Seeing a Different World

"SEEING A DIFFERENT WORLD"

a message by Rev. Dr. Bruce Havens

Coral Isles Church, U.C.C.

August 24, 2025

Genesis 12: 1-7 NRSV

¹ 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. ² 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. ³ 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.”

⁴ 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. ⁵ 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, ⁶ Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. ⁷ Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.”

  How many of us would like to see a “different” world? I don’t mean like, go to Jupiter or Neptune.  I mean to see this world embody a different reality.  Probably all of us feel like making some meaningful suggestions to God about changing things here on earth.  What would you like to see?  Our Scripture this morning tells the tale of an old man striking out with everything he owned to go to a different world than he lived in.

Let me try to make this story of Abram personal for you. Imagine being told by God, at 75 years of age, that God is going to make you a great nation out of you. What if someone [ God ] told you that you are going to leave your home and move northwest about 640 miles to New Orleans.  Then move southwesterly, oh say, to Houston.  And take over Texas.  Oh, by the way, God won’t tell you, you are going to New Orleans, just to “a land I will show you.”  No GPS on this journey.  Just G-O-D.  And you are going to tell the people when you get there, God gave you that land for your offspring. Who’s signing up for that trip, huh? I don’t know which took more, uh, “cajones,” believing God told you to do all this, or actually doing it.  I’m also not sure just how much faith in God this would require.  My sense is it would take a whole lot more than I can ever even imagine, let alone have.

Now let me put a little Biblical context to this.  John Holbert, [ “So Abram Went,” patheos.com/progressive-christian,  3/11/2024, ] says he has always “called this pericope the ‘lynchpin of the Bible,’ [not just ] the Hebrew Bible; I mean in fact the entire Bible, both testaments.

Genesis 1-11 is nothing less than a history of the failures of the people of YHWH to do things that their God had called them to do.” They ate the one thing God said not to, committed the first murder – on a family member, became so evil God sent a great flood to wipe the slate and then, the one chosen to survive had drunken sex with a family member.  They built a tower to “make a name for themselves,” and to, “expressly reject YHWH's clear call to ‘be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.’ Plainly God needed a new plan, a new process.

“And so YHWH acts in a new way. YHWH now calls a foreign man, Abram – name which meant ‘mighty father’ or ‘father of many’, to enact the work of God. Rather than speak to the mass of humanity, expecting them all to do YHWH's will, YHWH now chooses one person through which YHWH will attempt once again to effect the divine work in the world.  God clearly wants to see a different creation, a different world.  So God makes this promise to Abram: “through you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”  God seeks to bless even in spite of all that humans have done to subvert that.  I suggest to you that God wants to see a different world, according to our Scriptures.

Now, so far, none of this speaks to the issue that Abraham was an immigrant, that nasty, illegal identification in today’s United States.  Timothy Simpson, [ “The Politics of Immigration,” politicaltheology.com, March 10, 2014. ] speaks to our xenophobia, our fear of the stranger, the immigrant among us.  He begins by asking, “Why are we, who know the promise of God in this text to bless the nations through a stranger [in a strange land], so certain that ‘our’ strangers who just moved in across the street won’t likewise enhance and benefit our community?”

He says, “What the text calls us to do in our current situation is to treat each stranger like he or she was Abram, [ seeing ] ourselves in the story and thus imagining the way we would ourselves want to experience being a stranger.”  He challenges us to see that, “If Abram is truly a paradigm of faith, and if his calling is also our calling—to live an obedient and unsettled life,” to be willing to be a blessing to those we do not know and do not know us, … what if God … called us “to get up, go, and become a stranger ourselves in someone else’s space in response to the call of God on our lives.”

So all these issues and questions suggest this question, too:  God promises to make a “Great nation” of Abraham. How? And what constitutes a “great nation?”  That certainly is a point of discussion in today’s United-ish States of America, isn’t it? Who’s defining what “great” means?  Many of us have a very different vision than a lot of people right now.  What are we called to be and do as people of faith who trust that God has a different vision, a God who is looking for a different world than the one currently evolving?

The Bible study we did asked the question, “who is Jesus?”  It looked at the Gospels, Paul’s letters, writings that didn’t get included in our Bible, and also at how our sibling religions see Jesus.  Judaism and Islam both look to some of the same spiritual ancestors as we do, especially to Abraham.  I’m not terribly concerned with the official or scriptural view of Jesus held by either Judaism or Islam.  The short version is, we Christians proclaim Jesus is “Christ,” the Greek word for Messiah.  That means, among other things, a King anointed – or chosen – by God.  We talk about the Trinity, the historic version was “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”  Traditionally, we claim Jesus is fully God, fully human. Neither of our siblings who came from the tradition of Abraham believe these things. They both speak of Jesus as a prophet from God, holy in that sense, but not one with God or God in the flesh.  Their first point of belief is that God is one, there is no human who could be God as well as human.  Christians have gone to war and killed those of other religions and no religions for being different.  I would hope none of us here would see that as a way to be great at our faith or as a nation. 

Perhaps the better question is, how do we seek to follow in the pathways of both Abraham and Jesus?  The Scriptures show us that they had a different vision for our world.  How do we live so as to see a different world than the one we live in now?  I believe we must see ourselves as called to be Abraham’s heirs – to be a blessing to the whole world. Instead of dividing ourselves from others, can we seek to build relationships of blessing?  Instead of fearing our differences, let us believe that by learning about one another and our differences, we can better understand and live up to the best in our faith. The hardest part is trying to connect with our own neighbors, those who proclaim to be part of our own religion, those whose skin color is the same as ours, yet their vision for the world is so different. God sent Abram into a foreign land to begin to be a blessing.  All we have to do is try to figure out how to live with those right around us.  How do we stop buying into a world of “us” versus “them,” which plays right into the hands of those who want to make the world in THEIR image, not in God’s?

Abraham did not accomplish God’s purpose alone.  It is not up to us to accomplish this alone.  God’s vision is a world where we find ways to work together, regardless of faith, nationality, age, or all the other categories we make to define ourselves as different from others. The good news is God will be with us on this journey.  We are not alone.  Our Scriptures reveal a God who is mighty to save, and who will not fail. Let us get up and get going to bring the blessing of God’s vision of a different world.  We serve a mighty God, a God who is mighty to save!  AMEN.