Nomadic Faith

Genesis 12:1-4

We humans are a nomadic species. Paleontology and archeology tell us of the migrations of the human species early in human history. Humans began in Africa, we are told. Around 60,000 years ago we began to leave the African continent and spread throughout the globe into Europe, Asia and Australia. Humans even reached the Americas. Not far from where we used to live in Western Pennsylvania there is a site called the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, southwest of Pittsburgh. It is a rock ledge overhang, which according to carbon dating, was used as a campsite by prehistoric hunters and gatherers 16,000 years ago. It is the oldest known site of human habitation in North America. We humans are a nomadic species.

Therefore it is fitting that the forefather of our faith in the Biblical tradition was a nomad. His name was Abraham; his wife was Sarah. Together they are the forefather and foremother of the Hebrew people and the Jewish and Christian faiths. The Biblical religion was different than other religions in the Middle East. Other faiths were a product of agricultural societies and their deities reflected the cycles of the growing season. But the God of Abraham was the God of the shepherds. It is no accident that the most beloved chapter in the Bible is the 23^rd psalm, known as the Shepherd’s psalm, which begins, “The Lord is my Shepherd.”

In our OT lesson for today we are introduced to Abraham. The passage is known as the call of Abraham. God calls him to begin a physical and spiritual journey. Abraham’s journey is our journey. It can teach us how God calls us. Let us look at the passage. Genesis 12:1-4 “Now the Lord had said to Abram: “Get out of your country, From your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse him who curses you; And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” So Abram departed as the Lord had spoken to him, and Lot went with him. And Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.” This passage tells us several things.

1. First, God speaks to us. That is very important. We do not have a silent God, a mute Deity. God not only exists; he communicates. This is essential to having a relationship with God. It is fine to believe in God - to believe that God exists. That is great, but God’s existence does not mean much if there is no communication between the Creator and the creature. The fundamental truth of Scripture is that God speaks. That is what we understand Scripture to be. That is why it is referred to as the Word of God. The prophets preface their utterances with the words, “Thus says the Lord” or “The word of the Lord came to the prophet saying ….” God speaks.

God speaks in many ways. Go speaks through the natural world. That is the way that most people experience God. People who can never bring themselves to worship in a church building experience God in the beauty and grandeur of the natural world. God speaks in other ways. God speaks in our conscience. That is the moral or ethical voice of God. The Ten Commandments were written on the human heart long before they were engraved in tablet of stone. They were just etched in stone so we could not ignore them and pretend they aren’t authoritative.

But this is not how God spoke to Abraham. There were no scriptures for Abraham to turn to. No stone tablets. Abraham was not inspired by nature to leave his homeland. God did not give Abraham a moral command here in this passge. Neither did God speak in a booming voice like in the movies. It was an inner voice that spoke to Abraham. God spoke to Abraham through what we might call intuition. That is how God speaks to us today.

This is not an exact science. We can get it wrong. There are lot of thoughts and feelings going through our hearts and minds all the time. Which one do we listen to? Spiritual direction is the art of sifting through all the inner voices to discern the voice of God. It is an art, not a science. Spiritual discernment takes practice, experience and time. Hearing the voice of God begins with getting to know God. We get to know God by spending time with God. We cannot expect to hear and recognize the voice of God unless we are willing to spend time with God.

When I answer the phone, some voices I recognize instantly – even without caller ID. I have some friends whom I have not seen in years. But I would recognize their voice immediately. That is the way it is with God. God does not have caller ID. The only way to know that it is God speaking to you is by getting to know God well. The only way to get to know God is by spending time with him.

In the gospel of John Jesus uses the metaphor of himself as the Good Shepherd and his followers as sheep. He says, “I am the good shepherd; and I know My sheep, and am known by My own…. My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.” He says later talking about himself in the third person, “The sheep hear his voice; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out…. He goes before them; and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. Yet they will by no means follow a stranger, but will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.” There is no short cut to the spiritual life. There is only one way to recognize the voice of the Shepherd, and that is by spending time with the Shepherd.

There is no religious trick to doing this. Spending time each day in prayer and communion with God is essential. Reading Scripture is helpful. We call it the Word of God because Scripture speaks with the voice of God. Scripture speaks in human voices as well. Moses sounds different than Jesus. The prophet Jeremiah sounds different than the apostle Paul. But beneath the human differences one can recognize the divine voice. And it is not just about words. On Wednesdays at noon some of us are reading and discussing the Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. He talked with God but mostly he just lived in the presence of God without words. We are not expected to keep up a continual verbal monologue to God. That would be exhausting. All we need to do is walk with God in everything that we do. We get to know God by being his constant companion. In fact that is what Jesus’ term for the Holy Spirit means: One who stands beside us. When we know God, then we will recognize his voice when he speaks to us with that inner voice of intuition.

2. Now let’s move on to what God says.  What did God say to Abraham? Our passage says, “Now the Lord had said to Abram: “Get out of your country, From your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you.” There are two aspects here: go from and go toward. We have to leave something behind and we have to move toward something which is ahead. Our relationship with God is a journey. Like Abraham, Christians are, in a sense, spiritual nomads. We do not sit still in the spiritual life; we are moving.

God told Abraham to leave behind his country, his family, and his father’s house. He was expected to do that literally and physically. What about us? Jesus put it this way, “37 He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. 38 And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. 39 He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.” I think God is asking us to put God above all other loyalties. Martin Luther wrote in A Mighty Fortress is Our God, “Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also.” This is radical stuff. It is radical to put God above country and above family. And it can be badly misunderstood as well. This is not anti-country or anti-family. It is looking for something higher and greater than earthly loyalties.

God also calls us toward something. In this passage God tells Abraham to set his face toward a land that he would show him. The Letter to the Hebrews describes what this means.

8 By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. 9 By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; 10 for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God…. 13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. 14 For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. 15 And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.

In short God was calling Abraham and is calling us to put heavenly concerns above worldly concerns, to put the spiritual above the earthly. This is very practical. We can easily get caught up in worldly matters. We can get preoccupied with all sorts of things. Caught up in family dramas, with all their emotions and complex relationships. We can get caught up in political matters so much so that we sell our soul to a political party or a political ideology. We can get caught up in our own mesh of emotional problems and issues and concerns, enslaved to our own minds, being tossed to and fro by feelings and thoughts. God calls us to something more. God calls us to liberty – to liberation and freedom. He calls us to a spiritual life in the Kingdom of God.

That is what God was really calling Abraham to. Not just to leave Mesopotamia for Canaan. That was certainly true in a literal sense. But the passage in Hebrews makes it clear that God was calling him also to a heavenly country. Jesus called that heavenly country the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God. That is what God is calling us to. We are to be in this world – in this country, in our families, and our social networks – in the world, but not of the world.

I saw an old film recently. I wrote a blog about it, so those of you who read my blog will recognize the title. It is the 1941 film One Foot in Heaven, starring Fredric March and Martha Scott. It was the story of an ordinary Methodist minister and his family in the early decades of the twentieth century. I wrote about it because I found it very realistic. It is unusual to find clergy portrayed accurately in films. The title of the film comes a line in the movie where he talks about the spiritual life as being like walking ”a sort of tightrope. Balancing with one foot on earth and one foot already in heaven.” The spiritual life is having a foot in two different worlds. We cannot be as absorbed in this world as many people are because we know there is more than this world. There is more than this life. It is not that we do not take the very real social problems of this world seriously. We certainly do. But we know that this is only half the story. We see the problems of this world from a wider perspective.

3. I want to move on now to the rest of God’s call to Abraham. Verses 2 and 3 talk about blessing. It uses the word bless or blessing four times in two verses: “I will make you a great nation; I will bless you And make your name great; And you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse him who curses you; And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Normally this is taken to apply to Abraham’s physical descendants. Usually that is understood to be the Jews, even though in Genesis the Arabs are also descendants of Abraham, which complicates matters, especially when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict and the fight over the land of Palestine and the State of Israel.  But I am more concerned with the spiritual matters than real estate. That is how the NT interprets this text. The apostle Paul makes it clear that not all who have the blood of Abraham flowing through their veins are children of Abraham. Both John the Baptist and Jesus said that to the Pharisees who were proud of their ancestry. Paul said that it is those who have the faith of Abraham who are the true children of Abraham. He writes: “Therefore know that only those who are of faith are children of Abraham.” He goes on to say, “For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. … There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” Therefore the promise to Abraham applies to us. We are blessed by God through Christ to be a blessing of God to others.

One last observation about our passage. That is the final verse. “So Abram departed as the Lord had spoken to him.” A call expects a response. The call of God expects a response from us. The spiritual journey begins with an act of obedience, stepping out in faith. Abraham had a choice to make – to follow God’s call or not. He chose to take the road less traveled. Normally it is the faith of Abraham which is extolled. But it is important to note that faith always involve action. When God spoke to him, Abraham obeyed. Faith is not just believing things. It is acting on faith. When called Abraham to a higher calling, he went. In this way he is an example for all of us who are spiritual nomads, who see ourselves as pilgrims on this earth, seeking a heavenly country.