We all have those moments that define our lives. Those propitious, kairos moments after which we speak of a before and an after. Sometimes we instantly sense these epiphanic encounters for what they are: a first date with that special someone, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one. 

Other times, it is not until much later that we understand the existential significance of a particular moment in time: a job opportunity that didn’t pan out, leading you to consider a different career path, a study abroad experience that transformed your worldview, a chance encounter with an old friend that forged a generative business partnership.

As rare as these moments are, it is even rarer for an event we did not personally experience to help shape our individual destinies. 

Here in Genesis 12, we have such a moment. God—the maker and sustainer of the universe—comes to a herdsman named Abram. The Lord appears to Abram with a simple command: Go. 

Abram’s willingness to head God’s call is one of the most world-defining moments in the history of humankind—even though it did not happen to any of us personally. 

Without Abram’s yes, there would be no Jews, Christians, or Muslims today. 

We would have no Torah, no Bible, no Koran. 

There would have been no Byzantine Empire, no Ottoman Empire, no Crusades, no Spanish Inquisition, no Thirty Year’s War. 

The genocides in Nazi Germany, Armenia, and Myanmar would not have taken place. 

Apart from Abram’s willingness to go where God would lead, folks like Joan of Arc, Maimonides, John Calvin, Malcolm X, and Mother Teresa would have just been ordinary people.

The three Abrahamic faiths celebrate Abram’s faithfulness to follow God into the unknown in similar ways. The Jewish Rabbis highlight Abram’s role as the father of Israel. Christian writers of the New Testament stress Abram’s faithfulness to God. And Muslims emphasize his obedience to God.

In Jewish, Islamic, and Christian teaching, the focus of Genesis 12 falls more upon Abram’s willingness to go and its implications than on God’s command for him to go.

How curious it is that God commands Abram to go?

God calls Abram to move. To move his body away from his family, to move out of his childhood home in southern Mesopotamia, to abandon his hometown and never see it again.

This means that God was also calling Abram away from his language, away from his culture, away from that Chaldean homecooking his momma made every Sunday. 

So, here’s what’s puzzling me: What does the nature of Abram’s calling reveal to us about God?

Why was God’s blessing upon Abram and his descendants conditional upon Abram’s willingness to relocate? 

Couldn’t God have made Abram a great nation without him having to fill out that annoying change of address form?

Why couldn’t God have allowed Abram to choose easy, to choose familiarity, to choose sameness? 

I don’t really have any definitive answers to this line of questioning.

All I know is that God revealed Godself to a rando named Abram, commanded him to abandon everything that was safe, everything that was common, everything that was known, and that in his going, the Lord would bless him beyond all imagining. 

That’s what the text tells us. And that’s all we have to go on.

But, if we pan out from this scene a bit, we gain greater purchase on understanding this sending narrative and this sending God.

It spurs a line of questioning for me that is as exciting as it is sobering: 

What if God’s calling and promise to Abram in Genesis 12 is less vicarious than it appears at first glance? 

What if God’s calling to Abram is less a guarantee of our election by blood, by faith, or by emulation than an indictment of our collective condition before God?

In other words, what if the blessing arises from the going itself?

What if the transformative moment in Abram’s life is not merely vicarious?

What if it is paradigmatic?

When we hold this scene in generative tension with what precedes it, this line of questioning becomes a bit more compelling.

Genesis 12 is a transition chapter. 

The first 11 books of Genesis record God’s primeval activity of creating the world, creating the world’s creatures, and creating human creatures. 

It includes lots of genealogies and stories of mythic proportions: we have magical gardens, and talking serpents, and trees of life and wisdom. Everything gets a reset with Noah and his ark, and the narrative culminates in the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11. 

Around 292 years separate Abram’s call narrative from the toppling of Babel’s tower, the confusion of human languages, and the dispersement of human animals throughout the Levant. 

For 292 years we have no record of God intervening in the world’s affairs. 

Having confused a mono-linguistic and monocultural community, having multiplied human languages and sent folks scattering throughout the world, God seems to sit back and wait. 

We can only speculate what God was up to during the intervening years. 

I would suggest that the Lord was returning to her original vocation she took up in the garden of Eden: cultivating good fruit from the soil. 

Anyone who has ever tried to grow anything knows that a necessary component is always patience. There’s a lot of waiting, a lot of delayed gratification—whether it’s vegetables, fruit, a business, or a family, time is the universal ingredient. 

Now, here in Genesis 12, God deems the soil ready for a harvest. 

It is only after folks have settled into distinct tribes with distinct languages and distinct cultures that God elects Abram. God calls him out of his semi-retirement in Ur to follow God into a yet-to-be determined land. As it is with ripe fruits and vegetables, so it is with Abram. The germination and gestation culminate in a blessing, a harvest. 

Note that the blessing is not just for Abram. If he is willing to venture into the Great Wide Open, to take that pivotal first step away from the familiar and the same, Abram and his descendants will be blessed.

Abram will be blessed for going and his going constitutes a means of blessing others. 

Verse 3 reads: “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.”

Here we have a very particular person from a very particular place with a very particular language and culture being used as a means of blessing all the families of the earth. 

With Abram, the centrifugal movement away from Babel gets a jumpstart. Every community is in danger of becoming a Babel. Homogeneity fosters tribalism. Monolinguism can fester into xenophobia.

The God we encounter in Scripture likes to shake things up. And the shaking up is often geopolitical. God meets us in our particularity because there can be no generic person. We are all particular.

And God only ever meets us where we are and when we are.

And so I repeat, What if God’s calling to Go and Abram’s willingness to go is not merely vicarious but paradigmatic?

What if the blessing only arises in and from the going?

If this is true, then it is not merely Abram’s charge to head out into the unknown, but ours as well.

When I read the headlines, I am dismayed by the divisions among us. This sense of distrust and alienation from our fellow humans is not exclusive to America, but we seem to be doing an especially good job of it for the last few years.

Ethnocentrism and xenophobia have turned us against others for no reason apart from their otherness from some ideal that never really was. When we see our political and religious leaders dividing folks into insiders and outsiders using arbitrary identity markers we should be wary.

Let the horrors of the Middle Passage, the Holocaust at Rwanda, sit with us. What is happening in this administration is no different. We use different vocabulary, but the intention and impact is the same. In America today the division isn't between Europeans and Africans, Aryans and Jews, Hutus and Tutsis, though vestiges of this persist. Today, cisgender identity is elevated to suppress those who are transgender. American nationalists denounce and denigrate refugees and migrants under the specious claims that forced deportations will make America great again.

As I preach this sermon, ICE agents are running rampant across America with unprecedented federal support. As my Columbia seminary colleague Anna Carter Florence, and I have traveled around the country offering scripture engagement workshops for preachers. We've spoken with pastors in Portland and Minneapolis who are fighting to combat tyranny and violence for the sake of those in their congregations and beyond.

What I hear and what I read about the pogroms being carried out by the current administration sickens me. When I seek wisdom from Abram's call narrative, I can't help but wonder, What if a necessary requirement for all would be ICE agents was that they had to spend a year living in a different country? What if we made them learn another language, live among other kinds of people, cut off from the sameness so many of them take for granted? Then maybe it would be harder for them to execute unarmed people in the street, abetted by a perverted sense of justice.

We seem to have forgotten a very obvious aspect of our being: there can be no sameness without difference and no difference without sameness. Our particularities are only meaningful because we share certain particulars with certain folks and not with others.

The random evolutionary changes that gave us black, brown or white skin.

The phenotypic arbitrariness that gave some of us blue eyes and some of us brown eyes, some of us blonde hair and some of us red hair.

The haphazard comings and goings of our parents, grandparents and ancestors that demarcate our nationalities, our languages, our cultures.

The delicate blend of nature and nurture that leads some of us to identify as gay, straight or bisexual, or some of us to be trans, cisgender or non-binary, and for each of us to be more or less suited to the physical conditions of our environments.

All of these aspects of our identity have produced intractable conditions that have fostered our alienation from others, from creation, and even from ourselves. They would come to mean so much differently if we would just go.

If we would remain where we are born and bred, we remain locked in patterns of thinkings that are endemic to our thrownness into a particular body at a particular place in the world, at a particular point in history.

But if we go…

If we are forced out of our comfort zones by exposure to folks whose ways of conceiving the world are different from ours.

If we are forced to rely upon the hospitality of strangers for our survival.

If we are forced to learn new languages to communicate our wants, needs and desires.

If we are forced to move our bodies into strange and spectacular places we receive, not only similar challenges to those Abram, Sarai, and Lot faced, but the concomitant blessings as well.

Maybe what can truly make America great again is for more Americans to go away from America—and I mean, really go.

To go in a way that unsettles us.

That disorients us.

That force us not only to encounter different cultures and contexts in their difference from ours, but also to perceive just how much we have in common with folks who seem to be so different from us prior to our going.

Maybe this scattering and sending God knows what she's doing.

Maybe the only way we receive a blessing worthy of the name is to bless other kinds of people with our presence, with our curiosity, with our faith.

Maybe that moment when God told Abram to go so many millennia ago is the same command God poses to we who claim ourselves to be Abram's heirs. And if this is the case, it is in our going with God that our disparate faiths truly become Abrahamic.