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Lenten Place – Ur

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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. 

Pastor Thoughts

Lenten Places – Eden

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Lenten Devotions – Week 1

READING: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

Our Lenten pilgrimage through the wilderness began last Wednesday in the valley of Ashes. There, we were reminded that we were dust and ash and to dust we shall return. But we were also reminded that the cross stamped on our foreheads that night was first placed there in baptism, as a sign of God’s claim on us – a brand marking us as belonging to the Body of Christ. 

Then on Sunday, we visited the wilderness of temptation with Jesus. There, Jesus revealed to us that in the Wilderness, God meets God’s people. 

But our wilderness roaming is not aimless. In fact, along the way, we come to places of significance and meaning. Having already come down to the valley of ashes and the desert wilderness, our next stop is the Garden of Eden. You might recall this stop from Sunday’s readings. 

Though impossible to place on a map, Eden was paradise. There the Lord God walked with the Adam… the creature made from the mud of the ground – which is what the name Adam or A’Dam means in Hebrew. The Lord God made Eden a home for the Lord God’s good creation. In the Garden, the A’Dam was free to live in peace and free, though the Lord God instituted a few rules. The Lord God told the A’Dam that he could eat from any tree in the Garden except the tree of the knowledge of the Good and Evil. If Adam ate from that tree, he would die. 

Now the Lord God’s command was not prescriptive or intended to be punishment, rather it was like a parent warning a child not to touch a hot stove, for if you touch you will burn your hand. 

Then we jump from the Lord God and Adam, to the serpent and the woman. Our reading skips a few verses, the ones in which God takes a rib from Adam, or perhaps more accurately in Hebrew, splits Adam into two and creates Eve, which means the mother of creation. 

The serpent and Eve share in the first theological conversation of scripture. The serpent asks if the Lord God said that she should not eat from any tree in the Garden. Now of course, Even wasn’t there for the initial boundary setting between Adam and the Creator. She only has second-hand information. 

But like any good theologian, she looks for context. She locates the tree in the middle of the garden, offering a way to know where the tree could be found in order to avoid it. Then, in a theological move that every good Hebrew faithful would know, Eve adds a layer of protection. Just as the 616 laws of Israel that governed daily life: what could be eaten, what work could be done, and how to remain ritually clean, as they were designed to keep people always two steps back from directly breaking one of the 10 commandments – Eve adds an extra step to the Lord God’s boundary of not eating the fruit of the tree. Eve declares that the tree could not be touched. If the tree cannot be touched, then surely none of its fruit will be accidentally eaten. 

The serpent then presents Eve with a new reality – eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and you will be like God. 

This is where the gravity of Eden begins to pull on us. A good Hebrew or a good Lutheran ear would know that being like God is the issue at the heart of the commandments. It is to contravene the first commandment – I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other Gods before me. 

As Martin Luther said, if we keep the first commandment, then we keep all the others. If we fail to keep any of the other commandments, we also fail to keep the first. 

The temptation of the old sinner within us is the temptation to be like God – to be God in God’s place. 

Being like God also means innocence lost. Being like God means the reality of sin, the reality of suffering, the reality of self-centeredness, self-righteousness, and self-importance enters into our awareness. 

Eden is no longer possible for those who seek to be like God. 

And yet, it is human to want to know God. Human to seek understanding. Human to seek context and location. Human to speak words that try to articulate the divine, that try to describe God and God’s creation. The serpent in all his craftiness knew this. 

And the serpent knew that this meant Eden would end. 

But Adam and Eve do not leave Eden empty-handed. We do not leave from Eden empty-handed. 

God gave Adam and Eve skins and furs to wear, and God gave them a promise. That no matter where they went, that would be known. Known by and to each other. And known by God. 

Known by the God who gave us Eden, who gave us paradise. 

Known by the God who leaves Eden, who leaves paradise with us. 

The God who, knowing sin, suffering and death, would enter into the world by humanity… decided to be like us. To take on our flesh, our world, our lives. And to bear to our suffering, bear our sin and bear our death all the way to the cross… that we will one day see Eden once more. 

Amen