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"Blessings for the Journey"
February 17, 2008: Second Sunday in Lent, Year A
The Rev. Caroline K. Murphy, interim senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.UnitedChurchontheGreen.org

Scripture:

"May God take these words and make from them a holy word for us today."

Psalm 121

I lift up my eyes to the hills — from whence does my help come?

My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.

He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand.

The sun shall not smite you by day, nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.

The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in

From this time forth and forevermore.

Genesis 12:1-4a

Now the Lord said to Abram,

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him.

Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-12

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. . . .

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. By faith he received the power of procreation, even though he was too old — and Sarah herself was barren — because he considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one person, and this one as good as dead, descendants were born, "as many as the stars of heaven and as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore."

"Friends, God is still speaking to the world. May our hearts be open to listen and respond. Amen."

Sermon:

It is a surprisingly brief encounter — this first conversation that the Bible records between Abraham and Yahweh. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to name another passage where so much is packed into so few words. It's also hard to think of a passage that is more pivotal — pivotal in the sense of something swinging on a hinge, turning in a way that decisively shapes everything that will follow.

God's call to Abraham comes at a key moment in the biblical account. The first eleven chapters of the Bible have been about the broad sweep of primeval history, encompassing all of humankind. In many ways it has been a troubled story. From Adam and Eve's expulsion from the garden . . . to Cain's murder of his brother Abel . . . to the violence preceding the flood . . . to the people's ill-fated attempt to build a great Tower at Babel: through all of this, false pride and folly have left a terrible and tragic mark. Following the debacle at Babel, humankind is scattered over the face of the earth, divided and confused.

By the time Abraham appears on the scene, it is clearly time for a new chapter. And so the focus shifts at this critical moment from humanity as a whole to one particular person and his descendants, which will eventually include Jews, Christians, and Muslims, all three of these families of faith looking to Abraham as our ancestor. This is a crucial, hinge moment in human history. The covenant God established with Noah and with all living creatures under the sign of a rainbow will become crystallized with Abraham and his family. "I will bless you," God says to this one particular individual, "and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." The sweep of God's blessing is still all-encompassing, but now it will come through a very special covenant relationship with one person, and one family.

God's words come to Abraham (or Abram, as he is still called here) at a turning point in Abram's personal history as well. His father has just died. To compound his grief, Abram and his wife, Sarai, have been unable to have children. Now he is both without parents and without offspring. His childlessness must seem nearly as irrevocable as the death of his father, for he and Sarai are well along in years. Those who went before him are dead and gone, and the hope of new young lives to come after him has surely died as well by this point. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews says as much, talking about Abram as being "as good as dead" — hardly an epithet you would use to refer to a hope-filled, strapping young man, about to set out on an adventure!

Anyway, he has already had as much in the way of adventure as any reasonable person might wish for, if not more. Years ago, Terah, the father whose death he is now mourning, had packed up Abram and the rest of the family and brought them north out of their Mesopotamian home of Ur (in current-day Iraq, not far from Nasariyah). Planning, perhaps, to travel further, they had settled in the city of Haran (in what we would now call Turkey, near the border with Syria). Like Ur, Haran was a city of some substance and wealth. It became home to Abram and his family. But now, with his father gone, the past is a closed chapter. And, without any hope of children, the future holds out little promise.

Into this moment — a moment of deep loss, a moment that seems like the end of a chapter but turns out instead the beginning of something new — into this moment comes God's voice saying, "Go." God's first word to Abram is not, "Greetings" or "How are you?" or "I'm awfully sorry about your father," but rather: "Go," "go forth," "get yourself going." Lech lecha is the Hebrew expression used here, a command that repeats the "you" for added emphasis. "Go-you-forth" is how one translator puts it: "Go you forth from your land, from your kindred, and from your father's house, to the land that I will let you see." (The Five Books of Moses, trans. Everett Fox [New York: Schocken Books, 1995])

It's so compact, this emphatic word of God that will change Abram's life forever — and through him, the rest of our lives as well! So compact, and yet it does not skip over what Abram is being asked to do here, or make light of it. Did you hear the triple repetition of what he is to leave behind? Did you hear the command to "go forth from your country, and from your family, and from your father's house" — to leave it all behind? To leave the place, Haran, that has been Abram's home for many years now, to leave the extended family in which his whole life is embedded, to leave the house of the father whom he has so recently lost?

And yet this is precisely what Abram will do. He will go forth from all that is safe and familiar, taking only Sarai, his wife, and his nephew Lot. And taking one other thing as well: a strange and wonderful promise from God, the God who has not only said, "Go forth from your country and your kindred and your father's house" but has spoken of a land that God will show him. And then God has promised this: "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."

A strange and wonderful promise. The promise of a land — not a land that Abram knows or can picture in his mind's eye, but a land that God will show him. And the promise of blessing. Five times in those brief few words, some variation of the word "blessing" appears. I imagine Abram setting off on the road out of Haran with those blessings ringing in his ears: "I will bless you" . . . " you will be a blessing" . . . "all the families of the earth shall be blessed."

It's not just an ordinary journey that Abram is being called to take, and though it will have a destination that can be found on a map (the land of Canaan, present-day Israel), it will also take him to a new place in the geography of the soul, and in the relationship between the human and the divine. It will be a journey of blessing. God's blessing will come to Abram in many forms: protection and land — and yes, eventually, offspring as well. Moreover, it will be a journey of blessing for others. Indeed, through Abram, all the people of the world are to be blessed — you and me and the rest of New Haven and the people of Kuala Lumpur and of Sydney, Australia, and of the town of Bill, Wyoming, population 10. All of us are to be blessed by Abram's journey, and are to be given blessings for our own journeys.

Perhaps one of the greatest blessings we receive through this journey of Abram's is the one that the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews picks up on: the model of Abram's faith, his trust in God's blessing and promise that enabled him to take a deep breath and "set out, not knowing where he was going." For the truth is that we human beings are always coming to new hinges in our lives, to new forks in the road, to places like Haran where we have started to settle in, only to hear a voice or feel a nudge calling us to set out on a new journey.

Our journeys can take all sorts of different forms. At times, they may literally take us to a new physical location. If you have ever picked up and moved, you will know the jumble of hopes and fears, the mixture of curiosity and homesickness, the sense of displacement that such a move entails. When I first came to New Haven as a college freshman nearly 30 years ago, I was enthralled by the heady academic atmosphere at Yale, but I was also so homesick for my family home in New Mexico that I would sometimes wistfully look at the store that was then labeled "Yale Co-op West" and say to myself. "Ahh, this is as close as I can get — another 2000 miles and I would be home!"

Now, of course, having spent a large chunk of my life in New Haven but having lived elsewhere for the past 6½ years, I am relishing the opportunity to be back in a place that feels so much like home. For these few months, I am living in the same general neighborhood where I lived for 14 years. On Sunday mornings I am worshiping just a block from the church where I first learned the rhythms of Christian worship, and I even see some of the same people that I knew from that community here at United. I can't pretend not to be thoroughly enjoying all this — so much so, in fact, that it may seem a little odd, if not downright disingenuous, for me to be preaching about the virtues of setting off for the unknown. Except that the unknown does keep coming, or we keep being nudged into it. And in my experience, though the unknown certainly comes in association with a physical move, it also comes in the process of day-to-day living.

Recently a friend of mine was reflecting on the phenomenon of change in her life. "I've noticed," she wrote, "that my opinion on things changes as I get older. My body has changed a lot. I've changed my job and the place where I've lived. My children are growing up. There are many changes I would like to make for myself. I have habits I need to change — things to start doing, things to stop doing. I feel I have a reached a point in my life where I have to take a long look at my values. What's important? What's not important? What am I going to do with the rest of my life?"

This friend of mine was writing at mid-life. But the questions she raises are good ones for any number of life stages — for any of those times when, like Abram, we are asked to leave behind what is comfortable and familiar and set out into new territory, trusting in God to show us the way. Whether at mid-life or in young adulthood or in our later years, it seems that God is often calling to you and me just as God called to Abram: "Go forth from what is familiar, from what is comfortable, from what is tried and true. Go forth into the new territory that I will show you."

It can be disquieting to hear this call upon our lives. Think of how hard it is to be asked, say, to sit in a different pew on a Sunday morning, or to change some aspect of your appearance. How much harder it is to leave other, deeper things behind: relationships, even those that are no longer life giving; a certain way of looking at the world; the judgments we form of others. The hardest of all may be to leave behind certain well-engrained habits of heart and mind. One Christian thinker, Daniel Clendenin, is naming a deep truth, I believe, when he writes that "our ultimate journey is to move from a self-regarding heart curved in on itself to an other-regarding openness to the love of God, a love for others, and a love for all [God's] world" (www.journeywithjesus.net, essay posted 2-11-08).

And still we are called forth. During Lent especially, we are called forth on a pilgrimage leading toward a cross and an empty tomb and a deeper sense of our identity as human beings made in the image and likeness of God. Our Lenten pilgrimage is an emblem of our lifelong journey of life and faith. The journey will not always be a smooth one; in fact we can almost count on rough patches and wrong turns and what may seem like dead ends. And yet, like Abram's, it is a journey of blessings: "I will bless you so that you will be a blessing." Listen for those blessings ringing in your ears as you journey on your way. And lean as if on a sturdy walking stick on the psalmist's assurance that our God will not let you stumble, that the Holy One who keeps you will not slumber nor sleep, that the Lord is your keeper, your shade at your right hand, the One who will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. Amen.


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