Genesis 12:1-9 (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. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, 6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. 8 From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. 9 And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.
Genesis 12:1-4a, 6-9 are part, the rest being Genesis 11:28-30, 15:1-12, 17-21, of the J account of the call of Abram, the covenant with Abram, and his journey to the land promised to him by the Lord. Genesis 12:4b-5 is the insertion of the P account into the J narrative.
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; from this point on, J will view and interpret history through the aperture of a single social line, the seed of Abram, chosen by the Lord to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. 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)[1], “Go (lech lecha, literally "Go, you!").[2] 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 God -- no past, no future, no family, no land, no people. Just God. Abram is to decisively and deliberately go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house (bet `ab). The Lord 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.[3] This call suggests that in order 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” in order to fulfill the call of the Lord upon his life. [4] 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. [5] He is to go to the land that I will show you. None of us knows precisely what following the call of the Lord will mean or what places that call may take us. 2 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great. 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. 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 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.[6] In spite of the dramatic effect of the call, the call itself comes naturally, as if Abram has known this God throughout his life. The call relies upon what Abram already knew of God.[7] 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.4a So Abram went, as the Lord had told him. Abram is consistent with Noah, but different from many other people in the Bible who either objected or went the other way. 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.
It may not be quite so simple in our lives as it seemed to be 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.[8]
Life is a journey, not a guided tour.[9]
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.
Ultimately, 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.[10]
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.[11]
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.[12]
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.”[13]
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.[14]
We might learn something from trapeze artists. There is a very 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."[15]
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.
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 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.
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.
Genesis 12:4b-5 Abram took his family from Ur to Haran, and then to Canaan. The text is an insertion from the P document into the story of the J story of the call and migration of Abram. It shows the obedience of Abram. He becomes a model Israelite. To expect the ancients to leave ancestral bonds was almost impossible. Without cavil, Abram obeys the divine summons. 4b Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. 5 Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran. The inconspicuous detail of mentioning the purchase of slaves in Haran indicates both Abram's growing wealth and power, and the growing diversity of his household; in addition to Hurrian slaves, we will learn later (15:2) that his chief steward is from Damascus (some 300 miles south of Haran), and Hagar, who will bear Abraham's first son, is Egyptian. Abram's household reflects the universality of the blessing originating with it. The narrative passes over in complete unself-conscious silence the fact of Abram's having "acquired" persons in Haran (an important Hurrian city in northern Mesopotamia). Slavery was an accepted practice among the Hebrews. The expression probably denotes not only servants and slaves. And they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. Abram will function very much like a patron throughout his narrative, and his body of clients probably began to coalesce around him prior to his migration. When they had come to the land of Canaan, the traditional designation of the area and people along the Mediterranean between the southern end of the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee in the north. (The boundaries given in Genesis 10:19 are representational, not actual.) When Abram is promised this land in Genesis 15:18, the promised area is much larger than the historical area under anything that could be called Canaanite control. That the land promised to Abram/Abraham was never fully conquered by the Israelites is admitted even by the biblical writers in such passages as Judges 3:1-6. The descendants of the Canaanites would become known in classical antiquity as the Phoenicians.
Genesis 12:6-9 shows the progress Abram makes in his geographical journey. The locations mentioned in Abram's initial journey to Canaan - Shechem, Bethel and Ai - indicate an entrance into northern Canaan and a journey southward, toward the desert region of the Negeb. The willingness to travel physically has long formed an analogy to the spiritual journey.
6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, one of the oldest Canaanite cities. Shechem was an ancient city that once controlled a Canaanite city-state whose borders extended to the city-states of Jerusalem and Gezer in the south and Megiddo in the north (a total distance of some 80 miles, north to south.[16] It was also an important Israelite religious center from the time of the patriarchs, through the tribal period (Joshua 24:25), and into the New Testament (John 4:19-24). In the Old Testament, Shechem, which lay in the heart of Canaanite country, the land promised by Yahweh to the Israelites, was associated especially with the family of Jacob (see Genesis 35:4), the eponymous ancestor of all the Israelites. Abram's initial movement through the land of Canaan is located first at Schechem, which is approximately the north-south midway point of Canaan, and later site of the covenant ratification that made a national league of the 12 tribes of Israel, an important step toward full nationhood (Joshua 24:1-28).
Abram and his entourage went to the oak of Moreh, a sacred tree and cult center. The "oak at Moreh" is probably the "Diviners' Oak" at Shechem mentioned in Judges 9:6, an important Canaanite cult center appropriated first by the Israelite patriarchs and later by their descendants. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. This indicates a time of writing when the memory of the original inhabitants of the land possessed by the Israelites had faded. In the Bible, the term "Canaanite" designates, always negatively, the undifferentiated religious culture displaced by the Israelites in an area traditionally bordered by the Mediterranean coast in the west, Sidon in the north, Gaza in the south, and the eastern shore of the Dead Sea in the east (see Genesis 10:19). Although occasionally mentioned alongside other displaced peoples, the biblical Canaanites usually included such groups as the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Kenites, and the Rephaim (see Genesis 15:19-21; Exodus 23:23, 34:11; Deuteronomy 7:1).
7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram, Christians seeing here a good analogy with the “appearance” of the risen Christ to the disciples, especially as recorded in the Gospels, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared, see verse 7, to him. Thus, near by the sacred tree at Moreh Abram would build his own altar. Although not the first to erect an altar to the LORD (Noah had already done so, Genesis 8:20), Abram displayed exemplary piety as a Yahweh worshiper (cf 13:3-4, 18; 15:10-11), an identity that, in the story of his trial of the near-sacrifice of Isaac (22:13), would overshadow all other attributes. Abram's fearlessness in the story of his call to emigrate to an unknown land foreshadows his fearless devotion to his god when he is called, in sacrifice, to what appears to be an impossible future. 8 From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. This suggests an act of worship that connects the primeval narrative with the patriarchal narrative.9 And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb. Abram's sequential journeys past Bethel and Ai, toward the Negeb, indicate a southward route.
The Lord called Abram to travel about 500 miles. To walk that distance with a large entourage would have been a daunting task. One can do it, of course, as long as one remembers that even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. One can reach the destination, but only one step at a time. This is faith that cannot see the finish line but trusts that a blessing is waiting at the end. This is faith that cannot anticipate every obstacle but believes that the Lord is offering guidance along the way. This is faith that cannot always see the big picture but focuses instead on the path that lies ahead. He has a vision of the reward of reaching the end, that of being a great nation, but he also sees that this blessing will occur in order to become a blessing to the nations. To receive a blessing from the Lord is never the end game. Israel was chosen by the Lord to be “a light to the nations” (Isaiah 49:6). Jesus “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Followers of Christ are “to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last” (John 15:16). The Lord bless those who engage the Lord in their journey of life, but the purpose of such blessing is never to cling to them as if they are a personal possession. We receive them in that moment, but we also learn to share them with others whose unique journeys overlap with our journey. In this case, for Abram to receive the blessing, the primary obstacle was that the Canaanites were in the land. He might have felt a bit like the bumper sticker said: “I took the road less travelled. Now, where the heck am I?” The Lord promised that while Abram would not live to see it, his descendants will possess the land. Abram marked the promise with an altar and moved on with his journey. Abram had faith that the Lord held the big picture in view, and he became content to entrust himself to and live with the promise. He focused upon what he knew, taking one step at a time. Our journey is similar in that we cannot know a future we have not yet experienced, but we can entrust that future to the Lord who accompanies us in the journey. We will have our moments of altar building and worship as well, but we must not prematurely end the journey. He moved the entire clan away from their home, embarking on a perilous journey to an unknown destination, with sheep, tents and slaves. This happened not once, but twice. First, to Canaan to settle there at the Lord's direction. Later, during a famine, he was forced to move his family down to Egypt. He also found that there would be wars and prosperity, alliances and lies, mistakes and successes, births and deaths, jealousies and laughter, and promises - promises made by the Lord to Abram, that the Lord would make him the father of nations, whose children would number as many as the grains of sand in a desert, as many as the stars in the night sky. He found trouble in Canaan when a famine came. He courted trouble in Egypt with the Pharaoh. There were problems with Lot, his nephew, and the Sodom and Gomorrah thing, and then the time when he got ahead of the Lord by having his first son with Hagar the maid. Abram had his share of troubles, but he had adventures, opportunities, happiness and possibilities. The Lord gave him the moral strength and the strength of character to face the obstacles his journey would bring his way. Such are the reasons why Abram remains a model for people of faith and hope. We have new possibilities and opportunities, but always with challenges, difficulties, and obstacles to face.
Have you ever noticed how often people in the Bible are changing their addresses? It is hard to find anyone who is in a serious drama with God who is not on the move. A word of caution is appropriate. If the Lord calls you to stay home, you must stay home.
Studies have shown that Americans are physically on the move every 5.2 years. Americans have been on the move for years. Walt Whitman wrote "Song of the Open Road," Jack London penned The Road, and then in the late 1940s, Jack Kerouac took a roaring drive across America, and wrote the classic novel On the Road. The heroes of this book, Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, "were intended as the automobile-age equivalents of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. 'Beyond the glittery street was darkness, and beyond darkness, the West,' Kerouac wrote. 'I had to go.'"[17] Kerouac's love of the road has inspired a generation of nomads.
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous, yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle you see the blue center light pop, and everybody goes 'Awww!'" Such energy and emotion enliven another of his books, The Dharma Bums, "a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier."[18]
Yet, it may well be we are so busy chasing our dreams that we are sacrificing our "sense of place." And what a loss this is, because without a place of belonging, we lack a certain centeredness. Home is a concept that goes back to the dawn of humanity and may even predate religion. For millennia, it has given people a sense of peace, safety, stability and belonging. Is our urge to hop to new nests now destroying the concept of "home," replacing it with the more sterile idea of "housing"? Are we failing to pass the "old homestead" from one generation to the next, and in the process failing to transmit other important qualities to our descendants? Is the breakdown of the postmodern family somehow related to our need to move? Is our wanderlust a cause or an effect of this problem?
As pleasing as it would be to connect all these various societal failures with the "motion sickness" caused by our hops to new spots, this is not quite fair. People have been on the road since the time of Abraham, and somehow the values of home and family have survived their peripatetic passions.
Why would some human beings wish to live on Mars or on Europa, the moon of Jupiter? The only legitimate and good answer is the one George Mallory gave to the question of why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: “Because it is there.” Travelling to remote places may have an economic, scientific, and even sentimental attraction. People have a variety of reasons for moving from one place to another. Migration is a constant factor of human history, often over huge distances, for reasons difficult to discern. Most of us can imagine a future when emigration from Earth might become inexpensive enough for people to emigrate to another planet. It will require advanced biotechnology and understanding of population systems. Such advances will have a positive influence upon the daily life of people on earth. Exploring and travel are in the DNA of human beings.[19]
Moving - whether to a new neighborhood, new city, new state, new job - although it may involve trauma for kids and spouse, need not be a curse, but can be a blessing. What makes a transition good or bad is not when you hop, but how you hop, and the call of Abram in Genesis 12 can give us some hints about how to make the right moves. When the Lord calls, it will be best to move. Word will come in the deep inner sense you have that a move is going to be right for you and your loved ones, right in the sense that it gives you new challenges, new responsibilities and new opportunities for growth. As the Lord made a wonderful promise to Abram, the Lord has a wonderful promise for each of us to fulfill a destiny uniquely belonging to us. The grass is not always greener on the other side, but it might be, and it will be if we have properly heard the call of the Lord. The symbol of such proper hearing is Abram building an altar and offering worship. We need such altars and such experiences of worship in the spiritual journey that is our lives.
Faith means taking out on a journey which means leaving all that is familiar and secure and gives us identity. Faith means heading out for destinations we cannot see. The focus of our attention needs to be on where God is leading and guiding us. That which motivates us must be much larger than simply “for the sake of family.” Who we are, what we hope to be, our safety and security, need to be in God. There is a wonderful hymn that reminds us how important it is to experience God as the source of our lives.
Guide me, O thou great Jehovah,
pilgrim through this barren land.
I am weak, but thou art mighty;
hold me with thy powerful hand.
Bread of heaven, bread of heaven,
feed me till I want no more;
feed me till I want no more.
[1] 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.
[2] a Hebrew grammatical construction sometimes referred to as the reflexive or centripetal dative -- "take yourself" (KJV, "get thee").
[3] (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.
[4] 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).
[5] Barth (Church Dogmatics IV.2 [66.4] 578)
[6] Barth (IV.3 [71.4] 577)
[7] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology Volume 1, 204)
[8] — 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.
[9] —Unknown.
[10] Attributed to St. Augustine, but in reality, only the first part, in Letter 43.
[11] Often attributed to Cesare Pavese, but see Glenn Clark (1882-1956), The Secret Power in Business, http://self-improvement-ebooks.com/books/tsopib.php
[12] —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.
[13] –Brother Lawrence
[14] Spanish novelist Miguel de Unamuno
[15] Nouwen, Henri. Cited by Ian Pitt-Watson, A Kind of Folly: Toward a Practical Theology of Preaching. St. Andrew Press, 1976, 36.
[16] See G.E. Wright, Shechem [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965], 4).
[17] (Douglas Brinkley, "In the Kerouac Archive," The Atlantic Monthly, November 1998, 50-51).
[19] Inspired by -Freeman J. Dyson, "Warm-Blooded Plants and Freeze-Dried Fish," The Atlantic Monthly, November 1997. I did not mention the silliness of an apocalyptic view of what humanity will do to destroy its home.
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