Genesis 11:31-12:4

2017 04.30 Genesis 11:31-12:4 31 Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-inlaw Sarai, his son Abram s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. 32 The days of Terah were two hundred five years; and Terah died in Haran. 1 Now 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. 2 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. 3 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. 4 So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 1

God of Our Journeying We just heard how Abraham left his father s house and set out for a distant land, a place that was unfamiliar to him. I remember, as a young man many years ago, leaving my father s house and setting off for the strange and distant land of New York City. Well, it wasn t that distant. I grew up in the town of Stratford, Connecticut, which is only about an hour and a half from New York by train. After graduating from college, I found a job in New York. In order to save money, I decided not to move to the City right away but to take the train instead. It was not an easy commute. It took two hours to get from the door of my parents home to my office in the neighborhood of Chelsea an hour and a half on the train and 30 minutes of walking. I would leave the house before 7:00 in the morning and get back home at about 7:00 in the evening. I spent four hours of each day in transit! After a year and a half of maintaining that schedule, I decided the money saved was no longer worth it. I was ready to move to New York. I moved into the City with Jeff, one of my best friends. It was an apartment that he already occupied. His roommate, another friend from our hometown (also named Jeff), was moving out and I was replacing him. I remember moving day. It was late August, a hot, sunny Saturday. My sister and her husband, along with her husband s brother and his wife, had graciously offered to help me move. We packed what few possessions I owned, loaded them into a van, and headed for New York. The neighborhood I was moving into was called Hell s Kitchen. Nowadays, because of gentrification, it s full of upscale restaurants and brand-new luxury condos. But back in 1995 Hell s Kitchen was quite different. It was, well, let s just say...gritty. During the day it was a bustling neighborhood of small shops the fish market, the cheese market, the cupcake cafe, the West African grocery, the Italian grocery but at night when the shops closed the atmosphere changed. It wasn t a dangerous place, 2

but it was a place where you could see various illegal activities happening out in the open without looking that hard. We pulled up in front of the apartment building, and perhaps it was my imagination, but I sensed the disappointment and foreboding in the van. This is where you re going to live? someone asked. It wasn t paradise. It was Hell s Kitchen [SLIDE]. The bus terminal was on one side of the street and the Lincoln Tunnel, which connects New York with New Jersey, was on the other side. It wasn t exactly the leafy suburb of manicured lawns that I grew up in. I hurried out of the van because my sister Gail was in desperate need of getting to the bathroom. About halfway into the trip, she announced that she needed to use the bathroom right away. Summoning unknown reserves of will power, she somehow managed to hold it until we reached the apartment. The apartment was on the fifth floor, which was the top floor. There was no elevator. I hurriedly led my sister up the creaky, uneven wooden stairs. I burst into the apartment, said hi to Jeff, and pointed my sister in the direction of the bathroom. I will never forget what happened next. She shut the door. A few seconds of silence passed. Then she opened the door. There was a look of horror and disgust on her face. She had been dying to use the bathroom, but stepping out of the bathroom she said, I can wait. But I thought you really had to go? I went and investigated the bathroom myself. It was bad. I will spare you the details. Let s just say it was not a place that you would want any part of your exposed body to touch. In that bathroom you would need a shower after taking a shower. The bathroom may have been the stuff of nightmares, but the rest of the apartment wasn t much better. The kitchen was too small to fit a refrigerator, so the refrigerator 3

was in the living room, which was also to be my bedroom. You couldn t see the kitchen sink because it was filled with a small mountain of dishes. The bedroom door wouldn t open because the floor was covered in layer upon layer of clothes. Jeff s roommate had a wedding to go to that afternoon. The suit he ended up wearing he collected by digging through the pile of clothes on the floor. It s alright, I assured myself. I will make the space my own. Let s start by assembling the futon. I had bought a brand new futon to serve as both my bed and communal couch. It took us most of the afternoon to assemble because there were so many pieces nuts, bolts, screws, etc. But we finally finished! We were ready to take a well deserved break. The four of them my sister and her husband, her husband s brother and his wife all sat down together at the same time on my new futon. I remember the sound of metal grinding against metal. The futon collapsed, buckling under the weight of their four bodies. It settled into a wide v position, unable to be straightened or folded. It was rendered useless as both a bed and a couch. We never even got to assemble the new wardrobe closet, which was my other big purchase. It was still in the box when everyone agreed they were too tired to even make an attempt. I treated everyone to dinner and then my sister and the others went on their way and I returned to my apartment in hell I mean, Hell s Kitchen. It was far from the land where I grew up maybe not in distance but certainly in comfort and standard of living. As I settled in to bed that night, lying on my broken futon, I thought to myself, Did I make the right decision to leave home? I imagine Abraham asking himself the same question. He was settled in Haran. He did quite well for himself there. If we read to verse 5, we d hear that in Haran his wealth grew. He acquired many possessions. Abraham had a good thing going in Haran, but God called him from there to go on a journey to a better land for a greater purpose. 4

As it s told, the story of Abraham typically begins in chapter 12, with God telling him to go to Canaan and promising to make of him a great nation. But we began our reading a little earlier, at the end of chapter 11. The reason for that is because it gives us some extra context. Abraham isn t called suddenly out of the blue. As we see in verse 31 [SLIDE], Abraham already moved once before. Abraham s father, Terah, took Abraham, Abraham s wife Sarah, and Abraham s nephew Lot, and set out from Ur to go where? To Canaan! That means that Abraham was already on his way to Canaan before God calls him in the first verse of chapter 12. Let s look at 11:31: 31 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 into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there (Gen. 11:31). First of all, to avoid any confusion, Haran is both the name of Abraham s brother and the name of the place where Terah and his family settle [SLIDE]. We re not told why Abraham s father Terah decides against traveling to Canaan and instead settles in Haran. But what is clear is that God doesn t want Abraham to get comfortable in Haran. Abraham may have settled in Haran, but God doesn t want him to settle for Haran. God has bigger plans for Abraham. The name Haran means highway or crossroads [SLIDE] Abraham may have planned to settle in Haran, but he had in fact reached a crossroads. In English, to reach a crossroads is to come to a crucial point. At a crossroads you must decide in which direction to turn. Do I go left or right? It is from Haran that Abraham will need to decide whether to remain where he is comfortable or pack up yet again and journey to an unknown land with only a vague promise from God to guide him. 5

It is a situation not unlike the disciples faced at two points in their lives: first when Jesus called them to become his disciples, and then again after his resurrection, when he sent them into the world as his apostles. Each point represented a crossroads. To become his disciples, they would have to leave behind what was familiar. They would have to leave their homes and wander with him from town to town, not settling anywhere. They would have to leave behind their occupations as fishermen and trust in the strange promise that by following him they would become fishers of men. Yet, trust they did. Follow him they did. Abraham traveled from the land of Ur, his place of birth, and settled in Haran, where he thought his travels had ended. In a similar way, the disciples traveled with Jesus from Galilee, the place of their birth, all the way to Jerusalem, where they thought the story would end happily in victory for Israel, with the heir of David restored to the throne. This would be the payoff. This would be their reward for all the sacrifices they had made. Of course, the story did end in Jerusalem, but it was not the happy ending that the disciples had imagined. In Jerusalem they did not meet victory but failure. By the standards of what they expected Jesus to do, he had failed. In Jerusalem he didn t end up sitting on the throne, he was nailed to a cross. In Jerusalem they too had failed. They had failed him. They had failed to stay awake when he urged them to pray with him. They had failed to stand with him when he was arrested. Peter had failed even to acknowledge him. It s not hard to imagine what the disciples must have been thinking: Why did God bring us on this journey, this journey in which we gave up comfort and security, this journey in which we left homes and families and livelihoods, only to have it all end in failure? 6

The disciples had reached their second crossroads. Having met with failure and despair in Jerusalem, they could have returned home. They could have gone back to Galilee, back to their homes, back to their boats, and back to the lives they once knew. They could have pretended that it was all a bad dream from which they had finally awakened. But then comes Jesus to call them once more. We read about it last week in John 20. Jesus returns to the disciples. In the midst of their confusion and despair and doubt he comes to them. He comes to them to bring them peace. He comes to them to assure them that it is he, that he is still very much with them, that death has no claim upon him. But mainly he comes to them in order to send them. As the Father has sent me, so I send you (Jn. 20:21) he tells them. Just because they reached Jerusalem does not mean that the journey has ended. In fact, it has only just begun. At the end of the Gospel of Matthew Jesus commissions the disciples to make disciples of all nations (Mt. 28:19). Their lives were to be the fulfillment of God s promise to Abraham that in him all the nations of the earth would be blessed. The disciples had to learn that Jerusalem was not the destination. It never was. It was but a crossroads. Their journey would take them far from Jerusalem to strange and distant lands. One of them, Thomas, made it as far as India. I single out Thomas, not only because he was the focus of last week s reading, but because of the retreat that some of us attended this weekend. The guest speaker was a pastor from India. Rev. Dileep shared with us the story of William Carey [SLIDE], a missionary from England who felt led by God to India, where he spent most of his life. Among Carey s many accomplishments are translating the Bible into numerous Indian languages and founding the first Christian seminary in India. It is from that seminary that Rev. Dileep himself graduated, some 200 years after Carey had founded it. 7

That amazes me, the fact that because of this one man generations of Indians have been able to read the Bible in their own language and countless seminarians have received a Christian education. God used this one life to bless thousands upon thousands of other lives. That is also what God did with the disciples, sending them throughout the world to share the gospel. That is what God did with Abraham, sending him far from home and making him a blessing to all the nations of the earth. Now, you may think that all this was possible because these were extraordinary people. But you would be mistaken. William Carey, for all his accomplishments in language and education, was trained to be a shoemaker. The disciples were not master theologians who spent years studying; they were fishermen. Abraham had no particular qualifications that would explain why he in particular was called by God to be a blessing to all nations. They were all ordinary people, no different than you or me. God was not concerned with who they were and what they had done. Rather, God cared about who they would become and what they would do. What they would do was answer the invitation to go where God was leading them, even if they weren t certain where the journey would take them. They were willing to let go of their of their need for certainty and security and trust that the God who called them would also guide them. That s a tough lesson to accept in the modern age. In an age of electronic navigation systems we can type in an address and get step-by-step directions to our destination. Turn left here. Turn right there. Korean navigation systems, in particular, are incredibly detailed. They not only tell you the route you need to travel, they let you know when you re approaching a speed bump, or a sharp curve, or a traffic camera, and they even let you know the height of the next overpass. In fact, it s too much information! It s actually kind of annoying, like having a conversation partner who won t stop talking. 8

In Jesus Christ, God invites us to the journey of a lifetime. Make no mistake, answering the call to follow Jesus will unsettle your life. You will leave behind comfort and security. Following in the footsteps of Jesus will take you to places that you would not go on your own. Your way of seeing the world will change because you will see the world with his eyes. The path on which he leads you will not be an easy road. It will challenge you and change you. But that s because in Jesus Christ the God who calls us to the journey also journeys alongside us [SLIDE]. God of our journeying, inviting us to travel with you, forgive us when we cling to outworn security, afraid to let go of what is safe and familiar. Give us courage to take the risk of answering your call into joyous adventure. 9