It was on a morning after it had snowed in Nashville, when I saw the picture. It was taken from inside the house, through the open front door. There is snow on the ground, and you can make out the outline of a door mat, dusted with barely an inch of the winter wonder stuff. You also notice the crisp imprint of a dog’s paw—just one. Somebody in the house must have thought the dog might want to go, might need to go, or should perhaps go anyway, just in case, but the dog said no—in the unequivocal body language of a single paw pressed briefly into the thin layer of wintry precipitation and quickly withdrawn. The puppy was willing to try, but decided it wouldn’t take another step. It was cold and wet out there, and inside it was cozy.
Leaving can be tough. The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” The words are very specific about what he was to leave behind, and quite vague about his destination. Do you remember a time when you had to pack up and go? Allison and Jared are filling up boxes, a thousand decisions about what to take and what to sell or give away. Leaving takes effort. Pulling up the stakes and loosening the lines that had held your tent taut for so long, and watching it collapse, it takes effort. Allison and Jared and the boys know where they’re headed, but the unknown can be overwhelming. Do you remember when you found yourself on the road in mom’s old car or in the U-Haul truck or the station wagon with the kids in the backseat? Others talked about this moment as going to college, or getting married, or being between jobs, or starting over, but you couldn’t tell if you felt like an adventurer, an explorer, a pilgrim, or a refugee—you looked out the window at the passing landscape, carried by currents of excitement, fear, and hope.
Perhaps you recall that moment when you arrived, or you thought you did. You were beginning to feel settled, you had started to put down roots, and then the whole world changed in an instant when the phone rang and they told you that your best friend from college had died in a climbing accident; 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 rolled up your tent and you found yourself on the road, again. Where would you set up camp next and for how long? Who would be there with you? And who would you be at the end of the journey? The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” We always seem to know what we’re leaving behind; the rest is unknown. Warsan Shire is a British writer born to Somali parents in Kenya who grew up in London. She knows about leaving, and I trust her voice when I try to comprehend the reality of 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 overloaded rubber dinghies, crossing mountains, rivers, jungles, borders, and deserts, on the way to a better life for themselves or their children. These are lines from her poem, Home.[1]
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
…
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
The voice Abram heard—he knew it to be God’s. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” The story doesn’t say it wasn’t safe there anymore in Haran. It doesn’t say Abram’s herds couldn’t find pasture there anymore, or that the wells had dried up, and he had to pull up the stakes of his tent and move on. Abram and Sarai and his brother’s son, Lot, left Haran because Abram heard a call.
We’re in chapter 12 of Genesis, and the stories leading up to this moment begin with beautiful meditations on the promise of life. In the beginning, there is the wondrous word that calls all things into being, heaven and earth, light and life, creatures great and small—swimming, jumping, flying, crawling, growing, singing, roaring life. And God saw that it was very good.
Most of the stories that follow, not very good. It’s a miniseries about the fracturing of relationships with Adam and Eve and the serpent, Cain and Abel, the flood, the ark, and the tower of Babel, and amid the threatening chaos, the desire and determination of God to see life flourish. After Babel, the whole human family had come to a dead end. The sun still rose every morning, yes, and the rains still fell, but life was not what God intended it to be.
The Lord said to Abram, “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.” Where fractured trust had spread, fullness of blessing was to erupt. God spoke words of promise, but the first word was go. Leave the world you know, and become what I will make of you.
I will — five times this divine commitment is repeated in these four-and-a-half short verses, promising to give what human beings crave: well-being, security, prosperity, prominence. “The promise provides,” writes Walter Brueggemann, “exactly what the people of Babel … tried to form for themselves and could not.”[2] The promise cannot be had without the promise-maker.
We may want to know what made Abram so special. And how he knew it was God who was speaking to him. We may want to know what thoughts went through his mind, what questions he had, and whether he discussed any of this with Sarai. The story isn’t interested in any of these questions. The focus is entirely on God’s initiative to overcome the fracturing of relationships in creation, beginning with one human being. The focus is entirely on God’s promise and call and Abram’s response. And Abram doesn’t speak a single word in this encounter; he gives his answer with his feet. 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, as Paul insists, who entrust their lives to God’s call and promise.
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. Remembering that we are a people on the way is particularly important when nativism, nationalism, and “us first” is written on so many closed doors. “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 profoundly disruptive for many, just about anywhere you turn these days. 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 that we are all on the way, that we are becoming the people God wants us to be, all of us.
“Of all the things in the world,” wrote Jim Mays many years ago, “we are most interested in those to which we can attach the possessive pronoun—my family, my home, my possessions, my plans, … my life.”[5] In that constellation of interests, God’s call creates a crisis. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Our response determines whether we live with and for the promise or against it; whether we hold on grimly to the present ordering of our world and our vision, or find the courage to step out on faith toward hope.
[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] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Interpretation, a Bible commentary for teaching and preaching), (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982), 119.
[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
[5] James L Mays, “God has spoken,” Interpretation 14, no. 4 (October 1, 1960), 420.