The Lynchpin

(Lectionary for March 12, 2017)

This year’s Lenten journey began with our commitment to convert ourselves to a new view of the environment of which we are only a part. Last week, I urged all of us to become “servants” and “protectors” of our earth, and to do that by recognizing the normative power of the metaphors of Gen. 2:15. This call has become all the more imperative with the appalling announcement yesterday, by the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, that he did not believe that hydrocarbon emissions were the chief driver of climate change. Such a claim is so idiotic and so catastrophic in import that reasonable people, not to mention fully 97% of the world’s climate scientists, can only be astonished and disgusted. What can it possibly mean that the chief person charged in our government with protection of our environment, its skies, seas, soil, and streams, in fact rejects the concerted and long-standing work of the very best of our thinkers on these subjects? The truth of this fun-house horror show is just today barely registering in my brain.

But we must now even more press on to proclaim the truths that the Bible continues to offer to those who seek to minimize, if not annihilate, our call from God to serve the planet, and those who live on it. Today’s text narrows our focus to our relationship to our fellow human creatures as YHWH, God of Israel and creator of the cosmos, demands. This grand and glorious passage is nothing less than the lynchpin of the whole biblical drama.

Following the disaster of the opening act of YHWH and the world: YHWH’s creation of a monumentally good cosmos, balanced and ordered in its beauty and utility (Gen.1-2), we humans quickly and hilariously doing our level best to wreck the whole thing (Gen.3-4), YHWH sadly acting to destroy and start again, and promising afterwards never again to act in such a way against the cosmos (Gen.6-9), and finally those pesky humans again rejecting YHWH by building a foolish and shaky tower to “make a name for themselves” (Gen.11),YHWH goes back to the divine drawing board and seeks another route by which the human creation may find wholeness and harmony. YHWH this time looks to a foreign human being, one Abram from Mesopotamia, to effect the divine will toward the oneness of humanity, and by implication the oneness of the cosmos, so recently shattered by the actions of the tower builders. Listen to YHWH’s call of this Abram (“mighty father” in Hebrew).

“Now YHWH said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kin and the house of your father 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 anyone who curses you I will curse; and in you (or “through you” or “because of you”) all the families of the earth will be blessed (or “will bless themselves”)’” (Gen. 12:1-3). This simple-sounding text is rich with meaning and deserves far more than one brief essay. But here are a few of the highlights.

1. Abram is a complete unknown quantity. Though later imaginative commentators attempted to create all manner of stories surrounding his early life and emergence in Ur and Haran, he appears out of nowhere. The fact that he comes from the mysterious East should be no surprise since Israel long thought that many divine things had an eastern origin (note the east winds of the Sea of Reeds in the Exodus, the east wind that blows on the head of the ridiculous Jonah, and the famous wise men of Matthew’s Gospel, among many others). In short we know precisely nothing about this Abram. Subsequently, we will learn much about the man, in some cases far more than we wished to know!
2. Abram is asked by YHWH to do three increasingly difficult things in his leaving from all he knows to go to a land about which he knows nothing. He is first asked to “leave his country.” Anyone who has left the land she knows and loves, either by choice or by dire necessity, knows well the sting of such an act. We need only in our time ask any immigrant who has fled their land to find hope and safety in a new land what that feels like to imagine the difficulty of abandoning the land one knows to go to an unknown location. Second, Abram is asked to leave his “kin,” his close relatives. In the ancient world, and in many places in our modern world, relatives live close to one another, cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents sharing intimate lives with each other. Leaving one’s country is hard, but surely leaving the rich family compound must be harder. Then, third, he is asked to leave “the house of his father.” Here is without doubt the hardest request of all. Abram must leave father and mother, those who gave him life and help in his helpless infancy, who taught him to walk and speak, who supplied those endless necessities of life that brought him to adulthood. All of that, YHWH demands that Abram abandon to a completely uncertain future.
3. YHWH promises that Abram will be “a great nation,” and quickly defines just what a great nation is. Greatness has nothing to do with wealth or power or ICBM’s or, perhaps least of all, self-aggrandizement of any kind. A nation is ONLY great, says YHWH, when it is itself “a blessing.” Greatness is never defined by one nation only. Nations are great when they are known for their blessings to others. This is made crystal clear in the final and concluding line of Abram’s call. “In you all the families of the earth will be blessed (or “will bless themselves”). This claim is as straightforward and unarguable as any claim in the Bible: nations are defined by one thing, namely whether or not they serve as conduits to others of the blessings of YHWH.How vibrantly potent is this lynchpin of our Bible! Its implications are manifold and crucial for our perceptions of ourselves and of our fellow human beings. Our central task as humans in the sight of God is both simple and profound: we are blessings to all of our colleagues on this planet or we are not great. We serve our planet or we are not great. We are a blessing to all other humans or we are not great. Donald Trump shouts that he wants to “make America great again,” but if he truly means that call he can only mean, in light of Genesis 12, that he wants America to be a blessing to the nations. His actions thus far in his administration, do not appear to be at all concerned with other nations, save their service of so-called American greatness. Vastly increasing the Defense Department’s budget at the expense of myriad social safety nets and cultural treasures will not make America great, but will create fortress America, the very antithesis of greatness, according to Genesis.

The demand of Gen.12 is loud and continues to resound. It is a clarion call for us to redouble our efforts to create a country that serves the world and does not proclaim its own selfish proclamations of vast power and luxuries, the supposed envy of the world. We are blessings to all or we are the bane of all; there is finally no middle ground.

This Lent, let us proclaim loudly and forcefully that we vow to serve both our living cosmos, our ailing environment, and our equally ailing fellow travellers on our small spinning globe. These are the calls of Genesis, and even after more than two millennia, those calls remain vital and necessary if we are to continue our journeys together in the sight of the God who created and sustains us all.