Genesis 12 "So Abram Left" Scott Hoezee

The author of Genesis assumes you already know him. How else can you explain the bare-bones manner by which this shadowy figure named Abram suddenly appears in the biblical text with so little fanfare? At the conclusion of Genesis 11, Abram is mentioned for the first time but as no more than yet one more entry in a rather dry genealogical listing of the descendants of Noah's son Shem. We find out about Abram's father, Terah, and his two brothers, Nahor and Haran. We find out who these three boys married and where they ended up living in Ur of the Chaldeans. But that's it. There's nothing particularly striking about any of this material and nothing that would catch the reader's eye . . . unless you already knew how important Abram was. In that case, he was a man who needed no introduction.

Over time, his father, brothers, nephew, and the whole rest of the clan will fade from history and from memory. But not Abram, later called Abraham. "Father Abraham." Judaism claims him. Christianity claims him. Islam claims him. Those big three religions all trace themselves back to Abraham one way or another and for one reason or another. And yet in truth, we know so little about him. We're not told what he looked like, whether he was particularly intelligent or not, nor are we given much insight into his private thoughts. Yet this ancient man, born probably somewhere around the year 1875 B.C. (nearly 4,000 years ago, in other words) became a fulcrum of history. But just who is this Abram?

Genesis 12:1 startles us with the announcement that Yahweh himself cleared his divine throat one day and spoke somehow to Abram. And nothing has ever been the same since in this world. What became Israel started that long-ago day. The Hebrew peoples, later called Jews, started that day. We Christians believe that the line leading up to Jesus started that day, and from there the lines that get drawn clear down to this evening at a place called Calvin Church are plain to see. Across a vast gulf of history, almost four whole millennia of it, we find a connection to a man whose world, whose times, whose view of the universe, whose appearance, and whose lifestyle could scarcely be more different from anything or anyone we have ever encountered.

Abram. Abraham. He's not even introduced to us as being a particularly good, moral, or righteous man. We assume all that, but we're not told. Earlier in Genesis we were told that Abel found favor in God's sight. Noah alone out of all the earth was found to be righteous, and the text told us this. But Abram receives no such tag. He's simply called out of a clear blue sky. "Get going," Yahweh told him. So Abram left. Flying off on the wings of a promise too grand to take in and almost too good to be true, Abram left. He did what people in the Ancient Near East often feared to do, which was to leave behind the land of your father. Many people back then believed that to die away from home, away from your ancestral territory, was to be lost in the afterlife. Nevertheless, Abram left.

His swift obedience speaks volumes. If Abram asked any questions of Yahweh at this juncture, they are not reported to us. If he had any doubts, we are not told about them. Nor are we told if he and Sarai argued about this hare-brained idea of going to an as-yet unspecified place where the two of them would somehow form a nation (despite their inability so far to form even a family). They just go. They spent however much time it took to pack up and then they go.

Verses 6-9 read like a kind of travel itinerary. They go here and there, stop now and again. Finally they get to a place called Canaan only to discover, not surprisingly, a goodly number of people known as the Canaanites. As Abram surveys this new land, Yahweh whispers into his ear yet again, "It's theirs now but it will belong to your descendants later." God keeps using the words "offspring" and "descendants" like it's already a done deal. He obviously knows something Abram and Sarai don't know yet because of all the things they packed up and loaded onto camels in Ur, a baby buggy and crib were not among them. They'd never had use for one before and didn't have use for one now, either. Yet God keeps talking about a family--one so large it would need a large land like Canaan to contain it.

That's the promise anyway, and that's all they have to go on. So far they've been shown a land that already has plenty of people in it (folks who won't take kindly to the idea of being displaced some day). They've been told about a family, and even about an extended family, that has not begun yet (and won't any time soon, either). To top it all off, verse 10 tells us that the land to which God brings them has a famine! You can almost hear Sarai saying to Abram, "Nice place your God brought us to! You said he promised us a family one day by and by, but did he mention anything about food for tomorrow!?"

By now even Abram must have been wondering if he'd been hearing things. He maybe didn't admit that to Sarai, but Abram had to be honest with himself: an already-populated land that was enduring what verse 10 calls "a severe famine" was not exactly the Shangra-la Yahweh's travel brochures had talked about! So they go to Egypt to see if they can scare up some food. Genesis 12 does not tell us that Yahweh directed Abram there. It looks like Abram's own idea. Indeed, starting in verse 10, Yahweh fades into the background a bit.

Abram is in charge of the action now. He makes a decision as the pater-familias that they're going to Egypt so they won't starve to death. But no sooner do they start walking through the streets and Abram notices that his wife is turning heads. Her skin was maybe lighter and fairer than folks who had so long lived under Egypt's blistering sun. She is said to have been strikingly beautiful. So Abram gets nervous. He's not really very worried about Sarai but is thinking mostly about saving his own hide. He doesn't want to have his throat slit in the dead of night so that Sarai would be freed up to become another man's bride.

"Tell them you're my sister," he whispers to Sarai in a conspiratorial tone. So she does. It saves Abram's life, all right, but Sarai gets carted off to become the sexual consort of Pharaoh. Can you imagine the dirty look she shot at Abram as the Pharaoh's courtiers hauled her away to get dolled up for the Pharaoh's pleasure? Things like this would never have happened if they had stayed home in Ur! First they finish their long, dusty trip in a land with no food, now to save himself, Abram lets Sarai be treated like a whore. Meanwhile Abram, the lovely woman's ostensible brother, gets treated like royalty. The whole thing is so sordid and sad.

Twice in Genesis 12 Abram picks up and moves. Once it is at the behest of Yahweh, and the other time it seems to be at his own behest as Abram ditches God's promises and tries to take matters into his own hands. If the famine in God's land of promise was a test to see if Abram could trust God to take care of them there even still, then Abram failed the test. If at this point Abram had really embraced the promises of God, he would have feared neither starvation in Canaan nor murder in Egypt. But clearly he feared both and so struck out on his own, with quite unhappy consequences for lovely Sarai.

Finally in verse 17 Yahweh steps back onto the stage of the narrative. If you expected God to wag a finger in Abram's face, the narrative pulls a fast one on you by having Yahweh inflict innocent, clueless Pharaoh and his household with some disease. Why did Pharaoh get nailed for Abram's deception? If a con man swindles a trusting widow out of her life savings, you don't expect in the end for the little old lady to be the one sent to jail while the con man gets sent off scot free with the widow's money still in his pockets. Yet something like that happens here, and we're not given a single clue as to why.

One thing is for sure, however: both Pharaoh and Abram are shown that something quite important is going on with Abram and Sarai. But it has to be God who does the directing and the acting. In those sweeping promises that God gave to Abram in verses 2-3, Abram is assured that not only will he himself be blessed, but this blessing will be contagious. Abram will become a blessing-bearer--God's goodness will rub off. But that apparently is going to be true only if Abram stays faithful. Because look what happened to Pharaoh in Egypt: he rubs shoulders with Abram but receives a curse!

"All the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you," God declares. Try telling that to Pharaoh! He sends Abram and company packing before things get worse for him. Apparently, if God is not the source of the action, the promised blessings are not going to fall into place. And so begins the education of Abram.

As commentator Walter Brueggemann says, if Genesis 12:1-9 seems to fly high up into the spiritual stratosphere of covenant promises and of Abram's faithful obedience, then Genesis 12:10-20 brings this whole story back to earth. The soap opera-like affair in Egypt, replete with coy deceptions and sexual high-jinks, brings the journey of faith very much down to the level of the fleshly reality of every one of us. So maybe now is a good moment to return to the question I asked at the outset this evening: who is Abram? He's everyman. He's you, he's me, he's anyone who struggles to believe the promises of God in the teeth of a reality that seems at times to be all-but designed to make faith difficult.

Abram is one ordinary man caught up in the extraordinary saga of God's cosmic salvage operation. In some ways, it's easy to see the opening of Genesis 12 as a kind of new beginning in the Book of Genesis. We leave behind the broad strokes of God's dealings with the whole world to focus on the origins of Israel in specific. But it's a mistake to do that. We need to see Genesis 12 set in the cosmic context of creation. The same God who created everything, as told in the twin-creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2, is now working to reclaim that creation run amok, and he's doing it through the hapless figure of the lone man called Abram--a man who could not possibly have grasped the full scope of what was going to end up happening through him. "All the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you," God promises. But who among us could imagine how such a thing could happen?

But that's the promise. God vows to make blessings available all over the place if only Abram will do as he's told. There are thirty-nine books in the Old Testament. Scattered throughout those books, the Hebrew word for "blessing" crops up 310 times. But Genesis alone contains 28% of those occurrences--talk of blessing clusters in great clumps around the story of Abram because if God's greater blessing is ever going to come to the world, it will be because of what happens to this man and his long-suffering wife, Sarai.

Abram is going to have to relinquish his present for the sake of a future he will never live to see. Abram will live to see Isaac born, but he'll die many generations before anything resembling a "great nation" appears on the face of the earth. As we will see when this series concludes in a few weeks, by the time Abraham exits the biblical stage, he will himself own precisely one small parcel of the land God promised to him: it will be the small plot he purchases for Sarah's grave. And that's all he lives to see. A lone son, a dead wife, and the only land he can call his own is the place where he buries the love of his life.

If, in the end, Abram could look at that and yet still somehow believe the promises to be true, then it required of him a faith that can be described only as sacrificial. In Genesis 12, Abram ends up trying to save his own life and feather his own nest so that his present moment would be better, not worse. Before his life is over, however, he will learn that if God's promised blessing is ever going to come at all for this world, it will be because people like him renounced the comforts of the present moment so as to open himself up for a future destination toward which he would travel but at which he would never arrive in this life.

As Elizabeth Achtemeier has pointed out, in terms of narrative, the call of Abram in Genesis 12 follows directly on the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. In that story, the people cook up a plan to make a name for themselves. "Come, let's make a name for ourselves." But the end of that story is confusion and scattering. By contrast, in Genesis 12 Yahweh comes to Abram and says, "I will make a name for you!" Yahweh himself will be the one to make Abram's name great, and the result will be a new in-gathering of all the peoples of the earth under the canopy Yahweh's singular blessing.

But it's not going to come easily or quickly. The journey of faith cannot be fast-forwarded and there are no short-cuts we can cook up for ourselves to speed things up or to accomplish anything better than God himself will accomplish in his own good time. The journey toward cosmic blessing, like Abram's own journey of faith, will have its ups and downs, its peaks and valleys, its strong leaps forward and its woeful stumbles backward. But once God's promise is spoken in Genesis 12, one thing is certain: it will happen, it will come to fulfillment.

"So Abram left," Genesis 12:4 starkly tells us. Abram left, and he never stopped traveling really. That's the way of it when God calls you: you are summoned to a journey whose destination is glory yet the path to that glory is long, dangerous, frustrating, and always fraught with the temptation to chuck the whole thing in favor of just looking out for good old #1 in the here and now, the same way Abram did in Egypt. Thankfully, God's faithfulness toward us is more constant than ours toward God, and so by grace God keeps yanking us back onto the path of discipleship. As we now know only too well, that path meanders straight into a cross. If ever there were a gruesome reality in the teeth of which the promises looked null and void, the cross was it.

From that cross the Son of God shouted, "It is finished," but by saying that Jesus did not mean to convey that he was finished, washed up, done in and defeated. He meant that something was finished in the sense of being completed. What was finished? The blessing once promised to that man called Abram in Ur of the Chaldeans. "I'm going to bless the whole world through you," God told Abram. A couple millennia later a man named Jesus said, "Done!" And that's where the story of Abram leads for us Christians.

Of course, even so we don't have the fullness of the promised kingdom yet, either. We may be able to see a lot farther than Abraham and Sarah ever could. We know more now. We've seen what God was willing to do to keep the promise--in Jesus we've seen a sacrifice the likes of which Abraham could only dimly have suspected. Still, what we have is but a foretaste of the glory to come. A week ago tonight when we ate the bread and drank the wine of communion again, we once more were given a preview of that great heavenly banquet table to which we will all one day be called by name.

But we're not there yet, and so we join Abram, Sarai, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David, Isaiah, Peter, Paul, Mary, Martha, John, and a long trail of fellow Christian pilgrims as we walk the path marked out for us by the Trailblazer, the Pioneer and Perfecter of our faith, Jesus himself. We've got promises to hold onto through a faith that believes God will keep those promises. But we have to hold onto them in a world intent on kicking the stuffing out of our faith some days. That's not easy. "So Abram left." So must we. May God give us the grace to journey with Abram in the power of our Lord. Amen.