“Blessed to Be a Blessing” - Genesis 12:1-4a
The first book of the Bible might well be titled, "Genesis, or the Book of Divine Disappointment." God creates Adam and Eve and gives them everything they could possibly want, except for permission to eat the fruit of one tree. Adam and Eve disobey. After departing Eden, they start a family. Soon, the very first nuclear family explodes into violence, as one brother kills another. The earth becomes more densely populated, but God's dismay only builds. Again and again, human beings disappoint God by pursuing pleasure on the one hand and power on the other. They fail to pursue is what God values, what is good, just, and holy.
Genesis 1-11 details God’s struggle with a repeatedly rebellious, violent, and corrupt humanity. Genesis 12 has been described as a fulcrum, a lynchpin, and a major turning point in the Bible, because God does something that had never been done before by focusing on one particular family among all the families of the earth. Punishing all the earth was an ineffective means of dealing with sin, but now God establishes a special relationship with one family. God's election of the family of Abram and Sarah as a chosen and special vehicle of God's blessing affirms God's continuing commitment to humans and this world in spite of their rebellion, violence and evil. God will not let go of God's creation. Rather than give up and throw in the towel on humanity, God pushes the chips across the table and goes all in with one man.
The text isn’t a reward for Abram’s accomplishments and obedience. It is God giving His promise to one man before he has done anything. God is throwing his lot in with Abram’s. What happens if Abraham doesn’t live up to God’s expectations? What if Abram doesn’t go? What if he and Sarah have no children? God’s reputation is at stake. The future of humanity is at stake.
As God often does, God decides to work through a most unlikely pair: old Abram and Sarah. God intends to bless the world through this family even though Sarah is "barren" and unable to have children. God's selection of a barren husband and wife to be a blessing to others emphasizes that it is first and foremost God's power and initiative that will accomplish God's purposes. God's plan seems doomed to fail from the start, but the same powerful word that created the world out of chaos at the beginning will now create a new hope and a new future.
God also sends Abram to an unlikely place. Dr. Richard Lowery observes, “it is also worth noting that Abraham, with God's guidance, is migrating away from the center of economic, political, and military power in the ancient world to settle in distant lands. Ironically, the blessing of the whole earth will begin not from the center of power and influence, but at the distant margins.”
Abram’s father Terah began this journey away from their homeland in Ur. He had good reason to leave. His youngest son had died. The easiest way to cope with pain is always to run from it, and he did. His middle son settled down with his wife and family, but his oldest son Abram and his wife couldn’t have children. So he left his homeland with his barren son’s family and the grandson that survives the son he lost. We don’t know if Terah was meant to go all the way to Canaan, but the text says that he set out for Canaan. However, he only made it about a two day’s journey and settled in the land that came to be named for the youngest son he had lost, Haran. While we don’t know the details, it suggests that he couldn’t make the journey that his family was destined to make because he was so wrapped up in his loss, his grief, and his pain.
It was not an easy thing for Abram to leave either. He had to leave everything and everyone that was familiar to him. He left with nothing but a promise, his wife, and his nephew on the way to nowhere. It took an incredible amount of faith or recklessness to make the decision to go.
What is that keep us from making the journey that God has called us to? What keeps us from fulfilling our God given potential? What keeps us from realizing God’s blessing in our lives? These are the questions we ask during our Lenten journey.
The words translated as “go forth,” are actually quite ambiguous and difficult to translate. More literally, they suggest something like, “Go for yourself.” It implies that Abram's journey is for his own good, and his own benefit. Abram is told not merely that he has to give up everything and look for something better, richer, and more in tune with God's values, but that he must understand that the journey is for his own good.
According to the Abraham Joshua Heschel, what makes human beings truly unique is that we alone among all of creation are capable of being "self-surpassing." In other words, we are capable of valuing and responding to things that are greater than us. We can realize that life is not just about pursuing my own well-being, but about pursuing the well-being of others. Each of us must strive to look out for more than “number one.” God's focus on one particular family was from the beginning designed to be the funnel for God's blessing to all the families of the earth. God's people may be tempted to turn inward, to worry only about their own survival, to consider themselves God's only concern, or to ignore the wider community in which they live. Our work as God’s people will not be complete, and our covenant with God not fully realized, until blessing has come to all the earth.
Later when Abraham’s imagination could not comprehend how great God’s plan was in his life, he was told to consider the stars of the sky because his descendants would be as numerous as they. Like stars, we are obligated to bring a little bit of light to the dark places of the world. Wherever there is suffering, sadness, and heartbreak, there we are sent by God to bring love. We are called to see beyond ourselves. Perhaps that is why Abram is told to look to the heavens: He has to learn to see beyond his own immediate concerns, to feel the needs of others as deeply as his own. We have been blessed, we are blessed, and we will be blessed, but it is not a blessing that is for us alone. We have been blessed so richly so that God might bless others through us, and we will not be complete in Him and most fully realize God’s blessing in our lives until we bless others.
“All you can pass on is what you have become; that is your blessing and gift for your children, your loved ones, your neighborhood, and the next generation, “grace upon grace” Richard Rohr
We are told to leave what is safe and comfortable in search of a better place and a more authentic self, a self that is blessing at its very core. In order to achieve this, we have to know that God wants us to become godly in a very distinctive way--namely, to love and value the other as deeply as we love and value ourselves. The road to the Promised Land is often dark and painful, filled with human suffering and degradation. It is those very places to which God dispatches us, to bring blessing, and thus to become blessing. It is in the moments of truly surpassing ourselves that the covenant becomes genuinely embodied in our lives. And so we go, for God and for ourselves, toward the blessing that is the Promised Land, and toward the Promised Land that is blessing.
The text in Genesis 12 draws Abraham and Sarah into a journey that leaves behind an old life and looks forward to a future not yet seen. The season of Lent is a season that helps us to let go of old commitments and burdens and sets us free to journey into new territories, new promises, new hopes, and new lives. We are blessed. We are the blessing. “You belong to God’s universe because everything belongs. Every part of you belongs, and no part need be rejected or denied, but only educated, healed, forgiven, and set free in new form…” Richard Rohr
