"Abraham Part 1: Go From Your Country"

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on August 6, 2006

Text — Genesis 12:1-9

12 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.  2 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.  3 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.” 

4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.  5 Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan,  6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.  7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.  8 From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord.  9 And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb. 

How did Abraham get to be our spiritual ancestor?  How does he qualify? Three world religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — all trace their origins back to Abraham. But even if he is our spiritual ancestor, why should we care about Abraham and what happened to him?  The guy lived 3000 years ago. 

The passage from Romans says it was Abraham’s faith that made him great.  He trusted God.  But Abraham wasn’t especially virtuous, at least not in the conventional sense. Today, we’d expect a virtuous spiritual example to care about his family, right? Give the safety and well-being of your family a high priority. That’s not exactly Abraham.  

In a story that comes up a few chapters later, God will tell Abraham, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and offer him as a burnt offering.” This isn’t the time to get into what kind of God would make a demand like that. Let’s just assume for now that God had his reasons, and of course God didn’t make Abraham go through with it. When Abraham had the knife to Isaac’s throat, God sent an angel to stop him.  It’s the most famous story about Abraham — the binding of Isaac. 

But Abraham didn’t even question this command.  He didn’t struggle with it. He didn’t say, “Hey God, isn’t that a little extreme?” Abraham will argue with God when God is ready to kill the people of Sodom, but he doesn’t argue with the command to sacrifice his own son. He doesn’t even talk to Sarah about it.

I said that Muslims and Arabs also trace their lineage back to Abraham, not through Isaac but through Abraham’s first son, Ishmael, born to him through Sarah’s maidservant Hagar. 

So get this.  Muslims and Jews compete for bragging rights over whose ancestor had the honor of almost getting his throat cut by father Abraham and burned on Mt. Moriah. If this that’s the kind of thing they argue about, is it any wonder there’s war in the Middle East? 

And then, when Abraham and Sarah go to Egypt during a famine Abraham will virtually offer Sarah to be put in the Pharaoh’s harem so the Pharaoh won’t hurt Abraham. I guess this is what some people mean when they talk about Biblical family values. 

So Abraham isn’t what you’d expect a spiritual model to be. I tell you all of this so you’ll have a taste of what lies ahead and I encourage you to read ahead in Genesis, chapters 12-24, over the next four weeks.

But right here in the opening paragraph, we have a reason to care about Abraham and to join all the hundreds of generations who have pondered his life and what it means.

God tells Abraham — and this is a key verse — “Go from your country and from your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. Abraham doesn’t even know where he’s going.  He just knows what he’s leaving.  He’s leaving everything that has been familiar and comfortable up to that moment.

The Hebrew phrase for “go” is very interesting.  There are actually two words translated together as “go” — Lehk Lehka — and they have been the subject of a lot of Jewish, Rabbinic commentary, or Midrash, because it’s not clear what the second word lehka means. 

It could be an intensified “go” — as in go go.  Really go.  Or, the second word “lekha” could mean “to yourself.”  Go go, or go to yourself, or maybe both.  

So the Midrash suggests that Abraham goes on a double journey. He’s going to travel through geographical space.  He doesn’t know where to, but we know it’s to the Negeb, the desert in the south of modern day Israel.  This is a barren, hard desert that doesn’t even have the softness of sand.  It’s a range of rocks, where nothing grows except every 30 miles or so in some canyon there’s a few trees and a little shade.  Maybe a spring for travelers.  This is the outer, geographical journey.  But there’s also a journey to himself, an inner journey, a spiritual journey.

I tried to think of an English word to capture this dual journey and the word I came up with is dislocation. Dislocation can mean being moved geographically, like relocation against your will. But dislocation can also happen inside your body.  Your shoulder can be dislocated. You can be emotionally dislocated, disoriented, and thrown off balance.

God tells Abraham, “Go from your country.” Leave what you know.  Go to what you don’t know. This is part of all our lives.  

I felt the most dislocated when I was about 23.  There were a lot of things I wanted to do, but nothing I had any prospect of getting paid for and making a living.  I thought, “As soon as I find a career path, and get started on it, I’ll feel more at home.  Maybe by the time I’m 25. When I was 25, I still didn’t have a career path.  I thought maybe I’d be settled by age 35. When I was 35, I thought: maybe when I’m 45.  I have always been a late bloomer. Surely by then, the major issues will be settled.

Now I’m 58.  I do feel more at home in the world than when I was 23.  But I have to tell you, it’s never gotten really easy, the way I thought it would.  

Dislocation of one sort or another never ends. There’s always some struggle, at every age. As soon as you get one thing worked out, there’s something else to deal with. Maybe some of you have really “arrived” at that imagined state of contentment and bliss, and life isn’t pitching you any more curveballs. If that’s you, you’ve either died or achieved enlightenment.

I like to imagine that animals do enjoy a kind of peace that we don’t. Animals don’t seem to worry about the future.  But maybe that’s just a fantasy too. Actually, there’s some evidence that animals do worry about the future.

The point is, if your life isn’t all settled and trouble-free, as you imagined it would be, or if you feel dislocated, or a little off balance, not entirely at peace, it’s not because something is wrong with your life. There is something wrong with all our lives. There’s a huge contradiction or conflict built into human life. That’s another sermon.

But dislocation, this unsettledness, always having to leave what you know and head into what you don’t know — that’s just the way human life is.  Faith means to hang in there even when you’re dislocated, even when you’re told, go, go again, go to another country that God will show you.