each other and with the Divine.
Eugene Peterson warns against our tendency to narcicism and self-absorption such that we “exclude all who don't suit our preferences.” “We become a sect. Sects are composed of men and women who reinforce their basic selfism by banding together with others who are pursuing similar brands of selfism, liking the same foods, believing in the same idols, playing the same games, despising the same outsiders...A sect is accomplished by community reduction, getting rid of what does not please us, getting rid of what offends us, whether of ideas or of people. We construct religious clubs instead of entering resurrection communities...[But] with the call of Abraham, the long, slow, complex, and still continuing movement to pull all these selves into a people of God’s community began.” (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places)
What are we doing to ensure that we have a relationship with God that will benefit, not just ourselves or our own little group, but other human families as well? What are we doing to overcome our fear of the other, those we don’t know, so that the promise given Abraham will come alive in our own day and time?
The third fear Abraham faced as he departed Haran was the fear of powerlessness in the face of the impossible. Just at the end of the previous chapter, the biblical writer has announced that Sarah, Abram’s wife, is barren and cannot give birth to an heir. This family, it seems, has played out its future and has nowhere else to go. The situation appears hopeless. While this couple might not have had our knowledge of the biology of human reproduction, they knew full well that they were beyond their child-bearing years. Humanly-speaking, they faced an impossibility that brought them face to face with their own powerlessness to alter their circumstances. Biologically-speaking, barren Sarah and impotent Abraham were "as good as dead" (Hebrews 11:12).
But, as the Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann writes, “the marvel of biblical faith is that barrenness is the arena of God’s life-giving action” (p.116). The reality of Abram and Sarah’s infertility makes God’s promise of universal blessing all the more incredulous and marvelous.
Whenever an experience of barrenness comes to us, we all have good reason to fear the limits that mortality, disease, grief, loss, and suffering impose upon us.
I now know limits to my creativity, energy, and desires thrust upon me by the experience of cancer; I know the hard struggle to understand how I am now to see the promise and blessing of God being worked out in my life. The future, while not hopeless for me a year or two ago, seemed eerily dark and foreboding, and it was not always easy to summon the courage to face each new day with renewed conviction that it would not be my last.
But time and time again, I would experience the truth that the darkest darkness is when God’s little speck of light shines the brightest; it is when despair haunts your every waking moment that you really have to trust, with every fiber of your being, God’s promise of new life and a new beginning.
Rather than having belief in God, I had to believe God in. Rather than belief as intellectual assent, I had to believe God in by seeing faith as more of a journey than a set of answers, truth as less a realization than a relationship, and my own suffering and insecurity about the future as an experience of surrender to God rather than continuing to operate under the assumption that life somehow owed me recovery and good health.
Abraham received no promise that he and his family would live out their days free from droughts, plagues, sandstorms, discouragements, or defeats – but if he stayed true to his faith, he would be a blessing to his people and to all the world. By God’s grace, even in his old age, he dared to dream big. His reward was release from his fears and the fulfillment of the promise.
The wise teacher, Gandoff, says to Frodo in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “We cannot choose the time we live in. We can only choose what we do with the time we are given.” Abraham, even in his old age, was willing to subvert conventional wisdom; he knew that “to stay in safety is to remain barren; to leave in risk is to have hope.” (Bruggemann, 118)
Instead of lamenting his ignorance and the loss of control, Abraham embarked upon a journey into the unknown. Instead of fearing inclusion of the stranger and the outsider, he gave himself to God's promise of universal blessings for the whole earth. In the face of his own profound impotence, he believed that God could do the impossible. In so doing, Abraham became "the father of us all."
May God grant us courage to move when God calls, to love as God loves, and to be a blessing as God and others have been a blessing to us. So let it be. Amen.
