Evolving God
Genesis 12:1-4a
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 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.”
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him.
On the surface, there’s not much to this short passage. It’s the beginning of the Bible’s stories of the patriarchs of Judaism, so it seems a strange one for Lent, doesn’t it? After all, Lent is the time in which we talk about Jesus’ journey to the cross, and ultimately to resurrection— but this is a crucially important passage. It marks a turning point for literary and historical characteristics of the Bible, and for God God-self.
Remember that last week we read about the Fall—about Eve and Adam choosing to eat the forbidden fruit and becoming overcome with knowledge and shame. After that, God would punish them—they would be expelled from Eden, making food for themselves would now be a laborious and difficult task, childbirth would be painful and dangerous, living life would now be a difficult and frightening undertaking. And before from there to Abram, to where we are today, there are several other instances of an angry God and divine punishment. God, tired of humanity’s cruelty and corruption, feels sorrow and regret at creating them, at creating us, and, as the familiar story goes, floods the earth, destroying all of humanity, with the exception of Noah and his family on the ark. And just before the story Al read for us today, we have the story of the Tower of Babel—of humankind uniting to build a tower to reach the heavens. God sees this and becomes angry once again, and as punishment, creates different languages and scatters humanity throughout the world so that understanding one another would not be more difficult than ever. The stories of the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, and Babel are variations of creation myths. That doesn’t mean they’re not divinely inspired and that there aren’t things we can learn from them, but that is what they are. And they really challenge us (or me, at least) present a God who appears jealous, angry, and volatile— a God struggling with and grieving God’s own creation.
But today we get something different. We get God, picking a family, seemingly at random, and blessing them. We don’t know much about Abram, soon to be Abraham— only what’s written here and what’s given in his genealogy just before our passage today—so all we really know are the names of Abram’s family members, and, crucially important that, as it’s written in chapter 11 verse 30, that his wife, “…Sarai was barren; she had no child.” So Abram and Sarai had no offspring. It’s well-known that she will miraculously become pregnant at the age of 127 a little later on; but we’re not there yet.
When God says to Abram, “I will make of you a great nation,” that’s God saying you and your descendants will create a great nation. But if Abram and Sarai are unable to children, how would this ever be possible? God doesn’t say how. God doesn’t explain. God gives vague instructions and vague promises of blessings, and Abram says yes—yes to God’s instructions to leave their homeland for a new land. This would have been a big deal in these days—unless you were a nomad, it was a huge risk picking up and leaving your land, your family, your connections. And yet, Abram, trusting in God’s promise, “went, as the Lord had told him.”
In his masterpiece of theology and philosophy Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard recounts the troubling story that would come later—the binding of Isaac—in which God tests Abraham by ordering him to sacrifice his and Sarah’s long-awaited son, Isaac, and at the last minute, stops the sacrifice from happening. Kierkegaard sees this story as the ultimate example of a leap of faith, as it would later be termed, as an ultimate trust in God and in the possibility of God’s promise, and God’s ultimate plan. And while the command to murder one’s beloved child, a child who had been awaited for an impossibly long time, is an extreme one, and extremely cruel one at that, God, up to that point, had shown Abraham what was possible when you had faith—Sarai had become pregnant, Abram had become a successful and respected member of society, beloved by kings and peasants alike. The command is extreme, but Abraham had no reason to distrust in God’s plan after all he had experienced.
It could be argued, I think, that Abram took the bigger leap of faith in our passage today. Not only was it a huge risk leaving his homeland for vague promises, but if we’re being completely honest, God… did not have the best track record up to this point. Abram, a descendent of Noah, had surely heard stories almost exclusively of death and destruction, of God’s jealousy and vengeance. But he picks up and leaves anyway. He hears that God is promising him a family and fame, and he “went as the Lord had told him.”
I wouldn’t blame Abram if had chosen to stay put in spite of God’s call—all his people had known up to that point was destruction—it takes a lot of courage to trust that something or someone can change for the better.
Thinking about God turning a new leaf got me thinking about parenting. Parenting in today’s world of social media and constant advice and information being thrown at you 24/7 is exhausting, let me tell you—all the new buzzwords and names for different categories of parenting—permissive, gentle, authoritative, authoritarian—the list goes on. As if keeping a little being alive wasn’t already enough of a challenge, now you’re constantly wondering if you’re doing it the right way. But I couldn’t help but think of this evolution of parenting and child-rearing research and science when I was working on my sermon this week. In the not-so-distance past, the most common kind of parenting was authoritarian parenting—this is an inflexible and strict kind of parenting that involves threats and frequent punishment, intentioned to, essentially, scare a child into behaving. This can work, in the sense that children of authoritarian parents will often be obedient and well-behaved, but often not without unintended negative psychological effects for the child—anxiety, people-pleasing, depression…
The concept of authoritative, gentle parenting now seems to be the go-to (or at least it is in my bubble of the internet), and one thing that this style of parenting really emphasizes is positive reinforcement, and positive opposites. For instance, instead of no hitting, you say, gentle hands. Instead of stop throwing your food, it’s food is for eating. And when your toddler is whining that she wants to watch TV, (something I wouldn’t know anything about) instead of saying, no TV right now, stop asking, you say something to the effect of I hear that you really want to watch TV right now, but we’re going to each dinner together first. The idea is that this way, the child feels heard, feels seen, and in theory, can gain and understanding of why they can or cannot do something. It’s pretty simple, really—it’s treating your kid, no matter how young or irrational or frustrating they may be, as a human. It’s setting boundaries while also providing mutual respect.
It seems like God was trying a new parenting strategy— instead of threats of punishment, God chooses to bless Abram, seemingly out of nowhere. Abram trusts this new blessing God, and goes to Canaan. The result of this trust in God turning a new leaf, the result of these blessings, is that Abram would become the patriarch of an entire religion—he would help to usher in a new era and would help to vindicate God’s decision after the flood, to never, ever destroy us again. While yes, God does some other… questionable things (testing Abram, hardening Pharoah’s heart in Moses’ time) ultimately God stays true in the promise to never destroy God’s own creation again. We seem pretty bent on doing that ourselves in fact.
I think that’s what can be tough about being a Christian, or being a person of any kind of faith in today’s world. The world can feel hopeless sometimes. It’s tempting to get on our knees, to look to the heavens and curse God for not stopping all the violence (but if you need to, go for it—I always say, God can take it)— but especially in the wake of the news out of Iran this weekend, and there seemingly being a new catastrophe, domestic or foreign every week. I despise having to bring attention to these things in the pulpit as much as we’re all exhausted of hearing about it—truly. But to be a good Christian, we have to think about what our faith means for us amidst all the chaos of today’s world. And in today’s case—it means doing our best to be as faithful as Abram—doing our best to trust that God is keeping God’s promise. Because in spite of it all, the promise is being kept. Anything happening now is our own doing, not God’s.
We need to look to God’s promise—God’s promise by way of the mutual respect we’re given by God—in the hope that we remain faithful to God and compassionate and kind to one another. We need to look to God’s promise and God’s blessings, and do right by them. And while we should look to Abram as a gold standard of faith, we don’t have to put quite that much pressure on ourselves—because remember, he wasn’t that far removed from the stories of the expulsion from the garden, from the great flood, from the fall of the Tower of Babel. We can see how far we’ve come from these primeval times, and we can trust that things can indeed, get better. God’s given us the tools of love, of compassion, of the Spirit to guide us… and most of all, God has promised us—from Abram on, blessings over punishment. God has promised to be a gentle parent, and instead of threats, gives us gifts. It’s what we do with those gifts that make the difference.
This Lent, instead of directly following the path of Jesus, we’re following the path of God in the Hebrew Bible— last week we started with the ultimate primeval punishment with the reason for the expulsion from Eden… but now, we’re following a God bestowing blessings upon blessings on a people in desperate need. This Lent, we will see that in spite of all the chaos being sowed, God keeps God’s promise and continues to bless us so that we can continue to journey to the cross, and to resurrection.
Our passage today is one of a new, and evolving God. It is one of a God who’s done away with their punishing nature. It is one of a God that realizes the way to keep us going is to make sure we are heard, seen, and loved, and so we hear, see, and love, God, and one another, in return. And so, our passage today is one of new life.
Abram took a leap of faith in heeding God’s call—a God he has no reason to trust or love— to leave his entire life behind for a new one, and was rewarded for it. And our faith as Christians tells us of a God who loves us so much that we are gifted with Jesus, God’s only son, who walked this earth to show us what the power of love can accomplish. It’s hard to believe we were given that gift when we look at the world right now, when we look at what the powerful have chosen to do with it, when we see that the powerful have chosen to ignore it altogether.
But like our call to worship today said,
…today we wait—for the flicker in the darkness, the candle in the window; for the next sign to direct us as we lurch forward in all-encompassing dark. We may as well be doing this with our eyes closed— but that’s faith, isn’t it?
So may we keep the faith in the midst of violence and darkness, knowing that God’s promise is still being kept. May we look out for God’s myriad blessings in the chaos to buoy us. And may we remember that our faith tells us of necessary and painful journey to the cross—but it will always lead to the promise of resurrection. Amen.
