Genesis 12:1-4
(NRSV)
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.
Year A
Second Sunday in Lent
March 12, 2017
Cross~Wind Ministries
Title; Recall the Call
1373; 7
Introduction
In Genesis 12:1-4, the story of J
continues with the election of Abraham and the covenant of the Lord with
Abraham. Abram took his family from Ur to Haran, and then to Canaan. God calls
him to leave the home of his father. We need to reflect upon the significance
of this call. One way we can do this is to consider the ancient household. It
was the basic domestic unit of the agricultural and nomadic economy. It was a
cooperative unit of uncles, aunts, nephews, slaves, and their families. The
large group was the primary way they could provide enough food and money for
each other. Thus, we can see the dramatic nature of this call to leave the home
of the father. This call suggests that in order to establish his identity and
find his place in the will of God, he had to leave his familiar surroundings. He
must deliberately “Go” in order to fulfill the call of God upon his life. Abraham
awakens to the call of God. He must pass from a well-known past to a future
that is only just opening up. None of us knows precisely what following the
call of God will mean or what places that call may take us. God will also make
his name great. In 11:4, the people want to make a name for themselves by
building a tower to challenge God. Here, God will give him a name as he
fulfills his calling. Abraham becomes a witness to God as he moves toward the
goal. In spite of the dramatic effect of the call, the call itself comes
naturally, as if Abraham has known this God throughout his life. The call
relies upon what Abraham already knew of God. Other texts seem to have similar
language. In II Samuel 7:9, the Lord says David will have a great name. Psalm
71:17 refers to the name of the king enduring forever. The elect community is
an anticipation of the future of human fellowship with God and with each other.
Abraham went as the Lord commanded. Part of the power of this story is that it
becomes a model of the spiritual journey from the old self that we have determined
to the new self that God will form. Abraham will witness to the people of his
hometown and to the inhabitants of Canaan as he responds to the call. He will
witness to his wife Sarah, to his son Isaac. He will do so by saying yes to the
call of God.
Application
For those of us who take our Bibles
seriously, the call of Abraham is an inspiring story. Yet, it raises an
important question. Within the church, we often think of the call of God as
referring to the call to become a pastor, missionary, or other such full-time
workers in the church. Yet, is the call of God upon the life of a person
available to the rest of us “average” and “common” folk? The answer is yes.
In this message, I am going to
share a few statements about calling and the journey of life. As we recall the
call of God upon our lives, I hope such statements will help us consider how
our lives line up with the call of God upon our lives.
Twenty years from now, you will be more
disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw
off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your
sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.[1]
Life is a journey, not a guided tour.[2]
We are in the process of becoming
who God wants us to be. We become that person by heeding the call of God upon
us today.
Today, our first calling is to
become a follower of Jesus in every part of our lives. Regardless of what we do
with our lives, we are followers of Jesus first. After that, we are witness for
Jesus in our families and places of work.
Let us consider, for a moment, the
calling of pastor. I am going to share a few things that studies show about
pastors in America. I do not share this for you to feel sorry for us.
Imagine this scenario for a moment.
For pastors, fresh out of training during at least four years of college and three
years of seminary, the soul is afire, the mind bursts with creativity, and
hearts ache for the lost. They are willing to innovate courageously in
preaching and in their leadership.
However, Duke University research
is confirming that something is going wrong for many clergy sisters and
brothers.
• Clergy suffer from obesity, hypertension and depression at
rates higher than most Americans do.
• In the last decade, clergy use of antidepressants has
risen, and life expectancy has fallen.
• Many clergy report they would change jobs if they felt
they could.
• Clergy often demonstrate “boundary issues.” The urgency of
the needs of others burden and overtake them.
Clergy burnout. Overworking and
under-resting. Hearts, minds and souls stretched thin so that bodies become
broken.
Internal denominational studies are
echoing the Duke research. Some studies consider forty percent of United
Methodist ministers obese, compared to 29 percent of the general population.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America found that 69 percent of ministers
report being overweight, 64 percent have high blood pressure and 15 percent
take antidepressants. Compared to statistics from the 1970s, four times as many
Presbyterians leave ministry within the first five years.
In The Right Road: Life Choices for Clergy, author and physician Dr.
Gwen Wagstrom Halaas posits several recent cultural trends that may be pushing
clergy past their limits:
• Aging and shrinking congregations create new performance
pressures.
• The volunteer base has diminished in the era of two-income
households.
• Pastors’ spouses often have their own careers to which
they need to attend.
However, New York Times journalist
G. Jeffrey MacDonald has a different perspective, getting to the heart of the
matter. Beyond rest and relaxation is the pressure to forsake the calling by
the congregation. The daily wish lists clergy find in e-mail and other forms,
the choice between personal integrity and those that lead to greater job
security, and the pressure that comes as religion becomes a consumer
experience, move clergy toward unhappiness and unhealthiness.[3]
I share this with you for two
reasons. A young clergy couple is coming here with a new addition to their
home. You are going to have a large role in helping him and them to fulfill the
call of God. Yet, the other reason has to do with you. You see, I do not think
that clergy burnout is unique. Regardless of our chosen profession, while the
challenges are different, the effect is the same. Many Americans are becoming
less healthy and less happy. So how do we combat these trends in our respective
vocations?
Like Abraham, how does recalling
our calling keep us in the game? What is our burnout-prevention strategy?
Ultimately, the example of Abraham
and our stories can lead people to see our need to live a called life.
We will need to travel. Life with
God is a journey.
The world is a book, and those who do
not travel read only one page.[4]
If you wish to travel far and fast,
travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness
and fears.[5]
The most important journey we make
is from the childishness of concern primarily for self to the maturity of
concern for what God wants.
Based upon the calling of Abraham,
let us consider “calling” itself.
In my life as clergy, which extends
back to 1978 as a student pastor, we still have some major work to do here. We still
have many people who think that God calls clergy to ministry and laity simply does
secular work. You might be a lawyer, doctor, farmer, assembly-line worker,
office manager, or teacher. You may be a stay-at-home parent. Your first
calling is to become Christian where you are. Your primary witness is in that
place.
God calls every Christian to a
vocation.
We have the DNA of Abraham’s call:
We follow God, God blesses us, and we bless others.
Lord,
Take me where you want me to go;
Let me meet who you want me to
meet;
Tell me what you want me to say
And keep me out of your way.[6]
Then the Holy Spirit gifts each of
us individually, empowering us to live out our own calling. This makes sacred
work of being an architect, violinist, mother or electrician.
Our calling is sacred because we
respond to and engage God in our daily activity. In The Practice of the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence famously
said,
“Our sanctification does not depend as
much on changing our activities as it does on doing them for God rather than
for ourselves.”[7]
That is where “work” and “calling” collide.
Nevertheless, let us not be naïve
about this. We still live out our calling through some deeply challenging
experiences. Abraham had his own crises to deal with. We have ours.
• The teacher has to deal with increasing classroom size,
low pay, parental complaints and pressure to produce high test scores.
• The businessperson has to lay off two more people.
Cost-cutting measures trump her or his passion for innovation. The office
worker who labors in a cubicle feels stale and lifeless.
• The stay-at-home mom never feels ahead of the
slave-driving to-do list and must battle a tantrum-throwing toddler. She is
always a mom and a wife but does not have time to be her own woman.
• Dad feels suffocated when kids and chaos greet him at the
front door. The lawn needs mowing. The church needs volunteers. The daughter
hates her body, and the son is scared to ask a girl to go to the prom.
Conclusion
Perhaps these do not stack up to Abram’s
crises: circumcision, childlessness and then the call to sacrifice the one
child he finally has. Nevertheless, whatever our crises, they belong to us, and
no one gets to tell us they are insignificant. Truth is that we feel deep
experiential opposition to our calling. Like Abram and like the pastorate, life
is not roses just because God calls us to something.
Moreover, if we are not careful, we
will die in the details. We will hit the wall. We will burn out on what we do
because we have lost sight of why we do it.
Everybody has a calling that we
need to take the initiative to recall. We can keep focused on the reason God
has placed us here, in this time and this place. Without recalling that call,
we are begging for burnout. Do not let that happen to you.
Going deeper
Genesis
12:1-4 (NRSV)
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go [a Hebrew
grammatical construction sometimes referred to as the reflexive or centripetal
dative -- "take yourself" (KJV, "get thee"). According to
T. Muraoka, it "[S]erves to convey the impression on the part of the
speaker or author that the subject establishes his own identity, recovering or
finding his own place by determinedly dissociating himself from his familiar
surrounding."[8] The movement conveyed by the verb is more
than simple movement; it has a deliberative or determinative element as well.] from your country and your kindred and your
father’s house [We have here a technical term in Hebrew denoting not only a
patriarch's immediate family -- his wife (or wives), unmarried sons and
daughters and surviving parent(s) -- but potentially many collateral relatives
and dependents as well: cousins, nieces, nephews, in-laws, servants and
clients. The bet `ab, "father's
house," rather than the nuclear family, was the basic domestic unit in
ancient Israel, as a single heterosexual reproductive pair and their offspring
were not capable of supporting themselves in the pastoral-agrarian lifestyle of
the Hebrews. The subsistence agrarian and nomadic economy of the early
Israelites in the hill country of Canaan required more labor than a single
nuclear family could provide, and only through the cooperative arrangement of
the bet `ab could its members find sufficient economic and social security.[9]]
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, [In 11:4, the people decided to make their name great by building a
tower, but we now have another way to gain a great name, by responding to the
call of God.] 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.”
[First, Barth discusses this movement of Abraham as part of his discussion on
the awakening to conversion. One must pass from a well-known past to a future
that is only just opening up, “to a land that I will show you,” so to speak. He
clearly uses this movement of Abraham as an analogy of the spiritual journey
from the “old self” to the “new self.” He stresses, consistent with his
reformed tradition, that we cannot speak of decision or choice, here, but
compulsion.[10] He also points out that
Abraham is a witness to God as he moves towards its far distant and hidden
goal. He bears this witness, not only to the people of his hometown and to the
inhabitants of Canaan, but also to the estranged Sarah, to the unsuspecting
Isaac, and to all those implicated in his particular history. He is this quite
simply by doing what he is told to do in strict obedience and blind trust. He
emerges as one who is called by God to represent and reveal by way of
anticipation what God wills to do and will do, even though God begins to do it
in great concealment.[11] Pannenberg says God speaks
naturally to Abraham as though known to him. As important as such a call it is,
it does not establish new knowledge of God, but relies upon what Abraham
already knew.[12] Second, J may have drawn
this speech from royal ideology. J may have democratized royal ideology by
applying it to the ancestor of the people.
II
Samuel 7:9 (NRSV)
9 and I have been with you
wherever you went, and have cut off all your enemies from before you; and I
will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth.
Psalm
72:17 (NRSV)
17 May his name
endure forever,
his
fame continue as long as the sun.
May
all nations be blessed in him;
may
they pronounce him happy.
We see here that the elect community that the Lord will form
through Abram is an anticipation of the future of human fellowship with God and
with each other.] 4 So Abram
went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. [Abram is consistent
with Noah, but different with many other people.]
[1] — H.
Jackson Brown’s mother. See page 13 in Brown’s 1991 book: P.S. I Love You: When Mom Wrote, She Always Saved the Best for Last.
[2] —Unknown.
[3] “There’s a more fundamental problem that no amount of
rest and relaxation can help solve: congregational pressure to forsake one’s
highest calling. Pastors are constantly forced to choose, as they work through
congregants’ daily wish lists in their e-mail and voice mail, between paths of
personal integrity and those that portend greater job security. As religion
becomes a consumer experience, the clergy become more unhappy and unhealthy.”
[4] Attributed
to St. Augustine, but in reality, only the first part, in Letter 43.
[5] Often
attributed to Cesare Pavese, but see Glenn Clark (1882-1956), The Secret Power in Business, http://self-improvement-ebooks.com/books/tsopib.php
[6] —Prayer of the Rev. Mychal Judge, O.F.M., Fire
Department of New York chaplain who died on 9/11 in the World Trade Center
collapse.
[7] –Brother
Lawrence
[8]
(quoted in B.K. Waltke and M. O'Connor, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax
[Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990], 208, and note their example, 34).
[9]
(For one of the most complete discussions of the Israelite family to date, see
L.E. Stager, "The archaeology of the family in ancient Israel,"
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 260 (1985), 18-23.)
[10]
(Church Dogmatics IV.2 [66.4] 578)
[11]
(IV.3 [71.4] 577)
[12]
(Systematic Theology Volume 1, 204)
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