Commentary on Genesis 12:1-4a

Like many who preach the lectionary calendar, I’ve encountered the beginning story of the ancestral Israelite peoples many times. I’ve used this text to speak to seminarians as they leave their familiar thinking and surroundings to embark on a journey to an unknown country—the world they will inhabit as they study with people they don’t know, and accept (or reject) theological concepts they have never considered. It is a call to go. This Second Sunday in Lent expects us to enter the unknown journey in obedience to God, who is known and unknown in many ways. By inference, we are being called out of our familiar surroundings to a place of God’s own choosing.

How odd is the promise to Abram. He and Sarai will become a great nation when Sarai is already beyond childbearing age, and they have no child of their own. In fact, when the question comes up years after the promise in Genesis 12, Sarai (now Sarah) laughs (Genesis 18:10–15). They are “advanced in age” and Sarah has “ceased to be after the manner of women” (18:11). Who among us wouldn’t laugh? It is incredulous. I imagine preachers could play with the notion of feeling compelled or called by God beyond the time when one believes they are able. People often lean into the inadequacies of feeling ill-equipped, or too old, or some other marker of their being (race, gender, ability) that seems limiting to them as they look at themselves and experience a call beyond human ability.

But the pericope is marked with God’s “I” in verses 2–3: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” The last phrase, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” may rightly be translated “by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.”¹ Does it make a difference to those preaching as to whether the nations are passively blessed because Abram obeys God? Or are encounters with “families of the earth” an exchange in which those whom Abram encounters are empowered and encouraged and, thus, bless themselves?

What would it mean in this Lenten season if migratory encounters enabled every group to be empowered, and not just some people? As Frank Yamada noted, this promise is in the style of a common ancient Near East (Afro-Asiatic) land grant from a deity to a favored king or nation. Per Yamada, “[These types of treaties] were unilateral, meaning that the blessing flowed in one direction from the giver to the recipient. They were also unconditional. That is, such grants were based primarily in the benevolence of the deity and were not dependent on the previous actions of the subject.”²

Abram and Sarai did not see the promise of Genesis 12 for themselves, but the narrative says that their descendants did (see also Romans 11:8–12). The ancient Israelite saying “My father was a wandering Aramean” (Deuteronomy 26:4–6) apparently became a testimony, the ongoing story of a people who claimed their migrant status.

Abram and Sarai left land, family, and stability to become “strangers and aliens” in other lands. Their life away from their homeland was precarious at times. Remember that, in Egypt, Abram told Sarai to identify herself as his sister (which was true, but not the whole truth; Genesis 12:10–20 and 20:1–18). They are wealthy, with resources, and still vulnerable. Can the preacher imagine the deeper level of vulnerability if the migrant is poor and put that imagination in conversation with this pericope?

We know from our times that migration often happens for reasons such as economic distress, famine, environmental degradation, violence, or political instability. In fact, according to the story, Abram and Sarai were waylaid by famine, which is why they ended up in Egypt (Genesis 12 and 20). Imagine what pushes people away from their homeland that is not the voice of God. As British-Somali poet Warsan Shire writes in the opening stanza of her poem “Home”:³

No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only
run for the border when you see the whole city running as well. The
boy you went to school with, who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin
factory, is holding a gun bigger than his body. You only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

And from the final stanza:

I don’t know where I’m going. Where I came from is disappearing. I am
unwelcome. My beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the
shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory.

In telling this story in Genesis 12, Abram is not motivated by any such displacing matters. He responds to an inner urging, a voice, and maybe a God he is meeting for the first time. As a firstborn son, Abram’s leaving would be notable. As Wilma Ann Bailey reminds us, “In ancient times, it was unusual for the firstborn to leave. The pattern was for a younger son (Jacob, Joseph) to go while the firstborn son stayed home, charged with care of aging parents and unmarried younger siblings. That is why the reader is told that Abram’s father died, a brother died, and another brother is married and therefore an adult. Abram can leave with his integrity intact.”⁴ There is nothing in the text that indicates he talked with Sarai about leaving their home and their connections. I wonder what she thought or how she felt when she found herself packing up possessions and slave-servants to embark on a treacherous journey to an unknown land. God has spoken, Abram must have said. “Which God?” “Where are we going?” “How will we know when we have arrived?” “Do we know anyone who is already there who can welcome us?” “Why are we leaving our family?”

And they were leaving family, except for Abram’s nephew Lot. Are we missing some of the instructions from God? Why take Lot, Abram’s brother Haran’s son (Genesis 11:31)? Were Abram and Sarai now his guardians? Where was Lot’s mother after his father’s death? The plot line to the story of the ancestors is filled with gaps and questions, and a preacher might let her “holy imagination” wander off into the storyline to see where it takes her.

I hope those reading this offering experience several ways to enter a preaching moment that calls forth the sojourn that Lent expects. Perhaps we are being called to new spiritual disciplines, new thinking, new ways of praying, new environs, new compassion. As Bailey says, “Perhaps a new perspective will emerge only if he is exposed to a new environment in which old patterns no longer work.”⁵ Perhaps.

Notes

1. This translation is reflected in the footnote offered by the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition at Genesis 12:3, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2012&version=NRSVUE.
2. Frank Yamada, “Genesis 12:1–4a,” Working Preacher, February 17, 2008, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-121-4a-2
3. Warsan Shire, “Home,” https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poems/poem/103-30925_HOME, from Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, Penguin Random House, 2022.
4. Wilma Ann Bailey, “An Urge to Travel (Genesis 12:1–4; Psalm 121),” https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-urge-to-travel-genesis-121-4-psalm-121/. This article appeared in The Christian Century, February 12, 2008, p. 18. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscriptions information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.
5. Bailey, “An Urge to Travel.”