At that time, Canaanites were in the land.
Let me begin with a story.
One of my great joys as a chaplain at Shenandoah University is being able to bring students beyond their comfort zone into new environments. One of the—all things considered, minor—challenges of the pandemic was restriction on University-sponsored travel. Travel, and exposing our students to new contexts and perspectives, is such an integral part of our ethos at Shenandoah University. The university even has an annual spring break offering called “The Global Citizenship Project” wherein students, faculty, and staff apply to go on a completely free, all-expenses paid for, all-inclusive trip to another country to learn about the people and culture there. Every Spring Break for nearly twenty years now, SU has developed a culture of global citizenship by sending five or so groups of these GCP trips all over the world every year (well…except for 2020 that is)—from Panama to Thailand, from Mozambique to Malaysia, and beyond.
The only catch? When you apply for the trip, you don’t know which country you’ll be sent to if you’re selected.
But I digress. Even beyond these GCP trips, we strive to help our students make those connections with places and contexts beyond themselves. And last year, I had the opportunity to take some of my own students on a trip to attend the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) US National Student conference held at Princeton University. One of the pioneers of the Ecumenical movement in the early 20th century—bringing Christian students together to address the deep, global injustices of their time.
I was, personally, excited because it was my own first time attending any kind of gathering like that since February 2020. And as I perused the conference materials, I got really excited to hear from emerging and established experts on how our Christian identity intersects with the matrices of violence and injustices doing harm to our global and planetary body. Speakers like Rev. Dr. William Barber, Rev. Dr. Wil Gaffney, Rev. Erica Williams, and so much more.
And yet, as I reflect back on that weekend experience, I find that, while the whole experience was really transformational and helped me unlock new ways of thinking and being in the world, that transformation had nothing to do with anything that was structured or scheduled. The panels and keynotes and bible studies were all fine, don’t get me wrong, but they weren’t the site of transformation for me or my students. Rather, transformation occurred in the transitional spaces and moments during the conference. The conversations that occurred at mealtimes or in between sessions. The relationships and connections forged and strengthened.
Transformation, it turns out doesn’t occur in structured or controlled environments. Rather, it happens in the in-between spaces, the margins, the borders, the spaces and moments between you and me. Transformation occurs when we let go of the things we’re trying to control and embrace the messiness of mutual, relationships.
Of course, this should probably come as no surprise to us. How many of us have ever been in a meeting where the real discussion or the real decision happened after the meeting in the parking lot?
And as I think back on event and conference planning during the height of the pandemic, I realize just how much of that was what I was missing. Sure, the video panels and lectures were great, and I loved being able to hear voices and perspectives I wouldn’t otherwise be able to hear, just by joining into a Zoom webinar. But I think what many failed to incorporate into their virtual events was opportunities for unplanned, chance encounters and conversations. Opportunities for participants and attendees to connect and organize around the content they were consuming. And at a certain point, it was just exhausting. Zoom meeting to Zoom meeting. Virtual event to virtual event. I doubt that I was alone in thinking “man, I’m tired of this”.
Of course, my cynical streak says “hey, maybe that was by design”. Doesn’t that let the status quo remain the status quo and help leaders consolidate their own control?
On the other hand, maybe we were just trying to curate some semblance of normalcy during decidedly un-normal times. “Well, people came to these for the lectures and panels and keynotes before the pandemic, so we’ll just keep on offering that!”
Regardless of motivations, I hope that one of our takeaway from the pandemic is that “normal wasn’t working”. Our desire for control and reluctance to let go of the things we’re so desperately holding onto only leads us down a path of further devastation and degradation. Any short-term gains end up being wiped out by long-term, generational losses.
It's my firm belief that the call of the Gospel—that our calling as Christians—is to model what letting go can look like. Letting go of individual agendas for individual gain to allow all of us to flourish. Letting go of ourselves to embrace our neighbors. Letting go of our comfort to encounter and worship the Christ that exists on the margins—the Christ that exists between you and me.
And I want to be completely clear before I dig into this text. I have so often heard this message of “let go and let god” preached to placate and sedate those experiencing oppression and pain and suffering. I’ve heard it used to uphold and perpetuate oppressive status quos. As a petty platitude for the grieving or to promote passive quietism. This is not what I’m saying this morning. The ark of the moral universe, it turns out, is long and it bends towards entropic heat death. Any bending toward justice happens because of our collective action through the power of the Spirit.
I believe the Gospel calls us to let go of the false notion that the way things are necessarily have to be the way things are supposed to be.
There’s a joke that the optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears that he’s right.
But there’s a third way. Our faith should fuel us to cast and pursue the realization of a vision of a social order where all have enough, where every tear is wiped away from every eye—not that there won’t be any more tears, but that no one has to be alone in their grief.
And this is only made possible by looking beyond ourselves. By looking beyond our own spaces. By looking beyond our own silos and deepening our relationships with who we have typically “othered”.
At that time, Canaanites were in the land.
Abram, or as he would come to be called, Abraham, is a complicated figure. As the father of not one, not two, but three major world religions, we often think of him as this paragon of faithfulness—the very model of what it means to be obedient and submit to God’s will. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, we hear the God we worship referred to as “The God of Abraham”. In Jesus’ time, he was seen as this moral exemplar and the father of the nation. I mean, we all know that VBS song, right? Father Abraham had many sons, many sons had Father Abraham.
John the Baptist even warns his crowds do not presume to say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father! The author of Hebrews also points to Abraham as a stalwart model of faithfulness—by faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.
Even our text this morning, so Abram went, as the LORD had told him. And who can forget that famous story later in Genesis—the binding of Isaac—wherein Abraham does not withhold his son, his only son, who he loves from God?
This is certainly one way to read and understand the character of Abraham. It’s certainly the dominant reading and interpretation of the character. But I fear that when we scratch the surface, we find that we might have to let go of that image of the steady, obedient, faithful patriarch we tend to latch on to. Let’s take a little bit closer of a look then, shall we?
What is it that God asks of Abram at the very beginning of this reading?
Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
It’s worth mentioning that, at this point in the story, Abram’s world has already been turned upside down. In the previous chapter, we’re introduced to him at the end of a long, long genealogy passage. And here’s what we’re told:
We’re told he’s from the land of Ur of the Chaldeans. Now, if you, like me, are not as up to snuff on your geography of the Ancient Near East in the Early Iron/Late Bronze age as you would like to be, let me just say that Ur was, by all accounts a lush fertile city-state in Mesopotamia. We can find it near what we now know as the Persian Gulf, where the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers split apart.
We’re told that his younger brother, Haran, died in Ur, and that his father shortly thereafter moved their whole family north, following the banks of the Euphrates some 800 or so miles up to another river city called, confusingly enough, Haran, up near the contemporary borders of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
It’s there that Terah, Abram’s father, dies.
Abram’s life and world had already been turned upside down and then he hears the word of the Lord basically saying, “hey, I’m sure that things are pretty uncertain and chaotic right now—your father, your patriarch just died and all, but hey, I’m going to throw screwball into this whole thing and let’s see what happens”.
It’s there that God tells Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you”.
And it’s from there that Abram follows God’s command and departs for the land of Canaan, about another 800 miles or so southwest towards the Eastern shore of the Mediterranean.
Except. Is that actually what he does?
I don’t know about you, but the picture I have in my head of this story that I inherited from Sunday school was Abram kind of dropping everything and leaving—of Abram letting go of everything and departing alone…well…not alone. Sarai is in that mental image too. But yeah, just Abram and Sarai and the word of the Lord telling them where to go. Go from your country and your family and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him…
…And well yeah…Lot went too. Lot was Abram’s nephew. The son of his brother Haran, who died.
But yeah, just Abram, Sarai, and Lot, right? Nothing else? No one else? Abram, Sarai, Lot, and a prayer.
Oh…
Umm…yeah. Looks like he brought all of his possessions they had gathered too—as well as “the persons they had acquired in Haran”.
So, yeah, right off the bat, that image of the singularly faithful Abram, the one who was willing to drop literally everything and leave it behind to go where God was calling him to go—the paragon of perfect faithfulness—is a little bit off.
But that’s it, right? All those people were depending on Abram for their livelihood, right? He couldn’t just abandon them there in Haran with no plan for their survival. And, ultimately, he did go where God told him to go: the place of Shechem. God tells him: “To your offspring I will give this land”.
Fantastic. 800 miles traveled. Journey over. Abram and his caravan have made it. Abram even builds an altar to the Lord there! After all that travelling and all that turmoil, they can finally start to settle down.
Except there’s one problem,
At that time the Canaanites were in the land.
This wasn’t uninhabited land that God was promising to Abram and his descendants. Turns out, there were already people living there!
A number of indigenous biblical scholars have said many great and wonderful things about this messy reality of Israel’s relationship to the land of Canaan—a relationship that our own colonial forebears would emulate upon their arrival on this land we now call America. How can a land be promised to someone if there are already people living there? Who owns that land? Who controls that land?
But I wonder, instead, if God was calling Abram and his family into something bigger than private land ownership. How might our reading of this story change if God was instead calling Abram to live alongside, in right relationship with the other? What if God is calling us to not dominate or be dominated, but to live in right relationship with each other—to let go of our hierarchical social orders where ownership and control of resources is privileged over all else? Because, at the end of the day, our salvation does not come from the things we control. Our salvation does not come from the things we own. Our salvation does not come from the power and wealth we amass and consolidate.
Our salvation comes from the Lord. The same Lord who became known to us, not in someone like us, but in the body of a poor, homeless, Palestinian who preached liberation for the oppressed and release for the captives. Who told us that what we do to the least of these in our midst, we do to him. Who was beaten and whipped and lynched by the Imperial state power for daring to say that Caesar was not Lord. Whose resurrection and ascension in glory shows us that we have nothing—absolutely nothing—to fear in letting go of ourselves. That we have nothing—absolutely nothing—to fear in going beyond ourselves. Who told us that all of the law and the prophets could be summed up in “Love God. Love neighbor. Period”. And who is still revealed to us in the breaking of bread in a shared, common meal, where all are equal.
That’s where our salvation comes from.
God told Abram, “go to the land that I will show you”.
Abram went.
God showed Abram the land. Brimming with the possibility of new, mutual relationships. The undoing of Babel, which happened just a chapter earlier.
But Abram kept on going.
Abram kept on going.
Abram could not let go. Abram sought to keep controlling the situation. Seeking out places and power dynamics with which he was familiar. Later on in this chapter, he and his family encounter famine and go to Egypt—foreshadowing what his grandson, Jacob, and his children would do. He knew his place in the Egyptian social order and, perhaps more importantly, he knew ow to work the Egyptian social order to his own advantage. He gives his wife, Sarai, to Pharaoh, saying that she and him are only brother and sister. Time and time again, he keeps on trying to control his own salvation rather than trusting in the promise God had given him.
When push came to shove, Abram could not let go.
How often do we make that same mistake? What things from the past are we so desperately holding on to? What emotions are we seeking to control or stifle? If the call of the Gospel is a call to let go, what, dear ones, do we need to let go of?
What are we holding on to? Is it an idea of normalcy that was built for some, but not for all? Is it structured, controlled spreading of information with no room for collaboration or discussion?
When we let go of control, when we allow space for new opportunities and encountering the Christ that stands between each and every one of us, when we make room for the Spirit to move among us in ways we don’t expect, drawing us towards those beyond us, we find that life is all the sweeter.
We have been given the greatest gift of all, dear ones. We have been given the gift of each other. We just have to let go.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment