Lent 2A 2020
Rev. Adam T. Trambley
March 8, 2020, St. John’s Sharon
In the first reading today, God tells Abram to “Go!”. You’ve got to go. In that going, God will bless Abram and everyone after him. Our blessings come in Abram’s going. We will also find that God’s “go” to Abram is also an instruction for us.
This passage from Genesis is the beginning of the narrative about Abraham. The preceding verses at the end of chapter 11 provide Abraham’s genealogy and tell us that his father took their family from Ur in the land of the Chaldeans to Haran, and that Abram’s father died in Haran. The name Abram, used here, is his name until God changes it to Abraham later. This chapter starts with the first words to Abraham from God in scripture, which is “go”.
God tells Abram that if he goes, God will do a number of incredible things for him. First, God will make of him a great nation. This promise is significant, because Sarai was barren. (God would later change her name from Sarai to Sarah.) God then promises to bless Abram and to make his name great. God will bless those who bless Abram and curse those who curse him. These pledges are a basic kind of protection – I’ll take care of you and take care of those who help you. Then God adds the most incredible offer which changes all of history. God says, “You will be a blessings…and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. That covers a lot of people. That covers us, as well. Because Abram answered God’s call to go, he was in the place he needed to be when angels came to announce the birth of Isaac. From Isaac came Jacob and Judah and Moses and the prophets and all the people of Israel. By going, Abram has blessed us with the Old Testament scriptures and the ten commandments and the capacity to know the Creator of Heaven and Earth. By going, Abram opened the door for the great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that all see him as their father in faith. From the line of Abraham is also born Jesus, the messiah. By going, we find our blessing in Abram who was the ancestor of Jesus in whom we can believe and not perish, but have ever lasting life, as we hear in the gospel this morning. By going, Abram has blessed billions of people who are alive today, three thousand plus years later, as well as vast numbers of people who have lived and died during those years. By going.
Scripture tells us that God kept his promises to Abram. Abram went and God made of him a great nation. God made his name great – “God of Abraham” is one of the significant ways God is referred to, and it is hard to get your name much greater than that! God also blessed Abram, who ends up quite wealthy, defeats a number of kings in battle, and is protected as he goes to Egypt and other places. Abram goes, and God does what God promises to do.
Note that God does not say where Abram is supposed to go, just that God will show it to him. Even as God leads him to Canaan, Abram is always more of a wanderer than a settler. The first land he owns in what comes to be known as “The Promised Land” is a tomb that he buys for Sarah when she dies, and he ends up over-paying for it. What matters most is not where God is leading him -- that is in God’s hands and Abram will get there at the right time. What matters initially is that Abram goes, and what he goes from.
God tells Abram to go from his country, his kindred, and his father’s house. None of these are bad. They are limiting, however. We can think about what these areas mean. His country is the place where he knows how things work, formally and informally. He kindred are the people who have a set of relationships with him and expectations about him. His father’s house is the place where his life is stable and secure and set up in a certain way. By staying in his country with his kindred in his father’s house, he is never going to have the freedom to act in new ways, nor will he be able to meet the people God wants him to meet. Where he is might be fine, but fine is not good enough for the incredible blessings God has in store for and through Abram.
The last line of this passage notes that Abram’s nephew Lot went with him. Abram doesn’t have to go alone. His wife Sarai is with him and others in his household, as well as Lot and his household. Abram can take company with him. He just has to “Go,” and to go from his country, his kindred, and his father’s house.
We are also called by God to “Go.” We may not be made into a great nation, or have three world religions founded on our witness, or have our great-great-great-great-great grandchild be the messiah. But we are still called to “Go”. The going may be moving to a whole new country and never coming back, but it probably isn’t. We are more likely called to go across the street to visit a new neighbor, or across town to work with a new group of people, or across the world for a short-term mission trip, or even across the aisle in church to someone we don’t know, And in our going, we will be blessed and others will be blessed.
When we “Go”, a number of very important things happen.
First and foremost, we learn to rely on God. When we stay, it is very easy to rely on ourselves. We tend to set up life the way we want it. We have things that make us comfortable. We are generally smart and capable enough to find a situation that works for us and settle in. But the more settled we are, the less we are forced to rely on God, and the more likely we are to cling to what we already have.
God’s instructions to Abram of what to leave are helpful to us. We can think about our country as the place where we know how everything works. When we show up with our money, they take it. We know what they can tax us for or send us to jail for. We speak the language, can navigate the bureaucracy, and drive the car here. Leaving our country might mean going to a place where we don’t understand what is going on all the time, or where we are dependent on others to help us figure out how to get what we want. While one example of this could be going outside the United States on a mission trip, we can experience the same things by going to a holiday dinner at a friend’s who celebrates things differently or volunteering at an organization with unfamiliar procedures and a vast array of buzzwords and abbreviations.
We are often called to leave our kindred, when we think of kindred as those people whose relationships have defined us since we were little. We might be the “responsible older sister” or the “black sheep” or the “odd duck” or whatever. We might have been told we were clumsy or bad at math or less attractive or the life of the party. Our kindred are the people who, for good or ill, have shaped how we see the world and ourselves in it. While those understandings are necessary starting points, God doesn’t want us to end there. God wants us to live in the freedom to be his beloved children. God wants us to love the rest of his beloved children with joy, energy, and spontaneity. God wants us to bless others, and especially to be blessed by others, in ways that we didn’t know were possible for us until we stepped away from the voices of our kindred that echo about in our mind and limit our imaginations of who we can be and what we can do.
Then we are also called to leave our father’s house. This is the place we feel safe and secure. If we are in our father’s house, nothing can get us. Obviously, not everyone’s “father’s house” was a safe environment, nor is the sense of safety in how we think about our or our father’s house necessarily real. But metaphorically, our father’s house represents safety and security, and we have to be willing to step into the riskiness of life to give and receive blessings of greater depths.
As we move from the dependability of our country and living into the expectations of our kindred and the security of our father’s house into a fuller reliance on God, God can use us in ways we never imagined. If we go, we can find blessings in other people and bless them, as well. We might meet people who are very different from us, and who challenge our thinking and understanding, and find how God is present with them. We might end up in a situation where we lose control of our schedule or our food choices or our transportation preferences. We might have to sit back and trust God to get us what we need, and be amazed as he works through people we wouldn’t have expected. We might encounter people who need our help with something we never imagined we could do and find ourselves blessed by increasing our own sense of self while we serve another child of God. Anything just might happen. And that is exactly the point. Once we “Go” we are in God’s hands to bring us to any of the glorious, scary, wondrous, awesome, beautiful, overwhelming places and people and groups that inhabit his majestic creation. But we have to go. We may not have to go far. But we have to go to wherever God will show us. We have to take the first step outside our comfort zones and allow God to lead us from there.
As we follow God’s lead, we come to realize how little of the things we thought were necessary for our lives really are necessary. A lot of things that we can’t imagine living without are pretty unimportant. All we really need is God. God goes with us and provides us the people that will be part of our journey wherever we go. Like Abram took Sarai, and took Lot, we can go with our companions. Most of the rest of the things we cling to are little more than supports and excuses. If we really do need them, God will provide them along the way. Those who follow God have incredible stories of God providing the things they need, even little things. When we see God providing for us on the road, we develop a deeper sense of gratitude. We only learn these lessons when we leave what we know and “go.”
God has incredible blessing in store for us. God also has incredible blessings for us to bestow on others. We can’t imagine what God has in store for those who answer his call to “Go”. But we do know that if we stay, if we keep everything as it is, if we draw the curtains and lock the doors, or even if we put out a welcome mat and sit in our rocking chair waiting, we aren’t going to experience all that God long to give us. However good things are in our lives right now, God will still lead us to a better place if we let him. Many of those places are not far from where we are already, but they will bring us into contact with new people and new blessings and we will see God working in new ways. We just have to go.
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