This coming Sunday the lectionary Hebrew Scripture is Genesis 12:1-9. Many of you already know how deeply I respond to these Abraham saga stories. I feel we have a lot to learn from old Abe!

Everything Abraham had known about life and about God was there in his homeland and family. At the beginning of this Genesis text, God tells Abraham to literally pick up his stakes and begin a journey westward to the land Abraham had never seen. Abraham’s culture, much like our western cultures, expected a person his age (around 75) to be settled for life (perhaps one more move to an assisted living facility before the final move into the grave).

God starts with Abraham when our society and our Reformed Church would require mandatory retirement! Abraham has a long life with God – 12 chapters! - a life that is marked with Abraham’s obedience to God.  God said to him, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation and I will bless you, and make your name great, [why would God do this?] so that you will be a blessing. For me, this marks the beginning of the covenantal relationship between Abram, Sarai and God.

The Genesis text ends with one of my favorite biblical lines, “And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.” Isn’t it like that with most of us in our life of faith? There may be some who are able to do a kind of hop, skip and jump into Christian maturity, but most of us will journey and increase our faith in stages over time.

The stories of old Abraham gave early Hebrew scholars quite a problem because Abraham predates the laws given to Moses; the rules for living so that people would understand God’s heart. There was also a great controversy in the early church over whether Gentiles should simply be accepted into the church or if they needed to become Jewish and follow all of the Jewish laws. Paul settles the argument (Romans 4:13-16) with his example of Abraham.

Paul names Abraham as “the father of us all” – precisely because his relationship with God was based on his faith in God and not his keeping of the law.  Abraham’s faith and trust in God provided the doorway through which God was able to bring about the promises.

One of our cherished hymns addresses this issue of time and faith...

Our God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come,
our shelter from the stormy blast and our eternal home.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all our years away;
they fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.

Too often, we try to put God in our box; so we can find God more manageable. God will never be contained in anything we can contrive—including our sense of time.

Feeling pressed for time? Where does what you think you need to do fit in God’s great scheme of things?