“I wish I could go with you.” That’s what so many people said to me when I told them that I had won a fellowship that would let me spend my first year after seminary studying at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. It was 25 years ago at this point, so it was a very different world; you could not take people with you digitally the way you can now.
This was a decade before the iPhone was first available, 
and I didn’t even own a simple cell phone at the time. There was no social media on which to post or interact; email was the only real way to stay in contact with people, and even that required visiting what were called “Internet cafes,” where you could rent time on a boxy desktop computer (one in Uganda was in the back of a tailor’s shop!) and send an email over a rickety dial-up connection. It certainly wasn’t powerful enough to send any photos, but that was fine, because digital cameras weren’t a thing yet, so both I and everyone else had to wait a whole year until I returned to the States and got my film developed to see my pictures!
In retrospect, though, it was already the end of travel as an experience that cut you off from everyone you left behind. Just five years earlier, I had lived in Australia for a year, and that was far more of a disconnect, because we didn’t even have email then; phone calls were prohibitively expensive, so I had to write letters individually to family and friends instead of sending a periodic group email update, scrawling a brief summary of what I was doing on special airmail stationary that you folded into its own envelope to save money on the expensive postage that still took weeks to get back to the States from the far side of the world.
Which is why people said, “I wish I could go with you.” They technically could have gone, of course, but the gravitational pull of their jobs, their homes, was so strong that it seemed all but impossible to them. They had to wait for the airmail envelopes or the emails or the photos to finally develop to help them imagine what it might be like to have joined me on that trip. And who can blame them? Such a move is about as disruptive and life-changing as is possible. The main reason I could do it, both times, was that each time I had just finished a degree and had no job or children yet, so I had no real responsibilities, and someone else was giving me a fellowship to live on once I got where I was going.
Given all that, I think it’s hard for any of us to imagine exactly what God is telling Abram to do in this pivotal passage in the 12th chapter of Genesis. I’ve gone to live on the far side of the world twice now in my life, and I can’t truly imagine what it would have been like for Abram to have followed God’s command here, to quite literally “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”
First and foremost, when Abram leaves his country and kindred and his father’s house, he is not just leaving familiar surroundings and deep relationships; he is leaving behind everything that gives him his identity in his ancient world of deep familial ties to each other and to their land. In a very real sense, Abram IS who his kindred are and where his country and his father’s house is, so he is effectively becoming a new person, which perhaps is part of why God eventually changes his name to Abraham.
Second, he is not coming back. Those two years I lived in other countries were probably the most formative experiences of my adult life, and yet so much of their impact was in bringing what I learned from those experiences back to my own country and my kindred. That’s not Abram’s story, though; “go” means “gone” once he does it, gone to another country far away, never to return to the land of his kindred and his father’s house. And he will be truly gone from his family, which in that world is almost like a living death, given how much of one’s life and identity was dependent on those multiple generations of family.
There is no social media, no email, no telephone, no airmail: no possible way to maintain any kind of connection to those whom he leaves behind. And third, Abram is not young and adventurous. Even today, when relocation and ongoing connection is millions of times easier than it was in Abram’s day, many of the people who go to live in another country do so either at the beginning of their adult lives, as I did, or at retirement, moving to Portugal or Mexico or Costa Rica to save money on the cost of living.
Abram is seventy-five years old when he leaves, Genesis tells us, but while he might have thought otherwise before the Lord’s message, he is not retiring. Far from it! The journey he undertakes would have been arduous in itself, traversing many natural and cultural obstacles, with deserts and mountains and rivers on the one hand, and suspicious and even hostile local people in those lands on the other. So that’s hardly a comfortable retirement.
But more than that, God is telling Abram, in his seventy-fifth year, to leave the well-established comforts and familiarity of his ancestral home and go to a new land which God will show him. And God promises that, when he does so, God will “make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” God even goes so far to conclude by saying, “…in you all the nations of the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
Well, to receive a promise like that from God, Abram must be a pretty remarkable person, right? I mean, God is going all-in on Abram; it is through Abram that God sets in motion God’s grand plan for the redemption of the entire created order. That’s what God means by saying, “in you all the nations of the families of the earth will be blessed.” It is through Abram and his descendants that God will create God’s covenantal people, the Jewish people, starting with the miraculous birth of Isaac to Abram and his wife Sarai when he was 100 years old.
It is through Abram and his descendants that God creates the Ishmaelites, the children of Ishmael whom Abram fathered with a servant-girl when he became convinced that God needed some help to keep God’s promises to give him children. Both Muslim and Arab people trace their origins to Ishmael, Abram’s son. And, of course, it is through the generations of Jewish people descended from Abram that God brings Jesus, God’s Son, and the source and Lord of Christian people. All of those developments are part of fulfilling God’s original promise to Abram here in this passage. So surely, Abram is a person of rare holiness and faithfulness, of goodness and right-living, of character and integrity, right?
Nope, not even close. Abram, as it turns out, is kind of a mess. Today’s passage is really the first place we see Abram; he is mentioned in passing in the chapter before this, but it is here that his story really begins. And he at least gets this part right; when God tells him to go, he goes. But after this, he strikes out more than Kyle Schwarber does for the Phillies, and with almost none of the home runs. Aside from not trusting God to keep God’s promise about giving him children, Abram proves to be unreliable at best. He abandons both Ishmael and his mother in the desert, requiring God to miraculously intercede to save them and therefore part of God’s promise through Abram.
He gets so frightened of a local king in their journeys that he pretends to be Sarah’s brother instead of her husband, because he thinks the king will kill him in order to marry Sarah, so instead he lets the king get engaged to Sarah until, again, God has to intervene by warning the king in a dream that Sarah is already married, and the king then confronts Abraham by asking the question that Sarah surely had as well: “What were you thinking, that you did this?” He even prepares to sacrifice his own son, Isaac, until God dramatically stops him at the last minute because he doesn’t understand that God is vastly different from the local Canaanite deities that demand child sacrifice, when Isaac is literally the embodiment of God’s covenantal promise in the first place.
The truth is, Abram is, at best, nothing special when God calls him. And, ironically, that’s actually the good news of this passage. Abram did nothing, had nothing, was nothing especially good or faithful or right before God calls him in this passage. Abram does a lot that is not especially good or faithful or right after God calls him in this passage. And yet God still calls him, still sends him, still tells him to go, still bets everything on Abram going when he’s told to go. And he goes, going without hesitation, going without knowing the destination, going simply because God said to go, and that is enough.
It’s the going that makes Abram special, important, faithful, good and right, even when he is and ever will be far from perfect. Because going is the fundamental action of faith; we cannot be faithful to God without going. Jesus tells us to follow him, which means we first have to get up and go. Jesus tells us we have to love our neighbors as ourselves, which means we have to go to where our neighbors are, not simply wait to see if any of them wander into where we already are.
It’s in first going that we are able to do everything else of consequence in the life of faith: worshipping together, sharing in meals and prayers and study and conversation, listening to others wrestling with decisions of life and faith and sharing our own struggles, seeking forgiveness and reconciliation from those whom we have wronged, caring for those who are most in need, and often most resistant to going themselves and seeking out help. Pretty much everything that makes us Christian, that gives us our identity as Christians and lets us incarnate our faith in action, requires us first to listen to God’s call and then answer it by going. And often, that means going someplace that God will show us, rather than a place we already know, and by a road that we journey on in stages, as Genesis puts it, rather than a well-trodden path that takes us quickly and directly to our destination.
So where (or to whom) is God calling you to go? What has God been calling you to do that you have been tempted to answer, “I wish I could go with you, but…” What might be the next stage, the next corner, the next few steps at least to take in your journey of faith, in ours as a congregation? This passage invites and even compels each and all of us to consider those questions deeply, because going, and where we go, is one of the most important things we can do as Christians, as followers of “The Way,” as Christianity was known before it was ever called Christianity, because following Christ and going where God calls was so central to the faith. And as you begin to answer those questions, do so knowing that God does not simply send, but also goes: goes with us and ahead of us and beside us, ensuring that we do not lose our way, for in Jesus we know the Way, because the Way always knows us.