“From Haran to Canann”
Gen 12:1-4a
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
3/16/14
“Go,” God says to
Abram. “Just pack it all up, and
go. I’ll tell you where to stop.”
As Abram makes
preparations to go, he is not likely to be able to offer any reasonable
explanation for his actions. Living into
the trust required to uproot and leave family and familiar surroundings is even
more pristine territory than the land of Canaan itself. Abram is a trailblazer. He has no scripture or time-tested tradition
in which to ground his journey. All he
has is a lump in the throat. A churning
in his belly. A mysterious “Yes” that
escapes from some hidden place in his heart that his mind had never known. Yet, from within and without, Abram feels an
irresistible sense of Go.
Imagine what happens
when Abram does have to tell others why he is leaving, and that he has no
concrete destination in mind.
“God told me to go,” he
will say.
“God?” they ask. “Which god?”
“Just God,” answers Abram.
His family and friends
probably look at each other thinking, “Well, reckon it's time to cull the
herd. Old Abe seems to be about one hump
shy of a camel. Bless his heart.”
Abram lives in a place
and time of competing, tribal gods. The
very idea that there is but one God
whose sight, and breath, and hand extend further than the next clan’s property
line is totally foreign to his contemporaries.
In fact, they probably feel threatened enough to help this poor but
dangerously misguided soul pack up and be on his way.
“So Abram [goes], as the
Lord had told him.”
Thus begins the journey
that you and I still travel.
It’s all about
faith. “Faith,” writes Frederick
Buechner, “is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as
a possession. It is on-again-off-again
rather than once-for-all. Faith is not
being sure where you’re going but going anyway.
A journey without maps.”1
Abram steps out into the
bright darkness of uncertainty trusting that God will guide him toward a brand
new future. And for much of the journey
he gropes along rather blindly, in some instances rather pitifully and
faithlessly. But we can understand that,
too, can’t we?
Have you ever seen a TV
or movie depiction of firefighters inside a burning house? Hollywood’s a crock when it comes to fire
scenes. They make it look as if flames
actually light up the house so you can see, but inside a burning building it is
pitch black dark. Like a wolf devouring
its prey, smoke swallows everything, including light. That’s why firefighters, if they can help it,
never enter a fire alone. They enter at
least in pairs, and in groups of three of four when they can. They crawl on their knees, talking to one
another, each of them keeping a hand on the hose so they can help to pull it
through the house, and to spray water when they need to, but even more
importantly, so they can find their way out when they have to.
The first time I put on
turnout gear and went into a burning house, I told the other guys, “I don’t see
well without my glasses.”
“Trust me,” one of them
said. “It won’t make any difference.”
It didn’t. And I did have to trust him. I had to follow him into an unfamiliar house,
bumping into furniture and walls I couldn’t see, feeling and listening for the
men ahead of me and behind me. I also
had to listen for a still, small voice of calm within me, because it would have
been easy to have panicked and turned back.
I guess I heard something, though.
When you have to trust, you
will discover ears you didn’t know you had.
When familiar surroundings
and familiar ways of life feel so safe and comfortable, God’s call to Go comes as an intrusive and even
destructive word. And to act on faith is
risky business. It is to trade what
appears to be certainty for what is clearly uncertainty. Writing on this passage, Walter Brueggemann
says, “Faith is…the capacity to risk what is in hand for what is yet to be
given by [God].”2
There is a very
interesting detail in Abram’s story. The
detail actually lies toward the end of Genesis 11. In the 31st verse we learn that
Terah, Abram’s father, also packs up his family and all his possessions, leaves
his home of Ur, and sets his sights on the land of Canaan. When his caravan arrives in Haran, though,
Terah stops. We can’t know why Terah
stops, but that’s the beauty of sacred story.
Like a night dream’s desire for continuing attention, a sacred narrative
dares us to enter and to continue the action.
So Terah’s story asks us to ask ourselves why we stop when God calls and equips us to go so much further along
the risky trust walk of faith.
What do each of us have
in hand that that God’s relentless call to Go
deeper threatens? What do we as a church
family have in hand that God’s call to Go
further demands that we turn loose? What
must we risk?
Like most watershed
characters in scripture and in collective memory, Abram becomes much more than
the man himself could ever be.
Personifying faith, he becomes an archetype of the spiritual quest. As the ancient patriarch of Judaism, Islam,
and Christianity, Abram represents the deepest stirrings of the human heart to
go, to discover, and to become. To use
Brueggemann’s words again, Abram is “habitually restless [and] ready to dare.”3 As comfortable and content as he may be in
Haran, he simply cannot stay there.
Something eats at him to move on, to Go. That something
Abram and his descendants begin to call God, God with a capital “G,” God who
creates, inhabits, loves, and aims to unify all
things.
How do we listen for,
recognize and respond to that same intrusive, disruptive voice? It is always calling us to exercise our
faith, to risk, and to go, but to go where?
Well, that’s always hard to say.
We only know that we can never stay put in Haran, because Canaan is our
home. And where is Canaan? Well, I don’t think that we can know that in
any final sense, because Canaan is not any one place.
God’s call disrupts us
into a liberating truth – the truth that virtually every Canaan becomes a Haran
if we stay there long enough. Canaan
happens in blessed, memorable moments along the way. And when we have learned what each Canaan has
promised to teach us, that daring restlessness starts to churn, again. It urges us to leave what is familiar,
comfortable, and safe in search of that next place which may demand more of us,
but which promises to reveal more to us.
When we do walk the
troubled path of transforming grace, we learn not only to endure, but to
welcome and to trust the changes. We
learn how to become a part of the process of life, death, resurrection, and
rebirth. That is to say, of course, we
learn to participate in God’s ongoing work of creation.
We don’t always go, do
we? From time to time, all of us choose
to stay in Haran where we convince ourselves that we have figured it all out,
that we have gotten it right. So we muster all the fellow Haranites we can
find. We fly the flag and beat the drums
of Haran. “Hail Haran!” we cry as we dig
our heels in deep. But that’s when
things turn sour. When we try to stunt
the growth of a God-imaged heart, we get root bound, and we begin to die from
the inside out. At that point, we
project all that inner turmoil outward onto others. We blame and label the handiest and scariest them we can find for all that is wrong
with the world, while at least half of the problem is that we are stuck in the
rigid boundaries of Haran. God dares us
to become more fully human that we can ever be in any gated-community
Haran. If we are to know peace, the
journey must continue.
Yes, leaving Haran might
mean a physical move, or a change of vocation.
More often, though, it may mean reaching across an old wound to forgive
someone. It could mean trying to listen
humbly and without prejudice to some particular person or group of people with
whom we passionately disagree. Leaving
Haran surely means naming our hand-made, store-bought, and hard-earned gods –
those possessions, habits, and fears we worship – and then beginning to forsake
them one by one.
I will never, even for a
moment, regret the six years I spent teaching school. That difficult experience transformed me, and
I gave it my best possible effort at the time.
But when that blessed Canaan became a Haran, I had to leave. And when I
did, I left with tears, gratitude, and hope.
The same is true for my time in Cross Roads and Shelby Presbyterian
Churches.
Along the way, my
thoughts and ideas about who I am individually and who we are collectively in
God have changed, and they are still changing.
But I will never regret having thought differently at an earlier time. The journey into wholeness and authenticity
requires change because it demands growth.
It demands that I take chances that may seem to some folks like
foolishness, or maybe worse. I will
continue to experience failure and to make mistakes, but as long as I seek to
love and participate in God by loving you and all my brothers and sisters, by
loving myself, and by loving the earth that sustains us, I will have no
regrets.
What about you? Where are you right now? Canaan, Haran, or somewhere between? And how does God stir you with blessed
restlessness? How does God call you
higher and deeper into your own journey?
How do you listen for and hear God’s voice?
It’s all about
faith. It’s a “journey without
maps.” We begin the journey from each
Haran to the next Canaan by stepping out in daring faith.
And here is the
promise: As God is faithful to Abram,
God will be faithful to you. So may you
follow in the dusty steps of Abram and Sarah, Moses, Ruth, David, Mary, and
Jesus the Christ.
May you be restlessly,
gratefully, adventurously faithful to God.
1Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A
Theological ABC. Harper&Row, 1973, p. 25.
2Walter Brueggemann, Texts for Preaching: A
Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV – Year A, James D. Newsome, Ed. Westminster John Knox Press, 1995, p. 193.
3Ibid. p. 193.
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