1Now 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. 2I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3I 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.”
4So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him.
( Gen. 12:1-4a )
1What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? 2For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. 3For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” 4Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. 5But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.
( Romans 4:1-5 )
The scripture reading this morning introduces one of the heroes of the faith, Father Abraham. Genesis chapters 12 through 23 are concerned with the life of Abraham. In each of these twelve chapters, Abraham seems to be constantly on the move. He is a pilgrim and a stranger everywhere he goes. In part we judge Abraham’s greatness by the literary context in which we find him in the book of Genesis. In the first eleven chapters of Genesis humanity seems to be in a continual downward spiral. Adam and Eve begin in an idyllic garden but then fall morally and are expelled from the garden. Their two sons, Cain and Abel, become estranged, and one kills the other. Each generation seems to become worse than the previous one until God finally decides to wipe the whole race from the face of the earth with a flood and start over again with Noah. But Noah’s descendants are no better, ultimately building the Tower of Babel, which is presented as a titanic human rebellion against God. God destroys the tower and scatters the people, confusing them with multiple languages. Finally, in the 11th chapter of Genesis we come to Abraham, whose wife Sara is described as barren.
In other words, from God’s perspective human history had come to a dead end. Humanity had boxed itself into patterns and ways of doing things that were destructive and ultimately would only lead to evil. Left to our own devises, there was no way out. God needed to intervene with one human being who had the courage and faith to move in an entirely new direction. That man was Abraham.
Moral Dead Ends
We should be able to understand about historical dead ends and the difficulty of starting down a new path. In our American history the greatest example of a historical dead end is probably the institution of slavery. What could have been more anachronistic as the world moved into an industrial age than the continuation of the “peculiar institution.” And there were certainly Southerners who knew better but couldn’t bring themselves to do the things necessary to end it. One of the best examples of these was Thomas Jefferson, who railed against slavery in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, and who favored the elimination of slavery from the new territories in the 1780s. But Jefferson never freed his own slaves. And even though the finances of his plantation, Monticello, were always shaky, he continued to be a spendthrift and refused to institute basic reforms. When he died he was completely bankrupt and his entire estate was sold to pay his debts. He left his family nothing.
And perhaps the most troubling thing about him was his personal life. In the 1970s the historian Fawn Brodie published a controversial biography of Jefferson, arguing that he had a 38-year conjugal relationship with his house slave Sally Hemings and fathered six children by her. Historians have debated this fiercely. In 1998 DNA testing showed that today the Hemings family males all have Jefferson’s Y chromosome. It may be that Jefferson’s brother, Randolph, was the culprit, but the most likely explanation is that Jefferson himself was the father. He was known to be present at Monticello with Sally nine months before all of her births, and she was never pregnant when he was not there.
My point in bringing this up is that Jefferson had gotten himself in to a moral, political, economic and social dead end. The only way for Jefferson to have saved Monticello and his relationship with Sally would have been for him to make some very drastic changes in his life – personal, political and social. But he was unwilling to do this. And so he was trapped – and so was the South – and so was the nation. Sadly, as early as 1820 Americans were already considering the possibility of Civil War … an eventuality that was only 40 years away. They saw no way out of the dead end.
I wonder if one or two hundred years from now, historians will look back at the early 21st century and say much the same thing about the environmental crisis that we face today. We are currently pumping 700 million tons of pollution into the air everyday, day in and day out. This is not sustainable. Almost everyone agrees that this is changing our climate and that the results are probably going to be calamitous. And yet in a two-year presidential race it has hardly come up. Like Jefferson, we have personal reasons to continue the status quo; and we are part of a huge economic, social and political system that will not be easily changed. Yet future generations may look back on us and all the damage that they have inherited from us and wonder why we didn’t change things. Future generations – perhaps for all time to come – will look back at our generation and wonder how we could have been so shortsighted and so selfish. They will wonder, with all of our genius and inventiveness, why we could not have avoided this dead end.
The Greatness of Abraham
What the first 11 chapters of Genesis are teaching us is that, from God’s perspective, four thousand years ago the world was in a moral-spiritual dead end. The greatness of Abraham was that amidst all the ambiguity of his situation, and all the dissenting voices that he no doubt heard, and against the full force of inertia, he was ready to take drastic action. He was willing to stop what he was doing and move in an entirely new direction. This is no small thing. Even when faced with certain disaster, people often chose to stay the course. They choose immediate comfort at the price of eventual death.
God called Abraham to get on the road and move out. He said, “Leave our country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.” Abraham clearly had a choice. He could have opted not to go. Obedience to God meant that he would have to leave his comfort zone. He probably preferred to stay where he was, in the land that he knew, with the people that he loved, but in a place that had no future. It probably would have been easy for him to accept a status quo that led nowhere. People do it all the time. His other choice was to obey God. But that involved risk.
On the positive side of the ledger are God’s promises. If he obeyed, God promised to make him into a great nation – remember his wife was barren. God also promised to make him into a great man. And finally he would be a blessing to all the peoples of the earth. The price was obeying God, which meant that he had to trust him to do these things even though he never explained how they were going to come about or even where it was he was supposed to go.
As we read this story, we can tell that Abraham needs to move to a new place in order to become the father of a nation. He couldn’t do it in Haran, which was already well settled and had no room for a new nation. But, more important, Abraham needed a change of environment because he himself needed to be changed. He wasn’t going to change if he stayed in his father’s household, where he was secure and safe and comfortable, and where there was no need to change anything. He was never going to learn to trust God in Haran. He needed to move out in faith. And journeys of faith are the only way that we can move into the future that God has for us.
Faith journeys always involve risk because they always involve change – and change is always risky. We tend to prefer the devil we know to the unknown. We prefer keeping the good things we have even if they lead to death. This was the rich young ruler’s problem in the New Testament: he wanted eternal life, but he did want to give up anything to get it. Jesus said to his disciples that unless a person hates father and mother, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be his disciple (Luke 14:26). This is another way of saying that his followers would be people who are willing to leave all the things that provide comfort and security in order to gain something better. For Abraham that was “the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10).
James Baker
Early in the 1990s, former Secretary of State James Baker told a story at the National Prayer Breakfast. One morning, he said, he rode to the White House in his chauffeur-driver car when he saw a man on Pennsylvania Ave that he recognized. He was a former Washington powerbroker, a man who had ruled the White House with an iron fist. Now he was all alone, starring wistfully at the White House through the wrought iron gates. When Baker saw that, he vowed to remember the fleeting nature of power.
His story might also remind us of the fleeting nature of so much of life. It might remind us that sometimes we need to accept changes, and make changes, and perhaps see the dead ends we come to in life as God’s call to us to try something new. Perhaps God might be telling us that it’s time to get out on the road, even when the destination is not yet clear to us.
The Apostle Paul
In the first century at the time of Jesus, Israel also seems to have reached a dead end, a religious dead end. Its system of animal sacrifice was intended for a tribal people, but by the first century the nation had outgrown this system. The temple had become a giant slaughterhouse, with thousands of animals being killed on a daily basis at Passover time. This was untenable. Judaism had the potential to become a universal religion, but it could never realize its potential as long as it clung to outmoded ways – animal sacrifice, the refusal of Jews to eat with Gentiles, dietary laws, religious customs peculiar to a Semitic people but a stumbling block to other peoples.
In his early years, the Apostle Paul stubbornly clung to the old ways. He insisted on all the old tribal customs and persecuted the Christian sect that seemed to be shedding those customs in order to be relevant to non-Jews. Paul was probably the last person in the world one might have expected to launch a new religion. As Thomas Cahill has written, he was an intellectual overachiever, and an emotionally edgy person. He lacked the small talk that might have put people at ease; he had no anecdotes; he lacked charm; he had no tolerance for muddled thinking; he didn’t bear fools lightly, he simply didn’t bear them at all. How was God going to get through to such a stubborn, self-righteous, close-minded person?
Jesus very mildly called his disciples from their fishing nets to be fishers of men and women. He called Matthew from his counting table and converted him over dinner. He gently healed Mary Magdalene from her psychological torments and guided her into a new life. But mild measures would not do for Paul. On the road to Damascus God knocked him down from his horse, called him a persecutor, and blinded him for three days. Paul, like Israel, was committed to a historical dead end and was too stubborn even to see it. So drastic measures were needed.
And they worked. Paul completely rethought Jewish theology in the light of Christ. Before Paul, the preachers of Christ were mostly storytellers. They recalled the stories about Jesus and retold his parables. Paul was the first one to think about these stories theologically. He was the church’s first theologian. He started from the beginning, with Genesis and the story of Abraham. Abraham, he said, was not saved by works. The great thing about Abraham was not his works, not his accomplishments. The fact is, he had few accomplishments to boast about. What Abraham had to boast about was only that he had faith in God, that he trusted God. He trusted God when he left the comforts of Haran to travel to the Promised Land. He trusted God again when believed that though he was old and his wife, Sarah, was barren, God was yet going to give him an heir. And he trusted God again when he was willing to sacrifice Isaac, his dearly beloved son, simply because God said he should.
By emphasizing Abraham’s relationship to God based on faith, not works, Paul made explicit what Jesus taught; he pointed the church in a new direction; he made the Christian religion a pilgrimage of faith for each of Christ’s followers; and he reformulated the Jewish religion so that it would no longer be at a dead end but would be the universal religion that it is today for Christians all around the world.
Conclusion
Human beings are pretty much the same in any period: whether in Abraham’s day, 4000 years ago; first-century Israel; the 19th century American South; or 21st century America. Our natural tendency is to stay in Haran where we are comfortable, even when it leads nowhere. Abraham is the father of us all and a model to follow because he had the courage to leave Haran, to trust God, and to make his life a pilgrimage.
How do we apply this? One application is to our church, the UPB. There are some ways that our church is in Haran right now. But we have agreed that when we have a new pastor, we will have to leave Haran to move into the unknown. I want to remind you of that now because you should be mentally preparing yourselves to leave Haran. There will be some changes made around here that will be good for the long-term health of this congregation but which may cause some short-term discomfort.
And secondly I think that there is an application for us as individuals. There may be ways in which we might find ourselves preferring to remain in Haran rather than venturing forth as pilgrims, trusting God to meet our needs. If you find yourself in that situation, you might remember that Haran – however comfortable it might be – is a dead end. God doesn’t call us to dead ends. And he doesn’t call us to play it safe. He calls us to have faith and get out on the road … with him. There’s some risk there, but there is also life and endless possibilities.
The foregoing sermon was given by Rev. Michael Parker at the United Parish of Bowie.
© 2008 Michael T. Parker
