God’s first call created all things. And God sat back and looked at it and said, this is good. God’s second call was to a married couple, Abram and Sarai, an aged man and woman struggling with infertility and some intense family dynamics. And to them God said, Go! They say, you get to know someone, I mean really know them, when you decipher the patterns of their choices. That applies to God also. The bible reveals God’s choice patterns and therefore who God is. Through Abram and Sarai, the couple from modern day Iraq, God chooses to create an alternative community to embody the power of blessing in human history.

God comes to them and says five things: “Go, I will show you; I will bless you; I will make you a blessing.” I will be your portion. All of that is extraordinary, but the word portion-that’s the part that catches my ear. Interesting word that. We don’t use it much unless we’re talking about the amount of food on our plate, but it means so much more. Portion with God means the tangible manifestations of a faithful relationship with God. To include but not be limited to: destiny, fulfillment, fortune, heritage, healing, security, peace, sustenance, satisfaction, and joy. Go is what God said that day in the desert to them. But implied in those two letters, is go and I will go with you. I am with you at every turn in the road. I choose to be with you and choose to reveal myself along the way. Portion is what the poet laureate of the bible Isaiah was giving voice to when he wrote, “Surely it’s God who saves me I will trust in God and not be afraid, for the Lord is my stronghold and my sure defense.” That’s the portion of God's word that’s sending, guiding and pursuing me right now. I wonder what portion of God’s word is traveling with you?

Portion is quite a promise for God to make. Quite a promise for us to live our lives by. But that is faith after all. Call and response. See and know. Experience and tell. Trusting God so that we can see and describe what trusting God is all about. If this story was about two elite spiritual athletes long ago it would be extremely unhelpful. Exceptions are nice but don’t prove the rule. Abram and Sarai held no unique qualifications for the honor and blessing God bestows on them. That collapses time and space and puts us right beside them. That makes them just like us. That’s the good news. God doesn’t call the qualified, God qualifies those whom God calls! “Abram believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness,” the bible says. So you could argue Abram had a unique capacity for believing God’s promise. Maybe, but throughout the bible, God called and many answered. Many are the beneficiaries of God’s undeserved, goodness and faithfulness. So Abram might have been first to believe but he isn’t the last to be lavished upon with the outrageous promises of God.

As parents we sometimes wonder about affording our children with unearned privileges. We worry that if the children don’t earn the privileges they won’t really value them. They might even squander them. I am a father of five children, I certainly understand this line of thinking. But God’s way here in the story is instructive. The privilege of God’s portion is time released, impactful at critical intersections and compounding over the contours of faithful living. So value doesn’t come in the earning, it comes in the discovery. Going with, for, and toward God is discovery. So take an empty suitcase for the journey because there’s a lot to receive and a lot to learn. Far beyond the food, water and progeny of God’s portion, Abram and Sarai are also discovering God’s portion of wisdom, nearness and healing, that they are enough, even when the healing they need and we need if we’re being honest is from self-inflicted wounds.

Enough. That’s a word I hear more and more these days. People saying that they want to be enough or they say that life has made them know that they are not enough. As gentle as I can be, let me say this, no one is enough. When did enough become the goal? And by the way enough for what? We are all unfinished in one aspect or the other. There are gaps of ability, capacity and knowledge in all of us. Each of us are unfinished masterpieces. Isn’t that what is exciting about this whole God thing. That the creator of us and lover of our soul says to us in many ways, No condemnation, no shame, no guilt, no obligation Just invitation. Let’s go for a walk, God says. I want to be with you. Come and find out how I am enough God says to all of us.

Abram and Sarai, just like us, are called live lives energized by God’s promises which model a particular way of living for the world. God never cooks a meal for one person, or one couple in this case. God’s blessings are always intended to be a banquet for those present, those on the way, and even those in a distant millennia. Abram and Sarai, were God’s first human marketing campaign. And in this first campaign by God for the world, we see how God thinks versus how we usually think. St. Paul holds up this difference for us when he says, “Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see that many of you were the brightest and the best, not many of you were influential, not many from high-society families. God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose those “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretenses of the “somebodies”. Paul’s point is a simple one, and it’s profound, we are just like the first couple of faith, all of us are advertisements, all huge road side billboards for God’s power. Any boasting we can boast truly is in God and God’s power working through us.

Before God’s call to Abraham and Sarai, they were an immobilized family limited by biology, location, conventions and traditions. Now because God is their portion, their renewable resource, they are a responsive family animated by a God with an outrageous imagination. Maybe the biggest deal here is that in all categories of their lives God extends, enlarges and enlightens. Here again back to Paul he nails it when he says,“God can do infinitely, abundantly, exceedingly more than we can ask or imagine according to the faith at work in us.” Imagine the talk in the town about Abram and Sarai. Imagine how the towns folk were made to wonder because of Abram Sarai, about their own relationship with God. Imagine what Abram and Sarai had to say around bon fires and in tents the rest of their lives! Maybe something like this, We were just existing. Now we are living! What was futile for us now is fertile in God’s hands. What was too shameful to speak of before now is means for reconnection, redemption and joy. Everything changed for them when they decided to believe that they were who God said they were and heirs to what God said was theirs.

In God’s call to Abram and Sarai both the promise and the mechanism for proof of God’s reliability are present. God being their portion leads them to pilgrimage. And daily living as a pilgrimage with God, is the only way we can know with our minds, souls and bodies that this God is a promise keeping God! Pilgrimage is how we road test the reliability of God’s promise to be our portion. Pilgrimage, traveling where and how God calls us to travel is the way we let the world know that there is indeed a more excellent way! Once they hear the promise, Abram and Sarai, well they start packing. That’s because after all is said and done, worship is faith in action. Worship is what I actually do with my head, heart and hands. God was their portion and God deeply desires for us to know and confess that God is our portion.

And just because the journey with God can be long and difficult at times and even disorienting, here comes Jesus, God wrapped in flesh among us. Living and true. Jesus refreshes God’s call to Abraham and Sarai and says not only go but also follow me. Let’s go together, Jesus says. You are my people. I am your portion. I am your enough.

AMEN.