If you've ever moved house,
you'll know that the first
question anybody asks isn't why.
It's where. Where are you going?
And you tell them, and they
nod, and they either say "oh, lovely"
or they say "oh" in
a slightly different tone,
and either way the conversation can proceed,
because a place has been named
and the world has been made
manageable again.
Abram couldn't answer the
question.
God gives him what sounds, at
first, like a fairly comprehensive brief.
Leave. Travel. Become a
nation.
Be blessed. Be a blessing.
There's a promise of
descendants,
a promise of reputation, a
promise of protection.
It's generous, it's expansive,
and it's missing precisely one detail,
which is the only detail
anybody ever actually wants.
Go from your country and
your kindred and your father's house
to the land that I will show
you.
Not the land I'm showing you
now.
Not the land you can find on a
map, with a postcode and a train line
and a school five minutes'
walk away.
The land that I will show you.
Future tense. Later. Trust me.
We've just sung about this
— "God it was who said to
Abraham, pack your bags and travel on" —
and I love that hymn,
but it does make it sound
rather brisker than it was.
Because look at the order of
the leaving.
Country, then kindred, then
father's house.
It narrows. It zooms in.
Each phrase costs more than
the one before it.
Your country is, in the end, an
abstraction
— a flag, a set of customs, a
way of pronouncing things.
Your kindred are the people who know your business.
But your father's house is the
roof and the table
and the smell of the place
and every single person who
has ever known what you were like as a child.
Genesis takes its time getting
to the painful bit.
It knows what it's asking.
And Abram is seventy-five years
old.
We moved to London fourteen
years ago,
and when agreed to come to
Bloomsbury, we didn’t have a postcode either,
because the church had yet to
buy the manse for us to live in.
We just had a letter of
appointment, a church meeting decision,
and a trust that something suitable
would be found in time; and it was.
Abram just had a voice and a
promise and a direction of travel. That's it.
Whatever faith is, it isn't
certainty.
Faith is what you do when
you've run out of certainty and you go anyway.
Now, before we get too
misty-eyed about the father of faith, notice verse 5.
Abram took his wife Sarai.
She doesn't get a call. Nobody speaks to her.
She appears in the sentence
somewhere between the nephew and the livestock,
in a list of things that were
taken.
And a few verses further on —
just past where our reading stops —
when the famine comes and
Abram gets frightened,
he saves his own skin by passing her off as his sister
and letting her be taken into
Pharaoh's household.
It's a squalid little episode and Genesis doesn't soften it.
I mention it because we should
be clear-eyed about who God calls.
Abram is not a moral hero.
He is frightened, he is calculating,
and when it comes to it he is
prepared to trade his wife for his safety.
And God keeps going with him
anyway.
Which is, if we're honest,
more of a relief than an embarrassment.
God's call has never waited for us to become admirable first.
But here's the thing we tend to
walk straight past.
What God asks Abram to do is become
a migrant.
That's the founding act of the
people of God.
Not a battle, not a
coronation, not the building of a temple.
A man packing up a household
and setting out for somewhere
he can't name
because he believes he's been
spoken to.
The whole story starts with
someone crossing a border
without a plan he could
articulate to an official.
Put Abram in the present tense
and think about what happens to him.
He arrives somewhere he has no
papers for.
He can't produce documentation for the promise.
He has no permission to be
there, no permanent address,
no recourse to
public funds.
He'd be a case number and then a headline.
He would meet the full
apparatus
of what we learned
to call the hostile environment,
and he would find that the
country he'd arrived in
had developed an
entire vocabulary
— floods, swarms,
waves, queues being jumped —
designed to make it easier not
to look him in the face.
I'm not making a party
political point. I'm making a Genesis point.
The Bible's founding family
are economic migrants,
then famine refugees, then
resident aliens, then slaves,
and the law that emerges from all that
keeps hammering the same
instruction:
you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers.
We didn't get that from
nowhere.
We got it because it's who we
are.
And look around this room.
This is a city-centre church on
Shaftesbury Avenue.
Many of us are here because at
some point we,
or our parents, or
our grandparents,
left a country and a kindred
and a father's house
and came to a
place we'd been told about but hadn't seen.
We are not reading somebody else's story this morning.
Then Abram arrives, and Genesis
12.6 does something remarkable.
He reaches Shechem, he stands
at the oak of Moreh,
and the narrator adds — almost as an aside, almost under his breath —
at that time the Canaanites
were in the land.
The promised land has people in
it. It always did.
Genesis knows this perfectly
well and says so out loud,
in the very same
paragraph as the promise,
and then leaves the sentence
sitting there like an unexploded shell
for the next four
thousand years.
Because the most dangerous
thing you can do with Genesis 12
is read it as a title deed.
It has been read that way, of
course.
It was read that way by Christian
crusaders.
It was read that way by the
Puritans who sailed for New England
convinced they were entering
an inheritance prepared for them,
and who worked out
a careful argument
that land the people already
living there hadn't fenced or ploughed
was land nobody
owned.
It was read that way in South
Africa,
where a whole theology of
chosen people and promised land was constructed,
and where apartheid was the
result,
a theology the Dutch Reformed Church
has since had the
grace to confess, publicly, as sin.
And it is being read that way
now, in the hills of the West Bank,
where Genesis is quoted as a
property document
while families who have farmed olives for generations are moved off,
and where Palestinian
Christians — my friend Munther Isaac among them —
have to preach every Advent under the weight of a promise
that has been turned into a
weapon aimed at them.
So let's be careful, and let's
be specific
about what Abram actually does
with the promise.
He never owns a square foot of
it.
He pitches a tent.
He builds an altar and moves
on.
He builds a second altar and
moves on again.
He journeys by stages towards
the Negeb, and he keeps journeying,
and the only piece of that
land he ever legally acquires in his whole life
is a cave to bury Sarah in.
That's it. The father of the promise dies a resident alien with a grave.
In Abram's hands the promise is
a vocation, not an entitlement.
He walks it, he worships in
it, he blesses in it.
He does not seize it.
And any reading of Genesis 12
that arrives at bulldozers
has gone wrong somewhere well
before the bulldozers.
Because the promise has a
purpose clause, and it's the last line,
and it's the whole point.
In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
Everything before that is
instrumental.
The nation, the name, the
descendants numerous as the dust
— none of it is the
destination.
It's plumbing.
It's the pipework by which
blessing travels from God to everybody.
A chosen people is not a favoured people.
A chosen people is a people
chosen for something,
and the something is always
everybody else.
Blessing that stops with the
blessed isn't blessing. It's hoarding.
And a church that receives
grace and then builds a wall round it
hasn't
misunderstood a detail;
it's misunderstood the
sentence.
Which is why the lectionary
puts Matthew 28 next to it,
and it's the right call,
because it's the same sentence continued.
All the families of the
earth becomes all nations.
Abram's commission and the
Great Commission
are one promise reaching its
terms.
But we have to be equally
honest about what's been done with this text.
"Go and make disciples of
all nations"
has been carried up beaches
ahead of soldiers.
It has been used to justify
taking children from their parents
and languages out of their
mouths.
Go and make disciples has been
heard, over and over,
as go and make subjects,
go and make Europeans,
go and make them like us.
The Church has an enormous
amount to be sorry for here,
and saying so isn't
disloyalty;
it's the minimum honesty required before we're allowed to read the verse at
all.
So let’s try to read it
properly.
Make disciples, Jesus
says — learners, apprentices, people who follow.
Not converts, not subjects,
not statistics.
And then: teaching them to
obey everything I have commanded you.
Well — what did he command?
Go back through Matthew and find out.
Love your enemies. Pray for
those who persecute you.
Turn the other cheek. Forgive
seventy-seven times.
Whoever wants to be first must be last.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
the meek, the merciful.
You cannot make disciples of that
at gunpoint.
The content of the commission
rules out the methods.
If the message is enemy-love,
then any mission conducted by
coercion
has already failed before it's
opened its mouth.
And notice who's standing on
that mountain in Galilee.
Verse 17, just before our
reading: they worshipped him, but some doubted.
The commission is handed over
to a committee
that can't even agree whether
it's actually him.
Nobody is asked to resolve their doubts first.
Nobody is screened out.
That's the apostolic succession, and frankly that's us.
Then the last line, which is
the line that holds the whole thing up.
I am with you always, to
the end of the age.
Not "go, and send me a
report."
But with you.
Alongside.
And the one who says it is the
one whose hands are still marked,
who has already been on the
receiving end
of every kind of power we
might be tempted to use.
Which means we don't carry
Christ to anywhere.
He's already there.
He got there first, he's been
at work in every place we think we're bringing him to,
and the honest description of
mission is not delivery but arrival,
turning up somewhere
and slowly realising that the
Spirit has been busy here
for generations without
waiting for our permission.
The end of the age isn't a
deadline we're racing towards.
It's the horizon we already
live under.
So Abram builds his altars in a
land that isn't his,
among people who were there
first,
in the long meantime between the promise
and anything visibly
happening.
He gets no fulfilment.
He gets a tent, a route, an
altar, and a grave.
And he worships anyway.
That is a picture of the people
of God,
and it is a more comforting
one than it sounds,
because most of the Christian life is lived in that meantime,
after the promise, before the
evidence,
with the removal van already loaded
and no sign yet of the land
you were told about.
Worship, in that gap, isn't
consolation. It's practice.
It's how hope gets rehearsed
until it becomes a habit.
And it means the question this
text puts to us this morning
isn't are we prepared to
move to Shechem.
It's this: what's the country,
the kindred,
the father's house we're being
asked to leave?
Because it usually isn't
geography.
It's the familiar. It's the
way we've always done it.
It's the assumption that the shape of church we inherited
is the shape God requires.
Provoking faith in the heart of
London is a fine thing to say,
and none of us can tell you
exactly where it leads,
which is more or less the
point.
Just before the sermon we sang
"Will you come and follow me",
and I'd ask you to notice that
it's verse after verse of questions
before anybody dares an answer.
That's not a defect in the hymn.
That's the most accurate thing
we'll sing today.
In a moment we’ll sing
"Forth in the peace of Christ we go,"
and then finish with a hymn
about a hand
that has guided the flock from
age to age.
A hand. Not a map.
God has never yet given
anybody a map.
And then those doors open onto
Shaftesbury Avenue,
one of the most crowded and
most anonymous streets in Europe,
where all the families of the earth walk past each other
at one o'clock on a Sunday
afternoon,
not knowing a single name.
There is no postcode this
morning either.
There is a voice, a promise,
and a pavement.
You were blessed to be a
blessing.
It was never for you alone.
It starts outside that door.
Amen.
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