Called to Blessing Not Privilege
Genesis 12:1-9; Matthew 28:19-20
And God said to Abraham: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 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, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Our Scripture reading last week was the story of Noah. God promises not to use violence to deal with human violence and injustice. Instead, God promises to heal us from within, not to punish us from without. And God’s project of healing humanity from within begins with Abraham.
Who is Abraham? We are told he is from Ur of the Chaldees, which is known to us in secular history as well. It’s an ancient city near Basra, in what are now the marshlands of southern Iraq. Around 2000 BC, according to the archeologists, which is roughly the time the book of Genesis contemplates that Abraham would have lived, Ur is the largest and most sophisticated civilization probably that human beings had ever constructed at that point in human history.
The most important thing about Abraham, though, is that he is called by God. He is called to leave behind Ur of the Chaldees and all the sophistication and wealth that he would have known there, called to leave behind his family and his inheritance and everything that was familiar to him. Called to journey to a new land that he did not know, but that he was told would be shown to him. Called to be the ancestor of a new nation and called to be a blessing. And called to faith – to trusting the promise of this unfamiliar God that he wasn’t just throwing everything away, that the hope of a land and of many progeny and of great blessing was more than an idle flight of fancy.
But, why? Why does God choose Abraham for this call and this promise? Which is actually 2 questions – 1) why does God choose Abraham and not somebody else? After all, we read today that Abraham is 75 years old. We know from the rest of the story that Abraham’s wife Sarah is 10 years younger than him, so she’s 65, and they have no children. And people who are 75 and 65 who have no children are hardly the most obvious people to call to be the ancestors of a whole new people.
And Abraham hasn’t shown any particular spiritual depth or insight or moral qualities that make him an obvious person for God to pick for this role. From what we can see in the text, Abraham is not a particularly holy person. He is, as today’s reading tells us, an owner of slaves. He will, as the story goes on to say, force at least one of his enslaved women to bear a child, then send both mother and child out to the desert to die, and they would have died if God had not intervened. He will get involved in local wars in Canaan, and when he and Sarah finally do have a child, Abraham tries to kill him, again, God has to intervene to stop him. And there are other less than savory stories as well. Abraham does some good things too, but I think if Abraham was trying to become an ELCA pastor, he’d have a hard time getting through the candidacy committee. He’s got a lot of bad stuff on his resumé.
In our time, if we think of at some of our founding fathers here in the United States, and some of the things they did that we look back and say – Ooh, that’s not something a good person would do. It’s very controversial for us to think of these things. Some people will look at it and say, You can’t dare say anything bad about the Founding Fathers, they’re wonderful people, here in Mount Vernon we love George Washington, don’t say anything bad about him. And others will say, Those people were terrible, everything they did was awful, and we can’t trust any of the institutions they established for anything. The people of Israel took neither of these positions. They were quite forthright in the Bible about all the failings of Abraham – and yet God chose Abraham. Not because Abraham deserved to be chosen, but because this is who God is. God chooses people whom we would not choose in order to fulfull God’s plan.
But even if we understood why God chose Abraham and not someone else, there is a second question. Why does God have to choose anybody? Why is God always calling individual people to particular roles, such as this call of Abraham to be the founding father of God’s own people? Does God play favorites? Does God discriminate? There’s something that strikes us odd about the idea that God would single out particular people for specific tasks and to specific blessings. Why should God pick and choose at all? Doesn’t God love everyone?
And at one level that’s true, God does love everyone equally. And so God makes clear in this text that Abraham will not only receive blessing but will become a blessing for all people. Yes, God promises Abraham – I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, and God says, in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So there are certainly blessings for Abraham, but God intends by this call to bless not only the family of Abraham but all the families of the earth.
And how does that work? Because sometimes it seems that Israel is God’s favorite people. All those wars where God fights for Israel against the Egyptians and the Canaanites or whomever. And some of the prophets (e.g., Isaiah) will envision the day when Israel becomes such a model society, is so thoroughly blessed, lives so deeply in such harmony with God and creation, that other nations will be envious. They’ll want to come close to Israel in the hopes that some of that goodness will rub off on them, will trickle down to them.
And yet within the Bible we also see a gradual emergence of the idea that God blesses all the nations of the world through Israel in a way that is more subtle and profound than this. Sometimes we think of our own nation as being uniquely called by God – to be a “city on a hill,” to be a model for freedom that other countries will want to emulate, and then we’re surprised when others don’t see us as being as generous and benevolent as we think we are.
As a church, sometimes we think that we’re called by God to be special people. Called to be blessed people who live a high quality of life, and then we share generously with the “less fortunate” who we assume didn’t get all the blessings that we did.
But – and the theologian Chris Green has in particular helped me to see this – there is a difference between blessing and privilege. There are not some people who are more blessed by God than other people. In this sense God does not discriminate – God’s love and God’s blessings are for everybody. So if some people have a call to bring blessing into the world, it is not to make them more blessed, closer to God, or more fortunate than those whom God doesn’t grant such a call. Their blessing is entirely to be a blessing to others. The Anglican archbishop of Canterbury during World War II, William Temple, famously said, the church is the only organization that exists for the benefit of the people who are not its members.
With Abraham we see the beginning of this slow process of God revealing the nature of God to human beings. Abraham makes a lot of mistakes. Abraham’s descendants make many mistakes. We Christians who have been welcomed into the family of Abraham also make many mistakes.
The one thing Abraham has, at this point in the story, is faith. Even when Abraham doesn’t fully understand, he is called to go, and he puts one foot in front of the other and he goes. Along the way he learns about God, along the way he learns how to act toward others the way God acts, with love and mercy and compassion. We also have received a call from God. Like Abraham we may not see how we’re going to be more numerous than the stars of heaven, we may not see how we’re going to be a blessing to others. But like Abraham we know that God knows and that God calls, and all God asks or needs from us is our faith, our trust, our willingness to believe that God is doing something greater than we can conceive or imagine, and that whatever God is doing, in us and in our world, is in fact bringing blessing to us and to everyone.