Click on the image arrow for a podcast reflection on things that look like endings providing new opportunities and unexpected beginnings…

Transcript of the above podcast:

God’s first word to Abram (later Abraham) was an invitation to leave everything. God called Abram to leave his country, his people, his father’s household, everything that gave him tangible earthly security, to leave all this that he had built up over his 75 years) to go to a land that God would later reveal to him.

That’s a big ask. From all accounts Abram was a pretty successful guy, but God also promises Abram a lot: (there is a subtle pun there…”Lot” was the nephew of Abram!)

God’s promise:

“I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you;
I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

A couple of verses later we hear Abram’s response: “so Abram went as the Lord had told him.”

This is a pattern that we see repeated in the lives of every key character in scripture and every saint in the two thousand years of Christian history. Just as Abram leaves his homeland, so too all the great Old Testament leaders are called to leave everything they have built up and accumulated. In the gospels those who are called by Jesus also leave everything, possessions, narrow ways of thinking, letting go of previously adequate patters of thinking, and fears. Through the Christian centuries our heroes have let go of all they possessed to live in relationship with Christ.  Some have left money, others have had to let go of health and friends. Now don’t get too depressed here about all this letting go… this letting go is going somewhere…

Very often we reduce Christian faith to a pretty gentle existence with Sunday worship in a comfortable church, a few minutes every day to pray, and every now and then giving some help to those in need. It doesn’t seem much like the kind of adventure that Abram embraced. It’s rare to meet Christians today who are passionately excited about hearing the Word of God and receiving the reality of Jesus Christ in Eucharist. In New Zealand there might be more excitement, passion and sense of adventure at the starting line of a marathon or a rugby game. Perhaps we Catholics, we Christians have missed something? Where is the adventure?

Of course we would be crazy to leave security without a pretty substantial and reliable promise. Abram was not simply asked to leave what he had, but also given the promise of more than he had ever dreamed of. And in today’s first reading we see that the promise was much more than becoming a great nation with the power to bless and curse:

Abram bowed to the ground and God said this to him, ‘Here now is my covenant with you: you shall become the father of a multitude of nations. You shall no longer be called Abram; your name shall be Abraham, for I make you father of a multitude of nations. I will make you most fruitful. I will make you into nations, and your issue shall be kings. I will establish my Covenant between myself and you, and your descendants after you, generation after generation, a Covenant in perpetuity, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. I will give to you and to your descendants after you the land you are living in, the whole land of Canaan, to own in perpetuity, and I will be your God.’

So Abram is being asked to let go of some things, BUT so that he could have EVERYTHING a healthy human heart desires. A covenant is an agreement that is sealed not by contractual signatures on a page but in quality of relationship. We know this quality of covenant in our own relationships: not simply a 50/50 signature, but a relationship in which one carries the other at times and any lack in one is compensated by the other. The promise that God makes to Abraham is such a covenant filled with promise.

Abraham had expressed his desire for this relationship with God above all his other securities, and in embracing the adventure of faith had readied himself for this new depth of relationship with God, the covenant  that began a new era in God’s relationship with humans. Today, over four thousand years after Abraham, the three great monotheistic (one God) faiths (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) honour Abraham as our father in faith.

An Invitation:

• Yesterday we received a record number of comments which have become the central feature of this page as people encourage others from their own experience of life and faith. 
• Don’t miss today’s LEGO Crossing of the Red Sea contribution from Ana & David at the bottom of the page.
• Four Quartets. TS Eliot. Read by Alec Guinness at this link.
• This poem below has “gone viral.”  I thought you might appreciate it.

“And the people stayed home
And read books
and listened
and rested
and exercised
and made art,
and played games,
and learned new ways of being,
and were still.
And listened more deeply.

Some meditated,
some prayed,
some danced.
Some met their shadows.

And the people began to think differently.
And the people healed.

And, in the absence of people living in ignorant,
dangerous,
mindless,
and heartless ways,
the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed,
and the people joined together again,
they grieved their losses,
and made new choices,
and dreamed new images,
and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully,
as they had been healed.” –
Kitty O’Meara.