Morning Devotion for the Season of Epiphany
January 19, 2022
Feast Day of Wulfstan of Worcester, 1095 AD
Invitatory
Send out your light and your truth, that they may lead me, and bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end.
Amen.
The Lord has shown forth his glory: Come let us adore him.
Reading: Genesis 12:1-9
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.” 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. 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.
Meditation – Peter Vanderveen
This reading wasn’t problematic when I first learned it. I was taught that it was an account of great promise, given to Abram: it told of the originary blessing of God in making a covenant with a select individual and his descendants. And, as I was instructed, I could trust that this promise had been extended to me. Hooray! It’s good to have God on your side (or, said a little less crassly, wouldn’t everyone want to be on the side of this God – one who gives us real possessions).
Being on the winning side is exciting – and it’s also very easy, because, by winning, one’s focus can be limited to only oneself. Winning makes someone or some group triumphant. The moment is theirs. This is a ritual continually played out in our own time. Losers disappear. In sports, defeated individuals and teams are expected to quickly and graciously leave the field. They no longer matter. This used to be the case in politics as well – at least for elected officials. And it’s still very much what happens in the rough and tumble of daily life. Winning grants power; losing devalues and dis-counts. This holds in business, in education, in social relations: just about everywhere.
One might pity the poor Canaanites. Why should they be booted from homes they understood to be rightfully theirs? No reason is given here for their eventual removal from Canaan. God does not reiterate Noah’s curse on his grandson Canaan. Nor do we in our interpretations justify God by stating that God was doing what was right against the Canaanites. We simply don’t care about them, which is both the inevitable dynamic of history and a luxury for us who believe we have inherited the promise.
But then, winning doesn’t last forever either. As soon as you’ve won, you become the next target for someone else who wants to win. This was certainly the case for Abram’s descendants who (as the Old Testament recounts) captured Canaan and then repeatedly tried to defend it, losing the land many times. Claiming the land was the cause of extensive bloodshed. It still is today. Which makes this text problematic in this way – can God actually give this land, or must it always be fought over? There’s no easy answer to this question.
It may be the case that we too readily seek to be the ones who are gifted, so that we can make a claim for ourselves, rather than focusing on the future tense of the first sentence in the text. God sets Abram on a journey, not to a specified place, but to one that would only become apparent in time, as God would reveal it. This makes Abram dependent, and deeply so, always left to the task of following after what God would only eventually show. And thereby, the promise becomes not the land but the relationship and the way of living attentively before God. This is challenging, but it would remove much that is problematic from our expectations. It’s worth pondering.
The Lord's Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
