Lenten Devotions – Week 2

Ur

Genesis 12:1-4a

Our journey through the Lenten wilderness has brought us to important places along our way. We began our mid-week stops with the Garden of Eden last week, where Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil to become like God. But there they were sent on their way with God’s promise that they would not leave Eden alone, but that with them God would go into our much less than Edenic world. 

Today, we begin in the oldest part of the Bible. It is here in Genesis twelve, in the land of Ur, that we find Abram and Sarai. Ur was in southern Mesopotamia, the fertile flood plains of civilization around modern Iraq today, just to the West and North of Israel. 

Abram’s lineage is traced back to Shem. Shem, one of Noah’s three sons, Noah who, with his family in the Ark became the second Adam. The second ‘first’ human of creation, as God started over, blotting out all the wickedness of the earth with the flood. 

The call of Abram and Sarai is an unexpected one. The Lord meets this couple, who already had a life and kindred in the city of Haran, in the land of Ur. Abram and Sarai are called by God to give it all up and go. To get up and go to an unknown place, to a land that they did not know but that would only become known in the future. 

This call from The Lord is by no means an easy call to follow. Yet, this call sets the stage for the people of Israel and their relationship with the Lord God. There is a signal in this call to give up Sarai and Abram’s country, and father’s house, and kindred that the life of faith and obedience might regularly demand us to leave behind comfort and certainty. 

But Abram and Sarai faithfully go. Not knowing where the Lord God will send them. 

Eventually, Abram and Sarai will become the parents of Israel. Their sons, Isaac and Ishmael, and grandsons, Jacob and Esau, and their 12 great-grandsons, including Joseph and his dream coat, will eventually establish the nation of the Israelites. The people who are rooted and formed in the call of The Lord to get up and go. 

But God’s call is not just one that makes demands of Abram and Sarai, that makes demands of us. 

With God’s call comes a covenant. A trifold promise. The Lord promises to Abraham first land. Not just any land, but land that God will provide – promised land. Land that it takes Moses to lead God’s people to. A place to call home, a place where God’s people belong. 

The second promise is that God will make of Abram and Sarai a great nation, that God will bless them with many descendants. With offspring more numerous than the stars in the sky. People who will claim that they have Abram and Sarai, or Abraham and Sarah as their ancestors. 

Finally, the third promise that God makes is that Abram and Sarai will be blessed. Blessed means that they will carry with them the presence of God, that they will not go alone, but that God goes with them. Just like Adam and Eve who left Eden and God went with them, Abram and Sarai leave Ur with God along for the journey. 

However, these three promises are not just any promises. They are not promises that are just for Abram and Sarai; these promises are given or all of God’s people. These three promises become the Abrahamic Covenant – the promise that is the foundation of God’s relationship with the Hebrew people throughout the Old Testament. It is a birthright that Isaac was given over Ishmael, the promise that Jacob stole from Esau, the promise that Joseph rescued from certain doom when he brought his family from famine and into the land of Egypt. The promise that Moses than carried with the Israelites into the exodus and eventually almost to the promised land. 

They are the promises that Jesus would have learned as a young boy studying the Torah, listening at the feet of his parents at Shabbat, from the Rabbis in the synagogue, from the priests in the temple. The promise that the Pharisees threw in his face when he promised a new covenant. 

It is the promise that becomes the through-line from Genesis to the end of the Old Testament, and again from the Gospels to Revelation. The promise that still defines the people of Israel to this day. 

It is the promise that Jesus adds onto with the New Covenant of the cross, the new covenant that we receive in Bread and Wine, the New Covenant that defines us, the Body of Christ. That we too are given a place in God’s Kingdom, that we too are part of God’s family, that God is our God and we are God’s people. 

From humble beginnings in Ur, two faithful people were called to get up and go, to follow God’s call out into the world. With them went a promise, a covenant, that has carried from there to us, reminding us that in this world we are not alone but always going with God.