In Genesis 12:1-4a we find the J account of the call of Abram. Up to this point in the Bible, J has painted history in the broadest possible strokes. He has taken a universal view, showing humanity has failed in relation to the Lord and to each other. Adam and Eve were unable to obey one simple command. They experienced exile, the woman would have pain in childbirth, and produce from the land would be difficult. Humanity would continue its course of wickedness to which the Lord will respond with judgment. Most recently, the expression of arrogance in building the tower of Babel resulted in the judgment of the confusion of human language and separation into nations. Was such judgment the final word from the Lord? The story of human origins to this point in J wants to present us with the urgency of this question.[1] From this point on, J will view and interpret history through the slim opening of a single social line, the seed of Abram, chosen by the Lord to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. The point of the call of Abram is to heal the breach between the Lord and the nations. In a mere four verses, we have described the creation of an entire people and the establishment of a radically new kind of relationship between humanity and divinity. The “call of Abram” does more than separate a lone herdsman from his ancestral family. This “call” separates the old animistic, anthropocentric notions of the universe from a remarkably new way of viewing the divine/human or creator/creation relationship. Abram’s family was from Ur, a large city and a major center for the worship of the moon-god Sin. The Lord promises to Abram that which we all seek: a place, family, and fullness of life. In the promise that a nation shall arise out of him, a nation not named in the previous list of the nations, we find the Lord willing to do something new. The text does not yet suggest the reason for the choice of Abram. The Lord has decided by grace to work with a family that will be the beginning of a people and eventually a nation. What would have happened if Abram had stayed home? That would have been natural in his culture. Typically, one stayed with the clan and the religion of the clan. Abram, in letting go of his home, liberated himself to create a new home. He became free to worship and serve the Lord in his own way.
1Now the Lord said to Abram (Ab [or the Divine Father] is lofty, exalted)[2], “Go (lech lecha, literally "Go, you!").[3] In this powerful word from the Lord, the Lord is creating something new. It is a dramatic divine summons upon the life of Abram. Direct divine-human communication is presented matter-of-factly throughout much of the Hebrew Bible, with dreams, visions and similar accoutrements of divine-human interaction being depicted as common but not necessary. There are only two instances in the entire Bible where the Lord addresses anyone with direct personal command. The second occurrence of lech lecha, "Go, you!" is also spoken to Abraham -- this time in Genesis 22:2. Although English translation almost invariably fails to reflect this parallelism, both the initial call to Abram in Genesis 12:1 and the Lord’s shocking command to Abraham that he offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice are phrased with this lech lecha, "Go, you!" directive. This parallelism is significant. In both cases, the Lord is asking Abram/Abraham to give up his own identity as a symbol of his commitment to the Lord Yahweh. In Genesis 12:1, the Lord asks Abram to give up his entire past; in Genesis 22, Abraham is asked to give up his future. "Go, you!" severs Abram/Abraham from everything human he would cling to for security and identity. In both cases the lech lecha order leaves Abram/Abraham solely with the Lord -- no past, no future, no family, no land, no people. Just the Lord. Abram is to go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house (bet `ab) decisively and deliberately. The Lord calls him to leave the home of his father. While it is unclear exactly what prompted the initial move of Terah from Ur to Haran, there is no ambiguity about what inspired the move of Abram. The Lord’s directive to Abram is straightforward, both in its demand and in its promises. Genesis 12:1 does not try to sugarcoat or soft-pedal the things Abram is asked to give up. In fact, the text itemizes them.
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.[4] This call suggests that to establish his identity and find his place in the plan of the Lord, he had to leave his familiar surroundings. He must deliberately “Go” to fulfill the call of the Lord upon his life.[5] Abram awakens to the call of the Lord. He must pass from a well-known past to a future that is only just opening to him. We can properly look upon this text as analogous to the spiritual journey from the old self to the new self. [6] He is to go to the land that I will show you, land being one of the recurring themes of Torah. None of us knows precisely what following the call of the Lord will mean or what places that call may take us. The call of the Lord demands with increasing urgency detachment from strong ties to land as well as from kinship and the family.[7] 2 I will make of you a great nation, one not yet listed in the J narrative, progeny being another of the themes of Torah, and I will bless you, and make your name great. These promises come unexpectedly as an act of grace. Abram has no merit that we know of that would be a reason for this divine choice. In 11:4, the people want to make a name for themselves by building a tower to challenge God. Here, the Lord will give him a name as he fulfills his calling. Other texts related to David and the sacral kingship 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. The full significance of the passing notation of Sarai's barrenness in 11:31 now becomes clear, as Abram is promised not only land, but descendants to fill it, a theme that runs not only through Genesis, but also throughout the patriarchal literature of ancient Israel's near neighbors in northwest Syria-Palestine, the people of Ugarit. The Ugaritic stories of King Kirta and the patriarch Dan'el (mentioned in Ezekiel 14:14) turn on the same problem, and their stories, like Abram's, are filled with irony, tension, surprising turns, and sophisticated suggestions. Two significant differences between the Ugaritic stories and Abram's story, however, stand out. One difference is that in Hebrew narratives of childlessness, it is always the wife who is barren, never a sterile husband (see, for example, the stories of Rachel [Genesis 29:31], Hannah [I Samuel 1:2] and Samson's mother [Judges 13:2]). The purpose is so that you will be a blessing (wahyeh berakah). Abram is to become a formula of blessing with which people in the future will wish blessings upon each other.[8] Abram becomes a witness to the Lord as he moves toward the 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 history. He is this quite simply by doing what the Lord tells him to do in strict obedience and blind trust. He emerges as one who is called by the Lord to represent and reveal by way of anticipation what the Lord wills to do and will do, even though the Lord begins to do it in great concealment.[9] In spite of the dramatic effect of the call, the call itself comes naturally, as if Abram has known the Lord throughout his life. The call relies upon what Abram already knew of the Lord.[10] 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.” A second difference within Hebrew narratives of childlessness is that Abram's need for a son (a daughter would not be acceptable, socially or literarily) stems not from personal deprivation or desire (although it would certainly be present), but from his divine call: Abram's offspring is for the benefit of "all the families of the earth." Although it is true that the Ugaritic texts depict the domestic and the political under the concept of the patriarchal, the enlargement of the domestic to the scope of the national and beyond - without losing the essential connection to the domestic - is made more explicit in the Hebrew patriarchal narrative. Here is the etiology of Israel itself, bridging the gulf between the Lord and humanity as the distant goal of the judgment just given toward humanity at the Tower of Babel.[11] 4a So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.Significantly, Abram obeys this word from the Lord. Abram is consistent with Noah, but different from many other people in the Bible who either objected or went the other way. The narrator dismisses as unimportant any struggle of soul that might have occurred. He portrays the fact of mute obedience in simplicity. With this emigration begins his great alien existence and that of his descendants.[12] Despite his willingness to go where the Lord told him to go, fight whom he had to fight; despite his faithful altar-building activities and his sacrificial devotion to the Lord, whom he was only beginning to know, Abram could not help but notice that his life lacked a crucial component necessary for him to become the father of this promised "great nation." He had no son, no heir, no one to whom to pass on any inheritance.
At the heart of Hebrew faith stands the covenant commitment that forever binds together the Lord and the people of Israel. The concept of covenant -- which J presents in several different forms, established, and reestablished at several different points in biblical history -- is not unique to Israel. However, it is in Israel that "covenant" takes on a new life and moves far beyond its legal contractual roots. Covenant theology gives power and identity to an entire nation, and eternal vitality to Old and New Testament faith.
The Lord says to Abram, “If you go … I will show.” This is the reward of faith. When we step out in faith, the Lord draws the curtain back. When we go on the unknown path, the Lord lights the way before us. When we follow where faith leads us, the Lord shows us what we need to see. Where our eyes fail us, the Lord gives us sight.
It may not be quite so simple in our lives as it was for Abram but responding to the divine call in our lives will involve risk.
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.[13]
Life is a journey, not a guided tour.[14]
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.
The example of Abram 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.[15]
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.[16]
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 Abram, 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 Abram’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.[17]
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.”[18]
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. Those who believe do so with passion in the heart, anguish of mind, uncertainty, doubt, and even despair at times. If one does not have these things, one still believes in the idea of God, but not in God.[19]
We might learn something from trapeze artists. There is an incredibly special relationship between the person called the "flier" and the one called the "catcher." The flier, of course, is the one who lets go, and the catcher is the one who hangs by the knees from the other trapeze and catches the flier. When the flier reaches the top of his arc, his one task is to let go, arms reaching out into space, and then to remain as still as possible while the catcher grabs hold of him. It is a skill not easily learned, for it goes against every human survival instinct. "The flier must never try to catch the catcher. The flier must wait in absolute trust. The catcher will catch him, but he must wait."[20]
Abram had his own crises to deal with. We have ours.
• The teacher must deal with increasing classroom size, low pay, parental complaints and pressure to produce high test scores.
• The businessperson must 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.
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 our response to our vocation, 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.
[1]
[2] Abram’s name means “Ab [or the Divine Father] is lofty, exalted,” a type of name found extensively throughout the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East in general. These theophorous kinship proper names consist of a kinship element — father, brother, uncle, etc. — combined with a verbal (and sometimes nonverbal) element, as here. The kinship term refers to a deity understood as the divine patron of the person bearing the name. In Abram’s case, a subsequent name change will be explained by the Priestly writer of that event as referring to Abraham himself — “ancestor of a multitude” (17:4) — rather than to Abraham’s divine kin. In fact, like many biblical etymologies, the Priestly explanation of Abraham’s name is a Volksetymologie pressed into theological service; both Abram and Abraham were probably originally simply dialectical variants, with the longer form with the internal -h- being especially common in Aramaic names.
[3] a Hebrew grammatical construction sometimes referred to as the reflexive or centripetal dative -- "take yourself" (KJV, "get thee").
[4] (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.) 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, "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.
[5] 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." (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).
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13] — 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.
[14] —Unknown.
[15] Attributed to St. Augustine, but in reality, only the first part, in Letter 43.
[16] Often attributed to Cesare Pavese, but see Glenn Clark (1882-1956), The Secret Power in Business, http://self-improvement-ebooks.com/books/tsopib.php
[17] —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.
[18] –Brother Lawrence
[19] Spanish novelist Miguel de Unamuno
[20] Nouwen, Henri. Cited by Ian Pitt-Watson, A Kind of Folly: Toward a Practical Theology of Preaching. St. Andrew Press, 1976, 36.
Nice play on calling. I liked it. I always try to preach from the Old Testament because most people do not. This is a good take. On another note, I believe God offered Himself to every culture not just the Hebrews. You see it in Egypt, Babylon and even the American Indian. Every culture has, in their history a story of a one God. To me this makes sense in light of Romans one.
ReplyDeleteThank you. Interesting thought. Pannenberg in his way might agree.
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