"Leaving Home"

Texts: Genesis 12:1-9; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

It isn’t too great a stretch to say that Haran was the Kansas City of ancient northern Mesopotamia. The only big city for a long ways around, it was a trading center and people flocked there. An important crossing point for the California, Oregon and Santa Fe trails of its day, it was full of commerce and culture—everything was up to date there. Being such a cosmopolitan city also made it a religious center: the temple of Sin, the moon-god was there, and so the devoted made their trips of homage and devotion. If you were anybody, you would pass through Haran.

It was all those things but to Abram, it was something else. Haran was home. Abram’s father had brought them all there from the southern city of Ur, probably many decades before—Abram was 75 now. They had established themselves as a family in Haran, this is where they sat down for Thanksgiving dinners—Abram and Sarai, father Terah, brother Nahor and his wife Milcah, nephew Lot, and the in-laws, too. There in Haran they had gathered people and things. They made a name for themselves. They put down roots. Terah—Dad—died there. Haran was definitely home.

For being such a significant event in human history, Genesis 12 certainly begins simply: "Now the Lord said to Abram." There in the moon-worshipping community of Haran, to a multi-generational family with deep roots, Almighty God speaks: "Go…." Leave all this behind. Friends and family. Land and riches. Go where I’ll show you. And Abram went. And the story of salvation begins.

What is home for you? For some of us, it’s a rented room or two in an apartment complex. For others, it’s a condo with a little yard out back. For others, it’s a well-appointed multi-level house that we’ve worked long and hard for. Physical space is important to us—our home is our castle—no matter how big or small. And even within our homes, some parts are more "home" than others. Home might be a particular room where we go to think; even a certain rocking chair by a certain window.

Of course, home is more than a place, too. It’s an emotional place—the place within ourselves where we go to feel comforted, or where we go to heal, or where we just like to hang around. It’s a place that we got to, maybe through a valued relationship or a long struggle that led us to seek a place just to be. It’s that mental place from which we sit and view the world, where we are most ourselves, we like it there. It’s home.

And of course we all have a spiritual home, too. I don’t just mean our usual pew—although yesterday’s Star reported that where we sit at church does tend to indicate something about the rest of our involvement there. But I’m really talking about something on the inside: For each of us there is a certain way of worshiping, a certain image of God that we call to mind, certain songs, maybe even a certain prayer; it is the place in our faith we start from again and again, and the place we go at the end of the day.

These homes are a gift of God. They are a great strength, grounding us and rooting us and helping us stay on our feet. Stability is a virtue, and the mental and spiritual and physical places of our repeated launchings and retreats enable us to be stable, solid and reliable for those around us, and even for God. But is it possible that there is also a risk in having a home—in staying at home? Is it possible that one might grow so fond of home, that one doesn’t want to leave?

Certainly the place we expect to be right for us isn’t always the place God wants us to be. The New Testament lesson shows us that, as the people mourn the death of the synagogue leader’s daughter. The people were doing what they do when someone dies, gathering around to mourn. The flute players were playing, the crowd was lamenting. And so when Jesus interrupts and tells the people that the girl is not dead, they laugh through their tears. Eventually they must be moved—physically removed from the girl’s bedside, kicked out of their rightful place—in order to see their fundamental misunderstanding corrected. God’s plan is bigger than their plan. God’s power greater than theirs. The girl is not dead. But to see it, they have to move.

"Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house…." What will follow are tremendous words of promise. Promises of family and honor and blessing. What will follow is the offer of a land flowing with milk and honey, and in time even the promise that this childless couple would become the parents of a great nation. There will be an epic journey through the wilderness, there will be tests of faith and triumphs of God’s grace. From the seed planted at this very moment, will eventually blossom God’s people Israel, and even Jesus Christ.

But it doesn’t begin with the promise, it begins with an instruction: "Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you." One wonders if Abram could even have heard the rest of the Lord’s speech. Before he can be in the place of blessing or claim any accomplishment, something has to happen. Keep in mind that as far as we know, this Lord is a strange, mysterious figure to Abram. Keep in mind that Abram and Sarai have no children and, so far as they know, it will always be so. Keep in mind that Haran is home.

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house. I’m sorry Abram, but the place where you are, the place you have established as your own, the place where you have property and possessions and people—this comfort zone of yours—you need to let it go. Say good-bye to it, even though you have no proof that I’m telling you the truth. Good-bye even though a journey through the desert awaits. You’ve got to leave home.

And as it turns out, Abram obeys. And it is a long journey with many twists and turns. But God keeps the promises—every last one of them—and Abraham and his descendents, his descendents even now, are blessed.

Some of us know this phenomenon. Many have left the comfort and security of a good-paying job in the hope that something else might work out better in the long run. Students have made the difficult jump from parental nurturing at home to the independence of college—often doing so with fear and trembling, but knowing this is what is required for growing up. Marriage is such an occasion, too—in it, a person leaves the stable identity of one’s family, the freedom of singleness, the control of one’s own life—and offers it over willingly for the uncertain future of life with another.

It doesn’t help to know that marriages don’t always work out. That not every student turns out to be a good match with the college they have packed up all their belongings and gone off to. That jobs come and go. It’s easy to look up as Abram must have and see an awful lot of wilderness. To enter into Canaan only to find that it’s filled with pesky Canaanites. Then the deal doesn’t sound so sweet.

But still Abram goes.

Leaving our physical places of settlement is still hard. Like a whole generation of college-age people before them, the summer staff of the Heartland Center (who we commission today in worship) have left the comfortable climate of family and school friends, forsaken opportunities for high-paying summer work, and chosen instead the promised land of the Heartland Center. In so doing, they will be blessed. Not with the creature comforts of home, but with the opportunity to share their lives with young people and with each other, with a front-row seat on God pouring out blessings.

And there are hundreds of stories like that. Seminarians who have worked here—or are working here now—have left the frying pan of academia and entered the fire of day-to-day life at the church, and found it to be just the refining they needed. Churches have endured crises of losing a pastor only to find themselves strengthened by the process of undertaking a search for a new identity as a community of faith. In the trauma of family conflict, people have been forced out of unhealthy relationships and into new and real life, because they had to leave home.

The even harder homes to leave are the ones we don’t even know we are living in. The expectations we have of ourselves that bind us and focus us on ourselves and not on the One who made us and who calls us. Obligations we have placed on ourselves for the well-being of others when we leave no room for our own mental and spiritual health. Burdens of guilt or worry or anger that we’ve been carrying so long that we have started to think they’re just an extension of our backs.

And then there are the homes that really are comfortable: The sitting with the same people every day in the cafeteria, even when there are others who look very alone. The laughing quietly—or not so quietly—at the misfortune of an unlovable co-worker. The pattern of service that involves writing a regular check or putting in an hour a month here or there, satisfying our conscience but no longer looking for the next step out in faith.

Before the promise is made, before the journey begins, "Go, leave it all behind. Leave behind security and what is known and what you think makes you who you are. Leave it. And I will give you something new."

None of us escapes this challenge. None of us is so obedient, so faithful, that there isn’t some "home" we are clinging to from which God calls us away. And while that is a challenge and a test for us, it is also tremendously encouraging—because it means that no one, not one of us, is too entrenched for God to use, for Jesus to save. Not one of us is beyond rescue from whatever might hold us back. As Jesus went right up to Matthew, the tax-collector, one of the biggest sinners of all, and invited him to follow, so Jesus stands right at the front door of whatever home we have built and beckons us to come. It isn’t the healthy who need a doctor, after all, but the sick. Jesus came to call not the righteous, but us.

The Good News is that God’s great challenge to us is but one part of God’s great covenant. Abram journeys on, building altars to the Lord at stop after stop, learning faith through obedience, not doing much settling in, losing much along the way, but gaining everything in the end. A great nation is made of him, and through him all the families of the earth are blessed. So it can be with us. So it will be. When we have the courage and the faith to move out of our homes and to go to the places God is calling, our lives will preach God’s redemption, and be lights to the world. Believe in the promises that God goes with you, and then follow where God leads.

Amen.