Genesis 12:1-7
The Lord said to Abram:
Leave your country, your family, and your relatives and go to the land that I will show you. I will bless you and make your descendants into a great nation. You will become famous and be a blessing to others. I will bless those who bless you, but I will put a curse on anyone who puts a curse on you. Everyone on earth will be blessed because of you.
Abram was 75 years old when the Lord told him to leave the city of Haran. He obeyed and left with his wife Sarah, his nephew Lot, and all the possessions and slaves they had acquired while in Haran.
When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram went as far as the Sacred Oak Tree of Moreh in a place called Shechem. The Canaanites were still living in the land at that time, but the Lord appeared to Abram and promised, “I will give this land to your family forever.” Abram then built an altar there for the Lord.
Friends, I am so excited to announce that we are starting a new series in which I hope to explore different religious and philosophical movements that have impacted the world and culture we live in as well as space to consider what lessons we might be able to take with us and apply to our own faith journeys. This will be (hopefully,) a ten part series and so be looking for updates each month!
Our first movement has been so successful that for many in our modern world, It feels like the default setting, as opposed to a movement, but through the course of human history this movement is actually quite new, and only time will tell if it will be totally successful or not in fully expanding to the whole of humanity. that movement of course, is Monotheism.
Now, in the western American culture in which many of us find ourselves, monotheism, or the belief in One God, is really just assumed everywhere. As a society, while we often debate whether or not there is a God, we still assume that there is just one. And from prayers before political meetings, to blessings at legion potlucks or boy scout gatherings, the oneness of God is just assumed. Even if you don’t believe in this one God, as a product of this society, I am sure you would be able to pick this one God out of a line up. We all can picture our cultural monotheistic deity in our heads can't we and can easily find this God in comic strips and cartoons.
This God is a he of course, he is older with a white beard. Wears a long white robe, sort of a Santa Claus type. This image is such a part of our cultural construct, that it might surprise us to know that Monotheism is a recent development in human history.
The oldest archeological records show that any sort of religious expression our oldest ancestors practiced pointed to a sort of Pantheism, or idea that everything had a spiritual element to it, in previous reflections we have talked about Shamanism, which is a distinct form of Pantheism, and that is the oldest form of religion seems to have exists.
Now as time progressed, Polytheism, or the belief in many Gods and Goddesses came to be the standard and was for thousands of years and still is in some places today. Interspersed into the historical record however, there were at different times and places an attempt to move to Monotheism, but never with any real success. That is until, a man named Abram, later to be known as Abraham came onto the scene. Because he is the one who got Monotheism to stick, Abraham is known as the Father of Monotheism
The Book of Genesis, in our second reading this morning, tells us that one day, the Lord called to Abraham. Now, before we can continue on in the story, we have to stop and talk about the name Lord. In our modern monotheistic culture, the Lord, and God are this same person who is old in a white robe with a beard. But in this context, the Lord is actually a specific deity that was one of many Gods in the ancient world. Lord is actually a stand in name for a this word right here:
This word is made up of four Hebrew letters, Yud, Hey, Vav and Hey, which in English can be translated to either YHWH or JHVH. and this group of letters together are known by scholars as the Tetragrammaton. Now there are no vowels in the Hebrew Alphabet and so when Christian translators came to the Tetragrammaton, in the 1500s, they didnt know how to pronounce it and so they just put in a stand in word, “Lord,” and this practice has continued into almost every English translation of the Bible. This was also a theological move because in the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth is referred to as Lord, but that Greek word in the New Testament Kyrois, and has no connection to the Tetragrammaton. By using the same word though they were able to reinforce the claim of the Divine Nature of Jesus. So that is Christianity.
Now in many branches of Judaism, it is considered inappropriate to try and pronounce this name and so in that tradition, they use the word “HaShem” when they come it, which means “The Name” in Hebrew. Out of respect then for our Jewish neighbors and because no one actually knows how to actually pronounce the name, we are going to use the title Hashem as we explore this story.
So, our reading tells us that one day Hashem appears to Abraham and makes him this promise. If Abraham will follow Hashem into the wilderness and worship him alone as the only God, then Hashem will make Abraham a great and wealthy nation and that his descendants will be blessed for all time.
This is a bold offer coming from Hashem and to Abraham and to the first people hearing this story it would have been even more so. We are told in other places that Abraham lived in Ur, a city of great wealth and power in the time of the Sumerians and Hashem was just one of the many lesser deities that would have been worshiped in the vast pantheon of the Sumerian Gods and Goddesses. For Hashem to make this sort of an offer was a big deal because by all accounts Hashem was a storm god, someone you prayed to when you needed rain. Not who you prayed to when you needed to conquer a new land, or become wealthy and powerful, or most importantly to Abraham, have a child, specifically a son who would be heir to his vast wealth and estates.
Abraham accepts the offer however, and we are told that he is 75 years of age when the offer is made and he and his wife Sarah are already past the time where they could conceive naturally. We can infer from the story and Abraham and Sarah have already tried every other option to have a baby. They had seen doctors and made the right sacrifices to the right deities and yet, nothing had worked. To take a chance on Hashem is a bold move, but nothing less than a bold move, it seems, is going to get the job done.
Now, the life of Abraham included many twists and turns and takes up about ten chapters in the Book of Genesis, But for our purposes today, what really matters in the story is that at the age of 100, Abraham’s wife Sarah does give birth to a son whom she names Isaac. HaShem is credited with this miraculous birth and this event is the foundation for the Monotheism that is now observed in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
While there is obviously value in knowing this story as it helps explain how we as a culture got to where we are today, I also think that from a UU perspective, the story of Abraham is actually quite powerful. Many of ushave come from different religious traditions, many of us were raised in a particular faith that for one reason or another, simply didn't work for us. While those around us seemed to be deeply connected to the tales and traditions that we were a part of, they were not answering the deep questions and longings we had, and so, sometimes at great personal costs, we left.
Abraham’s story of trust and adventure is in a sense perhaps the most Unitarian Universalist narrative in the Hebrew Bible. The story of Abraham is a story of someone trying desperately to make the spiritual structures of his family and his culture work for him, but in the end realizing he needed to trust his gut, pack up his family and head out into the desert to try something new. To try and find something that will bring him peace and fulfillment. The desert can be a scary place. It is a world of shifting sand and unknown dangers but it is also the place where miracles happen. It's the place where everything is stripped away and you, and the call that you have answered are free to pursue each other.
While Monotheism in many ways and in many times and places became oppressive, the original movement was a call to freedom of faith and a call to explore the unknown in order to find our own answers. It was a call to take a chance and see what other options might serve us and our lives and our hopes more fully. The story of Monotheism began and was meant to be, a story of choice.
So this then is our charge and our summons from this movement. As we go from this place, may we continue to allow ourselves to be guided by our guts to follow the path we know is best for us, even when it goes against what our families, friends and cultures are telling us. May we have the courage to set out and follow the voices we know are calling us to a bigger, broader and more beautiful life. May we with boldness walk on paths still unknown, and have eyes to see the miracles that lay just beyond the horizon.
Blessed Be, Amen