An Old Testament Lenten Journey: To an Unknown Land

Genesis 12:1-4a
Second Sunday in Lent 2011

One day this past week, I realized that I was humming a familiar tune. It was a song from my childhood, long forgotten, but apparently long remembered also. Once I recognized the tune, I put with it the few words that I could remember: “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we fight our country’s battles in the air, on land and sea.” I have no idea why I learned the United States Marine Corps hymn when I was a child.

The melody is taken, more or less, from an aria in a French comic opera, but it wasn’t the melody that brought it back to mind for me. It was the “shores of Tripoli” that triggered my memory. That’s a reference to the battle of Derne in 1805 during the First Barbary War, the first land battle that U.S. forces ever fought overseas. There were actually only 8 Marines and two navy midshipmen involved in leading a mercenary force of some 400 Arabs, Greeks, and Berbers in an operation that included a 500-mile march across the Libyan desert and a pretty remarkable exercise in interfaith management as the commanding officer worked to keep the Muslims and the Christians in his army on the same side in difficult circumstances.

More than 200 years later, American forces are once again on the shores of Tripoli. Someone will tell me that I’m wrong about that, but if the last fifty years of American military tactics are any indication, there are more American special forces personnel on the ground in Libya this morning than there were marines and midshipmen involved in the battle of Derne in 1805 that has been immortalized in the Marine Corps hymn.

Earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown, the spread of radiation, and new hostilities in North Africa to go with operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are heavy times, befitting the season of Lent and the shadow of the cross. For some of us, though, the weight of the season is not grounded in foreign affairs or military actions or tectonic shifts or waves or particles. The weight of our season is closer to home in grief, in guilt, in loss, in illness, in uncertainty, in loneliness, in despair. Some of us don’t need international headlines to weigh us down; we’re carrying our own weight of the world on our shoulders, thank you very much. The words we’re singing aren’t the Marine Corps hymn but “The pathway is broken, the signs are unclear. I don’t know the reason you brought me here,” wherever here may be.

This morning’s Old Testament lesson from Genesis 12 is the second passage in our Old Testament Lenten journey. It marks the beginning of the journey of Abraham and Sarah to an unknown land. To understand the shape of their journey—and our own, we need to understand the place of Genesis 12:1-4 in the book of Genesis. The great German Old Testament scholar and Lutheran pastor Gerhard von Rad saw in the first 12 chapters of the book of Genesis an amazing pattern that he characterized as the increasing visible power of sin and the increasing hidden power of grace. The increasing visible power of sin and the increasing hidden power of grace.

Here’s what von Rad saw. In Genesis 3, you may recall from last week, the first man and the first woman violated the one limitation that God had put on them in creation. In Genesis 2, the Lord God said to the first human, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:16-17). Von Rad points out that when the man and woman sin by violating the one and only commandment in creation (besides “be fruitful and multiply,” but that’s another story), God does not, according to Genesis 3, carry out the death sentence that was hanging over their heads but expels them from the garden instead. Sin entered in, but grace prevailed.

In Genesis 4, the sin in creation escalates to murder when Cain kills his younger brother Abel. But when Cain is sentenced by God to “be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth,” the killer of his brother cries out to God, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” The Lord’s response to Cain is an inexplicable act of grace. “Then the Lord said to [Cain], ‘Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.’ And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him” (vv 13-15). Instead of allowing the threat of blood vengeance to run its course, the Lord God provided Cain with a protective mark so that no one would kill him. Why? Sin entered in, but grace prevailed.

You may also recall from last week that I said Genesis 6 begins with a strange little piece of ancient folklore about the cohabitation of “sons of God” and the daughters of humans that created a race of legendary hero-warriors (verses 1-4). This disruption of the created order was more than a moral God could stand, and so we read in Genesis 6:7, “the Lord said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But immediately after the divine determination to make an end of all flesh in a creation run amok, the very next verse reads, “But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.” So instead of making an end of all flesh, God provided for creation to begin again on the other side of the inundation. Why? Sin entered in, but grace prevailed.

By Genesis 11, the human beings are up to their old tricks and are attempting to become like God by building a temple tower that will reach into the heavens to secure their fame and their future. In Genesis 11:6, God looks out on the situation and says, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them”—and that means they will have become like God. So the Lord says, “‘Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.” Von Rad points out that finally in Genesis 11, for the first time in creation, God did exactly what God threatened to do in punishment. Destruction and confusion and scattering and alienation are the threat and the penalty, one and the same: “The Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.” This time, there is no amelioration, no grace.

Until the beginning of chapter 12, that is: the journey of Abraham and Sarah. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. . . . and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:1,3). The call of Abraham, the theological ancestor of Jews and Christians and Muslims alike, is God’s act of grace that expresses God’s intent that destruction and confusion and scattering and alienation are not God’s will for creation. God’s will for creation is always blessing (Genesis 1:28; 12:4).

Buried in Genesis 12:2 is a small and often overlooked turn of phrase that is at the heart of the journey of Abraham and Sarah. NRSV translates the end of verse 2 this way: “so that you will be a blessing.” But the final phrase in verse 2 is not a result clause at all, as it is usually translated. Instead, weheyeh beraka, as it reads in Hebrew, is an imperative; it’s a command. “As for you,” it says, “be a blessing.” That’s the journey of Abraham and Sarah: to “be a blessing.” Sin enters in, but grace prevails. “In you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.” That’s the journey of the church and of every member of it: “be a blessing.” The apostle Paul wrote, “If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise (Galatians 3:29): “In you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” That is your reason for being; that is our reason for being.

That is why whenever we are faced with the weight of the season or the weight of the world either one, when “The pathway is broken, the signs are unclear; I don’t know the reason why you brought me here,” still we sing, “I’m gonna walk through the valley if you want me to.” We don’t know where our journey will take us or when, but the shape of our journey is to “be a blessing.”

Thomas E. Murray, Jr., was a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission from 1950-1957. In 1954, Murray published an article titled “Don’t Leave Atomic Energy to the Experts” in a journal called The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In that article, Murray argued that far too few people in the military, in politics, and in the general public fully understand the implications of nuclear science and technology. “Leaving it to the experts,” as he put it, portends what he called “a tragic price” (February 1954, p. 48). More than a half century later, experts and non-experts all over the world are scrambling to reassess the price of even peaceful uses of nuclear power. But listen to the conclusion of Murray’s article.

“After attending a large-scale nuclear explosion, one can never forget the sudden deafening angry roar of tortured nature as energy escapes, in a fraction of a millionth of a second, from its ancient confinement in matter. [Human beings] too have gigantic energies captive in their minds, needing only the compression of circumstances for release into the most varied forms of human activity. In its highest form, this release of energy joins with God’s grace. . . . What our world needs most now are architects of survival—those blessed peacemakers of the Sermon on the Mount. They exist—just as surely as that energy exists which when released produces the incredibly giant explosions that are now shaking the world” (p. 50).

When Murray calls us to “the gigantic energies . . . of human activity” that “joins with God’s grace,” he is singing Abraham and Sarah’s song singing God’s song: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” “Be a blessing!”


Photo of a Tripoli beach at sunset sunset by Faris Haider Al-Ftasy, used under license of Creative Commons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.

An Old Testament Lenten Journey: Living with Knowledge

Genesis 2:15-17 and 3:1-7
First Sunday in Lent 2011

Have you ever had an “eye-opening experience”? The kind of experience I have in mind is this. Whether you wanted to or not, you came to know something that you didn’t really need to know. Your life would have been just fine without knowing it; but once you knew it, you couldn’t look at something or someone the same way ever again. Knowing this one thing changed everything. It changed everything about a person or a relationship or a marriage or a family or a workplace or a church or a community. You didn’t really need to know it, but now that you do, there’s no going back. This morning’s Old Testament lesson from the book of Genesis, the first passage in our “Old Testament Lenten journey” is about an “eye-opening experience.” Genesis 3:7 says, “then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew. . . .” They knew.

The story of Adam and Eve doesn’t give us any reason to think anything other than that the first man and the first woman were getting along just swimmingly in the garden of Eden. How could they not have been? They had the whole place to themselves: no in-laws, no outlaws, no laws at all, really, just some simple instructions. They were, no doubt, young and in love, and they were tilling and keeping the garden as they had been created to do without a care in the world. It was paradise, after all, sheer bliss.

“Ignorance is bliss,” they say. In one form or another, it’s an ancient proverb. The Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes or Qohelet as it is known in Hebrew says, “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow” (1:18). When I taught the book of Ecclesiastes in my classes at Furman, I would always tell my students that Ecclesiastes 1:18 was the basis of my understanding of my call as a professor: my job was to increase their vexation and their sorrow. And I was pretty good at that. It was the British poet Thomas Gray who in 1742 in a poem titled “On a Distant Prospect of Eton College” put the ancient proverb into the form we have known it in English ever since: “Where ignorance is bliss, ’Tis folly to be wise,” he wrote. “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.”

The first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis are intended to tell us about the nature and meaning and structure of ourselves and of the world in which we live. We usually think of Genesis 1-2 as containing the stories of the creation of the world by God, but chapters 3-11 of the book of Genesis are every bit as much creation stories as Genesis 1-2 are. The creation of the physical world is recounted in the first two chapters of Genesis. And then the next nine chapters narrate the creation of the psychological and social and spiritual and linguistic and demographic world as the ancients new it and understood it to be.

In the beginning was bliss: a man and a woman, God, and a garden. That is, until in Genesis 3, the man and the woman became alienated from themselves and from each other and from God. They fashioned clothing to hide themselves from each other, literally and figuratively; and they even tried to hide from God. By the end of the chapter, they were expelled from the garden to eke out a hard-scrabble existence that was sometimes as much a curse as it is a blessing. Now, that’s more like the world we know than life in the garden of Eden. In Genesis 4, the arrival of the second generation of human beings brings with it violence and estrangement when Adam and Eve’s oldest son Cain murders his younger brother Abel with the result that Cain becomes a marked man and a fugitive for the rest of his life. Now, that’s more like the world we know than life in the garden of Eden.

Then, after a genealogical interlude in Genesis 5, Genesis 6 begins with a strange little piece of ancient folklore about the cohabitation of “sons of God” and the daughters of humans that created a race of legendary hero-warriors (verses 1-4). But more importantly, what was happening in creation created grief for God, according to Genesis 6:5-6, which says, “the Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that the inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry for having made humankind on the earth, and the Lord was grieved in heart.” Talk about “in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow”: God knows vexation; God knows sorrow.

So in chapters 6 through 9 we read of a great flood, as though it were the overwhelming waters of the tears of God in sorrow and grief over how badly psychological and social and spiritual creation was turning out. But even after a new beginning in chapter 9 with a brand new blessing from God and a covenant promise that God would never to do it again, creation is spoiled all over again by Noah’s propensity for drunkenness and the human propensity for enslavement and oppression of one human being by another. Now, that’s more like the world we know than life in the garden of Eden.

Genesis 10 is another genealogical interlude that explains how the human beings dispersed and diversified after the flood into their own lands, with their own language, by their families in their nations. It is only there in Genesis 10 that we finally arrive at a psychological and social and spiritual and linguistic and demographic world that looks anything like the world we live in: diverse peoples in their own lands, with their own language, by their families in their nations. In Genesis 11, the story of the infamous tower of Babel narrates the same development as the judgment of God rather than the multiplication of peoples, but the end result is the same: a world populated by human beings who are spread out and separated and alienated one from another by competing allegiances to land and language and family and nation.

How could it have all gone so wrong from something that started out so right: a man and a woman, God, and a garden? You see, the Lenten journey that we make from Ash Wednesday to Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday in remembrance of the journey to the cross and to the tomb and to the depths of hell that Jesus made began a long, long time ago. It began even in the beginning, as it were, when the goodness of God’s creation was spoiled by an eye-opening experience that changed everything.

And no matter how much you and I might like for things to go back to how they were before our eyes were opened and we knew whatever it is we know now that we wish we didn’t, there is no going back; there is only going forward, living with knowledge.

The younger of my two brothers tells the story of when he was a boy on a sunny afternoon on a back porch in suburban Wilmington, DE, when our quiet and unassuming grandfather explained to him how nuclear fission—the splitting of the atom—works. Then my grandfather drew a simple, clear diagram of an atomic bomb and explained how it worked, all of which was fascinating to my brother. It was only decades later, after my grandfather died, that we began to learn how it happened that this quiet and unassuming man had his eyes opened in the 1920s and the 1930s to atomic chemistry so that by the 1940s he was well prepared and well connected to participate in the one of the greatest advances in science—and warfare—in the twentieth century.

This morning, as the world watches anxiously at the likelihood that nuclear meltdown has already begun in reactors number one and three at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant, we are all reminded that human knowledge can be every bit as much a curse as it can be a blessing. On account of thousands of quiet and unassuming people like my grandfather, the Japanese are already more familiar with death by radiation than any other people on the face of the planet. Their history has taught them all too well how scientific advances and competing allegiances—their own and others’—to land and language and family and nation can turn beauty beastly, can turn life deathly, can turn good evil. That’s meltdown. Meltdown is what happens when heat builds up in our reactors, and we don’t cool it down before it releases toxic levels of radiation into the environment around us. We’ve all done it; we’ve all participated in it.

Yesterday afternoon, as Bev and I talked about the repercussions of this morning’s time change to Daylight Savings Time—“spring forward”—on our family, she said, “It’s going to put everybody out of whack.” “Yep,” I said, “it will. But what I’d like to know is when it was that everybody was ‘in whack.’ I must have missed it.” Creation is out of whack; persons are out of whack; families are out of whack; workplaces are out of whack; churches are out of whack; entire communities, economies and nations are out of whack. If the book of Genesis is any indication, it has been that way from early on in the beginning.

And that’s why every year the first stage on our Lenten journey is repentance. Repentance is recognition, confession, and redirection. The first step in repentance is the recognition that we are out of whack, that every one of us is Adam and Eve spoiling the garden for themselves and for everyone else. We have to recognize it for what it is before we can do anything about it. We are all out of whack. Recognition. The second step in repentance is confession, acknowledging to God that we have sinned against God and against others in things we have thought, in things we have said, and in things we have done, and in things we have failed to think and failed to say and failed to do. Confession. And the third step in repentance is redirection: getting back ‘in whack’ with God and neighbor and self. Redirection.

Recognition, confession, and redirection are at the heart of the Lord’s Supper that we share this morning. The vexation and grief that God experiences over creation and the sorrow and suffering that Christ experiences over us come down to this table, to the bread and the cup, in the form of mercy and forgiveness and love that are our only antidotes and our only sustenance for living with knowledge.

“All we like sheep have gone astray, But Christ would shepherd us alway; And for our sins in sorrow weep, Content to suffer for his sheep. Miserere nobis, Lord, have mercy” on us. Lord have mercy on us.


Photo from the Associated Press/NTV Japan via APTN.

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.