Going and coming

Abraham and Jesus

This past Sunday I preached at the Church of the Good Samaritan in Paoli, Pennsylvania, one of the historic evangelical parishes in The Episcopal Church. Two of the appointed readings were Genesis 12:1-9 and Romans 4:13-25.

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

+In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

I am moving this summer. I’m moving to a city and a country (Toronto, Canada) where I’ve never lived before and where I know very few people. Moves, especially big international moves like this one (which I’ve made before), always raise a host of existential questions: Where will I live? What church will I find to belong to? Who will be my friends? How will life change? What will I miss from my previous home?

So I feel especially primed to enter imaginatively into our Old Testament lesson this morning. As our passage opens, the God who created the world, the God who has just identified himself as the God of all the nations who descended from the survivors of the Flood, speaks to one individual descendant of Noah’s son Shem, a resident of Ur in modern-day Iraq. This individual has already uprooted from Ur, as our text begins, and has resettled in Haran, perhaps in modern Turkey. The man’s name is Abram, and God comes to him and says: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

Shai Azoulay, Living as a Pilgrim (2019), via the Visual Commentary on Scripture

It is a stark command, arriving like a meteor in a cloudless sky. And it escalates in its intensity: Abram is to leave behind not only his native land but also his extended family, and not only his extended family but also his immediate household. He is to strike out independently for a place he does not yet know. He is to leave his past behind and set his face toward a future he can only dimly glimpse. As one commentator has emphasized: “Throughout the entire story one must always remember that to leave home and to break ancestral bonds was to expect of ancient men almost the impossible” (Gerhard von Rad).

(Years later there will be a similar demand to leave his future dreams behind as well: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering…” And again the command escalates: not only your son but your favored son, not only your favored son but the one named Isaac, not only your promised offspring but the one whom you love…)

How does Abraham summon the strength to perform these great feats, to relinquish the only life he has or can fathom? The only answer the text gives is that God made a promise, and Abraham trusted the Lord’s word: “Go… to the land I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

God promises Abraham a new homeland, a family (his own children), and a legacy. The original Hebrew seems to suggest that Abraham’s prosperity will become the stuff of legend: “By invoking your name, all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.” “May you be blessed like Abraham!” is perhaps a modern way to imagine what God promises the nations of the world will say when they recall Abraham’s favored status. His name will become proverbial.

And Abraham trusts. The New Testament insists on the fact that Abraham was only able to do this by looking away from his own resources and casting himself wholly on God’s promise. Here is how St. Paul puts it in our epistle reading: “the God in whom [Abraham] believed… gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” God is the God of the impossible, the One who raises the dead, the God who creates out of nothing. Therefore, Abraham “did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead… and the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.” Abraham considered the identity and character of God, and he trusted. If God was able to bring the world into existence and sustain it continually by his powerful speech, then what else could ever be impossible for God to provide?

For this reason, throughout Israel’s history and on through the community of Christians, believers have been able to see in Abraham’s “call and this road which was taken… not only an event in [their] earliest history, but also a basic characteristic of [their] whole existence before God… [God’s people have seen themselves in Abraham]… being led on a special road whose plan and goal [lies] completely in [the Lord’s] hand” (von Rad). We can and have, again and again, ventured everything because of our confidence in the effectual promises of God.

I can move to a new home this summer with the assurance that God will take care of me. You can approach that enemy once more in the hope of reconciliation because God has promised to be with you. You can volunteer for that ministry role that intimidates you because God has promised to bless you. We can take that costly stand for justice because God has promised us a name that is not dependent on the approval of others. We can place our future hope entirely in God — not in our skill or prospects, our bank account or portfolio, our scheming and networking, our property and health and our even most cherished relationships but wholly and completely in God’s promise to bless us and keep us, no matter what losses may come.

Margaret Adams Parker, And Abraham stretched forth his hand (woodcut, 2001)

But I think there may be more to see in our Old Testament lesson about this God who is trustworthy. Later in Romans, Paul takes the daring step of using Abraham’s obedience as an illustration of what God himself is like on our behalf. He alludes to Abraham’s offering of his son Isaac when he writes that God “who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?” Paul is inviting us here not only to consider Abraham a model or paradigm for our faith in God. He is doing something even more striking: He is inviting us to see God as the One who makes the ultimate, impossible sacrifice. God the Father has given up his only eternally-begotten, beloved Son for the sake of sinners — us, his enemies. God has not withheld this most precious gift from us, bearing the cost himself instead of making us pay it. There is no greater gift that God had to give. If God has given this most extravagant gift, is there any other thing that we need that God would ever withhold from us?

I think we might even go a step further, though — a bit beyond where Paul has led us. I see in Abraham not only a glimpse of God the Father’s shocking generosity but also God the Son’s leaving behind his homeland. Abraham left his native land; the Son of God left his heavenly home, journeying into the far country of our fallen humanity. Abraham left the security of his extended family; the Son of God left his splendor and glory and throngs of adoring angels, taking our human form and being born in our likeness. Abraham left his father’s house, and the Son of God “left his Father’s throne above / So free, so infinite his love” (Charles Wesley).

Because Jesus has walked in the footsteps of his ancestor Abraham, we can trust his grace and love completely and go forth on our own journey of faith.

Amen.

A couple of other things:

• I had hoped in my sermon to be able to quote from R. S. Thomas’ poem “The Coming,” but I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate it. Here it is anyway:
  
  And God held in his hand
  A small globe. Look he said.
  The son looked. Far off,
  As through water, he saw
  A scorched land of fierce
  Colour. The light burned
  There; crusted buildings
  Cast their shadows: a bright
  Serpent, a river
  Uncoiled itself, radiant
  With slime.

                        On a bare
  Hill a bare tree saddened
  The sky. Many people
  Held out their thin arms
  To it, as though waiting
  For a vanished April
  To return to its crossed
  Boughs. The son watched
  Them. Let me go there, he said.
  

• RIP Robert Louis Wilken. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read: “Christian thinking did not spring from an original idea, and it was not nourished by a seminal spiritual insight. It had its beginnings in the history of Israel and the life of a human being named Jesus of Nazareth, who was born of Mary, lived in Judea, suffered and died in Jerusalem, and was raised by God to new life. That this history was the history of God’s self-disclosure does not make it any less historical, but it does mean that what is seen with the eyes is not the fullness of what there is to see.”