Move 1: Abram’s Faithfulness

We all have 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 who makes your heart sing, 

: 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 than you could have otherwise imagined, 

: 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 shape our individual destinies. 

Here in Genesis 12, we have such a moment. God—the maker and sustainer of the universe—comes to a heardsman 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 Spanish Inquisition, no Hundred Year’s War. 

The genocides in pre-Colonial America, Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and Sudan would not have taken place. 

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

The three Abrahamic faiths celebrate Abram’s faithfulness to follow God into the unknown in similar ways, even as they claim him uniquely as their own:

Jewish midrash on Genesis 12 celebrates Abram’s obedience to Go where God calls. The Hebrew phrase is lech lecha, meaning “Go for yourself” or “go forth.” In Jewish teaching, Lech Lecha represents:

Faith expressed through obedient action

Trust without knowing the destination

The beginning of Abraham’s role as the father of Israel

Throughout the Qur’an, Ibrahim is repeatedly called a ḥanīf—one who submits completely to God alone.

The Qur’an states that “Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but he was a ḥanīf, a Muslim [one who submits to God].”(Qur’an 3:67) His faithfulness is defined first and foremost as exclusive loyalty to God.

Our Christian interpreters follow the same line of thinking as our Jewish and Islamic cousins. 

In Romans 4, Paul stresses Abram’s faithfulness and devotion to God in Genesis 12 as a way to separate faithfulness in Christ from adherence to Judaic Law.

The writer of Hebrews 11 exalts Abram as acting on faith before seeing the results of his faithfulness.

In Jewish, Islamic, and Christian teaching, the focus of Genesis 12 falls more upon Abram’s obedience to go than God’s calling for him to go.

Move 2 - The Curiosity of God’s Calling to Go

How curious it is that God commands Abram to go?

God calls Abram to move his body away from his family, out of his childhood home in southern Mesopotamia, away from his hometown of Ur.

This means that God was also calling Abram away from his language, away from his culture, away from the Chaldean cuisine that his momma made. 

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 of Abram a great nation without him having to fill out that annoying change of mailing address form?

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

I don’t 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 familiar, and that in his going, the Lord would bless him beyond all imagining. 

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

But, if we pan out from this scene a bit, we gain greater purchase on our grappling with 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 more compelling.
Move 3: God Scattered Folx for a Reason

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, including we 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 movement 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 folx scattering, 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 Chapter 12, God deems the soil ready for a harvest. 

It is only after folx 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 for Abram alone. 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 to bless 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. The God we encounter in Scripture likes to shake things up. God meets us in our particularity because there can be no generic person.

God only ever meets us where and when we are.

What if God’s calling to Go and Abram’s willing response 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.

Move 4 - What the world needs right now.

When I read the headlines, I’m 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 have been doing an especially good job of it in recent years.

Ethnocentrism and xenophobia have turned us against others for no reason apart from their otherness.

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 folx 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 others 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, strait, or bisexual, or some of us to be trans, cisgender, or nonbinary, 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 that have produced intractable conditions, that have fostered our alienation from others, from creation, and even ourselves would come to mean so much differently if we would just Go.

If we only remain where we are born and bred, we remain locked in patterns of thinking that are endemic to our throwness into a particular body at a particular place at a particular time in history.

But if we go…

If we are forced out of our comfort zones by exposure to folx 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 forces 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 folx who used to seem so completely and utterly different from us prior to our going.

Maybe this scattering and sending God knows what she is 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 that our disparate faiths may truly become Abrahamic.