Abraham Part 2 - Egypt

One of the memories that always stays with you as a parent is the sight of your firstborn taking his or her first few steps.

After weeks of your little one hauling himself or herself up off the floor and standing there on wobbly legs, smiling; there comes a moment when they decide to let go and make for something a few steps away.

And that’s when it all begins – the sometimes painful but ultimately rewarding business of learning to walk.

Today’s excerpt from the story of Abraham reminds me a little of those first few stumbling steps of childhood. Last week we saw Abram make a good beginning when he decided to let go and move away from everything he knew in response to God’s promises.

I will give you a family, God had said. And I will give you this land of Canaan as the place where they shall live.

And so Abram set out from Haran, and he and his entourage literally walked the land; moving from place to place, building altars at Shecem and Bethel. Getting a feel for this place and its peoples.

And in time, his wandering took him south west, into the dry, rocky area west of the Dead Sea known as the Negeb or the Negev.

And it’s there, after a promising start, that Abram’s wobbles begin.

“There was a famine in Canaan” says the writer of Genesis 12. And in a way, that’s no surprise. I remember being in that neck of the woods many years ago and noting that at 8am in the morning the temperature had already reached 30 degrees. Rainfall is always scarce in that part of the world; very little grows, and it wouldn’t take much of a drought to make parts of the country virtually uninhabitable.

Now if you’re in that part of the land, and things are getting tough, the conventional wisdom is that you should go down to Egypt.

Egypt has its deserts too, but what it also has is the Nile, and the Nile delta, and as you’ll see from this image, that has a huge effect on its ecosystem. The green is vegetation, and you’ll notice that wherever the Nile flows, there’s enough water for plants to grow.

 

The Negev relies completely on rainfall – Egypt has the backup system of the world’s longest river running through its backyard.

So the obvious thing – the logical thing – for Abram to do was to make for Egypt.

However, I don’t know if you’ve spotted the possible flaw in that logic.

Why had God asked him to leave Haran? To go to the promised land of Canaan. What was he now doing, at the first sign of trouble? Leaving the promised land of Canaan!

 

And yet at no point, do we read of Abram scratching his head and wondering if that was the right thing to do. Whether God might have some alternative plan up his sleeve to see him through this difficulty.

As far as we know he doesn’t do anything to try and establish what God would have him do. In fact, God seems to be conspicuously absent from this bit of decision making. And that will come back to haunt Abram.

Now it’s easy to criticise from a distance of 40 centuries, and it’s not my people who are struggling for food and water and about whose fate I have to make decisions. But the promised land had its own river, the Jordan, and it supported life and agriculture along its banks, just like the Nile.

Could Abram have looked north rather than south to solve the problem?

Could he have stayed in Canaan and survived, albeit with difficulty, rather than risking everything in Egypt?

Well, we can’t be sure. But it seems clear that he didn’t pause to ask the question.

And I think that’s our first learning point from today’s story.

In life, we invite trouble when we don’t take the time to pray and gain God’s perspective on our situations.

Each day we all make thousands of decisions and most of them are largely inconsequential. I know the theory that’s called the butterfly effect would suggest otherwise, but I’m pretty sure my choice of socks or breakfast cereal this morning isn’t going to have lasting consequences for my life or anyone else’s for that matter.

But there are times, when all of us find ourselves standing at junctions where we have to make decisions and where the path that we take can, in Robert Frost’s words, make all the difference.

Am I going to marry that person? Am I going to stay with them when things get difficult?

Will I take that job? Do the rewards outweigh the costs?

Will I buy that particular house? What sacrifices will I have to make in order to be able to pay it off?

Maybe there’s an activity that I, or someone in my family, loves to do, but it takes place regularly on a Sunday morning. How do we go about deciding what we’re going to do?

In a recession, where do I make the cuts I’m going to have to make in order to get by?

We can all of us look at these kinds of questions and make logical choices about them. But the point I’m making is that the way of logic isn’t always the way of faith.

If he’d set out to merely logical, Abram wouldn’t have left home and people and livelihood. It doesn’t make sense.

Following the logical path would have kept Moses tending sheep, Peter in his fishing boat and Jesus off the cross.

The logical thing to do isn’t always the right thing to do.

 

Now I’m not arguing for the merits of irrationality here. But I am arguing that the people of God need to use faith as well as logic when it comes to our decision making. Are we really trusting the God we say we believe in? Or are we merely trusting our own wits and intuition?

Having begun well, it’s starting to look like Abram’s forgotten who brought him to the promised land in the first place.

And things go from bad to worse.

Just as they’re about to arrive in Egypt, Abram comes to the worrying conclusion that his lovely wife is going to attract unwanted attention. Might sound unrealistic for a woman well into middle age, but to that objection I have a two word rebuttal – Helen Mirren!

 

And Abram worries that in order to get Sarai, someone’s going to try to get him. So he cooks up this story about them being brother and sister rather than husband and wife, because in the culture of the day, it would be the responsibility of a woman’s brother to deal with potential suitors in the absence of her father. And that meant they might look more kindly on Abram.

So that’s the little white lie they settle on as they pass through customs and immigration. And it ends up backfiring spectacularly.

And it’s another instance of Abram going about his business in a way that’s more about trusting his wits than his God.

And the commentaries have a field day with this particular incident in his life.

One or two, controversially, see this as a piece of crass manipulation on Abram’s part and reckon he was getting ready to do some horse-trading and swap Sarai for some loot. But in a culture that prized fidelity very highly, that seems far too damning a verdict.

Perhaps more kindly, some suggest that the lie was only meant to protect them in the short term, until the famine ended. Maybe Abram thought he could fend off any potential interest in Sarai by playing the part of the hard-nosed brother who wasn’t going to settle for anything but an extortionate dowry.

But in the end, of course, the decision was taken out of their hands because the only man in the land who couldn’t be refused came calling. Pharaoh took a shine to Sarai and arranged for her to be brought to the palace; the latest addition to what was probably a sizeable harem.

Can you imagine what that must have been like for both of them?

The utter powerlessness they must have felt when all the might of Egypt came calling? How could they refuse?

Can you imagine the agonised, whispered conversations they must have had in the dead of night while the servants were sleeping? Turning options over and over in their minds, but never finding one that would save them.

Can you imagine the look that must have passed between them as Pharaoh’s officials finally came to take Sarai away, leaving Abram surrounded by a dowry of sheep, goats, camels and slaves but feeling eviscerated in the middle of it all. Watching his wife being taken away to the household and the bedroom of another man whose status he could never hope to challenge.

Utter powerlessness. That’s what they must have been feeling.

They’d been promised descendants and a place to live. In that moment it looked like both promises were dead in the water.

But the lesson of Egypt, for Abram and Sarai, and for us, is that when our resources are at an end, God’s are just beginning.

Out of this situation of utter hopelessness, he works deliverance for them. He works it because he has plans for their future, and he won’t see that messed up, even when they’ve stupidly placed themselves in danger.

Now the Bible’s quiet on what passed between Sarai and Pharaoh – we don’t know whether their marriage was consummated or not. But the Jewish Midrash – their ancient commentary on the Old Testament – takes great delight in describing the very personal nature of the discomfort Pharaoh and some of his household experienced.

And when you remember that in the ancient world sin and disease were thought to go hand in hand, you can understand how Pharaoh comes to the conclusion that Sarai - and her undisclosed marital status - are the root of the problem.

Before you can say jack robinson she and Abram are summoned by Pharaoh and after rounding on Abram for his deception, he angrily dismisses them in just four Hebrew words: “here wife, take, go”.

And so they leave and return to Canaan: wiser, perhaps, and definitely richer because Pharaoh, unaccountably, let them keep the dowry he’d given them. Maybe he was worried about what might happen if he didn’t.

But it wasn’t just wealth they brought back with them to Canaan. They now knew God in a way they hadn’t before. They now knew from practical experience that God is always greater than the situation we find ourselves in, no matter how hopeless it might seem.

And that’s a principle that runs the whole way through the story of the Bible, and that God’s people have to keep learning again and again.

I don’t know if you spotted it, but the parallels between the story we’ve just heard and the story of the Exodus are uncanny. Many years after Abraham, his descendants would once again go down to Egypt because of famine.

In time, they too would end up in Pharaoh’s clutches, in a situation which seemed utterly hopeless. But then God, through Moses, delivered them; he sent plagues on the Egyptians, and the Israelites left the land with the wealth of Egypt in their kit bags.

And the parallels don’t end there - this ceremony that we celebrate today – the Lord’s supper – is the self-same story of deliverance, writ large on the canvas of history not for one man, or one nation, but for all the peoples of the world.

Foolishly, our race stumbled into the captivity of sin and death and our existential situation became utterly hopeless. We could do nothing to save ourselves. Nothing.

But then God intervened in Christ, to overcome sin and death through his self-giving on the cross. And he made a way for us out of our captivity – a way that is open for anyone to take. Whether we call it the way of faith, or the way of the cross, or the way of discipleship doesn’t really matter. What matters is that your feet are on it, and that you’re moving in the right direction.

The stories of Abram in Egypt, the Exodus, and of Christ’s death on the cross bring us the same piece of good news, albeit separated by centuries.

They show us that God is always greater than the situation we find ourselves in, no matter how hopeless it might seem.

Abraham Part 1 - Abram's Call

This morning we’re going to begin a new sermon series that’s going to take us up to and into Advent. And it’s a kind of series that I haven’t attempted before. We’re going to be looking closely at just one Biblical character and following his story from beginning to end to see what we can learn from him – not just from his faith, but from his faults and his failings too. Because the more you read these stories, the more you realise that the so-called heroes and heroines of the faith are just as human and fallible as we are.

The person we’re going to be travelling with is Abraham, whose story is found in the early chapters of the book of Genesis.

So why Abraham?

Well, there are a few good reasons why he’s especially worth our attention.

The first few chapters of Genesis sound almost mythical in places and to this day the church can’t agree on how to interpret the accounts of Adam and Eve, The Tower of Babel and Noah. Some would go to the stake to defend their historicity; others would be equally convinced that they’re legends; albeit legends that teach us important truths about ourselves and God.

But Abraham is the first Biblical character of real significance to emerge from those shadowy mists and be seen in clear definition. He really was. We know his story. And in many ways, his story sets the trajectory for the whole Biblical narrative. It’s no exaggeration to say that we are here in church today because of him.

The promises God made to Abraham were worked out through the history of the people of Israel, but found their ultimate fulfilment in Christ; and that’s why, perhaps more than any other Old Testament figure, the New Testament writers keep taking us back and back again to the story of Abraham.

And that story continues to have huge resonances for us in today’s world. 2 billion Christians, a billion Muslims and twelve million Jews claim some kind of spiritual or ethnic heritage from this one man.

As we’ll discover later, God changed his name from Abram to Abraham – which means ‘father of nations’ - and that’s exactly what history has proven him to be.

In an age when religious tensions continue to simmer, perhaps it’s no bad thing to remember that for all our differences, we do share a common ancestor and at least some common ground.

We join Abraham’s story at the beginning of Chapter 12 in Genesis when he’s still known as Abram, and we find him living with his father’s people in the town of Haran. His father, Terah, had set out from the city of Ur in Babylonia with a view to travelling to Canaan, but for reasons that are never made clear, he abandoned that idea and settled in Haran in Mesopotamia.

Abram is married to Sarai, but they’ve been unable to have children and largely because of that, they take a particular interest in Abram’s nephew Lot, whose father died when he was still young.

That’s where we pick up the story – in Chapter 12.

LET US PRAY

A Rabbi once wrote:

Birth is a beginning
And Death a destination
But Life is a journey,
A going - a growing
From stage to stage.
From Childhood to Maturity
And Youth to Age.
From Innocence to Awareness
And Ignorance to Knowing;
From Foolishness to Discretion
And then perhaps to Wisdom.
From Weakness to Strength
Or Strength to Weakness--
And often back again.
From Health to Sickness
And back, we pray, to Health again.
From Offense to Forgiveness,
From Loneliness to Love,
From Joy to Gratitude,
From Pain to Compassion,
And Grief to Understanding--
From Fear to Faith.
From Defeat to Defeat--
Until, looking backward or ahead,
We see that Victory lies
Not at some high place along the way,
But in having made the Journey,
Stage by stage;
A sacred pilgrimage.

Birth is the beginning
And Death a destination
But Life is a journey,
A sacred pilgrimage
Made stage by stage--
From Birth to Death
To Life Everlasting.

Abraham’s story is the story of a journey within a journey. We can mark out his progress on maps, see where his travels took him, geographically. But the more important journey is the one that was simultaneously happening inside him – the journey of faith that led him deeper into God and into himself.

 

And that journey began with one word from God that came to him as he lived and worked in Haran among his father’s people – and that word was ‘leave’.

 
The Lord said to Abram – “Leave”.

We’ll get to the significance of that in moment, but as a wee aside, I wonder how you react when you hear that phrase “The Lord said”?

These phrases tend to wash over us because we’re so familiar with them in the Biblical narrative, but they’re worth pausing to really listen to.

The Lord said.

How did he say? How did he speak to Abram?

I only ask because not to ask puts this kind of story on a different plane from you and me right away. Subconsciously we put Abram in a box labelled ‘super spiritual’ and assume that he belonged to a different order of humankind for whom direct words from the Almighty were nothing out of the ordinary.

And I’m not sure that’s either right or helpful for us.

If God is God, we have to allow him to communicate with us as he will, and we can’t rule out direct communication. But equally well, we have to say that that doesn’t seem to be the norm for most of us. Most of us aren’t hearing audible voices telling us what to do in life; indeed, if we were, it might well give our families cause for concern.

For most of us, guidance and discernment come slowly and they’re confirmed over time. We hear the voice of God through circumstance, through wise counsel, through the naggings and desires of our own heart that refuse to leave us alone; through the words of Scripture.

Most of the time, this is how we’re guided. We move towards a growing sense of what’s right and what’s needed.

Years ago when I was thinking about ministry and went along to the selection conference, one of the things they were most keen to discuss was the nature of my call to this kind of work. Where had it come from?

And the truth is, it didn’t come in a Damascus road moment; though it may have done for others. For me, it grew over time. I had a growing sense that this was the path I needed to take in life; scripture seemed to be pointing that way, friends, whether Christian or not, were positive about the idea; my desire and my gifting seemed to be taking me in that direction. Over time, those different strands of thought were wound together like the strands of a rope, forming strong conviction that this was the right way forward for me.

In retrospect, I could speak about that call as though it were a sudden thing. But in practice it took a lot of time to grow.

Now there have been other times, when I’ve felt a sudden prompting from God to do something or visit someone, or say something. These things happen too. And maybe if I were more open to God, they would happen more often.

But the key thing, I think, is not to worry too much about how God speaks – whether suddenly or over a long time – The key thing is to cultivate the kind of attentiveness we need in order to hear from him at all.

Abram, it seems, was cultivating that kind of listening. And God’s voice, as it so often does, brought a challenge and a promise at one and the same time.

“Leave” he says. “Leave your country, your relatives and your father’s home”.

Think about that for a moment. How would that command make you feel, given that it came in the days before long-distance travel, telephones and Skype? Not to mention civil rights, land law and the welfare state!

At a time, in middle age, when most of us have settled down and the only big thing on our horizon is retirement, Abram’s being asked to leave everything: the part of the world he’s grown up in; the people and the culture he’s spent his life among; the family who have nurtured him from his mother’s arms.

God is asking him to leave. To leave not just his country, his relatives and his father’s home, but all that they stand for. His security, his livelihood and his very identity.

Why would God ask that of him? And why on earth would he say ‘yes’?

Let’s take those questions one at a time:

Why would God ask that of him?

To see if he’s up for it!  If you’ve planned an expedition to conquer Everest and within a few hours of leaving some of your colleagues are missing  their comfy armchairs and their regular fixes of Coronation Street, chances are you’ve got the wrong companions.

The road God wants Abram to travel is a difficult one – lonely, nomadic and outright dangerous at times. He has to know that he’s up for it.

But he also has to instil within Abram the understanding that from now on his security and his identity are to be in God and in nothing else.

We define ourselves in so many ways – where we’re from, what we work as, the nature of our family relationships. But the argument of Scripture is that before any of these things, no matter how important they are, we need to understand ourselves as belonging to God.

The author Gerry Hughes tells a story about a friend of his called Donald who’s fond of winding people up. They were at a church meeting together and the group were doing that thing when you go round in a circle and say a few words about yourself by way of introduction. And it was all the usual stuff – “I’m Susie and I’m a teacher. I’m David and I’m a mechanic”. And when they got to Donald he gave a wee smile and said “I’m Donald, and I am a unique manifestation of God’s creative genius”.

Funny story, but a serious point. How do we define ourselves? By our jobs? By our roles? By our family connections? By our place of birth?

All of these things are fine. More than fine – they’re good and they’re necessary. But all too easily they can come to define us: squeezing God out of the picture altogether, or relegating him to the role of a bit-part player in the story of our lives.

Here, in our story, God intervenes with Abram to make sure that doesn’t happen. “Leave” he says, intentionally stripping him of all the insulation that family and place and culture provide, and bringing him to the place where he has nothing and no-one to fall back on but God himself.

There comes a point in the life of a young eaglet when its mother pushes it out of the nest and sends it plummeting into the void. It’s a moment of huge risk, but the young bird has to learn to trust its wings, and read the currents that can help it fly. It seems harsh, but it’s the quickest way to learn.

Perhaps this command to ‘leave’ is God’s way of helping Abram fly.

And as we know, he accepts the command. But why, when it seemed so taxing?

The answer, I think, lies in the promise God makes to him in verse 2. “I will give you many descendants, and they will become a great nation. I will bless you and make your name famous, so that you will be a blessing”.

“I will give you many descendants”.

I wonder if that was the clincher for Abram. Already he and Sarai have tried to have children and haven’t been able to. They may well have given up hope of ever having a family. Is it that yearning within him that makes him set out at God’s command? That promise of a better future?

Did he dream of a son with Sarai’s eyes?

I’m sure that’s a part of the reason he responded, and in that, I think we see an example of a pattern that happens time and time again in the Bible. God calls his people to walk on difficult paths, but only for the sake of a better future.

The parallels between today’s story and the call of Jesus’ first disciples won’t be lost on you, I’m sure. Abram was to leave family, place and livelihood. Jesus’ call to James and John, Peter and Andrew, also took them away from home and family, boats and nets. Why did they go? Because this enigmatic rabbi promised that they could share in what he was doing. He would make them fishers of men. Men with a deeper purpose in life; something that wasn’t just about getting by, or existing, but spoke to the very core of who they were and what they longed for.

And we see the very same thing in the life of Jesus himself. In a wonderful passage in the book of Hebrews the writer says that:  for the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Do you see the pattern?

Sometimes the paths God leads us on are difficult, but he only takes us along them because there is the hope of a better future ahead.

And perhaps that’s the key thing to take away from our reading this morning.

Sometimes the right thing to do is not the easy thing to do. It would be easier to stay put, say nothing, batten down the hatches. Resign yourself to how things are. Inertia and fear of the unknown are powerful forces in many of our lives.

But at the same time, there’s something within us that yearns for things to be different – we dare to think that God might want them to be different; but we’ve no idea what the journey ahead of us is going to look like.

And we’re left with a decision to make. Do we resign ourselves to how things are, or do we dare strike out in the faith that God is taking us somewhere better, even though the way may prove to be challenging?

I wonder if any of you are at that kind of a place this morning? Maybe you’re sitting here today and you’re resigned to how things are. This job; that relationship; this pattern of living that you find yourself in.

Maybe God’s word to Abram is his word to you today. Leave.

Either leave the situation itself, if that – under God – is what you need to do. Or leave behind the mindset that makes you resigned to how things are. Physically stay, but set out on the journey of faith that’s going to see things change, remembering that you don’t travel alone. God goes with you.

And God promises not only that you will be blessed, but that in your going, you will become a blessing to others.

You will find, in the words of the Rabbi’s poem.

that Victory lies

Not at some high place along the way,
But in having made the Journey,
Stage by stage;
A sacred pilgrimage.

May God bless us all as we listen for him, and journey with him in the week that lies ahead.