The roof gone.
The house gone. In the rubble, grandpa’s report card from 1950.
All the trees in the neighborhood gone.
Most of the photos people found, some of them miles away, belonged to the elderly couple who were killed in their home.
On the farm across the backyard the Alpacas were safe. The barn they were in, untouched.
The airport, the warehouse, the barber shop on Jefferson, the juice bar at Five Points, gone.
One home in Wilson County, all that is left is the slab and the stairs from the basement to nowhere.
At East End UMC, where Judi Hoffman is the pastor, the large stainglass window, only recently refurbished to its original glow, now lies shattered on the street, next to pieces of the shredded sanctuary roof. One neighbor stacked the hymnals in a dry corner of the sanctuary and others lent a hand piling up debris at the curb and boarding up the blown out windows. This morning, they gather for worship in the park.
On Thursday, I took a carload of buckets, brooms, bleach, detergent, blankets, flashlights, diapers and paper towels to New Covenant Christian Church to support their ministry in the neighborhood after the devastations of early Tuesday.
My friends Andrew and Lindsey asked for muscle and boxes to pack up their salvageable belongings and move, after the tornado had left their home uninhabitable.
Everywhere neighbors showed up to work with neighbors, to pass out supplies, to hug and comfort, #NashvilleStrong. I think we got this, but it won’t be easy. We need to continue to lift each other up in prayer. We need to reach a little deeper and write another check. We need to find out how we can help and show up. We need to continue to respond to the divine call to sacred work and holy living: to build and restore the beloved community at every level of neighborhood that touches our day-to-day lives.
Do you remember a time when you had to pack up and go? Do you remember how it felt? It took effort, didn’t it, pulling up the stakes and loosening the lines that had held your tent taut for so long and watching it collapse. Then you found yourself on the road, not sure whether you were an explorer, a pilgrim, or a refugee, or what they call a kid growing up. Others talked about this moment as going to college, or getting married, or being between jobs – but to you it was a journey into the unknown. Everything was new, and at least for a while you found yourself floating on strange currents of excitement, fear, and hope.
Perhaps you recall that moment when you thought you had arrived; when you felt settled, when you had started to put down roots — and then someone you loved died; or your parents called to tell you they were getting a divorce, and what seemed like a reasonable thing to do for two adults who had grown apart turned out to be so painful and hard. And you pulled up the stakes and you rolled up your tent and you found yourself on the road, again.
Where would you set up your tent next and for how long? Who would be there for you? And who would you be at the end of the journey? We always know what we’re leaving; the rest is unknown.
Leaving home is never easy. Warsan Shire is a British writer born to Somali parents in Kenya who grew up in London. Her poem, Home,[1] came to mind as I tried to absorb the news about refugees in northern Syria, trapped between Russian cluster bombs falling behind them and a closed border, thousands of them, now counted among the millions of people of all ages around the world who are leaving home on foot, by car or train or bicycle, crossing the sea in rubber dinghies, crossing mountains, rivers, and deserts, on the way from just not there anymore to who knows where.
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
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
…
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
…
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
…
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying leave,
run away from me now
i don't know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
Abraham and Sarah didn’t flee, they didn’t run away. The voice Abraham heard was God’s, saying, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” The story doesn’t tell us that it wasn’t safe there anymore in Haran, or that his herds couldn’t find pasture there anymore, or that the wells had dried up and he had to pull up the stakes and move on.
The stories leading up to this moment in chapter 12 are beautiful meditations on the promise of life. There is the wondrous call that brings all things into being, the call of God the creator who spoke and there was light and life, wonderful, colorful, breathing, swimming, jumping, flying, crawling, floating, growing, singing, roaring life. And God saw it, and it was very good.
The stories that follow, not so very good. We read about the creator’s struggle with rebellious humanity in a miniseries about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the flood and the ark and the tower. At the end of Gen 11, eight sad words speak of the hopelessness of that world: “Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.”[2] This family, and with it the whole human family had come to a dead end.
But the one who called the worlds into being made a second call. The Lord spoke to Abram, and with that call the walk of faith became a possibility in the world.
Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 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.
God’s call interrupted the hopelessness of humanity’s exile and opened a new and hopeful history, with the end being once again what it was at the dawn of creation: blessing.
God spoke words of promise, but the first word was Go. Leave your country, your kindred, your father’s house, and go to the land that I will show you. At seventy-five, even in ancient biblical times, the last thing on your mind is packing up all your belongings, moving to a new place, and starting a brand new life. And the thought must have crossed Abraham’s mind, but it’s not mentioned in these four-and-a-half short verses. The focus is solely on God’s call and promise and on Abraham’s response. We, of course, want to know, Why him? What made Abraham so special? And how did he know it was God who was talking to him? Did he not have any questions or concerns about any of this? Did he discuss this at all with the rest of his household, including his wife? The story has no interest in answering any of these questions. The focus is entirely on God’s promise and call and Abraham’s response. He and his household became migrants for the sake of the promise, resident aliens sojourning among other peoples.[3] And as sojourners of the promise, they became the ancestors of Israel and of all who entrust their lives to God’s call and promise, as Paul insists. And those who belong to Abraham’s family by faith are heirs of God’s promises, members of God’s covenant community, citizens of the world to come.
It has always been important for God’s people to remember that we are a people on the way, not necessarily geographically, but in terms of who we are and where we are going. We are a people who live into the divine promise. We are a people who believe that the kingdom is already here, and we live into it until it is here for all and forever. Remembering that we are a people on the way is particularly important in this day and age, when nativism, nationalism, and “us first” is written above so many closed doors and gates.
“The simple fact of being a human being is you migrate,” I heard a man say on the radio. “Many of us move from one place to the other,” he said. “But even those who don’t move and who stay in the same city, if you were born … 70 years ago, [and] you’ve lived in the same place for 70 years, the city you live in today is unrecognizable. Almost everything has changed. So even people who stay in the same place undergo a kind of migration through time.”[4]
The pace of change in our world and its depth are disruptive and overwhelming for many, just about anywhere you turn these days, and fear is rampant, not only among those who leave home just to survive, but also among those who are afraid to let them in. It’s easy to forget that we are all migrants, which makes it all the more important for the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the sojourners of the promise, to remember.
We are migrants, all of us, walking together, working side by side, looking out for each other, on the way home to the city of God.
[1] See full text at https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/mission/mandm_assets/2016workshop/Home.pdf. For audio by author, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=182&v=nI9D92Xiygo&feature=emb_logo
[2] Genesis 11:30
[3] See Genesis 12:10; 17:8; 20:1; 21:23, 34; see also Hebrews 11:8–9.
[4] Mohsin Hamid http://www.npr.org/2017/03/06/518743041/mohsin-hamids-novel-exit-west-raises-immigration-issues