Scripture: Genesis 12:1-9
The scripture from Genesis is one of the lectionary scriptures for this Sunday. As many of you know, I don’t often preach on the lectionary scriptures. I often have something else in mind or choose to look elsewhere for ideas. But I almost always read the lectionary scriptures for the week, just to see what happens between me and them, and sometimes I end up, for one reason or another, basing my sermon on one of them. This is one of those times.
When I read the passage from Genesis this week, it resonated with me in whole lot of ways—doesn’t always happen, frankly, when I just read the designated scriptures for the week. They often don’t seem to be connected to much of anything I care about and so I just respectfully put them aside. Not so this week. There seemed to be lots of connections to me as I read this passage, so many in fact that I wasn’t sure I could give a coherent, focused sermon on this passage, there were so many things it led me to think about. But also so many associations that in this case, I decided that I couldn’t just put it aside. The result, I knew, might be a kind of stream of consciousness sermon, moving from one thing to another and somewhat lacking in clarity or direction, but I decided to take that chance, and this is your official warning that what follows may be lacking in clarity or direction. Anyway, here goes: some words based on thoughts provoked—I guess inspired would be a better word—by my interaction with Genesis 12:1-9.
Abram, not yet Abraham even, the beginning of the Biblical story. Oh, well, there’s Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, and the Tower of Babel, and Noah and the flood, they all come before Abram, but they’re all like a preface, setting the stage for the story that begins with Abram. It’s a story that begins with Abram on a journey. It’s a physical journey to be sure, but it’s a spiritual journey as well. That’s the way the Biblical story begins, with the story of a journey.
And that’s one reason I’m attracted to the story today. I was just talking last week in the sermon about how we at Sojourners see the life of faith as a spiritual journey, in part took our name because of that understanding, and how when we are faithful to that name and the understanding that lies behind it, we are in resistance to the very strong tendency all around us to see religion as a set of beliefs and affirmations and assurances that we are supposed to subscribe to, rather than as a journey, which is a very different approach to the life of faith. And then here the very next week in the recommended readings for the day, is this story of a journey that stands at the beginning of the Biblical story. It reminds us that this idea of faith being a journey is not just some new age idea or something dreamed up by religious progressives in the latter part of the 20th century, an idea already over-used and sounding a little trendy. It is not that at all when you think about it. It’s a very Biblical notion, there from the beginning and repeated time and again in the pages of scripture. We Sojourners are not just making this up. Our name is grounded in the Biblical story. The kind of faith we are trying to live out is grounded in the Biblical story. And if we understand the Biblical story in this way, we will always be able to find echoes of that Biblical story in our own stories as modern day Sojourners.
Abram’s journey, we are told actually in the last verses of chapter 11, began in Iraq. Well, it really says Ur of the Chaldeans. “Terah took his son Abram and his grandson, Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan…” It says Ur of the Chaldeans, but it was Iraq, what we know as Iraq. A suggestive connection. Iraq was in the background as the Biblical story begins. Iraq is in the background now as our Christian story continues. For all Christians, it is there, looking on as we go about our churchly business, asking what our response is going to be, not letting us just go about our business obliviously, even if we try. Our Christianity, whether we like it or not, is lived out against a background of Iraq. It haunts us. We ignore it at our spiritual peril. I was thinking something like that last week too as I prepared my sermon. I have been thinking something like that pretty much all the time now for quite some time. When Christians, wherever they are, bow their heads in prayer or stand to sing a hymn, Iraq is present in the background. I don’t mean that Christians should be writing letters or demonstrating instead of worshiping, just that Iraq is part of our spiritual landscape. Of course many other things are part of our spiritual landscape as well, but especially Iraq and especially Iraq for American Christians. We not only include Iraq in our prayers. We don’t say any prayer completely separate from Iraq.
And now a confession. (This is a different train of thought.) When I have imagined Abram setting out on his journey of faith, the picture that has come into my head most often I am pretty sure is a picture of a single person responding to the call of God, traveling across the desert, finding his way eventually to the Promised Land. I know why I have that image. It’s because deep down inside I think of the various faith journeys that you and I are making as fundamentally very personal and private matters. My journey of faith, and yours, I tend to feel, is at its core a solitary, even a lonely, one. Jesus walked this lonesome valley. We must walk that lonesome valley. Not just the valley of our dying, but the lonesome valley of our living. There are some things that are just between ourselves and God. There are some things, the deepest things in our hearts and spirits, that are essentially unshareable with other people. If they are to be shared at all, it will be with God.
There is a philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, who said that religion is what you do with your solitude. I don’t know about the religion part, but I have always felt that you could say that faith is what you do with your solitude. My faith is what transpires between me and my God. I can hold a belief that there must be some power that has brought the universe into being, some source of life, and whatever that power or that source is, we call God. I could hold that belief. But faith is something different. Faith is what transpires between me and God. It is that inaudible prayer of gratitude a person might say when she wakes up in the morning, or the way a person might give himself into God’s arms as he falls asleep at the end of the day, or the deep sorrow a person might carry with her about something that cannot be forgotten and that she doesn’t know how to speak of and doesn’t want to inflict on others but that she offers up to God because otherwise it would be too much too bear, or it’s some sense of forgiveness or of belovedness that a person feels he is missing that he comes to God with, or it’s a silence, a blessed, holy silence where God is felt as a reality within that silence, or an empty, hollow silence a person may feel when her heart turns to God but God is not present, is known only as an absence. The life of faith is what transpires, all those things that might transpire in that personal, private, solitary space between ourselves and God. If faith is anything at all, it needs to be forged in the soul, where no one else save God, lives.
But I referred to all of this as a confession. It’s a confession not because it’s a completely wrong way to think about things, but because it leaves some things out. Like Sarai, later to become Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Abram’s story is not the only story that counts, even though the Bible tells us more of his story, and even though when this story is referred to in the New Testament in the Book of Hebrews, it says, “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.” No mention of Sarah. It is important to work at correcting the sexism that sometimes is present in the Bible and that sometimes has been present in the readers and interpreters of the Bible. And we can fall into it so easily just by taking Abram alone as the symbol for our personal journeys of faith, as the book of Hebrews did, and as I confess I have done quite often in my own mind without thinking about it. But we do need to think about it, and although it may sometimes seem unnecessary or trivial to some or even bothersome to some others, it is important to have the verse in the hymn we sang at the beginning of worship acknowledge Sarah: “The God of Sarah praise; all praises to God’s name…” It is important for us to acknowledge that God is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, one of the traditional formulas for referring to God, but is the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel and Leah. Maybe we would all understand that anyway, but given the gender bias that is so deeply embedded in scripture, synagogue, and church, it is important to work at changing the way we speak and the images that inhabit our almost unconscious mind. As one example, I have promised myself some time ago to work at not collapsing all journeys of faith into the symbol of Abraham making a solitary journey. Sarah was there too.
But that is not the only problem with that image. Our journeys may be, in important ways, private and solitary. But that is not the image we are given in Genesis. It is not that God called Abram, spoke to his heart, and Abram set out on this journey, not knowing where he was to go, which is the way Hebrews describes it. It is not that Abram and Sarai set out on a journey, not knowing where they were to go. We know at least that there was a father and a nephew who were part of the group. We learn later that there was a sizeable household that was part of the entourage. This was no solitary journey that is being described. As a practical matter that would not be likely. Setting out on a journey of hundreds of miles, or thousands, across desert terrain, one would need provisions and camels and servants. Rather than imagine a solitary figure, Abram or Sarai or even the two of them together, we should imagine a caravan. This was an extended family, a small community on a journey of faith together. And that image, as opposed to the solitary person of faith, leads me to some other thoughts.
Mostly I think we do take for granted that our journeys of faith are individual ones. We are pretty clear here at Sojourners that our purpose as a church is, in large part, to be a community of faith where those individual journeys are respected, where we don’t force anyone into a theological mold, where we know people trust in God and struggle with God in very different, very personal ways, where there is safe space to ask questions and express doubts, where there is room for everyone to explore in their own way what it means to be a Christian. I think we are really very clear that we want Sojourners to be an open, welcoming, accepting, non-judgmental environment for a wide array of seekers and believers and all sorts of combinations of seeking and believing. We want to provide maximum latitude for people to be who they are without pretense or pretending, hoping and praying that we will all be fed for our journeys along the way, and that we will find ourselves being fed by one another along the way. We are pretty clear about all of that.
What we are not so clear about is whether we have a journey to make together, beyond all those things I was just talking about. What we are not so clear about is whether we have a common journey, whether we are a community of faith. I was thinking about that last week too during Andy White’s visit and as we talked some more about what he referred to as our process of discernment about our plans regarding the property next door and related matters. The issue first of all, of course, is not one of finance, and this Genesis story is a reminder of that as well. It is an issue of whether we as a community feel a call to move out in some direction. Abram—and Sarai, and their community—needed that call. They needed a direction to travel in. But we are reminded in Hebrews that they also went, not knowing where they were to go. It is an interesting place to be, that peculiar blend of knowing and not knowing, where we will need to be as we make whatever decisions we are going to make as a community. Well, I don’t want to go too far down that road this morning. We will be having the discussion much more in the not too distant future.
In the meantime, may we do our best to support one another in our various journeys of faith. May we travel not only side by side, but lovingly. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 8, 2008