Take Over, God!
Commentary
In these passages, God calls on individuals to give up control of their lives and follow a whole new way of living. Abram and Sarai leave the comfort and familiarity of family and home to set forth on a journey with no clear destination. They heard, obeyed, and changed the world. Paul expands on this singular event in Abram’s life and how that changes our world. And Jesus reaches out to someone on the margins, someone well enough off to believe they don’t need direction and calls on that person to follow him.
It all looks good on paper, especially the pages of our Bibles, but how ready are we to let God lead us into new and different territory?
Genesis 12:1-9
Right before this passage the genealogy of Tarah presents us with a dead end. Tarah’s journey to Canaan, which will later be identified as the Promised Land, is cut short. One son died prematurely. Another son has no heir. But where there seems to be no future, God bursts on the scene and promises a future that didn’t exist before to Abram and Sarai.
In return, Abram and Sarai are to set out on a journey to God’s good destiny without knowing all the particulars. They have to leave the dead end. It takes courage to set out as an immigrant, whether literally, emotionally, or spiritually. When you step forward into another land, everything you know is wrong. You are out of your comfort zone, and your language zone. But this move will end up as a blessing for untold billions, Christians, Jews, Muslims, all of whom trace their lineage back to Abram.
The immigrant changes life for her descendants in incalculable ways. We sometimes fail to recognize what a bold move it is when a stranger takes her place among us.
The first stage of this journey takes the couple to Shechem, a sacred site with centuries of religious associations, with the oak of Moreh. Moreh calls to mind the words teacher, oracle, giver. But it is transformed when Abram calls upon the name of the Lord by name, YHWH, I AM. This place now has a new religious history.
Even so, the journey is not close to being over. Abram and Sarai, in one sense, never fully arrive at God’s promised destiny. The promise does not immediately come to pass. Some things they will never see. Their faith will waver, and be restored, and waver again. They will make mistakes, big ones. But God is with them – and God is with us. We are part of something bigger than we imagine. We are on a journey, and though we are citizens of heaven we remain strangers in a strange land, who will not fully arrive at our destination in this lifetime.
Perspective matters. It’s like that old medieval story about the traveler who comes upon two men smashing large rocks into smaller rocks. When asked what he is doing the first man answer, “Breaking up rocks.” The second man, however, answers, “Building a cathedral.”
Romans 4:13-25
The apostle builds on the story of Abraham’s faithfulness, emphasizing as stated above that Abraham did not fully arrive at his destination in his lifetime, and that in part this is because the promise is as much for us as for Abraham. He obeyed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. When we obey without fully realizing like Abraham we are taking hold of the same promise, even if we do not see it fulfilled. Paul suggests in some ways we have an advantage over Abraham. We have seen a God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” That is Jesus. We also have the example of the obedience of Jesus, giving control over to the Heavenly Father even as Abraham gave control over to the Great I AM.
We who are faithful without fully seeing what we believe in, regardless of our ethnic, cultural, or religious background, become part of the family of Abraham, to whom the blessing is promised.
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
And now Jesus is calling a new family into being and telling them, like Abram and Sarai, to set out on a journey. In this passage, Jesus comes under criticism for the calling of Matthew, the tax collector, who is an outsider reviled by his own people for his seeming collaboration with the hated Roman occupiers. But this is a member of the family of faith, and just as it was the will of God for Abram and Sarai to set out without a clear path to follow, Jesus calls Matthew, no doubt comfortably installed in a home and profession with more security than many in his era, to get up and go, and follow him to parts unknown. In response to criticism about this move, Jesus reminds his critics that it is the ailing who need a doctor – with a little bit of unspoken irony that maybe his questioners are not as well as they think. And this image of healing, with Matthew now a part of his entourage, takes visible form as Jesus heals a young girl and a woman with a bleeding problem, both marginal figures who may not have been as considered as important in that male-dominated society as others might have been. These might have been controversial choices, but just as the Oak of Moreh, a place of ancient wisdom, is transformed into a place of worship of the Great I Am, so the supposed wisdom of our age is transformed by our relationship with Jesus so that we may heal the outcast, the lost, the forsaken, and the forgotten.
It all looks good on paper, especially the pages of our Bibles, but how ready are we to let God lead us into new and different territory?
Genesis 12:1-9
Right before this passage the genealogy of Tarah presents us with a dead end. Tarah’s journey to Canaan, which will later be identified as the Promised Land, is cut short. One son died prematurely. Another son has no heir. But where there seems to be no future, God bursts on the scene and promises a future that didn’t exist before to Abram and Sarai.
In return, Abram and Sarai are to set out on a journey to God’s good destiny without knowing all the particulars. They have to leave the dead end. It takes courage to set out as an immigrant, whether literally, emotionally, or spiritually. When you step forward into another land, everything you know is wrong. You are out of your comfort zone, and your language zone. But this move will end up as a blessing for untold billions, Christians, Jews, Muslims, all of whom trace their lineage back to Abram.
The immigrant changes life for her descendants in incalculable ways. We sometimes fail to recognize what a bold move it is when a stranger takes her place among us.
The first stage of this journey takes the couple to Shechem, a sacred site with centuries of religious associations, with the oak of Moreh. Moreh calls to mind the words teacher, oracle, giver. But it is transformed when Abram calls upon the name of the Lord by name, YHWH, I AM. This place now has a new religious history.
Even so, the journey is not close to being over. Abram and Sarai, in one sense, never fully arrive at God’s promised destiny. The promise does not immediately come to pass. Some things they will never see. Their faith will waver, and be restored, and waver again. They will make mistakes, big ones. But God is with them – and God is with us. We are part of something bigger than we imagine. We are on a journey, and though we are citizens of heaven we remain strangers in a strange land, who will not fully arrive at our destination in this lifetime.
Perspective matters. It’s like that old medieval story about the traveler who comes upon two men smashing large rocks into smaller rocks. When asked what he is doing the first man answer, “Breaking up rocks.” The second man, however, answers, “Building a cathedral.”
Romans 4:13-25
The apostle builds on the story of Abraham’s faithfulness, emphasizing as stated above that Abraham did not fully arrive at his destination in his lifetime, and that in part this is because the promise is as much for us as for Abraham. He obeyed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. When we obey without fully realizing like Abraham we are taking hold of the same promise, even if we do not see it fulfilled. Paul suggests in some ways we have an advantage over Abraham. We have seen a God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” That is Jesus. We also have the example of the obedience of Jesus, giving control over to the Heavenly Father even as Abraham gave control over to the Great I AM.
We who are faithful without fully seeing what we believe in, regardless of our ethnic, cultural, or religious background, become part of the family of Abraham, to whom the blessing is promised.
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
And now Jesus is calling a new family into being and telling them, like Abram and Sarai, to set out on a journey. In this passage, Jesus comes under criticism for the calling of Matthew, the tax collector, who is an outsider reviled by his own people for his seeming collaboration with the hated Roman occupiers. But this is a member of the family of faith, and just as it was the will of God for Abram and Sarai to set out without a clear path to follow, Jesus calls Matthew, no doubt comfortably installed in a home and profession with more security than many in his era, to get up and go, and follow him to parts unknown. In response to criticism about this move, Jesus reminds his critics that it is the ailing who need a doctor – with a little bit of unspoken irony that maybe his questioners are not as well as they think. And this image of healing, with Matthew now a part of his entourage, takes visible form as Jesus heals a young girl and a woman with a bleeding problem, both marginal figures who may not have been as considered as important in that male-dominated society as others might have been. These might have been controversial choices, but just as the Oak of Moreh, a place of ancient wisdom, is transformed into a place of worship of the Great I Am, so the supposed wisdom of our age is transformed by our relationship with Jesus so that we may heal the outcast, the lost, the forsaken, and the forgotten.
