Daily Devotions

So Abram went up from Egypt, he and his wife, and all that he had, and Lot with him, into the Negeb. Now Abram was very rich in livestock, in silver, and in gold. He journeyed on by stages from the Negeb as far as Bethel, to the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Bethel and Ai, to the place where he had made an altar at the first; and there Abram called on the name of the Lord.

Now Lot, who went with Abram, also had flocks and herds and tents, so that the land could not support both of them living together; for their possessions were so great that they could not live together, and there was strife between the herders of Abram’s livestock and the herders of Lot’s livestock. At that time the Canaanites and the Perizzites lived in the land. 

Then Abram said to Lot, “Let there be no strife between you and me, and between your herders and my herders; for we are kindred. Is not the whole land before you? Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left.”

Lot looked about him, and saw that the plain of the Jordan was well watered everywhere like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, in the direction of Zoar; this was before the Lord had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. So Lot chose for himself all the plain of the Jordan, and Lot journeyed eastward; thus they separated from each other. Abram settled in the land of Canaan, while Lot settled among the cities of the Plain and moved his tent as far as Sodom. Now the people of Sodom were wicked, great sinners against the Lord.  Genesis 13:1-13

Lot’s father died young, leaving Lot in the care of his grandfather.  When his grandfather died, Lot moved in with his uncle, Abraham.  Lot was with Abraham from the beginning of their journey to the land of Canaan.  As Abraham prospered, it seems that he shared his bounty with Lot.

So it was that, as they got closer to the promised land, they began to run into those particular problems associated with the wealthy – we have too much stuff and no place to put it.

Here Abraham makes a decision that restores him in our eyes.  He allows Lot to choose where to settle.  Since the right thing to do would have been to defer to his benevolent elder, Lot should have taken the less choice looking land.  But he didn’t.  He took the pretty land and stuck Abraham with the wilderness.

That choice lifts Abraham back into high esteem and it lowers our estimation of Lot.

Today’s lesson is that things are not always as they seem.  Wealth does not equate wisdom and what looks good at first might not seem such a great choice on down the line. 

Let us pray:  Gracious Lord, far too often we look for the quick fix, the easy path, the lowest hanging fruit.  We need patience and wisdom.  Teach us to wait when we’re in a hurry, to think of tomorrow, not just today, and to trust your guidance along the way.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

When Abram entered Egypt the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. When the officials of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. And for her sake he dealt well with Abram; and he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys, and camels. But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife. So Pharaoh called Abram, and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her, and be gone.” And Pharaoh gave his men orders concerning him; and they set him on the way, with his wife and all that he had.  Genesis 12:14-20

This little nugget needs to shock you.  It is the sort of passage we find in the Bible that we are likely to just skip past as we follow the plot.  So how about if we describe it this way – Abraham pimped his wife to save his own skin.  And Pharaoh took him up on it.

Immediately we see what is at stake – everything.

Should Abraham lose Sarah then the promise of fathering offspring who would inherit the land would go away with her.  If…that is…she really mattered.

Evidently she didn’t.

As I said yesterday, this story was written long after the events it describes.  Centuries after the events it describes.  Which means the story was carefully crafted.  That actually makes it more surprising to us.  I’m always surprised when I cross those stories that don’t put the heroes of Israel in such a great light.  Our modern tendency is to bury the foibles and mistakes and misjudgments of our heroes.

But what if this story was finally put together in lasting form as the people of Israel were crawling back from a generation of suffering in Babylon, beginning to rebuild their lives in the land they had almost forgotten?  What if they were still trying to come to grips with the shock of thinking themselves the chosen people of God and yet watching everything fall apart?  What question might they have been asking?

How about – What did we do wrong? Or – Where do we go from here?

And what if, in their self reflection, they decided that their lack of real devotion to God was the seed that sprouted in all sorts of misbehavior and thus they felt themselves having been judged harshly and punished by God through the Babylonians…but now they were getting another chance to start again?  They had turned away from God just as Abraham had used Sarah for his own protection?

So we see it again.  The real message of our faith isn’t our own purity, perfection, or performance – the real message of our faith is the providence, the protection, the provision, and the forgiving love of God.  God is the God of the seventy times seven chances to turn around and try again. 

Our mistakes do not define us.  Thus there is no need to bury our foibles and mistakes and misjudgments and sin.  Better always to own them, acknowledge them, confess them, make right what can be made right, and move on.

Let us pray:  Forgive us, O Lord, when we take matters into our own hands, driven by motives of fear, selfishness, and pride.  Forgive us when we use others rather than loving them.  And give us the humility that allows us to forgive ourselves.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Now there was a famine in the land. So Abram went down to Egypt to reside there as an alien, for the famine was severe in the land. When he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife’; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account.”  Genesis 12:10-13

This surprising little left turn in the plot of our story has much to teach us…or at least it raises a lot of questions that invite us to dig a little. 

First, do you see the allusion to the exodus story?  Abraham and Sarah are facing hard times so they head to Egypt.  Sound familiar?  Doesn’t it remind you of Joseph, left for dead, but rescued from the well and sent off to Egypt?  A little later his brothers are facing a drought so they too head off to Egypt.  In the New Testament, that other Joseph is warned by God of Herod’s murderous plot so he takes Mary and baby Jesus to Egypt. 

What is going on here with all of these “bad times leads to leaving Israel for a foreign land only to be later rescued by God” stories?  Is it that God lacks creativity and keeps rewriting the same story?  Not so much.

It is passages like this that bolster the argument that the central life experience that shaped the Old Testament was the gut-wrenching defeat of Israel by Babylon, which then led to a ruinous generation of captivity and servitude between about 586 BCE and 528 BCE that is commonly called the Babylonian Exile. 

That period of loss and cultural dislocation, and all the years which followed as Israel picked itself back up out of the ashes, is when the various pieces of written and oral history were woven together into the coherent narrative we see as the Old Testament.

(If you find this interesting and want to do a little background reading, click here.  This paper does a pretty good job of reviewing the questions around how the Old Testament came together.)

The point here is that hard times do not mean that God has abandoned his people or his promise.  Hard times do require hard decisions and call many things into question (we will talk more Abraham’s questionable ethics tomorrow), but hard times often are the necessary twists in the journey that strip us of pretentions and get us back on the right road.

Let us pray:  Gracious Lord, we pray today for people who are facing difficult times in their lives – facing hunger, sickness, civil war, wild fires, grief, and all that often leads us to question your presence and power.  Make a way in the wilderness and bring light into darkness.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.  Genesis 12:7-9

“And there he built an altar to the Lord…”

I’m a Christian of the Lutheran persuasion.  I was baptized as a baby because that is what you did.  I doubt many in the family could have given much of a theologically sophisticated rationale for this practice but it happened.  Just me, my mom, a rebellious Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod pastor, and his wife were in the church that Sunday afternoon.

Later, when I was in college and ready to actually join a church on purpose, it was the American Lutheran Church that my dad and family attended.  There too, while my memory includes meeting with Pastor Peterson several times and reading the books he gave me to read, while I remember being convinced by the Lutheran understanding of grace and trust in Jesus, the fact is that I had family roots there and they trumped everything else.

The Lutheran movement began in Germany and spread to the Scandinavian countries.  We would like to think it spread because of the novelty of actually reading the Bible closely with a willingness to align our church life and teachings with what we found there.  But I’m thinking it also had a lot to do with large landowners and the upper class growing increasingly tired of paying fealty to Rome.

Then the Lutherans came to the United States.  Who came?  Seldom the eldest brothers or anyone else who had much of a life or modest prospects in the old country.  It was the cast offs, the ne-er-do-wells, and the troubled.  Moving to America was more about running away from bad prospects than it was about launching forth into new possibilities.  The point is – it wasn’t the pastors who jumped on those first boats.

The immigrants landed and were processed.  They got on trains and headed west to where their relatives were settling.  They made their land claim, built sod houses, started scratching the dirt, and strove to stay alive another year.  But they had brought their hymnbooks, their Bibles, and their faith. And eventually, they banded together and built a special building and then sent word back to the old country that they were ready for pastor.

They KNEW that God was in their journey.

So it was then.  So it is now.  God is always in our journey.

Let us pray:  Guide us ever, Great Redeemer, to the lands which stretch before us, to the challenges ahead.  Guide our feet, our dreams, our hoping.  Guide us on the journey inward, to those places far from home, to new vistas, strange encounters, all the places in which we roam.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land.  Genesis 12:3-6

Listening again to the stories of Abraham and Sarah means looking back to history before history.  Looking back to a culture that was very very different from our own.  A time before time. 

The temptation is to ignore that distance and just take the story as it comes to us.  God says “Go to Canaan” and Abraham loads up the family and takes off.  The Bible says that he was 75 years old at the time and we think of our Uncle Roger who is about that age as well.  Some of us imagine the Beverly Hillbillies on camels.  Few of us catch the reference to “the persons whom they had acquired in Haran” and realize that Abraham was a slave owner in a culture dependent on the practice of slavery.

One person in church on Sunday told me that he hated this whole story.  He has spent years struggling with the idea that God would send Abraham into an otherwise peaceful land inhabited by Canaanites in order to kill them and steal their land.  He has…don’t you think….a point?

Delegations from Israel and Palestine are talking again about an illusive peace.  We might think their struggle reaches only back to 1949 but we know better.  The struggle for supremacy in that area dates back to this time before time.  The argument remains, “God told Abraham to go get this land for US.”  So they fight about who gets to be us.

We get into trouble, I think, when we look back into history only to justify what we want today.  I know that we don’t and can’t have access to “pure history”, to the unblemished, unvarnished, unspun account of what really happened.  So the values best imported into listening to history might be humility, open-mindedness, and judgment.

We look at life and see a tension between things staying the same and things changing.  We want what we like to stay the same, and we want what we don’t like to change.  The universe, however, seems little moved by what we want.  Change, movement, is the constant reality.  And movement is what is happening in this story.

This is a story about letting go of what was for the promise of something better.  About how one man following God leads to uprooting his whole family, their whole lives.  It is about a clash of cultures, of ways of being in the world.  Ultimately, and here is where our bias enters, it is all about working out God’s promises for the good of all.

Let us pray:  Dear Lord, as parents we hate to see our children fight.  We are so often afraid because we see a future our children do not see.  As your promise called a people to get on the move toward something better, may we trust as well in your wisdom to take us where we cannot see.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Now 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. 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.”  Genesis 12:1-3

Pastor Junfeng Tan is the new Associate Pastor now serving with me at Faith Lutheran Church.  Yesterday was his first Sunday to preach.  His task was to kick off our new August sermon series following the lives of Abraham and Sarah.  Every Sunday is a “God moment” for me, but yesterday proved particularly so.

Pastor Tan grew up in Northern China.  He went to school to study Chinese literature and worked teaching Chinese to English speakers.  He became friends with a Roman Catholic priest who was his student.  Eventually he moved to the University of Minnesota to earn a Phd. In Chinese Literature.  There he found the care of the Chinese Hospitality Center, begun by former Lutheran missionaries.  He went to their Bible studies that became a worshipping community.  He was baptized and began seminary studies.  He met and married his wife, a Korean, at the end of his senior year and just prior to beginning his first call in South Dakota.  They adopted two boys, one from China and one from Korea.  And now his family lives in Houston.  Whew.

So there I was in worship, listening to a man who has been on a very improbable journey in his life, preaching about another improbable journey, from Ur in the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan…as he helped us see that this is only one journey.

As the world would keep score, we do not share the family lineage of Abraham and Sarah.  Yet we are blood relatives – Jesus the direct descendant and we grafted into the family through the blood of Jesus.

Our life is a journey, following God’s will, to unforeseen places with surprising twists and turns but all for the good of others.

Let us pray:  Gracious Lord, thank you for guiding and encouraging your people to follow as you prompt, opening doors, shutting off escape routes.  Thank you for bringing Pastor Tan to Houston.  May you bless him, his family, and all of us as we seek each day to do your will.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

¹⁷By faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac. He who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, ¹⁸of whom he had been told, “It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named for you.” ¹⁹He considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead—and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.  Hebrews 11:17-19

I took a philosophy course when I was in college as an elective.  I can’t remember the title of the course, what we read, what we wrote, or what we learned.  But with crystal clarity I do remember my professor telling us that, in his opinion, the story of Abraham and Isaac is the most disgusting, horrific, story in the Bible and it ought to be removed.

That line affected me on lots of levels.  I’ve never forgotten it.  It wasn’t the idea of “removing” a story from the Bible that stuck with me, it was the shock I felt at hearing him talk about a story in a completely opposite way from what I had thought my whole life.

At some point I had been taught – and I say “at some point” because I have no memory of how it came about – that the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was proof positive that Abraham was a man of incredible faith.  It made Abraham a hero in my book…and Isaac incredibly lucky that God intervened when God did.  The story was intended, in my young mind, to encourage me toward the blind faith of Abraham.

By attacking the story, my professor was challenging my conception of faith.  He was putting himself (and me) above the story.  He was thinking critically.  He was drawing out the implications of where such a story would lead.  That was the moment for me when I quit trusting “what I thought I once knew” and became open to the possibility that faith might lead me to new places, new ideas, new possibilities.

I think, at that moment, my faith became faith.

Christians, Moslems, and Jews all trace their family stories back through Abraham.  Thus we share ideas of faith, devotion, following God’s promises, benefiting others, and willingness to sacrifice.  But look behind the broad strokes and it is clear that we all remember very different things about Abraham and we draw very different conclusions.

I’m thinking we should talk more and fight less.  And I’m thinking we should look far more closely at what we are willing to sacrifice and what we would do well to simply let go.

Let us pray:  Dear Lord, stories define us yet stories can also bind us.  Bless us with the openness to hear old stories with new ears, with the willingness to truly engage, and with compassion toward those captured by very different stories than ours.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

⁸By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. ⁹By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. ¹⁰For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.  Hebrews 11:8-10

The two most significant Christian observances are Easter and Christmas.  Both fly in the face against any suggestion that God is content to stay “out there” or “up there” – whether referring to “up in heaven” or lodged deeply “in our hearts.”  Christianity is a very down to earth way of being in the world.

Faith, then, is far more than intellectual assent to theological propositions.  Faith is also very much a down to earth endeavor.  Faith does things in the world.  Faith motivates us, challenges us, encourages us – to act faithfully.  To BE people of faith rather than people content to talk about faith.

The writer of Hebrews, citing a long list of heroes of the faith, focuses on what they did, not simply what they thought.  Abraham WENT where he was SENT.  He followed a promise, the end of which he could not see, because he trusted the promise maker.

Yes, God’s gracious love comes freely to us.  We live in love.  We can’t escape God’s love.  But we can forget who we are and whose we are.  We can live, not by faith in God, but by idolatrous faith in deceptive promises that can never deliver what we believe they can. 

Let us pray:  Dear Lord, speak to us as we move throughout this day.  Help us see what drives us, what false gods we chase, the ways we can authentically respond to your love in our decisions, our actions, and our hopes.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

²¹Tell me, you who desire to be subject to the law, will you not listen to the law? ²²For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. ²³One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise.  Galatians 4:21-23

You can’t read the stories in the first several books of the Old Testament and not come away surprised that there was so little attempt to “clean them up.”  Most of us have some black sheep in the family history.  We tend to “forget” those stories as soon as possible.  But Israel captured them.

Some stories might seem scandalous to us today but weren’t in the cultural standards of that day.  Like Abraham’s relationship with Hagar.

God promised Abraham that he would be the father of a great people who would be a blessing to all the people’s of the world.  It was an amazing promise.  Abraham was nothing special.  He was already old.  And he and his wife, also old, were childless.  It became ever easier to doubt that Godly promise.

So Abraham and Sarah jumped the gun.  They got a better idea than God.  Now, mind you, it wasn’t that they lacked patience.  Genesis 16:3 says they had already lived in Canaan for ten years when Sarah determined to use Hagar to produce a child.  Ten years is a long time to wait.  But jumping the gun on God seldom works out for the best.  Ishmael’s birth didn’t exactly fill Sarah’s heart with joy.  It also didn’t fulfill the promise of God.

And now we, over three thousand years later, are still feeling the effects as the children on Abraham’s family tree battle for the hearts and minds of people.

So Paul, looking back at this story, looks out at the Christians in Galatia who are being pressured to incorporate Jewish ritual practices into their new-found freedom in Christ.  His whole letter to them is an argument to resist the voices who would reduce following Jesus down to following human rules and regulations.  He likens those who would live according to the law to the children of Hagar, slaves born of a slave woman.  And those who trust in Jesus, who live in freedom, to children of Sarah, born according to the promises of God.

My sense is that the Galatians were feeling the same pressure as Abraham and Sarah.  Their lives had been captured by a promise but they weren’t seeing it yet.  So they want to get the jump on God.  They want to MAKE something happen rather than trusting God to do what God would do in God’s time to do it.  They want the good they expect (perhaps that they think that they deserve) more than they want God to have God’s way with them.

That seldom works out.

Let us pray:  Gracious Lord, may we be patient today as we wait on your promises.  Forgive us for taking into our own hands what we ought to wait for from you, and for failing to use those same hands as you would have us.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

⁶Just as Abraham “believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” ⁷so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. ⁸And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.” ⁹For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed.  Galatians 3:6-9

Next week, when we listen to the call of Abraham from Genesis 12, we will see again the shift from the pre-history stories of the previous chapters to the particularity of God singling out Abraham as the promise carrier for the world.  Anyone reading Genesis for the first time would notice that shift.  God is up to something new.

We will never know who first told that story.  We’ll never know who was the first to write it down, preserving it for future generations.  We can rest assured that it wasn’t dictated by some angel in the wilderness onto tablets of stone – but beyond that, we would be guessing.

We know a little bit more about Paul, who wrote about Abraham in his letters to the Galatians and Romans.  In those writings, Paul is doing exactly the same thing that I am doing this morning, that countless Christians do all the time.  He is reaching back into the stories of his faith, looking for connections to the present day realities of his readers. 

In Abraham, Paul sees that the intended recipients of God’s promise are all the people of the world, including Gentiles.  The universality of God’s promise would be carried through the particularity of God’s relationship with people.  People who trust God and act on that trust.

How many times, after Jesus changed his life, did Paul ask himself, “Why couldn’t I see that sooner?”  Paul’s conversion to Christianity didn’t change the language of Genesis 12, it just opened his eyes to what he had previously been blind to.

So it is with us.  Jesus healed blind people.  Faith healing isn’t about dropping your crutches in a crowded auditorium – it is about suddenly seeing yourself, your world, your reality, infused with God in ways to which you were previously blind.  And acting differently as a result.

Let us pray:  Dear Lord, may we trust this day, not in ourselves or our ability to trust, but only in you, working in our lives and our world in ways that are beyond us, yet include us, for the good of all.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.