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.